Look at me now.
Stanley held out a pair of gloves, shooting Wolfgang that solar-flare smile again. “You’ll want these.”
“For what?”
Stanley blushed, then lowered his voice again. “Driving gloves, Mr. Pierce. All true enthusiasts wear them.”
Wolfgang waved his hand as he steered the car through the open showroom door and into the parking lot. “I’m new to cars, Stanley. Not life.”
He hit the button to lower the top, and the Mercedes’s roof retracted into the trunk with a low whine, allowing bright sun and gentle wind to stream into the car. It felt amazing.
Stanley dropped the gloves into his lap with a dull sniff, then motioned toward the street.
“You’ll want to take it onto the freeway, Mr. Pierce. The quality of the ride is truly —”
“Is it fast?”
Stanley frowned. “Mr. Pierce, this is a Mercedes. The nuance of the driving experience cannot be simplified to a word as limited as fast. To appreciate a car like this, you really—”
Wolfgang hit the gas. The nose of the car bucked upward as the engine roared and the back wheels spun. A moment later, they rocketed out of the parking lot in a wild slide, tires screaming and the engine throbbing. Wolfgang felt equal parts adrenaline and fear rush through his system as the tires grabbed and rocketed them onto the multi-lane street that faced the dealership. Horns blared, and cars swerved past. Stanley screamed. Wolfgang clutched the wheel with both hands and broke the turn as the car shifted, then he felt something in the base of his spine like the explosion of gunpowder detonating behind a cannonball. He was pinned to the seat as the nose lifted again and everything around him turned into a slow-motion light show of extrapolated colors.
Engine noise, tire smoke, and the incessant screaming of the petrified salesman next to him all blended into a glorious crescendo of sensational overload. Wolfgang cut the wheel to the left, sliding through a light as it turned red. A moment later, they were on the freeway, and the speedometer zipped past one hundred. Wind ripped through his hair and Wolfgang threw his head back and shouted, cutting in between cars and trucks as the Mercedes clung to the pavement as though it were on rails. He’d never felt anything quite like it—power, flash, and thrill.
And Stanley screaming. Wolfgang took them two miles down the freeway, then abruptly swerved off the highway and slid to a stop at a fuel station. The engine wound down and throbbed with glassy-smooth perfection, unstrained by its sudden workout.
Stanley sat panting in the passenger seat, and Wolfgang ran a hand through his hair. His fingers still trembled with adrenaline overload, but the sensation felt good. It felt like life.
“I’ll take it!” he said, looking for the first time at Stanley. The salesman sat quaking, his fingers wrapped around the edges of his seat so tight that his knuckles turned white. To his credit, he hadn’t wet himself, but Wolfgang sniffed a couple times just to be sure.
Stanley brushed the wrinkles out of his suit with two sweaty hands. He adjusted his tie, wiped his glasses, then nodded. “That’s most excellent, Mr. Pierce. I’m so glad you like it. If we can find our way back to the showroom, I’d be delighted to draw up the papers.”
Wolfgang absentmindedly stroked the smooth leather of the steering wheel. In the back of his mind, he heard a soft, distant voice, and the words came back to him as clear as if they had been spoken the day before. “You’ll go far one day. The world will be yours.”
Wolfgang blinked, then looked out the window. Stanley rambled on next to him about service packages and premium warranties, but Wolfgang wasn’t listening. He was in another place, at another time, standing barefoot in the kitchen as his mother leaned over the stove, cooking up a box of Hamburger Helper. Her left eye was swollen, almost shut, and her dirty hair hung over a bruised neck. “You’ll get out of here. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll see you out of this hellhole.”
“Mr. Pierce?”
Wolfgang realized he’d zoned out as the memory took over. He turned the car back toward the highway, driving gently this time. There was no rush. The phone in his pocket buzzed, and he dug it out. He punched in the passcode as Stanley mumbled something about “complete cellular integration,” and Wolfgang saw a single text message light up the screen from a contact labeled only as E.
“Gonna have to expedite that paperwork, Stan,” Wolfgang said. “I’ve got to be in Saint Louis by five.”
After parking the Mercedes in a garage across the street, Wolfgang ascended to the fourteenth floor of the Bank of America Plaza in downtown Saint Louis. The entire fourteenth floor—like most of the building—was vacant, save for the unofficial operational headquarters of Charlie Team, the elite espionage unit that Wolfgang was a member of. Charlie Team was the third operational unit of SPIRE’s field division, and SPIRE—a private corporation specializing in sabotage, procurement, infiltration, retaliation, and entrapment—was America’s elite provider of for-hire espionage services.
At least, Wolfgang thought so. He joined Charlie Team five months earlier after spending three years as an individual operator running minor corporate sabotage gigs. Since then, Charlie Team had conducted high-stakes operations in Europe and Africa, both of which delivered levels of adrenaline Wolfgang had hitherto only dreamed of, not to mention paychecks that outstripped his lifestyle by an order of magnitude.
Hence the Mercedes.
Wolfgang stepped through the office door and was immediately greeted by the acrid odor of cigarette smoke. He wrinkled his nose, glancing around the darkened room, but saw none of his teammates gathered around the table or the marker board on the far wall.
Then he saw Megan leaning next to the floor-to-ceiling window at the far end of the room, a cigarette smoldering in one hand as
