his phone, walked to his front door. On his porch was a large paper bag. “What’s this?”
He grabbed it, took it to his kitchen, and looked inside. The smell of warm roast beef met his senses before he could open the Styrofoam container. Under the container was a six-pack of beer.
“Sasha predicted you’ll get drunk tonight and thought food would make your morning a little better.”
There weren’t many times he was at a loss for words. “That was thoughtful. Thank her . . . thank you.”
“About your shitty security . . . with your permission, I’d like to bring people over tomorrow and correct that.”
“Neil—”
“You don’t have outside cameras, lighting, or alarms. The garage is completely penetrable. And what happens when something goes off, someone calls you to ask if you left a door open? My housekeeper has a better system than you.”
“You probably put her system in.”
“Beside the point.”
Leo smiled, opened the lid on his dinner. Prime rib . . . nice. “I was undercover for months, barely made it back here to make sure a pipe didn’t break and flood the place.”
“If Olivia shows up, it’s not safe enough for her.”
He looked away from the food, considered Neil’s words. “Do you really think she will?”
“Impossible to tell. I like being prepared.”
Leo grabbed a knife and fork from the drawer.
“I leave at eight in the morning. I’ll put a key under the mat.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
It felt good to laugh.
The beautiful thing about hiding in Europe when you spoke a half a dozen languages, and you weren’t too short or too tall and your features were ambiguous, was that you could morph into almost any nationality, and no one questioned a single thing.
Olivia walked into the ING bank in Amsterdam, where she had an account. And she did so as a woman twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than her.
The teller walked her back to the safety deposit boxes where she was left in complete privacy.
Olivia looked down at the box she hadn’t seen in three years. There were a dozen of them littered around the world. Europe, Asia, South Africa, the Middle East, America . . . They were her social security.
Pohl had bankrolled many of the early boxes. Cash, identification, passports . . . weapons. Unknowingly, she’d used them . . . at first. Then she realized how easily he could keep track of her through the boxes, through their contents. Slowly, she emptied those he’d financed, liquidated the weapons . . . literally smelting them after each . . . well, after each assignment. And even when he didn’t have her squeezing the trigger, if she used an ID he’d procured for her, she burned it. Found her own resource for new ones and perfected a dozen different identities to access them.
And in time she was harder to track until one day, many months after she’d allowed herself to have a friend again, she disappeared completely.
Amelia’s death had devastated her. Somehow Pohl must have found out about their friendship, and he’d killed her as an example.
That’s what Olivia believed until Sasha and Neil’s team came into play.
For a year after learning the truth, that Amelia hadn’t died because the two of them had been friends, but at the hands of the reigning power at Richter . . . Olivia realized that her disappearance, her accepted demise, had taken root. And once Pohl was eliminated, no one was the wiser.
That didn’t stop Olivia from looking over her shoulder. Didn’t stop her from sleeping light and living with the ever-close gun under her pillow as if it were a teddy bear she could curl up with at night.
Twice in the past seven years she’d tried to find legitimate work. Promised herself she’d eventually abandon the boxes altogether, leave the blood money where it was or acquire enough wealth that she could dump the contents in a charity bin for orphans and walk away.
After all, abandoned and orphaned children don’t care where the money that feeds them comes from. God knows Olivia didn’t question anytime good fortune came her way.
She’d been found at the age of five next to a woman who had overdosed in an abandoned building. It was assumed the woman was her mother, but it wasn’t like anyone bothered with a DNA test to make sure. Olivia remembered next to nothing of those years.
She’d been placed in an orphanage in Munich and shuffled around like chattel. Almost how a dog gets moved from one shelter