Page 88 of The Wolves Come at Night
Angelie stopped hurrying, pulled a baseball cap from her back pocket. She pulled her hair through, slung her bag across her body, and immediately looked so American Taylor almost laughed. Angelie murmured, “Into the Rodin. Now.”
She had a set of passes—Taylor recognized them as the multiday museum passes that allowed tourists to jump lines and enter the sites unmolested. A minute later they’d passed through the house proper and into the elegant green gardens of the Musée Rodin.
Sirens began to wail, but Angelie simply darted toward the first epic bronze sculpture and posed. “Get in here, girl, take a selfie with me,” she called in a credible but cringeworthy southern accent.
Taylor walked over to her and fake smiled for Angelie’s bent arm. “No one our age talks like that. Can we just…”
But Angelie was off. The gardens were quiet, and nearly deserted. It was too cold for most sane people to enjoy an afternoon outdoors. Fake selfie by fake selfie, they made it to the far wall. Angelie dropped the stupid grin. Taylor was momentarily taken aback by the fact that she missed it. Angelie was charming when she smiled. Her normal expression was so serious as to be dour.
“Over the wall,” Angelie said.
There was a wrought-iron bench under the willow tree. Taylor dragged it to the wall, climbed over the white stucco, and carefully dropped to the sidewalk on the other side. Angelie was with her seconds later, and the car slid to the curb. They were inside and off before anyone noticed them.
Forty-Five
In the car, Angelie called Santiago on the encrypted phone. “Are you prepared? Good. We have everything we need. We will be there shortly.” She tucked the phone away and crossed her legs casually, as if this was simply another day, another Parisian afternoon with snow falling from the sky like petals in the wind. Her nonchalance was alarming. The silence was too much for Taylor to hold back any longer.
“Why the hell did that just happen?” She was steaming mad, but Angelie didn’t seem to care. She answered casually, calmly, dispassionately.
“I did what I had to. And we got what we needed.”
“Bullshit. You’d planned to take him out all along.”
Angelie cocked her head to the side like a spaniel hearing a strange noise. She was not accustomed to having her orders, nor her barbaric methods, questioned.
“And if I told you I was going to eliminate him, you would have reacted poorly. As is evidenced by the tension you’re feeling right now. Take a breath before you have a stroke.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I wasn’t making a joke. Your face is red, and you’ve nearly pulled your hair off your head. Settle down.”
Taylor bit back a retort and untangled her fist from her ponytail. She hated it when people pointed out her hair tic. It was an unconscious thing, and people who cared about her didn’t mention it. Angelie’s observation of it felt like a loaded gun to her head. This whole thing was going sideways, fast.
Angelie caught Taylor’s gritted teeth and with half a smile, chose the moment to continue her elucidation. “Sometimes, Taylor, when you are in the field, you will have to act in ways you don’t expect. You’re wrong. I wasn’t planning to kill him when we went in. He was about to shoot you.”
“Oh, don’t you pretend for a moment you did that for me. You took out the guards—”
“Also unplanned. When someone tries to shoot me, I shoot back and ask why later. If I hadn’t, you’d be leaking all over La Boulanger’s floor. Not only would that be a shame and a waste of a good resource, Thierry wouldn’t take kindly to me losing you on your first mission.”
That obsequious tone… “Oh, so you killed them to save me? This is not going to work. I will find Carson myself. Drop me at the corner.”
“No.”
The driver, in response to Angelie’s curt answer, had the audacity to speed up.
“I’m serious, I will not—”
“Quit complaining and look at this.”
She tossed a file in Taylor’s lap. Taylor, too, was unaccustomed to having her authority undermined, and debated for half a moment about pressing the button to slide down the window and toss the file onto the street. She only stopped herself when she recalled the multitude of bodies they’d left behind. Too many lives had already been lost for this information.
Instead, she did as Angelie asked, took a deep, admonishing breath through her nose, and opened the file.
Joseph Game, aka Gareth Maughan, had a lot of money in La Boulanger’s bank.
At first glance it totaled somewhere in the $150 million range. Investments, assets, the supposed stake in Bitcoin, plus good old-fashioned liquid money in a variety of currencies, mostly dollars.
“That’s a lot of cash.”
