Read the Opening Chapters of The Nuremberg File
A new thriller novel by James Mascia
Hey all,
We here at Dren have been busy. It has been a while since we’ve written a novel since we’ve been working on comics and role-playing game stuff almost exclusively lately. But we decided we needed to get back into telling stories that relied more of words than artwork. So, this is the first, of what will hopefully be much more in the lines of prose stories for you.
So, what is this story about? Well, let me tell you.
When a high-stakes theft rips an ancient relic out of the shadows and leaves a trail of bodies in its wake, SIS operative Evan Pike is thrown into a chase that moves faster than the authorities can contain it and darker than his superiors are willing to admit. Every lead opens another door, and behind each one waits a new complication: compromised communications, shifting loyalties, and an enemy who always seems one step ahead. The only person who can get Pike close to the truth may be Robin Ledger, the thief at the center of the storm, but trusting her could be the mistake that gets him killed. As the pursuit turns into a countdown and the conspiracy tightens, Pike realizes he is not simply trying to recover what was taken, he is trying to stop what comes next. If the truth has been hidden for centuries, what will it unleash when it is finally dragged into the light?
So, without further ado, enjoy the first four chapters of The Nuremberg File.
CHAPTER 1
Evan checked the time on his phone for the fifth time.
It wasn’t like Croft to be late like this.
The train was scheduled to leave in less than ten minutes. She should have been here before he arrived, but looking up and down the platform of Gare du Nord, there was no sign of her.
If she missed this train…
He checked the time again.
Intel said the American was onboard this train. If they didn’t board now, they might miss him completely. That would be weeks of work, weeks of tracking, wasted.
Where the hell was she?
He paced along the smooth, dark tile of the platform as he looked out at the light streaming through the tall glass wall at the end of the station. His hand squeezed his phone so tightly it left imprints in his palm.
In his six years in the SIS, he’d never lost a mark, and he wasn’t about to let it happen today.
The American, Ledger, an international thief with possible ties to terror attacks, had stolen a piece of art in Zürich. He and Croft were posing as a husband-and-wife team of black-market art dealers interested in acquiring the piece.
The files said besides Zürich, Ledger had also recently run crews in Madrid and Antwerp, and that he preferred jobs where the contents of the vault weren’t the prize so much as the passwords it took to get inside. But, then again, he’d gotten away with millions in money and art.
The files were also vague on what Ledger looked like. Some claimed he was six feet tall with black hair, while others insisted that he was five feet and blonde. No one had ever gotten a picture of the mysterious man.
The art and money didn’t concern Evan. What he needed was information about the attempted bombing of the British embassy here in Paris four days ago. Once he and Croft got what they needed, they could hand Ledger over to Interpol and let them deal with the thefts.
The device used at the embassy was crude: off-the-shelf components nested inside a printer casing, the sort of thing any competent graduate student could assemble with a shopping list in one afternoon. But the device matched those the American had used in the past, so he was on a very short list of suspects, and he just happened to be taking the train from Paris to London.
Evan didn’t think that was much of a coincidence.
He’d been around long enough to know that when something smelled rotten, it probably was. Like at the dead drop in Glasgow. It was just an old-school info drop: a battered paperback of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy tucked into the crime section at Voltaire & Rousseau, third shelf from the bottom
Except the book waiting for him wasn’t the same edition that had always been there. This one was newer and it had a different cover. It was the first clue that something was wrong, but Evan chalked it up to a mistake. Perhaps the contact had damaged the original.
But his walk back along the Clyde with the book, he felt something was wrong. It wasn’t until he was back in his room that he discovered just how wrong.
Every message from that contact had used a running-key cipher to decrypt it and the page it was attached to would be the key, but this one used a double transposition cipher. This was the type of cipher training manuals taught. Evan tried to rationalize it as an oversight, or perhaps the contact had decided to rotate in a new cipher to make it harder to track.
But it still didn’t feel right.
As Evan scribbled letters into columns and watched a set of coordinates click into place too cleanly, he felt the hair on his arms stand on end. It was too easy.
Even though it was against protocol, he had investigated himself, and it turned out the contact had been dead a week. Whoever had murdered him had been trying to throw his team off. Unfortunately, his killer was long gone and left less than no trail behind him.
Evan had that same feeling now.
He checked the time again. This was cutting it too close.
“10:15 pour Londres. Dernier appel à l’embarquement,” came a distinctly recorded feminine voice over the speakers.
The boards changed too, announcing the final boarding call.
He pulled up his contacts in his and scrolled down to Willow as he stepped onto the train. The air pod in his ear rang–once, twice.
Then, he heard something. It was muffled, coming from a little further back in the train, but it was unmistakable. Tubthumping played–Croft’s ringtone.
Had she gotten on the train without him? Without him spotting her?
It seemed unlikely.
Of course, it could have been a coincidence. It was conceivable someone else had the same annoying ringtone on their phone.
He hung up.
The music stopped.
He called again.
The music started.
“What the hell?” muttered Evan.
He’d been standing outside waiting for her for the last twenty minutes, and she’d been on the train the whole time? He’d have to give Croft a severe talking to.
He followed the sound of her ringtone as it continually let him know that, “You’re never gonna keep me down,” into the cafe car on the train.
He stepped through the sliding door into a narrow room resembling a bar-on-rails, he bumped into a light-haired woman who was just exiting the car as he entered.
“Oh, scusi,” the woman said.
“Sorry,” he said.
A long, curved white counter gleamed under a dark ceiling. Glass fridges were stacked with sandwiches and cans. A small digital menu flipped between coffee, pastries, and other light snacks. Along the windows ran a narrow ledge where people could place their cups. LED strips traced the ceiling’s curve, and the air smelled of coffee. The door on the other end of the car led further back into the train, probably where the woman had come from.
The car was empty, the volume of song playing told him that at least her cell was in this car.
“Croft?” he called.
No answer.
Something wasn’t right. He pulled his sidearm, a Sig Sauer P320 Compact, out of his jacket and held it out in front of him.
“Croft?” he called out again. “Willow?”
Still, no response.
The ringtone stopped abruptly as Croft’s voicemail message began. Quickly, he yanked the air pod from his ear and shoved it into his pocket. His eyes never stopped scanning the room.
There was no movement. Yet, he could feel the hair on his arms standing at attention.
He leaned over the counter and scanned the floor. No sign of her. As he rested his elbow on the counter, he glanced into the back room where they stored extra food and supplies. It was the only logical place she could still be in this car.
He hopped over the counter, never lowering his gun, and he slowly crept into the back.
The sight that greeted him made his heart stop.
CHAPTER 2
Evan Pike had been with the Secret Intelligence Service for six years. Trained for HUMINT–Human Intelligence–operations, he was put into the field a few months earlier than most of his peers. It turned out that Evan had a knack for identifying and recruiting contacts that could offer intelligence over weeks and months that could bring down the real bad guys.
Four months ago, he’d been introduced to the fresh-faced, just out of training, Willow Croft, and he was tasked with showing her the ropes of actual field ops. He’d been reluctant to take a junior officer under his wing. He was hardly a teacher.
But Croft had proven herself on day one. She was smart, funny, and she knew how to keep herself out of sight. She was one of the most professional young recruits he’d ever met.
Now, in the backroom of the Eurostar’s cafe car, Croft lay on the floor. Her eyes stared up lifelessly as her last moment of terror was cemented in place in her features. She wasn’t breathing.
The train lurched forward, and Evan had to balance himself as he stood above her lifeless form, stunned.
A hundred questions ran through his mind. First and foremost of which was, “What the fuck happened?”
They were supposed to meet on the platform, board together, and then go to car three where they’d meet Ledger, under the guise of Mr. and Mrs. Smythe. So, the second question that raced to the front of his mind: “Why did she get on the train before me?” Which was followed quickly by, “Why didn’t she tell me?”
It didn’t add up.
His eyes scanned the area, looking for anything that might give him a clue about what had happened.
But the place was clean. Other than the clear bruises along her neck that told him that she’d been strangled to death, there was no physical evidence to be found. But he had to admit, he was no expert in forensics.
Although, the train had just pulled out of the station. Wasn’t it strange that the cafe itself wasn’t open? At the very least, shouldn’t there be someone here prepping for the journey? Where were they?
“What were you doing, Croft?” he murmured as he crouched down and closed her eyes.
It was for reasons like this that they weren’t supposed to go alone. Even on a routine operation, things could get dangerous quickly, and it was always better to have someone at your back if shit hit the fan.
Her phone lay on the floor beside her. He picked it up and swiped the screen. Locked. He hated having to do it, but he needed to see if there was anything on there that would answer some questions.
“Sorry about this, Croft,” he said as he grabbed her lifeless hand and pressed her thumb against the phone.
The screen sprang to life. He flipped through her calls–nothing unusual there–and then her texts. The very first message caught his eye.
It was marked an hour ago and was only a few simple words: “On train. Cafe Car. Urgent.”
What was most disturbing was, according to the text Evan had sent this himself.
But he had sent no such message.
Quickly pulling out his phone, Evan scrolled through his messages. That same message didn’t appear in his texts. The last message he had sent to Croft had been last night, simply asking what she wanted from the little crepe cafe he’d found earlier yesterday afternoon.
New questions formed. “How did a text get sent from my phone, without me sending it?” he mused aloud.
Unfortunately, it was a question he would have to answer later.
With the train in motion, he had less than two and a half hours to meet Ledger, so when they arrived in London, he could identify him and SO15 officers could pick him up. He just wasn’t sure how he could do that if his “wife” wasn’t with him.
But if anyone found Croft’s body before they reached the Channel Tunnel, they would stop the train here in France and he might lose Ledger. He couldn’t allow that to happen, so he had to hide Croft to buy himself enough time. Once they were in the tunnel, he’d be clear.
The only place to stash her though looked like this small refrigerator. Evan grabbed her under her arms and dragged her through the cramped space.
She really deserved better than being stuffed into a cramped freezer, but he didn’t have much of a choice at the moment. He reached into her jacket to grab her gun, only to find it missing.
He quickly scanned the room to see if it had fallen somewhere on the floor in what he had to assume had been a struggle for her life. But there was no gun. The only conclusion he could draw was that it was in the possession of her killer.
Yet another thing he’d have to deal with later.
He searched her pockets. Her passport, identifying her as Jane Smythe, and her ticket were also missing. That made things even more complicated. It was more urgent than ever that he found Ledger.
Then he thought about the money. Croft was carrying a bag with €4,000,000 inside. This was supposed to be Mr. and Mrs. Smythe’s payment for the Zürich art piece. If that was gone, Ledger would walk away.
But the bag lay in the corner, untouched and unopened. Evan breathed a small sigh of relief.
As he folded Croft’s body into a fetal position to better slide her into the refrigerator, he couldn’t help but think how their cover had been compromised. The text, the timing, the empty café car—none of that happened by accident. Someone had nudged all these events into place.
But by whom?
There were no obvious choices, and there were only a handful of people that even knew they were here.
He let the question settle. The harder he reached for an answer, the quicker it slid away. He knew this pattern: pull one loose thread and the whole jumper comes apart in your hands.
Croft had come here alone because a message wearing his identity told her to. And that fact bothered him more than anything.
He opened the door to the refrigerator, while holding Croft in an awkward position.
“Bloody hell!” he shouted, and scrambled backwards, dropping the body on the floor.
The cold light inside the cold chamber fell on a shape that made his stomach drop before his mind could name it.
CHAPTER 3
The train was moving. The streets of Paris had already given way to lush French countryside and had begun picking up speed. The little overhead monitors showed they were traveling at just over 300kph. That gave less than 40 minutes before they entered the tunnel.
Plenty of time.
The orders were clear. The stolen artifact was not to enter England by any means. Her employer had been very insistent on that. Which meant retrieving it and getting off the train before reaching the channel tunnel.
She felt the gun in her sleeve. It was the best place to conceal it for now, and she hoped that when the time came, it would be easy enough to slide out. Creating a panic onboard before she was ready wasn’t going to do her any good.
It was all about timing. The gun would come out when she wanted the train to stop–not before.
The little girl she’d taken it from had been weak–hardly put up any fight at all. She couldn’t get one past all the levels of security herself, so she’d allowed someone to carry it in for her. Her employer had identified the girl and her friend as SIS officers. It had been all too easy cloning the man’s phone at the little crepe shop yesterday. Then a simple text message, and she had the girl where she needed her.
And now she had all the tools she needed.
She’d nearly been caught though. The girl’s cell phone went off just as she was starting toward her true target, and the man had come in moments later. He had been more concerned with following the ringtone though than to pay her any mind.
He should be sufficiently distracted for a while, she surmised, and if he decided to stop the train because of the present she’d left, all the better.
She let herself blur into the rhythm of the carriage—the thrum underfoot, the soft clack of cups, the slick hiss of doors as she passed from car to car. She counted the doors in her head, not hurrying. She wouldn’t call attention to herself until she had to. No one would remember the woman carefully walking through the train car, but they would remember the woman in a rush.
She reached car three, where the first-class passengers were. She showed the ticket she’d taken to the woman in the navy-blue uniform guarding the door.
“Go ahead, ma’am,” the woman said, waving her through.
“Thank you,” she responded, stepping through the sliding door.
It was too easy when you had the right tools.
The only thing still standing in her way was the American thief.
Ledger sat alone in one seat with the two empty seats across.
She took one of those seats, placing her ticket on the table between them and said in a charming English accent, “Hello, I’m Mrs. Smythe.”
***
Evan stared back at the cold, lifeless eyes of a woman crammed into the café’s undercounter refrigerator—knees cinched to her chest, lashes filmed with frost, a purple ligature blooming at her throat, waxen skin haloed by the humming bulb while condensation pearled on her cheeks like sweat that would never fall.
At least now he knew why the cafe wasn’t open.
Whoever had killed Croft had first killed this girl—the one who should be tamping espresso and sliding plastic-wrapped sandwiches across a counter—and folded her into the only cavity cold and quiet enough to make her disappear. Then the killer had posed as a Eurostar employee, lured Croft into this cramped backroom space, and had strangled her. No mess, no struggle. It was clean and it was quiet, meaning the killer too needed to keep things stealthy.
That part he was sure of.
What he still didn’t understand was, why.
The killer had taken her gun, her ticket, and her passport, but left her cell phone and €4,000,000 behind.
As Evan turned the thought over, the carriage doors sighed apart with a pneumatic hiss and a slice of cold air.
“Merde!” a rough male voice exploded into the café, the curse cracking like a dropped tray.
“Shit!” Now he was out of time.
Footsteps tromped angrily across the car. “Mila! Why is the cafe not open?” he barked in English with a very heavy French accent. “Mila!”
Evan slid out from the back before the man could barge through the door. “Sir,” he called, lifting a leather wallet. He flipped it open to the crest and the three letters he needed the man to see. “Hello, sir,” he said in as calm a voice as he could.
The man wore the typical dark blue uniform with the teal tie that most Eurostar employees wore. The brass name tab on his lapel read GABRIEL. His eyes flicked from the badge to Evan’s face and back again, anger cooling into wary confusion as the train hummed around them
“Gabriel,” he said. “I’m SIS officer Pike.” He held out the badge for a moment longer as the angry and confused eyes of the man scanned it. Then he tucked it away, “There’s been an incident here, and I’m going to need you to not panic.”
Gabriel stared at him, now with uncertainty. “What kind of incident?”
Evan saw no reason to soften the blow. “Mila is dead.”
Gabriel’s mouth opened, closed; his chin lifted as if to reject the sound itself. Disbelief flashed first, an instinctive shake of the head, a tiny step backward. Then his features set into a kind of grim resolve. His hand went to the radio on his hip.
Evan raised both palms. “I’m going to have to ask you not to report this.
The disbelief snapped back, sharper now. “And why not?”
“Because the killer also murdered one of my officers, and I believe they are still on this train. If the train stops, that gives them a way off. As long as we’re moving, they’re trapped onboard, and that gives me the opportunity to catch them.”
He didn’t mention Ledger. He didn’t mention priorities or the SIS knife-edge he was balancing on. Sadly, catching Croft’s murderer had to be a secondary objective.
Either way, he had about two hours to accomplish both, and far less if this train stopped.
He watched Gabriel’s eyes instead—the way they slid past Evan toward the back room, then to the windows.
Gabriel’s hand hovered over the radio, unmoving. Evan could see the war going on in his head. It was his obligation to report this, but he also wanted justice for Mila.
“Mila was your friend?” Evan asked, softer.
Gabriel’s jaw worked. “Just my employee,” he said, and the word just landed wrong even to his own ears. “But I knew her.” A beat. “She sent half her pay to her mother. She hated the night runs. She—” he stopped, as if speaking made it more real.
“Then give me a chance to find her killer.”
Gabriel’s shoulders dropped a fraction. The radio hand trembled, stilled, and finally fell to his side. ”I can give you only until we reach the tunnel.”
Evan nodded. “That will be enough.” He knew that once they reached the Channel Tunnel, they wouldn’t stop the train anyway. Better to go through to London than to stop in the tunnel where it would be harder for authorities to reach them.
Then, Evan stepped into the backroom, retrieving the bag and the money. When he emerged, he hopped back over the counter and stepped up to Gabriel.
“I need you to stay here and make sure no one goes back there.” Evan pointed over his shoulder toward the back area. “Including you. Believe me, you won’t want to see it anyway.”
Gabriel looked at the back room. For a moment, Evan thought he would insist on going in there. But eventually the man nodded his agreement.
Satisfied that this situation was handled, at least momentarily, Evan began for the front of the train.
As soon as he found Ledger and identified him, he would search for Croft’s killer. Though, as he thought about it, he believed he might find both in the same place.
CHAPTER 4
“Where is your husband?” asked Ledger.
Ledger was suspicious, and she had to do something to ease the target’s mind. Although Ledger was dead as soon as she’d sat down, she needed to acquire the artifact first. That meant keeping the target calm until she possessed it.
She shrugged nonchalantly. “He will be along shortly. I thought the two of us could start while we waited.”
Looking out the window at the green landscape zooming by at more than 300kph, she decided how she was going to play this. Each target was different, and would have different reactions to her methods. So, she tried to read Ledger.
“As you know, my husband and I are very interested in the piece from Zürich,” she said simply, feeling the weight of the small handgun in her sleeve. How close were they to the tunnel now? Thirty minutes? “But I need to verify its authenticity before any transaction can take place.”
The smile on Ledger’s face told her what she needed to know before any words were whispered. “I never show off my goods until I see money on the table.”
The artifact could be anywhere. She could make her threats now, but she had the feeling the target wouldn’t respond to them the way she wanted…yet.
She’d just have to play the game.
“And we can’t show you any money until we have proof that what we’re buying is real,” she intoned.
Creating an impasse would force the target’s hand. Ledger would now have to make a decision–to either continue to negotiate, or to walk away. Either one would work in her favor.
Ledger’s eyes flicked toward a bag sitting in the adjacent seat.
That’s where the artifact was.
She’d received a file on this Ledger–a master thief and an excellent code breaker, supposedly a genius. But only a fool would bring the object they were trying to fence to the actual meeting. If she had an object worth millions of euros, she would keep it a safe distance away. That way, she had leverage if she needed it.
“Well, no money, no art.” Ledge leaned back with a smirk, as if this were the end of the conversation.
Her frozen expression didn’t change. She knew she was the one with the power here. A flick of her wrist and the stolen handgun would be where she needed it. She already knew where the artifact was, she technically no longer needed Ledger in the equation anyway.
“If we have no deal…” she began but then cut herself off as her eyes flickered to the man approaching from the back of the car.
***
“Honey,” Evan said as he approached and looked at the light-haired woman he’d bumped into just before finding Croft’s body. “You were supposed to wait for me.”
How could he have been so stupid? Of course, the one person he saw in the cafe car would be the killer. But she was small and unassuming and didn’t exude the confidence that often accompanied a killer.
He shouldered into the booth, crowding her toward the window. The vinyl squeaked. She gave just enough of a performance to keep it from looking like a struggle. Under the table, he pressed the muzzle of his gun in the line of her ribs–a small, invisible persuasion, just under the table so that Ledger wouldn’t see.
As he looked across the table though, he inwardly twitched. If this was Ledger, then the file was a fairy tale. The person sitting across from him was no man. She was a dark-haired woman with fair skin and the kind of composure that read as gentleness but with an edge. He might have called her beautiful if she weren’t a thief and a national problem.
He smothered the flinch, let his expression settle into bored affluence, and set the courier bag on the tabletop.
Evan stared straight into her green eyes. “There’s four million. You’ll get the rest when I see the piece.”
She didn’t even glance at the bag. A small, almost courteous shake of the head. “That’s not how this works, Mr. Smythe. We had an agreed upon price. And I don’t deliver until I have it all.”
“I’m not asking you to deliver,” he said, voice level, pushing just enough on the weapon under the table to make his point to the woman beside him. “But I can’t hand you ten million without an assurance that what we’re looking at is real. Surely you understand. This is payment to see it.”
“That’s a very expensive peek,” she scolded. “And no.”
“Then call it earnest money.”
“I prefer the old-fashioned term, cheating the seller,” she replied flatly. “All of it, or I walk away now.”
Evan grabbed the bag. “If that’s how you feel,” he looked toward the woman, pressing the gun into her rib again, telling her that her cooperation was mandatory. “Come on, honey, we’re leaving.”
Ledger took the bait. “A courtesy,” she reached into her pocket, producing a cell phone. Her fingers danced on the screen for a few seconds and then she turned it, so Evan could see it.
An old paper, sitting on a table inside what looked like a hard plastic sleeve you might put posters in if you wanted them to stay flat. The paper showed an image of the sun with a bunch of blue and brown dots and lines surrounding it over what looked like a city that might have been on fire.
Laying next to this old paper was this morning’s copy of Le Parisien, Paris’ premiere newspaper for international and local news. It offered proof that she at least possessed the object in question. However, it gave no indication as to whether or not she actually had it with her. For all anyone knew, the stolen art could have been sitting on the table where the picture had been taken.
Evan was no art expert, but he thought that an awful lot of trouble was being put into trying to find a piece of art that frankly didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
However, that wasn’t his concern. Now that he’d identified Ledger, he now had to keep an eye on her for the next two hours until they arrived in London. He also needed to figure out what to do with this killer, sitting beside him.
“Sight seen.” Ledger tapped the phone with a fingernail and the screen went blank.
“Do you take my husband and I for fools?” the woman in question asked. “How do we know you haven’t swapped the artifact between that photo and now?”
Ledger’s mouth tilted. “You don’t.”
“That’s not an answer,” the woman said.
“You’re buying from a thief on a train. If you wanted a guarantee, you should’ve gone to a museum gift shop.”
The light-haired woman shifted as if to cross her legs. Metal found Evan under the table. The precise, intimate pressure could only have been the barrel of a gun pressed against his crotch. He kept his smile pinned in place and didn’t move the gun buried in her ribs.
The message was clear, “You shoot me, I shoot you.”
Ledger didn’t catch the movement. She shrugged. “Honestly, you don’t. But let me tell you, I haven’t been in business as long as I have, by screwing over my buyers. Word gets around quick when things like that happen.”
Ledger’s gaze sharpened. “Since we’re trading assurances—why this piece? Of all the art pieces in Europe, why Hans Glaser’s 1561 Nuremberg broadsheet?”
“We have eclectic tastes,” the woman said smoothly.
“Eclectic,” Ledger echoed, amused. “So not the usual ‘space angels over Bavaria’ crowd, then.” She cocked her head. “Tell me your favorite feature of the print.”
“The sun,” Evan said evenly.
“The…celestial forms,” the woman offered. “Stars.”
“Stars,” Ledger repeated, as if smelling something unpleasant. “Not the black ‘tubes’ Glaser described, the ones he says spilled spheres like hail? Not the crosses with tails? Not the ‘blood-red’ spear that hangs over the city like a bad omen? Not the smoke plume outside the walls where it all supposedly fell to earth? Stars.” She folded her hands again. “What about the print itself—since you care about authenticity. How do you plan to prove it’s not a fake?”
The woman looked at Evan as if for help. He had no idea how they would have identified this as the real thing, and he feared that Ledger already knew it, but he had to continue the bluff.
“The paper itself. We’d be able to tell by looking at the paper.”
Ledger shook her head. “There’s a watermark in the lower right if you hold it to the light. Any true collector would know that.”
Evan cursed inwardly, though he kept his expression calm. This would have been information that he should have had walking into this meeting.
Ledger leaned her elbows on the table and folded her hands together, both index fingers pointing at Evan and the mysterious light-haired woman about to blow off his manhood.
“If anything, I can’t trust the two of you. I’ve never heard of you before. I’ve checked you out, and your backgrounds come up fine, the missing Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt, the supposedly destroyed Picasso cat statue taken from the Hemingway House in Key West, an original manuscript of The Hobbit–all apparently in your possession.” She sighed and leaned back in her seat again, crossing her arms across her chest and shaking her head. “And yet when check in with any colleagues or acquaintances, no one has ever heard of you. No other art dealers have heard of you. That means that you’re likely Interpol, or some government agency.”
Evan could have cursed, but he kept his composure as neutral as possible. This whole operation had gone to hell in just a few minutes. Who was so sloppy back at headquarters as to give them a cover that was as transparent as glass?
She grabbed Evan’s bag and the backpack on the seat next to her and stood. “And since the two of you seem determined to kill each other, I’m going to thank you for my payment, and I’m going to head out now.”
Evan thought about calling after her but thought better of it as the pressure on his crotch grew a little more insistent.
“She is getting away,” the woman hissed, the accent she’d worn a minute ago snapping into something harder—definitely German.
He glanced at her. Younger—late twenties, maybe—pretty in an efficient way: neat blonde ponytail, clear skin, a faint crescent of a scar at the jaw. The thought barely formed before he crushed it. Beautiful or not, she’d throttled Willow Croft, and the cold muzzle digging into him was Willow’s gun.
“If you don’t want her to get away,” he murmured, smile fixed, “you’ll point that somewhere else.”
Her mouth barely moved. “If you move your gun, I move mine. We both lose different things.”
“Then we both do nothing while she walks,” he said. “That the plan?”
Ledger had already reached the sliding doors.
But the gun didn’t budge.
“Put it away,” he said, quieter. “You won’t shoot me in first class. Not with all these witnesses.”
“I will shoot you if you shoot me,” she answered, equally soft. The muzzle nudged a fraction. “Decide.”
He couldn’t risk pulling his gun away, it might have been the only thing keeping her from shooting him. She’d already proven she was not only capable, but willing.
Ledger was gone. The only good news was that she couldn’t, as of yet, get off this train. As long as the train kept moving, he still had a chance to capture her. But he needed to get rid of this other woman first.
Continued…
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