gossip, I can be back in fifteen minutes.”
“Go,” I said.
“How much you want the check for?”
I took a sip of tea and looked out at the street. The number of consulates in the same building as the Moldovan Consulate would make things difficult security-wise, I suspected. Bringing guns inside would be nearly impossible, yet I knew for certain that Yuri’s security detail would be fully loaded, which presented some problems. If we met privately with Yuri and his men were forced to kill us, it would be easy to cover up under the guise of an attack on the Moldovan Consulate by a burned spy, an ex-Navy SEAL and an Irish terrorist; Brent and Barry would be more difficult to explain, but they were also two people not many other people would miss, just as Barry feared. Plus, I’d need to find a place to stash Sugar where he couldn’t hurt himself or others.
This would take some planning, but I had some ideas.
“Make the check for a hundred thousand,” I said. “That should be enough money to ensure the opportunity to make a toast at this event, don’t you think?”
“Why not make it a million?” Barry said.
“Yeah, boy,” Sugar said, apparently feeling that he was allowed to speak again. “Go big or stay home. That’s how I roll.”
I hated to agree with Sugar. But even a clock is right twice a day. “Do it,” I said and Barry was up and gone.
It was just after noon, which meant I had a little less than eight hours to make it all airtight. I texted Fiona with some of the new details and then called Sam.
“Thank you for calling InterMacron,” Sam said.
“We’ve had a slight change of plans,” I said.
“Don’t tell me I learned all of this for nothing,” he said.
“No,” I said, “you’ll need it.” I told Sam about the event honoring Drubich that evening and about the generous donation I thought InterMacron should make in his honor. “How do you feel about doing a little public speaking tonight?”
“As long as they have an open bar,” Sam said, “I’m prepared to speak at length on any number of subjects.”
13
College boys, Fiona thought, were the worst of their species. Aesthetically, there was very little wrong with a twenty-one-year-old male at the peak of his conditioning, his body healthy and able to withstand punishment. Fiona was happy to admit that. And she couldn’t resist staring at a few of the particularly lovely specimens as she walked with Brent across the campus of the University of Miami. In fact, if college boys could just learn to keep their mouths closed and their bodies toned, they’d be perfect chew toys for a woman like herself. Fun, disposable, not terribly annoying.
But when they opened their mouths…
It was as if they forgot they had mothers, or sisters, or even beloved pets, since surely they didn’t treat their dogs as poorly as they treated women. What base form of human, other than boys in college, thinks it’s appropriate to walk up to a woman and ask her if they could “get with that”? Or ask if she was “down for it” or if she’d be interested in “getting your drink on with me at the frat house” as if any of those invitations weren’t little more than veiled requests for sex?
It was just before noon and Fiona was escorting Brent to lunch before she’d be forced to sit through yet another class. She’d spent the previous two hours and thirty minutes in a lecture hall listening to some crusty professor in a tweed jacket telling complete and utter lies about history, to the point that she’d finally raised her hand to ask a question, but fortunately for the old cud behind the lectern, he didn’t bother to look up from the text he was reading. Fiona would have let him know, in exacting detail, how American education was apparently predicated on misperception.
It was more than she could take, really, listening to the professor butchering the past. He’d gone on some long-winded jag about how the British had attempted to oppress their colonists living in America and that’s what started the Revolutionary War, a war that was scantily discussed in the history books Fiona recalled, though her memory was very precise on the minimal material she was taught about the issues related to that particular war: the colonists were a wanton band of separatists, an issue she was well versed in, but unlike the Irish, they didn’t have the advantage of being right.
It was just madness, though it did help her to understand Michael a bit more (and, to a lesser extent, Sam), who wore their patriotism like both a badge and a shield. A false history can do that to you.
And if suffering through the indignity of that experience wasn’t bad enough, the boy sitting beside her for those one hundred and fifty minutes of revisionist drivel kept “accidentally” brushing his hand along her thigh. She’d intentionally sat in the back of the lecture hall, a few rows behind Brent, so that she could keep the entire room in her vision at all times. It was set up with stadium seating, but the two doors into the hall were at the bottom of the room, on either side of the lectern stage, so from her vantage point in the back Fiona would be able to take out anyone who might wish to do Brent harm long before he or she laid eyes on him.
So Fiona found a seat next to a boy in a light blue Oxford shirt, with combed and parted Republican hair and a fair complexion. The kind of boy she presumed called women “ma’am” and men “sir” and probably grew up in a city like Savannah, Georgia, and was filled with Southern courtesy and wouldn’t try to look into her purse and thus wouldn’t have questions about why she was on campus with a chrome-plated Glock.
She sat down beside him and he smiled at her wanly-the kind of smile she’d expected him to give her. A gentle declaration that she was, indeed, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but also that she was so far out of his league that he’d just let her know, by showing his perfectly white teeth, that he’d be no bother to her at all.
For the first ten or fifteen minutes of the dreadful lecture, the boy beside her bounced his left hand off his knee as if to a beat in his head. It was annoying, but far less annoying than listening to Sam chew, for instance. And then Fiona felt a slight… nudge… on the middle of her right thigh. She looked down and saw that the boy’s pinkie was touching her; she scooted over a bit.
“Pardon me,” the boy said quietly and without even turning to look at Fiona.
“No problem,” Fiona said.
Then, five minutes later, he did it again and Fiona scooted again.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said. This time he turned to look at Fiona and flashed a more active smile. He got his eyes involved. “Listening to him drone on makes me jumpy.”
“No problem,” Fiona said, because she truly empathized with the boy.
“I haven’t seen you in here before,” he said.
“I’m just sitting in,” she said.
“Cool,” he said.
Thirty minutes later, Fiona felt a bit more pressure on her leg and looked down to see that the boy was essentially resting his pinkie and his ring finger on her thigh.
“You have really soft legs,” he said. “I thought I was touching my chinos.”
Fiona leaned toward the boy and the boy leaned toward her, taking up most of the middle distance with what Fiona now discerned was far too much cologne. Polo or something else meant to make nineteen-year-old girls swoon in their Dress Barn rompers.
“If you touch my leg again,” Fiona said, “I’m going to dislocate your fingers.”
“Dislocate,” he said and gave her that smile again. “I like that word. I’m sorry. I’ll move them myself if you like. You don’t need to dislocat e them.”
Fiona got the sense the boy didn’t know what “dislocate” meant, since he was still trying to flirt with her. Another failure of American education. She’d be happy to show him the word’s precise meaning.
A few minutes later, Fiona felt a tapping on her knee-this time it was clear that it was intentional. Fiona decided to give the boy the benefit of the doubt that he wanted something from her and thus was tapping her with
