Fearless: Complicated Creatures Part Three (58 page)

“You said Sammy sent you?” Mack asked curiously as Wes took a seat across from him.

“She did.” Wes nodded, knowing full well she’d done no such thing. “We were upstairs talking at the luncheon for the Wyatt Foundation. I was asking her about someone she thought you might know.”

“No kidding?” Mack cocked his head. “Who?”

“Man by the name of Toma Sakurai, Sammy’s uncle on her mother’s side.” Wes watched him closely. “You remember him, right?”

Mack’s quizzical look belied his sudden stillness. There was an alertness to his posture that tripped all of Wes’s red flags. That was the thing about investigating a man versus his dossier. Anything looked innocuous on paper, but once you looked someone in the eye, if you were paying close attention with just the right amount of intuition, you could see their character, could glean their truths, no matter how closely they were guarded. Wes wished he had a camera.

“Why do you ask?” Mack asked, leaning back in his leather executive chair.

“Well, Sam’s asked me to help look into the circumstances surrounding Rob and Ry’s death.” Wes felt the tension emanating from Mack like the infinitesimal pull on a fly line. “Seems she’s got reason to believe there was some foul play.”

Mack nodded slowly. “She’s mentioned that.”

“So I started to look into all the people who might have benefited from Rob kicking the bucket before his time. Been a real hair ball, I can tell you that.”

“And you think Mr. Sakurai was one of those people,” Mack surmised, his eyes gleaming.

“Well, see I did at first,” Wes admitted. “I understand there was no love lost between the Sakurai family and Rob Wyatt for stealing their precious daughter away.”

“If there was any animosity between Mr. Sakurai and Rob, then I wasn’t privy to it,” Mack told him carefully. “In fact, I haven’t seen the man in years. He’s a shareholder but he never attends the board meetings.”

“Yes, that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Wes nodded. “I thought that was strange too, being that he inherited all his sister’s shares when Ry died. So I looked into him, and it turns out he was the last surviving member of the Sakurai family. He wasn’t married. Didn’t have any heirs.”

Mack lifted a bushy brow. “Why are you using past tense, Wes? You know something I don’t?”

“Oh, it’s just because I’m assuming the man’s dead,” Wes replied with a shrug, like it was a perfectly obvious conclusion. “See the last known record of him was entering the United States in June 2000. His dividends are paid out, but no one’s seen hide nor hair of him since Rob and Ry died.” His eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that something?”

“What’s something is waiting for you to get around to what you’re doing in my office, Wes,” Mack replied with the lift of a dark, bushy brow. “You gonna get to the facts, or do I have to sit here for the whole megillah?”

“You were the last person seen with Mr. Sakurai,” Wes lied. “I was just wondering what you recall about the man? Maybe tell me what the last thing you discussed was?”

Mack steepled his fingers. “Couldn’t tell you that, Wes.”

“Why?”

“Too long ago,” Mack replied with a disinterested shrug. “Old man like me? Sometimes I can’t remember where the hell I put my reading glasses,” he joked, though the atmosphere in the office took a distinctly hostile chill.

That was the thing about beating the bushes. Sometimes you got the good stuff—a fox dashing out across your path—the hunter being hunted. Other times, it was just a distracting mess of wild notions, scattering in the air like butterflies. Either way, Wes was getting what he needed out of the conversation. Every instinct he had told him that Mack McDevitt wasn’t to be trusted. Not by a long shot.

“So what happens when a board member goes missing?” Wes pressed.

Mack appeared briefly amused. “We’re a private company, Wes. Any information about how we run our business is strictly confidential. You should know that,” he tutted. “Matter of fact, that’s exactly what Sammy would say to you too, so now I’m thinking maybe she didn’t send you here to ask questions that she already knows the answers to. I reckon you just blew by on your own wind, son.” He stood up, gesturing to the door. “You found your way in. Now you can see yourself out.”

Wes shrugged amiably, standing too. “Suit yourself.”

Mack smirked at him. “Always do.”

Wes turned to go, but he stopped about halfway to the door. “Oh, there’s one more thing I forgot to mention.”

“This ought to be interesting,” Mack replied tersely, resting his hands on his desk.

“Oh, it is,” Wes answered with a confident look. “When I couldn’t find record of Sakurai leaving the country, I followed a hunch looking through missing persons reports and came up with something. An unidentified Asian man of Sakurai’s approximate age, height, and weight was found shot to death, just outside the city a couple months after Rob and Ry died. He was too decomposed to be positively ID’d though. Case went cold.”

Mack considered him. “Bit morbid to believe that poor man was Sakurai, don’t you think? Maybe he’s just out on a beach somewhere, enjoying his millions.”

“Maybe,” Wes conceded. “Or maybe he allied with the wrong man.” He opened the office door. “You have a good day now.”

*

April—Early Afternoon

Wyatt Ranch, Texas

J A C K

Jack stared at
the speaker phone in Samantha’s office, incredulous. “What the hell do you mean they think they’ve got a one-in-ten chance of catching Lightner when he lands?”

“Exactly as I said,” his father answered over the intercom, gruff. “We’ve got the CIA, the FBI, Houston police, and the goddamn Texas Rangers all over every airport that’s landed within a hundred miles of Houston and nothing to show for it.”

“Lightner’s being especially careful now that he’s stateside,” Jaime chimed in from Chicago. “We lost the signal when he landed in Florida to refuel. My guess is he tossed the phone for a new one.”

“
Cristo!
Where the hell is he?” Jack dragged a hand down his face. “If I was on the run, I wouldn’t land near a major city. I’d go for an unmanned airfield.”

“There are thousands of those in Texas and Louisiana,” Jaime pointed out. “Even with all the help we have from the FAA, a good pilot knows how to maneuver low enough to avoid controlled airspace. All we know for sure is that he’s angry and he knows Samantha is in Houston.”

“Fuck!” Anger spiked through Jack’s veins as he pushed up out of his chair. He thrust his hands through his hair, pacing the office. “Samantha wants to stay and draw him out. She thinks he’s planning on attacking at the Wyatt Foundation Gala in a couple days.”

“She’s got to cancel,” Jaime sputtered. “No way can she risk it.”

“Then Lightner will definitely know we’re onto him,” Jack pointed out. “Besides, he could raise the stakes and do something crazier. Maybe try to blow up Wyatt Towers or another city block in Houston just to get back at her. He’s losing his shit. He wants revenge.”

“Gianni—you’re crazy to stay there and tempt fate,” his father told him. “It’s madness.”

“It
is
kind of nuts, bro,” Jaime agreed. “This guy has nothing left to lose
and
he’s got a nuclear weapon. That’s a recipe for nothing good.”

Jack glared at the speaker phone. “I’m not leaving Samantha.”

“See reason, Gianni,” his father pleaded. “She doesn’t want you to stay in Houston either.”

Jack planted his hands on the desk and leaned toward the phone. “I’m going to say the same thing that I said to her, Dad: Wild horses couldn’t drag me away. I swore to her I wouldn’t leave her again, even if she asked me to. Even if she insisted upon it.” He took a breath, then laid down the hammer. “You would never leave Mom, would you? Jaime, you would have never left Cassie, just as you’d never leave Maddie now. So don’t fucking tell me to walk away from this woman. Just
don’t.”

A tense silence followed, before Jaime broke through it, saying gently, “He has a point, Dad. So what’s the plan, Jack?”

“Samantha wants to draw Lightner out at the fundraiser,” Jack informed them. “They’ve doubled up security, and the museum already has an impressive system they’re piggy-backing off of. He’ll be walking right into a trap.”

“Would it be more or less dangerous if we didn’t know when or where he was going to strike, Dad?” Jack countered. “I don’t want to live my life constantly looking over my shoulder, waiting for revenge to strike. Samantha’s right to do this. If we’re ready for him, it’s dozens against one. I support her decision one hundred percent, if it means we can get this sonofabitch once and for all.”

“What about all those innocent bystanders?” Sandro retorted hotly. “Have you considered how many people could be hurt besides you and Samantha?”

“Dad, Lennox Chase is the best private security firm in the world right now. Coupled with that, Mitch has sent the best guards from Leviathan. If you want to alert the FBI and the CIA to what’s going on—you’re welcome to do that, too. Either way, we’ve got this situation as under control as possible. I have faith in her,” Jack told his father. “Now I need you to have faith in me.”

“So you keep telling me,” Jack smiled, hearing his father’s sigh. “Look, the chopper will be here to get me in a few minutes. I’ll be in Houston just in time to meet the rest of the team coming in from Tel Aviv. I’ll call you both once we’ve got the game plan.”

“Hey, bro?”

“Yeah, Jaime?”

April—Early Evening

Wyatt Towers, Houston, Texas

S A M A N T H A

“H
ow can you
be sure Lucien Lightner is going to try to cause a ruckus at the Wyatt Foundation gala tomorrow?” Aunt Hannah asked as she sliced vegetables at the expansive granite counter of their penthouse kitchen. Carey sat across from his mother at the counter, sipping a tall glass of water while Jack stood beside her, helping her prep dinner.

“We can’t. But it’s a brash, showy move. My guess is he thinks he’ll be able to waltz right in with that new face of his and get to me right in the middle of Houston’s high society, and at my own charity event no less,” Samantha answered frankly from where she stood at the kitchen table, looking over the schematics for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that they’d spread out on the kitchen table.

The MFAH was one of the largest art museums in the United States. The sprawling three-hundred-thousand-square-foot campus was located in the heart of the city next to Rice University and a massive acreage housing the wild animals of the Houston Zoo. Alejo stood next to her, reviewing the architecture and the grounds, looking for exploitable vulnerabilities.

Hannah sighed from where she stood. “Sammy, I should cancel the gala. I can’t abide putting you and a thousand other people at risk because of the possibility that a madman is going to crash the party, hankering to deliver what he considers to be your comeuppance.”

“It’s a risk, absolutely,” Sam admitted readily, moving toward her aunt to stand across from her at the counter next to Carey. “But we’ll be more than prepared. The downside is that the museum campus is a lot of ground to cover by tomorrow night. The upside is that we’ve never had more support and manpower. Carey and I met with the heads of the FBI field office and several key personnel from the CIA this afternoon. We’ve discussed it seven ways to Sunday and ultimately, we feel if we cancel the gala, we risk Lightner attacking at a later date in another location we couldn’t begin to guess at. Or worse, he could go into the wind and resurface when we least expect it.” She paused, meeting Jack’s eyes across the counter. “But if we bait him—make a big splash of it with both me and Jack in attendance—we believe Lightner won’t be able to resist reacting.”