Chasing the White Lion James Hannibal (essential reading TXT) 📖

“You want any?” Tyler asked, coming down the hatch stairs a few minutes later with a full pot and stack of paper cups.

Val shook her head, still placing one foot at a time on the threshold like a tightrope walker.

“Suit yourself.” He sat down and poured himself a cup. He dumped a packet of sugar into the coffee, swirled the liquid with the empty packet, and rolled it up into a little ball. Three of the four other cups he lined up one by one, upside down.

The runway outside remained quiet. Depending on winds, Marco might be anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour away. He hadn’t exactly filed a flight plan.

Val made a hundred-eighty-degree turn at the end of the threshold. “You never did tell your little protégé how you plan to deal with those containers full of weaponized drones.”

“I thought you didn’t care what happened to the drones, as long as we get the money.”

“I don’t. But she does.” The grifter took two quick steps, holding her arms out for balance. “You shouldn’t keep her in the dark all the time.”

“I like to surprise her. Builds trust.”

“Not always.” She abandoned her tightrope walk, taking interest in Tyler’s upturned cups. “Shell game?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He slipped the paper ball under the first and began weaving all three in figure eights.

“Keep the ball cup back. Otherwise the mark will see the transfer.” Val waited for him to stop and tapped the center cup. As predicted, the paper ball was there.

Tyler sighed and started over. “I always loved this game, but I never mastered it.”

She pulled over a chair and sat down. “Move the cups a little faster, not enough to make it hard, but enough to make them wonder.”

He stopped. She tapped a cup. The ball was there.

He started again, slower this time, instead of faster as she suggested. After a few seconds, he paused, squinted at the cups as if he had lost track of the ball himself, then kept going.

“The weapons, Tyler. What’s the plan?”

All that maneuvering and weaving in and out had left the cups in relative disarray. Tyler lined them all up at the edge of the table and lifted his hands, giving Val a nod.

She rolled her eyes and lifted the center cup.

The ball wasn’t there.

She lifted the left, then the right. No paper ball. She frowned. “Okay. Good transfer. You’re wearing a T-shirt, so it’s not up your sleeves. Show me your hands.”

He did, rippling his fingers. Both hands were empty. Tyler lifted a fourth cup at the far corner of the table—the extra cup he had offered to fill with coffee for her when he first emerged from the AS2. The paper ball rocked back and forth in the breeze.

Val sat back, perplexed. “How did you—?”

“I like to surprise you too.”

The sound of a light jet on final approach drew both of their gazes to the runway. Tyler left her sitting at the table and walked out into the moonlight. “Here comes Don Marco.”

AN OBSERVER MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT Tyler and Val looked like a miniature welcoming party, waiting on the tarmac as the jet pulled in before the next hangar over. But Tyler couldn’t banish the feeling they were two teens—a boy and his date, out past curfew and now waiting to face her angry father.

Don Marco seemed to share Tyler’s thoughts. “You two,” he said, coming down the steps after four young handlers took defensive positions at the nose, tail, and wingtips. “Did I not say once the Gryphon job was done, you were to sit down with me in Campione? Together?” He gave Val a kiss on each cheek, earning a dutiful but cold kiss on each of his, then stepped in front of Tyler. The old Italian’s bushy white eyebrows pressed together in a scowl. “We made a deal, Adam. Yet here we all are, six months later. What have the two of you been doing all this time.”

“Working.” Tyler cleared his throat, which had suddenly gone dry. “Val’s been working for me. That’s all.”

“With him,” Val said. “I’ve been working with him, not for him.”

“Right. With me.” Tyler couldn’t stop himself from giving Marco a subtle head bobble that said With me means for me.

Val smacked his arm. “I saw that.”

“Your pilot can stow the jet in there.” Tyler gestured at the empty hangar. “And I made arrangements for you and your men at a house near the marina. We can still have that sit-down you wanted, tonight or tomorrow morning. By noon, things will get busy.”

“No.” Marco turned away from him to scan the airfield.

When he didn’t elaborate, Tyler cocked his head. “No sit-down? No, your pilot isn’t staying?”

“Both. You two need to leave.”

Something in his tone—something Tyler hadn’t picked up—seemed to affect Val. She touched her father’s arm. “Why would we leave? You don’t have a vehicle.”

He stopped scanning the airfield long enough to look her in the eye. “There was a time when you called me Papa.”

“That time is long past, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to you. Why do you want us to leave?”

“Jafet’s people are coming. They can’t see us together.”

The hair on the back of Tyler’s neck stood up. Marco wasn’t scanning the airfield out of routine paranoia. He was expecting Jafet’s men—dangerous men. How much time did they have? “You spoke to Jafet without me.”

The Italian nodded. “I’m staying with him at Club Styx. It was the only way he’d agree to the meeting. An escort is coming for me now. My men and my pilot will return to Campione.”

Concern choked Val’s voice. “If you go into that mountain alone, you’ll never come out again.”

“You don’t know him as I do. Jafet will want to gloat—to lord his hospitality over me for a night and a day.” Don Marco shifted his gaze from Val to Tyler. “After that, my survival depends entirely on you.”

CHAPTER

FORTY-

FIVE

ADAMANTAS MARINA

MILOS CALDERA