Page 48 of Red Line

Grey shrugged. “Right now, that’s not my worry. We need to get into the ball and see what’s up.”

“You’re planning to steal the ring?”

“Steal … well, no ring, no reward money. We wouldn’t keep the ring, of course. We’d make sure it got into the hands of the heir, right? In effect, Elena doesn’t own the ring. She simplyhaspossessionof it. She got it via the assassination of five men. And Dr. Klein as collateral damage. So six down, that we know of.”

“Dr. Klein is a loss. He was a grumpy old man, set in his ways. But he knew his stuff. And he always helped when he could.” Red tipped her head. “You’re sure the woman who took the briefcase is this woman making contact? One and the same?”

“With Dr. Wajeeb providing us with a name, we were able to get more examples of Savas on security cameras, airports mostly. AI compared those samples to the woman at Dr. Klein’s address. It has a high probability of the right body composition, height, and walking patterns. We had no face for comparison. We have some now. But it's CCTV crap. The clarity isn’t there. Better to wait on what Iniquus hands us from the aging process.”

“Okay. And you think Elena will have the ring on her at the ball? What if she doesn’t?”

“She’s meeting the guy, Joel Brighton who has the passwords and the bank account number. Joel asked to meet Elena at the ball to make the exchange happen. So one assumes she’ll have the ring on her somewhere.”

“Forty million.” Red drummed her fingers on her thigh.

Grey nodded. “It’s a lot.”

“They aren’t going to do that at the ball.” Red pursed her lips as she paused. “They’ll just be setting up the handover.”

“That’s what Black and I decided as well.”

“So it could be anyone who shows up,” Red said. “It might not even be her. I mean, she would be exposing herself.”

“True.”

“And this guy, Joel, he’d have to have had his ticket well in advance?”

“He did. Two tickets, one for himself and a plus one.”

Suddenly, Red’s eyelids grew heavy. Her head clanged. She so wanted to go back to sleep even though that damneddream was an oily sheen on her thoughts, and she didn’t want to sleep if it meant revisiting those sensations. “Grey, you figured this all out. I’m not enjoying this game. Let’s cut to the chase. What’s the plan?”

“We’re told Elena was offered a ticket. Until then, she’ll be a mole in the ground, right?”

“Yes,” Red acknowledged. “So we go to the ball, you and I? To what end? I mean, taking the ring would be the simplest task. But when do we ever do simple?”

A grin spread across Grey’s face. “Simple is boring. What would you like to get out of seeing Elena talking with Joel?”

“What I want to know is the end goal of this transaction. Is Elena heading into a cushy retirement? Or is she planning something? I want to know if this reward will fund something big and bad. Saturday? I can dance on Saturday, but I don’t have a ball gown.”

“That’s being handled.”

“Thanks, fairy godmother. And if you could turn my pumpkin into a coach?”

“I’ll do my best,” Grey said, then added, “The assignment needs to answer the following questions: What is the money paying for? What’s plan?”

The truth about terrorist plans was that they were hard to extinguish once conceived. If you kill the planner, the plan survives. If you kill the financing, there are other ways, other times, and other avenues. In order to kill the plan, you needed to know the plan, and you needed to destroy the plan and all of its pieces and parts.

How?

Typically, sunlight did the job. Tell everyone about the plan. Tell the public the day, the time, and the perpetrators.

Getting Elena Savas might possibly—but improbably stop the plan.

Getting the ringwouldn’tstop the plan.

Red needed to follow the money.

That meant that Red needed to protect Elena’s ability to get to her payday so they could watch the money move, find out who the players were, and where the money was spent.

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