The Palace - Christopher Reich Page 0,11

case. Scratched all to hell. She turned it on. A picture of an attractive blond woman filled the screen. There was no prompt for a numeric passcode. The owner preferred facial recognition. Fair enough.

Danni set the phone to one side and examined the second item: a MacBook laptop. This pleased her. The SON Group specialized in iOS and macOS operating systems—specifically, how to hack them and breach their every security measure. There was a rumor going around that the SON Group had inserted one of its engineers into the Apple software development team in Cupertino to “help” develop the latest iteration. If asked, Danni would answer with a smile to rival the Sphinx. The less said, the better.

Two men appeared in the doorway. Dov and Isaac, her two best engineers. One was short and fat. So was the other. Both had shaved heads and three days’ growth of stubble. Neither had spent so much as a minute beneath the Mediterranean sun these last years.

They approached Danni’s desk and without bidding scooped up the phone and the laptop. “The usual?” said Dov.

“Drain them,” said Danni. “Not one drop left.”

“Who’s it for?” asked Isaac. “Langley? London? Hey, the phone has a little sand in it.” He laughed snippily. “Don’t tell me the Saudis again.”

Danni shot him an angry look. The Saudis were a sore point and the reason she had barely slept these past weeks. The SON Group’s clients were limited by strict company policy to governmental organizations: intelligence agencies, defense entities, security forces, and the national police of countries deemed friendly to the cause—the “cause” being democracy and the advancement of Western ideals. SON’s technology had been developed with a singular purpose: to combat terror and crime. They were the good guys, even if they did charge top dollar. Danni had no problem with that.

She did have a problem with her company’s technology falling into the wrong hands. Word had gotten back to her that the recent murder of a journalist critical of the Saudi ruling family (and attributed to a Saudi prince) had been abetted by SON software secretly installed on the journalist’s phone, thus allowing the prince to track the journalist and lure him to his death. Needless to say, the Saudis were not a client.

“Don’t ask,” she snapped. “Just get it done. And fast. By yesterday.”

The men left the office with the offending articles.

Danni checked her watch before placing a phone call. The time in Italy was one hour earlier. If her client wasn’t out of bed, he ought to be.

“Pronto,” said Luca Borgia in his rumbling baritone.

“Your package arrived from Thailand. I’ve assigned my best men to it.”

“Danni, I cannot thank you enough,” said Borgia, all charm as always. “What would I do without you? A serious matter. I’m concerned.”

His unctuous manner did little to lessen her anxieties. In no way did Borgia fit the description of a SON Group client. He was as far from a governmental entity as could be imagined. Luca Borgia was a businessman. A billionaire industrialist who controlled one of Italy’s largest holding companies with interests in everything from silk to steel. One of those interests happened to be a twenty percent stake in the SON Group. Borgia had been one of her father’s initial investors. He was family. Company policy or not, Danni had no choice but to assist him in solving what he’d claimed was a case of industrial espionage.

It helped that she in no way countenanced the theft of company secrets. Someone had gotten their hands on her own company’s closely guarded software and gifted it to the Saudis. Now a journalist was dead.

“Give me a day,” said Danni.

“A day. But no longer,” said Borgia. “Some matters cannot go unpunished.”

Chapter 5

London

The Warwick Arms was a grand name for a block of council flats in Stepney, East London. Four grim twenty-story buildings huddled in a cruciform around an unloved park with rusting swing sets and neglected picnic tables. Simon found a parking space nearby, guiding his car through a maze of broken bottles, beer cans, and assorted trash. A group of sullen-eyed teenagers monitored his approach. Somewhere a hound was baying. He’d arrived at Gin Lane, two hundred some years later. Hogarth would feel right at home.

The Brown family occupied a flat on the sixteenth floor. Simon had called ahead. A corpulent, weathered woman in a flowered housedress, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, greeted him.

“You’re him,” she said. “Riske. I don’t suppose you have good news, seeing

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