Rising Hope by Edie James
31
Sarah gripped the rail hard.Could this day get any weirder?
Austin raced back up the stairs and set the metal box in the center of the big table. “This was in the last bag,” he said. “The rest were just filled with drugs.”
A little larger than a shoe box, with thick, insulated walls and a watertight lid that hung from sizeable hinges, the container looked like a high-tech storage box.
Star appeared with a thick bath towel and a set of large tweezers. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and teased each piece carefully out of the box.
There were a lot.
Rings and necklaces, their every surface encrusted with diamonds. Brooches and elaborate necklaces. Gems in colors Sarah had never seen outside a museum. Reds, greens and deep sapphire blues.
Her gaze ping-ponged between the stunning pieces and Enzo’s face. Did he think she knew about the jewels all along? It wasn’t a far-fetched belief. She’d been part of the op from day one. And she’d scolded him for getting anywhere near the bags.
No reason for him to think she wasn’t part of this.
She tried to watch him without calling attention to her scrutiny, but the loot had his full attention. With her anxiety level already ramped up way past overload, she was becoming curiously numb. At least physically. Mentally, she ached to drag him out of the room and plead her case. She hadn’t known. Whatever this was about, she would never have pulled him into it without his consent.
Ethan reached over the loot, photographing each piece with his phone while the rest of them watched open-mouthed.
Except Jack. He was watching her and Enzo. “I’m gonna guess you two had no idea this was there?”
“No,” she responded instantly. “But I never looked in any of the bags. The cartel, and the agents who picked it up from us, were really touchy about that. My contact, Ulrich, would open a duffle and show me the top layer, but I never touched them.”
She cut Enzo a look. Now it all made sense. Ulrich’s jumpiness, and Panetta’s snippy instructions to keep clear. “I thought the cartel didn’t want to be accused of shorting the delivery, and I figured Panetta and Munson didn’t want to risk us contaminating evidence.”
“Or stealing it,” Enzo added darkly. He shrugged, his eyes still glued to the diminishing pile in the metal box. “That’s the feeling I got.”
Jack blew out a breath. “That makes a strange kind of sense.”
The look he sent his partner, Austin, made Sarah’s stomach lurch.
“This is bad.” She put Jack’s expression into words.
Jack winced. “That’s one word for it.”
Star held up a brooch the size of Sarah’s palm, twisting the piece in the light. “These are amazing.”
And dangerous. Sarah immediately understood the implications of what they’d found. The pieces would be worth several fortunes, for sure. And no one knew they were moving from the cartel into the hands of someone working the undercover mission.
An inside source of some kind.
And now she and Enzo had disappeared with the loot.
She shuddered, suddenly chilled to the tips of her toes. This discovery made the trouble they were already in look like a playground fight.
Star nudged an emerald the size of a small egg with the tips of her tweezers. “Take a couple shots of the whole collection,” she directed her husband.
Ethan pulled out a chair and climbed up onto it to get the whole contents in one shot, then headed for the computer desks in the room behind them.
Star put each piece back with the same care she’d taken unpacking them.
The rest of them sank into the surrounding chairs. Sarah felt like the air had gone out of her. Her brain was numb.
Looking dazed, as if he’d just witnessed a multi-car pile-up, Jack rubbed a hand over his face. “We’ve got a safe downstairs. The admiral and I are the only ones with the combination. If it’s okay with you two, we’ll store these there for tonight.”
She and Enzo both nodded.
“Sounds like a plan,” Enzo agreed.
The hollow quality in his voice made Sarah ache all over again. What had she gotten him into?
“Wow!” Ethan exclaimed from the main room. “You guys need to see this.”
They all ran in.
He wheeled his chair back from the wall of screens in front of him. There, splashed across the multiple monitors were at least several of the larger pieces.
“The Romanov Jewels,” Ethan announced. “Some of them, anyway.”
Star made a little squeaky sound. “As in the Russian Royal family?”
Her husband nodded. “Looks like. We’ll need to go through the catalogue, but you can see a bunch of them look identical.” He pointed at the pieces Sarah recognized.
“How much are these worth?” Austin asked. “Assuming they’re real.”
Ethan slid to the side, attacking the keyboard on a separate computer. His head jerked back. “Yeouza!”
Austin smirked. “I’m assuming that’s a lot.”
Ethan swallowed several times before he found his voice. “Sold with appropriate provenance, the full collection would go for something north of half a billion dollars.”
Jack cupped a hand to his ear. “Did you say half a billion, as in ‘B’?”
Ethan’s face went slack, as if the reality just hit. “I did.”
Sarah scrunched up her nose. “And no one would be able to sell them on the open market as part of the Romanov collection.”
“No,” Star agreed. “Not when they got delivered in a duffle bag full of drugs.” She twirled the hank of pink hair around her finger. “So let’s say the recipient plans to cut up the pieces. There are hundreds of carats of diamonds alone here. We’re still talking tens of millions.”
Sarah’s gaze found Enzo’s. They were dead.
So. Very. Dead.
As if she could read Sarah’s mind, Star scooted closer and put a hand on Sarah’s arm. “You’re safe here.”
For now, maybe. She had no reason to trust these folks, but she did. It wasn’t them that concerned her. It was the people who’d be hunting them.
“We’re locked down tight here,” Jack insisted. He turned to the rest of his crew. “Under the circumstances, I think we’ll all stay.”
The rest of his team nodded.
Austin eyed the closed-up box as if it contained a live grenade. “We better bring the admiral up to speed in the morning.”
Jack agreed. “First thing.” He gestured at the box. “For now, let’s go back to our original plan. The four of us try and get a little shut eye while Ethan and Star dig into this. Until we have some actionable intel, there’s no point in making a firm plan of attack.”
Enzo sought her gaze. “That makes a lot of sense. Nothing we can do tonight.”
Austin stared at the blind-covered windows, his expression hard, as if an unseen enemy lurked out there somewhere. “Except get dead.”
Jack ushered them downstairs to the sleeping quarters. “There are sweat clothes and toiletries,” he told her and Enzo as he stopped in the hallway between two windowless rooms. “Lock yourselves in and try and get some sleep. Austin and I’ll stand watch.”
Sarah smiled her thanks and waited for him to head back to the main hangar.
Enzo hovered in the doorway of his quarters, clearly needing to talk, too.
She stepped into the hallway, needing to look into his eyes. People often lied, but their eyes mostly didn’t. “I didn’t know about the jewels,” she said.
He settled his hands on his hips and nodded, his expression soft. Caring. “I know. I didn’t think it for a minute.”
She looked hard, but saw no evidence that he was lying. Despite the waves of trouble they faced, she sagged with relief. Soon, though, the Knight Tactical computer geniuses would look into her background.
Would Enzo feel the same way once he learned about her past?
A pain, suspiciously like the sharp poke of grief, jabbed her right beneath the ribs. Losing Enzo’s regard shouldn’t mean a thing given the very real possibility that they wouldn’t make it out of this mess alive, but when did feelings make any sense?
Needing to dampen the pain, she opted for a change of pace. She cocked her hip, tossed back her hair, sending the scraggly remains of Peaches’ over-the-top ‘do over one shoulder and shot him a cheeky grin.
“You have yourself a nice night, now, Boy Scout.”
She turned on her heel and shut the door behind her before he could fire back.
The shower would have felt heavenly, if she’d been able to feel anything at all. Washed and dried, all traces of Peaches Duvall erased, she bundled herself in the borrowed sweats and laid face up on the bed, staring up into the dark.
Getting Enzo out of this was goal number one. No. It was the only goal.
Unless the Knight Tactical team came up with some amazing, whiz-bang plan, she’d have to turn herself in.
She was the only one with nothing left to lose.