“Count on it.”
He could hear two female voices who must have just entered the bathroom. Eden hung up the phone.
Chapter 7
Her hands were sweaty. Not clammy. Actually sweaty. And her blouse was getting sticky because she’d been wearing it since yesterday morning, and now it was almost four o’clock Friday afternoon.
She rubbed them against her skirt and cursed Asher Thorne. It had been five hours since she’d first talked privately with Asher, and on the last phone call, he’d told her their plan. It was worse than anything her dumbass brothers had come up with in their wild, drunken, teenage years in the wilds of Montana. They were going to have to be smarter, better, and really, really lucky to pull this off.
Since her phone was stuck deep in her underwire bra, she glanced over at Carlson’s phone. It was thirteen minutes to the top of the hour. Señora Azua’s executive office was on the opposite side of the huge open bank area. As soon as the explosions started, she was going to need to get her down the stairway to the vault. This floor and the two below it would be toast. She needed to give Suzanne a head start.
Eden’s head swiveled away from Carlson’s phone to look at Suzanne’s pale face. Despite the intermittent ice packs, Eden hadn’t seen a discernable reduction of the swelling on her neck. She needed to be seen by a doctor, not some wanna-be-veterinarian. Eden had been giving her slow sips of water to ease the pain in her throat, and now it was time for her to pee, whether she needed to or not. The fact that the woman’s bathroom was next to the stairway was just a happy coincidence.
She leaned over and put her ear near the woman’s face.
“You need to use the restroom?” Eden queried. “Yeah, we can arrange that.”
Suzanne’s eyes fluttered open, but the woman looked at her with keen intelligence.
“Help me up,” she whispered.
“Leland?” Eden turned to the man to see that he was already standing up.
“I’ll help.” All of his attention was focused on Suzanne.
“When the hell are those damn frogmen going to let us know what the hell is going on?” Carlson groused. He punched repeat on his phone again, trying to get Asher or anybody else on the team to answer. Eden knew it was useless, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him.
“Leland, she needs to walk a little bit. She’s not going to want you to sit her on the toilet,” Eden whispered when he went to pick Suzanne up.
“Then she can stand up when we reach the bathroom door,” he said grimly.
Eden’s lip twitched. The man reminded her of her dad. What the hell, when all hell broke loose, he could carry Suzanne downstairs. That would be much better than trying to help her down the stairs on her own.
She looked over at Carlson’s phone. Eleven minutes.
Asher looked down at his watch. It was seventeen hours since they’d landed in Venezuela, and he was about to execute one of the most bizarre plans known to mankind, let alone a special operations force.
He just thanked God it didn’t include a fucking clown car. He was sure it would have, except it was too small. No, instead, he was stuck with feathers, crepe paper, a giant dragon head, and a metric shit ton of green sateen with gold trim. He worked through the giant cut-out that they’d made in the neck of the dragon so he could work.
Turned out Ezio’s grandma was addicted to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. As a result, Ezio knew as much about that parade as Cullen knew about Mardi Gras. Between those two things, they came up with the idea on how to hide the explosions that Asher was going to make as he blew out a hole in the back wall. They were like two tweenyboppers talking about the hot boy at school as they figured out how they needed to steal a float and butt it up against the back gate and have Asher hide underneath it.
Then Rafa got into the game, and it became teenager central. Rafa of course knew somebody who knew somebody. Before Asher knew it, they were going to a run-down garage in the back of an auto body shop where a bunch of university students had a float they were willing to sell. All they wanted were a couple of iPhones that Rafa was able to scrape together from another deal that he cut.
Cullen was loving every moment of it. Ezio played his part, too. The girls didn’t recognize one uniform from another, and Ezio was able to get the couple of University girls to swoon over his good looks, which helped the deal to go down easier for Rafa.
All three of them were crazy. Certifiable. Nuts. But they made it happen.
Now here Asher was, sweating like a dyslexic at countdown. The night was hot and humid as fuck. Add in the body armor, being wrapped in neon green material that didn’t breathe, and then like a turd cherry on top, there was the paper mâché dragon’s head that hovered over his head.
“You doing okay?” Ezio asked from behind him.
“Dandy.”
“Come on, haven’t you ever wanted to be in a parade?”
“No.” Asher concentrated on applying the C-4 charges to the exact right pressure points on the steel gate.
Damn, it’s hot.
He would have preferred doing this alone. If something went wrong, he’d like to be the only casualty—not that he intended anything to go wrong. He was damn good at this. But still, it pissed
