Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
“What do you mean?”
“I mean”—I take a sip of the water with ice I have in front of me. I want to remain alert and hydrated. Both seem important in their own ways—“that things were all going smoothly for a while. After… well, after you and I…” She closes her eyes. Opens them again. “After Christine and I reconciled—or so I thought—she and I went back to our ways, doing the things we do, and even though Danny wasn’t with us at the time, everything felt relatively… normal.”
“You’re asking relativity to stretch itself quite thin there,” she notes.
“Indeed,” I acquiesce. “But, in any case”—and a cold chill courses through me as I recount what I know and what I believe—“then, suddenly, Christine either fell or was thrown from a rooftop. We still don’t know precisely which. But it is highly unlikely that it is the prior. Christine making a mistake… slipping, falling… that is not who she is.”
“Are you sure?” Eliza asks. “In my experience, people do fall. Sometimes hard.”
I nod in an attempt to dignify the point while not becoming simultaneously derailed by the metaphor. “Yes,” I say, “but not in this case, I can’t believe.”
She nods too, sips her drink, says, “Go on.”
“My point is that subsequent to that, things became—and have remained—very strange. Even by the metrics we might normally use to gauge such things,” I say quickly before she can once again remind me of how categorically beyond the standard all of our lives are.
I continue, “Upon me sending Danny to fetch her and the three of us finding ourselves together again, we endured a monumental assault on Danny’s home. And we endured another monumental assault on a home in the middle of nowhere where we were hiding. And while I now know both of those events to have been orchestrated nominally by Lars, I believe they weren’t. Not fundamentally. Not ultimately.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a laaitie. A young Zulu oke called Solomon. He was with me for a brief moment. But I didn’t hire him. And when I asked Lars, he told me he didn’t hire him either. And Lars killed him before I had a chance to interrogate the matter further.”
“All right,” Eliza says, slowly.
“How did someone find their way into my organization without me or Lars knowing? Why did that person come into our world right as Christine was being thrown about? Someone from the outside has managed to find their way into a place of influence in my orbit. And it would seem that they have been watching me ever since. Because someone retrieved me and Lars from the base of the cliff from whence we were shot. Someone placed us in repose at the estate. The same someone who abducted Andra and Theo. The same someone who shot Brasil Lynch off that bridge yesterday. Or last week. Or last year. Or whenever the fok it was.”
I pause long enough to twist my neck. Because I’m frustrated. Because I do not like not having control, but it is something with which I am becoming colossally familiar.
“Point being: Someone has been well ahead of every step we’ve made, and someone is shadowing us in a very curious way. And they have now requested a trade. For what exactly, one can only assume. But all I can come up with is that it is something inexpressibly valuable. And the only thing I can conjure that possesses that level of inherent value is a fokken seven-carat diamond.”
I breathe in deeply through my nose and let the breath out heavily the same way. Eliza stares at me for a good long moment, absently swirling the now mostly liquid, ice-diluted contents of her tumbler.
“All right then. So why involve my child?”
“Because she is also my child.”
“That’s not—”
“I know. I don’t know. I’m not Magnus Carlsen,” I admit aloud.
She thinks for a moment, says, “He’s the chess—?”
“The chess grandmaster, yes.”
She sighs. “Okay. Yes, well. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” She takes another breath, stares at her drink, and says, “So, what did you want to talk with me about?”
I lick my lips without thinking. Despite my ice water, they are unexpectedly dry. “I wanted to say two things,” I start. “First, when this is all over and we get Andra back safely”—she shoots me a glance—“which we will,” I emphasize, “that will be that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I say. You will never see me again. Or us. Me. Danny. Christine. We will disappear forever and you never need tell the child I exist. I will not bother you again. But I will see to it that you have enough resources to give her the finest life a person could possibly want.”
“I don’t need—”
“I know you don’t need it, but I’d like to provide it.”