PROLOGUE
This. This was why Nick Dawes so rarely took a freelance job separate from his mercenary team, the Hudson Kings. “What did you say to me?” Nick asked, his finger hovering over the keyboard, an explosive heat about to burst out of his chest.
The enormous, sweaty Russian criminal who’d crowded into the van with Nick for the last two hours licked his lips and shrugged, but his eyes flicked nervously to Nick’s hands. “Is nothing,” Vlad Sokolov said.
It definitely wasn’t nothing.
The van door opened; Sokolov flinched, and then Maksim jumped into the interior, looking like a python in his skintight neoprene. Maksim was a lone-wolf operative; he didn’t run with a mercenary team. He usually didn’t run with a team at all. Given the shit going down, Nick thought maybe the guy had it right. “We done?” Maks asked.
Sokolov mopped his face with his sleeve. “We are not,” he said, dipping his chin as if he could will Nick’s finger to press down on the “Enter” key.
Nick stared at Sokolov. Maksim stared at Nick. “Nikolai,” Maks murmured. “Let’s finish.”
“You piece of shit,” Nick said to Sokolov, standing up in the tight quarters and only just noticing Tristan looking at them over the driver’s seat with his jaw dropped.
Somebody’s cell phone buzzed. Maks dug his out of the knapsack he’d stored in the van. “I don’t know,” he murmured into the phone. To Nick he said, “Law wants to know why the van is still in view. Our target is heading this way.”
When he didn’t get an answer from Nick, who was still waiting for a decent response of his own from Sokolov, he gave his own answer and hung up.
“Come on, Nick, we’ve got a window,” Tristan said, his voice rocking a higher-than-usual pitch.
“Is that what you really think?” Nick said to Sokolov, his brain full of fury. Just red-hot fury.
“Never seen you lose it, and this is not the time,” Maks said, his palm pressing on Nick’s chest.
Nick threw off Maksim’s hand and focused on the Russian boss. “You massive prick. If that’s what you think, watch me do the laundry.” Nick sat down, barely able to see through the red, and punched routing information into the computer to move the $20 million into his own personal holding account in the Caymans. Where nobody else could see it. “Poof, motherfucker.”
Sokolov blinked. Then he looked closer at the screen, and Nick could actually see the fabric of Sokolov’s shirt trembling over the place where his heart was beating off the charts.
“Tristan!” Sokolov yelled.
“S’gone. Money’s gone,” Tristan said, typing frantically into the second laptop resting on the front passenger-side seat.
Maksim looked out the van’s open door, clearly trying to decide if he needed to bail. He’d packed a set of serious weapons on the way out to steal the account codes with Law, and he pulled one of his guns from his boot. Ironic that he thought he needed one now.
“Where is money?” Sokolov barked, sweat pouring down his temples like a dam had broken.
A dam had broken. Just not one anybody had expected. He should never have done this job, but he just haaad to go and prove something to himself. Hell, to Rothgar and the team. To Jemilla Johnson, his childhood fairy godmother and the only person in his past who’d ever cared about his future. Not that he’d let on to Sokolov what this was all about . . .
And frankly, Jemilla would be more disgusted by this mission than anything else.
That knowledge alone should have stopped him from rising to Sokolov’s bait. But some small part of him that had been on self-destruct for years was now gaining the upper hand.
Nick sat there, red-hot anger still coursing through his bloodstream, watching the heist go to hell, with a kind of sick fascination. Maks was trying to staunch a total freak-out by Tristan and Sokolov that was actually making the van rock on its wheels. Sokolov’s angry, spitting mouth looked like something out of an old gangster movie. Tristan was more of a cartoon, bug-eyed, clutching his laptop up front.
Nick’d put the money back in a second, but he wanted Sokolov to really feel the burn.
He looked down at his screen and calculated what interest he could accumulate by keeping the money overnight. The insanity of that thought made him smile, which did not go unnoticed. “You are amused?” Sokolov screamed.
Maksim held Sokolov back with a bear hug, his gun hand pressing against the larger man’s chest. “Nikolai, put it back,” the merc said tightly.
Nick looked over at the enormous flailing Russian, thinking about how much he despised him. He’d purposely given Sokolov the impression that he was starting to break from his team, that he was heading for a solo path like the one Maksim walked.
Nick would never, ever bail on Rothgar and the Hudson Kings.
The whole point of doing this freelance mission in the first place was to pick up intel on Sokolov that could be useful to Rothgar and the team. The whole point was to contribute something bigger and more important than pressing “Enter” keys while he watched the cavalry—primarily Chase and Flynn and Geo—take all the risks to life and limb.
Nick hadn’t told Rothgar what he was doing with the Russian boss, of course, not even when he’d recently discovered there was unexpected overlap between Nick’s side gig here and the bigger job involving Sokolov that Rothgar was working on with the whole team. If Sokolov figured out it was Nick’s team going after his girlfriend, Anya, there’d be hell to pay, but it would be more telling to back out of Sokolov’s heist, so the only way out was forward.
A stream of curse words—some English, some angry Russian—polluted the interior of the van as Maksim and Sokolov faced off, guns waving in every direction, including at Nick’s head.
He homed in on Maksim’s strained face and suddenly processed how unfair playing this game with Sokolov was to his fellow mercs.
“Where is money?” Sokolov yelled at the top of his lungs, spittle flying in all directions. The faint gurgle of his normal heavy breathing sounded even more labored than usual.
Pull yourself together, Nick. Give Sokolov back his money and get the hell out of his world.
Nick put his fingers back to work on the keyboard. “You begged me to take this freelance gig, Sokolov. I didn’t need the money, but I was bored.” And sick of making the rest of the guys on my team do all the dirty work. “When you begged me, I said yes. In part because I’d like to give the SPCA a sizable donation this month, in part because I always learn something from Maks doing stunts, and in part because you fed me a line about how I’d get some field action, which you then assigned to Law. But now . . . now I’m really, really annoyed that I didn’t opt for extra sleep.”
“Your job is money. You are financier!” Sokolov reached over and actually banged his meaty fist on the keyboard. “Where is money!”
The screen flickered. Nick stared in disbelief as the cursor turned into a cheerful rainbow-colored beach ball of death, before the computer froze up for two seconds and then reloaded the page. He’d been logged out.
There were a lot of ways to move money, clean money, hide money, and redistribute money. Nick knew them all. Once Law and Maks finished their fine fieldwork and retrieved the bank-account codes and Tristan had iced the firewall and laid their own security over Nick’s keystrokes, it was Nick’s game.
For this mission, he’d designed an elaborate system through which he’d clean the money and erase the evidence of its provenance. He’d electronically divide and pipe small quantities of heist money to contacts through a maze of underground accounts. Mysterious trusts, shell companies, anonymous money managers in other foreign countries . . . it was a tangled web. It was Nick’s web.
Only Nick knew who and where these contacts were, and only Nick knew the passwords to reclaim these divided increments of cash and reassemble them into fresh, unscented, yet carefully bleached $20 million inside Sokolov’s overseas bank account once the laundry was done and the bills were dry.
“We need to get out of here,” Maks said. “We need to get off the premises . . . fuck, Tristan, are you listening? Put the van in gear and move out.”
“Shit, shit . . .” Tristan’s head swiveled back and forth as he looked at the laptop open on the passenger seat next to him and then back at Sokolov, who was staggering toward Nick with his hands up in strangle position. Tristan went for the laptop; Sokolov went for the kill.
Nick was already logging in again, and the precision required to do so forced him to cool his temper and regain some semblance of his usual better judgment. He didn’t like that he was potentially leaving twice the tracks, and he wasn’t too keen on losing sight of $20 million either. Ah, but there the money was, okay, and he pressed down with his finger to reroute it back from his Caymans account to the holding account where Sokolov could see it, before Nick doled it out to the middlemen for the cleaning process. Done. Teach you a fucking lesson you . . . you . . .
Wait. Wait a minute.
They still weren’t moving, because Tristan had not put the van in gear and moved them out; he was at the second laptop, obsessing about the money. “Where’s the money, Nick? I don’t see it. I don’t see the money,” Tristan said, pointing wildly at his screen. He was talking to Nick but looking at Sokolov, and now Maksim was shouting, shaking Tristan’s sleeve, and it was like trying to think in the middle of a goddamn circus.
Nick blinked, his fingers hovering above the keyboard, just waiting to QWERTY the twenty mil from A to B. But the money was stuck in a pipe or something. He couldn’t pull it back, and he couldn’t push it out. Somehow, the ether had it . . . he was 100 percent certain he’d pulled the money back, but it just wasn’t there.
Nick had never made a mistake on a job. Not once. He was there when Flynn and Dex were injured in a couple of cock-ups, but it was never on him. I don’t make mistakes. What the hell is wrong with me? Sweat stung his eyes, and he wiped his forehead with the pristine edge of his French cuff.
“The big house is waking up, people,” Maks said. “We need to pick up Law and get gone.”
Twenty million dollars. And it wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere.
Vlad Sokolov lunged forward.
Red-hot turned to ice. Sokolov’s fingers started to squeeze; Nick began to lose consciousness.
Maksim got out of the van and came around to the driver’s side, where he literally shoved Tristan to the passenger side on top of his laptop with the sole of his boot, put the van in gear, and moved. The van side door was sliding to and fro as they peeled out of the compound and drove without headlights straight into the black.
The last thing he heard before going dark was Maks: “Comrade, you’re definitely not getting the money back if you kill him now.”