Page 41 of Smith

“Remember when we were in that house in Prague?”

“The mansion?” I asked.

“Yeah, the mansion with the diamonds hidden in the walls.”

Not just any diamonds—blood diamonds from Botswana that we’d tracked through Africa where they entered into Spain by way of Morocco. Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, then finally into Czechia.

Three bags of rocks, each weighing right around fourteen ounces, was enough to cause a shitstorm of epic proportions. Each of those bags held roughly nineteen-hundred carats. In other words, the transporters had smuggled nearly ten million US dollars’ worth of raw diamonds across a continent and four countries besides. The good news was the seizure of those diamonds meant they weren’t traded for weapons. The bad news was and still is, people were willing to murder over a fucking bag of rocks.

“I’ve been thinking,” he started. “The walls in here, the living room—hell, all of the downstairs walls—are gypsum. The upstairs is a combination but all of the exterior walls are drywall.”

“I’m not tracking,” I told him.

“Someone remodeled the upstairs and replaced the plaster with drywall. Earlier, Aria said when she bought the house, and the earlier videos confirm, she had no plans of a major reno upstairs.”

He was correct. Aria had explained the change in plans when Jonas had asked why she switched gears and decided to lose a bedroom for the sake of a closet and a bigger bathroom. Bottom line, it was for resale value. The master bedroom closet was shit. No woman would walk into the master and fall in love with shit closet space and a tiny bathroom. But she would make her kids share a room or forgo a guest room for a big, beautiful bathroom and closet.

I wasn’t a woman—I bought my house because it was close to the office. I didn’t have to deal with traffic, nothing needed to berepaired, and the wall in the living room was big enough to hang a huge-ass TV on the wall. But I reckoned Aria knew what she was talking about and not because she was a woman—she was fucking smart.

“Brother, you’ve lost me. We’re already going off the working theory someone broke in and tore the wall apart because they were looking for something. The question is, did they find it?”

“We need to tear down more walls.” Jonas said.

Aria would have a shit hemorrhage if she heard him say that.

“Are you crazy?”

“For shits and grins I looked through the doorbell footage Kira found from the house at the end of the block.”

“I watched the same footage. There was nothing there.”

“Sure there was. An ambo, police, and fire truck all passed that house at twenty-three-nineteen.”

I couldn’t recall the exact time but after eleven sounded about right.

“Okay.”

“I pulled the emergency callouts from that night. The woman who lives two doors down had a heart attack.”

Jesus fuck.

“You’re thinking whoever was in here, heard those sirens and bolted?” I needlessly asked.

“Yep.”

Well, fuck.

Jonas was right—more walls had to come down.

Aria was going to go apeshit. Not that I blamed her. Every new sheet of drywall that had to go up cut into her profit.

“What’s this got to do with the mansion in Prague?”

“The homeowner’s assistant hired a crew to do a remodel. The homeowner never knew his house was essentially a storage facility for contraband.”

Damn, but he was right about that, too. Our team wasn’t part of the search—we left after we tracked and detained. But the briefing we got was that the rich couple who owned the house had no idea their assistant had ties to terrorists. The men the assistant hired for the remodel were part of the organization. They’d installed secret panels throughout the house that were later used to hide weapons, drugs, and diamonds.

“You think whoever the Calvins hired to do the upstairs remodel hid shit in the walls?”

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