Read Odin (Billionaire Titans Book 2) Online
Authors: Alison Ryan
“You expect me to help you? You must be kidding.”
One of QB’s goons joined us in the kitchen.
“You don’t have to. But if you don’t, then Odin dies. If that doesn’t convince you, then you die. If I still haven’t found her, I simply burn this house down and they’ll find her remains when they sift through the ashes. Oh, and those of…what did you say the baby’s name was?”
I was in a state of complete shock. I wished I’d injected myself with the Ketalar. I sat in stunned silence.
“No? Unfortunate. Take her upstairs. Kill Odin in front of her. Then bring her back to me,” QB instructed his man, who walked toward me.
“Please. Please don’t, you don’t have to do this,” I begged.
Just then, another of QB’s men came in through the side door, carrying a laptop. My laptop. He set it down on the table in front of QB, hit a few keys, and stood back. “Kipton. And a baby. It’s a live feed, although she shut the camera down a few minutes ago.”
QB studied the laptop, then turned it toward me. It was the streaming feed from Odin’s room, where I’d monitored him during his convalescence. He rewound it, and we watched Piper rush into the room and punch in a code to close the door behind her. I admired her grit. Even in private, and with her newborn in her arms, she displayed no panic. She tried her phone, but had as much success as I’d had. She set Lea down on Odin’s bed and moved about the room, searching for weapons or supplies. As if a light bulb clicked on above her head, she suddenly stopped and stared directly into one of the cameras. Within seconds, the feed was disabled.
“Did you deliver the baby, Clara?” QB asked me.
I nodded.
“It must be such an incredible experience, to hold brand new life in your hands. I envy you that, Dr. O’Grady,” he said.
“Yet you prefer to take life. That’s a paradox. Or a sign of you being bat shit crazy,” I replied.
“Dear girl, I take no pleasure in killing. You don’t understand me at all. I am a civilized person. If and when it becomes necessary to kill, I do not hesitate. But I don’t enjoy killing for killing’s sake.
“But in the interest of full disclosure, I do sometimes employ men like that. Ruthlessness and a thirst for blood sometimes trumps diplomacy. Your friends in Milan are going to meet some men like that, very soon.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that if QB were here, that meant he wasn’t in Milan. And if QB knew they were there, and Atlas didn’t know that he knew, then the danger he and his team were in was extreme.
QB excused himself and left the room for a few minutes. I was left under the supervision of two large men with guns. I sat quietly.
When he returned, QB sat down and smiled at me. “I made Odin the same offer I made you. Remember? Cooperate or I’d kill you, then I’d kill him, that one. Yes?”
I stared daggers through him.
“Ah, well, Odin must be very fond of you. When I mentioned harming
you
, he suddenly changed his tune. Let’s go pick out something to read, shall we?”
QB rose and walked over to the bookcase concealing the secret room. He rubbed his palms together, then stepped back and laughed. “Arthur, if you please.” One of his men approached the shelves, and QB recited the titles and in which order to remove and replace them. As the final piece was put in place, he stepped behind me. “Piper Kipton is an unpredictable type. A wildcat. I’ll follow you into the room. Wallace, you make entry. Arthur, on my six.”
We formed a single file line and entered the secret room.
C
omplete
. Fucking. Disaster.
With every mission, I was trained to have a secondary location. Sometimes a third and fourth. With the Milan trip, we arranged for a small house in the Lombard countryside on the outskirts of Milan.
If you have the right connections, there’s a global network of people; fixers, cleaners, doctors, and others who can get you what you want, where and when you need it, regardless of local laws, customs, or availability. They’re motivated by money, and top shelf customer service means repeat business. It’s disadvantageous for them to double cross or jeopardize any clients.
Raven got us an apartment near the stadium, outfitted with weapons and state of the art surveillance equipment. The house in the country would serve multiple functions for us. If our apartment was compromised, we had a fall back. If we got separated during the hit on QB, it was our rendezvous point. If we needed somewhere to take QB or one of his henchmen, that was the place.
Now it just seemed like a place for me to bleed to death.
We arrived in Milan scattered on different flights, originating from different locales. Nathaniel was first, followed by Carlo and Raven together. I was last. We sent Carlo and Raven, both fluent in French, to meet Nathaniel’s Legionnaires in a public square across town to coordinate. No need for them to know where our base of operations was.
We spent a few days scouting our locations and gathering intel. Raven was able to filter out helicopter traffic around the stadium on satellite feeds and narrow down the possible locations of QB’s helipad, and we set about narrowing the list.
She was also able to identify a few more of the people from the video at the match. The woman with QB was named Shu Qi. She was a former model and daughter of a Chinese diplomat. Her uncle had ties to the North Korean government. This was getting better and better all the time.
We started to nail down specifics with four days left before the match. I didn’t
love
our plan, but with the number of variables and the size of the crowd, I felt confident we’d nab or take out QB if he showed up as expected.
Until Raven and her facial recognition algorithms threw the first monkey wrench into our plans.
“Our target is on the move, Atlas,” she said, sitting on her bed in the apartment, surrounded by two open laptops and a tablet.
“Explain,” I replied. Carlo and I walked over to the bed. Nathaniel was out doing reconnaissance.
Raven spun a laptop to show us a still taken from an airport camera. “Shu Qi. With a ‘woman’ in a headscarf and veil, who looks about the right height to be QB. From Copenhagen. Two days ago.”
On the tablet, Raven played the video for us. The pair made their way through the airport, trailed by a pair of men who were doing their best to appear disinterested in the tall Asian woman and her companion, but who, to the trained eye, were clearly following them. Security, perhaps?
Raven typed into her second laptop. She scrunched up her nose. “They’re flying to… let me see, hang on. Singapore. That flight is bound for Singapore.”
I thought for a moment. “Okay, stay on those two. See if you can locate them once they land. And the two guys behind them. I want to know where they go once they hit Singapore.”
I didn’t want this to turn into a global wild goose chase. I could afford to keep up with QB, but Piper, Lea, and Odin were on my mind. I had a brother to bury. The last thing I wanted was an open-ended chase around the globe.
The Singapore intel, as well as the identity of QB’s female friend, were pieces of information I thought my father might be able to make use of in his own campaign to defeat our nemesis. He was grateful for the tips, but all he really wanted to talk about was Lea. His voice cracked when he expressed to me how badly he wanted to meet her. To hold her. I promised him that he’d have the opportunity soon.
* * *
T
he next day
, after an early dinner together, we split up. Carlo went to meet with the Frenchmen, Raven went in search of an electronics store, and Nathaniel and I walked the few blocks to the stadium. We wanted to get a feel for traffic and police presence in the evening, although we knew things would be different on game day.
As we circled the structure, Nathaniel’s phone rang. “Carlo,” he mouthed to me as he answered. His eyes narrowed and he put a finger in his ear to focus on Carlo’s voice.
“We have a situation,” Nathaniel said to me after he disconnected the call. “The Frenchmen are dead. Carlo arrived at their apartment and found the door open and them inside with their throats cut. All their weapons and gear was left untouched. Atlas, these were bad dudes. Even if robbery was the motive, no mugger or street thug could have taken them out.”
I weighed Nathaniel’s words.
“Call him back. Tell him not to go back to the apartment. Directly to the safe house. Shit! I’ll get a hold of Raven.”
I got Raven on the phone. She had returned to our building to grab an umbrella since storm clouds were gathering.
“Don’t go to the apartment. Do you understand? Get to the street and get yourself to the safe house. Be careful you aren’t followed. I know you’ve got equipment in the apartment, but it’s not worth the risk right now. We’ll attempt to retrieve it later.”
Raven agreed. We had vehicles at the apartment, but each of us had left either on foot or using public transportation. Nathaniel and I were debating whether it was worth trying to go back for one of our cars when it happened.
A pair of vans pulled up and five men emptied out of them, heading directly for us, suppressed pistols in hand. Nathaniel took fire immediately as we turned to run. He collapsed after only a few steps, and I dove behind a dumpster in an alleyway next to the San Siro Stadium.
I drew my own weapon and returned fire, dropping two of my pursuers. The other three were on me in an instant. I picked up a pallet leaning on the wall, slamming into them in a moment that would have made for a good Three Stooges stunt if I wasn’t fighting for my life. I straddled one of the fallen men and finished him off with a head shot. One of the men I’d hit with my first shots rose to his feet, but Nathaniel was able to draw his weapon and take him out before he, himself succumbed.
One of the vans peeled out and the other one backed down the alley, effectively rendering our conflict invisible to any passersby.
A gunshot shattered my wrist and my weapon was gone. A second tore through my thigh. I hit the floor and rolled to the man I’d just killed, pushing his body up in front of me as a shield. I picked up his piece with my left hand and emptied it into the man who’d shot me.
I knew I only had seconds, perhaps a minute, before I lost consciousness. I reached for my phone with my good hand, but before I could do anything with it, I was being picked up by two men. The last remaining shooter and who I guessed was the driver of the van.
As they dragged me toward the van, I was able to get a look at Nathaniel. He was beyond anything I could do for him under the best of circumstances. My mind flashed to Carlo and Raven. Then to my family back in Las Vegas. If we’d been ambushed, how much danger might they be in?
We reached the van, and the driver unlocked the back as I slumped against the other man. I was light-headed and cold, going into shock and leaving a trail of blood the length of the alley.
If the bullet had ruptured my femoral artery, I figured I’d already be dead. Since it apparently hadn’t, I figured that without medical attention, I probably had thirty to forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour.
The van unlocked, the man bent to help lift me. Before he could, however, he stiffened and collapsed. Behind him, holding a Taser, stood Raven. The man holding my arm dropped me and fumbled for his gun, but Raven filled him with electricity before he could act.
She looked down at me, surveying my wounds.
“How bad?” she asked.
“I’ve lost a lot of blood. Hit twice. We can’t stay here.”
She rushed over to where Nathaniel lay, and she gently closed his eyes. She put a hand on his shoulder and said a quick prayer, sending his spirit on its way, before returning to me.
“No way I can lift you. I’ll help you get in the back of the van. We can ditch it a few blocks from here. Unless you have a better suggestion?”
I hastily agreed, and together we managed to roll me into the back of the van. She hit the two men with her Taser again and removed their belts, fashioning tourniquets for my arm and leg. Raven found keys and drove, circling the stadium before heading in the opposite direction of the safe house as quickly as she could. Content we weren’t being followed, but not sure the van didn’t have a GPS tracker attached to it, we ditched it in a parking garage. Raven found us a nondescript sedan in a security camera blind spot and used tools from her bag to open and start the vehicle. Together we got me into the backseat and she covered me with a tarp from the back of the van.
“I cannot fucking believe I’m in Milan and driving
this
,” she said, as we pulled back out onto the street. She had slipped on an oversized pair of sunglasses and wrapped her hair in a purple turban towering above her head.
The tourniquets slowed my bleeding, but the pain was crippling and I was struggling to remain conscious. “Call Odin. And a doctor. I need help, Raven.”
* * *
A
few minutes later
, Raven gave me troubling news.
“I can’t reach anybody,” she said. “I tried Odin, Piper, Clara, and Randall. Straight to voice mail. What’s happening, Atlas?”
“I was so fucking stupid. Somehow he knew. QB knew we were coming. And he’s probably at the house right now.”
We reached our safe house and Raven did the best she could to keep me alive while we waited for a doctor to arrive. We couldn’t go through ordinary channels because of our security breach, so Raven was left to hope a seldom-used contact could send medical help our way.
Without it, I doubted I’d see another sunset.