26. Micah and Twist

From outside the door, Twist said, "Okay, make sure you're on the other side of the room while we come in."

Blaze crawled up the wall, the smooth plaster cool under his bare feet and palms, bracing himself like a tension rod between the alcove walls that were about eight feet apart, the gunshot wound in his thigh screaming.

As soon as they'd walked into the bedroom, those two walls had drawn his attention.

Granted, Blaze was always on the lookout for a terrain tactical advantage or an object that could be used as an improvised weapon or medical device, like that ballpoint pen in the drawer could either be a stabbing weapon or, if unscrewed and the ink insert taken out, a tracheotomy tube.

He'd also noticed the door, which was steel like a prison cell with the hinges on the outside. The locking mechanism drove bolts into the frame on all four sides of the door.

He wedged himself near the ceiling about a foot above the door frame and waited.

From Blaze's vantage above, the door opened outward. A foot came into the room, and then he was looking at the top of Twist's sandy brown hair and the two plastic take-out boxes he was holding.

Micah's blond head followed Twist in, his hair parted sharply on the side, and the short black line of a gun wavered as he fanned the business end of it across the seemingly empty room.

Blaze released his hold on the walls and reached, dropping onto Twist's and Micah's backs and knocking them to the floor.

The plastic boxes that held their lunch went skittering across the floor, dammit, and so did the gun.

Micah scrambled after the gun.

Blaze wrapped his elbow around Micah's neck and squeezed. "Stop, or I'll choke off your carotid arteries until you're dead."

Micah raised his hands slowly, his fingers spread in surrender.

He loosened his arm slightly because Micah was probably seeing spots by that point. "Other weapons?"

Twist said, "Micah has another one in the back of his pants."

Blaze shifted slightly and pulled a small Beretta from Micah's waistband.

A thin red line down the top of the slide meant a round was in the chamber, but the safety was clicked on.

He stuffed it in his waistband at the small of his back because he'd rather accidentally shoot his ass off than put it in his trouser pocket and take out one of his nuts. "Any other weapons?"

Twist shook his head while Micah glared at him through their reflection in the window.

Blaze released Micah and shoved the two of them toward the wall. "Sit down. Face the wall. Hands behind your head."

By this time, Sarah had stood up from her position behind the bed and was holding the ballpoint pen in her fist like women generally hold a knife, with the point coming out downward.

He handed her the gun, butt first. "I'm going to go find some of those zip ties. If either one of them moves, shoot them."

"Yes, sir," she said.

Her husky voice sent a thrill through him and necessitated reminding himself that the middle of an operation was not the time to shove her up against the wall and fuck her until she cried out.

The way that woman distracted him might get them both killed, but what a way to go.

He watched Sarah spread her feet and hold the gun competently in both hands, pointing it at where Twist and Micah had followed his directions and were facing the wall.

As Blaze was leaving the bedroom, one of them must have twitched. Sarah said, "I'm a farm girl. I've killed a lot of coyotes and other varmints my life. One or two more won't bother me one bit."

What a woman. Once this was over, he would make sure he showed her how much he appreciated her valor.

Sure enough, an entire package of long zip ties and two black cloth bags with drawstrings were lying on the coffee table in Logan's creepy all-white living room, as colorless as Arctic dry-suit scuba training on the blinding ice under the sun-leeched sky. He also grabbed a white-handled serrated knife from the white-enameled block in the kitchen, just in case.

When he returned to the bedroom, Sarah was sitting on the bed while she held the gun on Twist and Micah. "These two clowns say they want to negotiate."

Blaze got to work cranking Twist's hands from the back of his skull down to behind his back and interlocking the zip ties around his wrists. "You don't have a lot of position to negotiate from."

Twist muttered, "This room is bugged for both audio and video. I can sweep it, and then we can talk without being overheard."

Blaze did the same to Micah, zip-tying his hands behind his back.

Micah's sharp glance suggested more. "How long has it been bugged?"

He winced. "A few weeks after I came on board, which was months before that time you and Kylie stayed here."

"That fucker."

"I don't know whether Logan or anybody watched, but the mics and cameras are here," Twist said.

Micah shook his head. "I should've known better than to trust him, but it didn't even occur to me that he might be spying on us in his own guest room."

Blaze stood, stretching his back after bending over to where they sat on the floor. "I don't know that I need you guys. I could leave you here tied up and let Mary Varvara Bell deal with you when she figures out you failed to keep us from escaping, or I could just shoot you myself."

Sarah said from over on the bed, "I've always heard about how people in New York City mind their own business and don't care to investigate when they hear gunshots."

She played bad cop pretty well. Blaze was amused.

He glanced back at her but didn't take his eyes off the two men sitting on the floor for more than a second. "I'd just strangle them with this arm." He flexed, and his biceps bulged under his short tee shirt sleeves. "No reason to waste bullets."

Sarah chuckled from behind him.

Blaze said, "I was about ready to take Micah out anyway after he held that fucking gun on us a few days ago," he said.

"Not to mention that they both called my aunt, who wanted to kill us," Sarah said. "Kill him anyway."

Blaze chuckled this time. "You're ruthless."

"It runs in the family."

Micah turned his head but didn't say anything.

Twist, however, said, "The mics and video are connected to an off-site hard drive. They will see and hear all of this."

Blaze sighed and tucked the gun into the back of his waistband again.

He used the knife from the kitchen to pop the plastic zip ties that he'd used to bind Twist's wrists. "Get busy getting rid of them, then. Sarah, if that one moves, shoot him."

"Sure," was all she said.

She either was a little bloodthirsty or a pretty good actor. Blaze was a little worried about which one it was.

Then again, farm life. She probably ax-murdered and ate those chickens she named.

In the living room, Twist rifled his backpack while Blaze held the gun on him the whole time. He came up with a small apparatus with a loop on the top. "I know where I put bugs, but I don't know if I'm the only one who bugged this apartment."

Twist worked quickly at first, walking directly to the bone china candy dish on the table and removing a cat hair-sized copper wire and flat square from the bottom of it, and then unraveling a longer wire with a white cone on the end from one of the albino statues near the ceiling-to-floor windows that overlooked the lush summer green of Central Park.

After a few easy removals that he'd definitely known where they were, he began using the loop-topped device, meticulously examining every part of the walls and furniture while he watched the dial.

He found three more devices, two microphones, and a camera stuck to the top of the glass wall at ceiling height, where it would have a panoramic view of everything in the apartment.

As Twist found them, he crushed each one under his heel.

Blaze watched, making sure Twist removed a spying device every time the needle on his instrument's dial swung and he didn't miss any, accidentally or not.

In the end, Blaze mused aloud, "I'm surprised Logan didn't know he was being bugged."

Twist looked up at him, his startlingly blue eyes wide under his lashes like he was going to say something with portent. "Logan knew they were here. Many politicians have been videotaped indulging in hookers and blow or were bribed in this apartment. That's a great thing about all this white decor. It doesn't show the cocaine."

"Ah, kompromat. Is that how Logan got you and Micah to work for a Russian bratva?"

Twist shrugged. "The supposed loan from the Malefactor, of course, and then Bell threatened my wife."

Blaze had been at Twist's small wedding to Colleen Frost a few months before, an impromptu affair on Twist's yacht in Monaco with only a priest, the four of them, a few people who worked on Twist's boat, and the royal family of Monaco in attendance. "And you didn't come to me, an actual US Navy SEAL, for help?"

"You saw what Mary Varvara Bell is capable of. Actually, you didn't see. That was fucking nothing. She wants those weapons from you badly, otherwise, she would've shot you both there in her office. Probably gut shots, so you could watch each other bleed out."

"Nah. Blood stains are hard to get out of white carpeting," Blaze quipped.

"She has cleaners and a carpet guy on speed dial. They would've pulled up that carpet, bleached the concrete underneath, and laid down new before she got back from lunch."

Disconcerting."I saw that glance between you and Micah in her office. Both of you were coerced into working with her, weren't you?"

"It was that damn loan. She called it in. I did something that would send me to jail if the government ever found out."

"And what was that? Blaze asked.

"Legally, insider trading."

Blaze snorted. "She wants enough military-grade weapons from me to start World War III. What's a little insider trading?"

"It was more than just a little. It was outright market manipulation. Because she's hanging that over me, I'm funding her operation with cryptocurrency manipulation, and I'm her beck-and-call hacker. She's planning something big. She wants me to hack the US government's emergency services so they can't respond."

"Emergency services?" Blaze asked because it wasn't adding up. "Not the military?"

"Yeah. There's something big going down."

"When?"

"I don't know. They keep talking about hiding weapons under heavy coats, so I guess it'll go down someplace where it gets cold."

While Twist was debugging the bedroom, Sarah told him, "Micah says he has something to tell you."

Micah Shine talked a lot. While the rumors were that he had gone legit after he'd accepted the Malefactor's money, he'd played fast and loose with investment opportunities with their mutual overly wealthy friends since he'd graduated from college.

Those guys could afford to lose a few hundred million here or there and not even notice it. It wasn't like they'd paid taxes on any of it.

"Are you guys planning to overthrow Mary Varvara Bell?" Micah asked.

"Why?" Blaze demanded.

Twist piped up from where he was peeling a wire off the back of the white headboard. "She threatened Kylie's life, too."

Micah's wife was Kylie Miller.

Blaze continued interrogating Micah. "But what else does she have on you?"

Micah's shoulders lowered as he sighed, and he rested his forehead against the white wall. "My name is Marcu Argento, and my whole family was in the Italian Mafia in New York. They were murdered when I was a kid. I've been in hiding ever since. That's why I was able to walk in and take over Salvatore Grande's operation in Philadelphia and use it to destroy Vincent Genovese's power structure in New York City. I hold them both now, Philly and New York."

Blaze paused, digesting that information and integrating it before he blurted, "So you're the goddamn Godfather?"

Micah's shoulders shrugged and fell again. "We don't use that term."

He glanced at Sarah, whose dark eyes were wide as she stared over her unwavering gun at Micah. "But you're the capo di capo, or whatever you call it?"

The back of Micah's blond head swiveled as he shook it. "We don't use that one, either. Just the FBI does."

"Then what do you call your position?" Twist asked him.

"We don't really call it anything. I'm just the boss. The chairman, you know?"

Twist said, "I thought Frank Sinatra was the chairman of the board."

"That was the joke because he was connected. The capos liked hanging out with him because he was famous. He was just a singer, but he had the panache."

"Okay, good to know." A thousand other questions about John F. Kennedy and other US presidents and politicians boiled up in Blaze's brain, but focus was essential in Navy SEAL operations. "So why does a Russian bratva leader have the New York and Philly mafia boss by the balls?"

"That's the fucking question, isn't it?" Micah growled.

From over on the other side of the bed, Sarah said, "Because the Italian Mafia only inducts people who are descended from their one region in Italy, like Sicily or Naples. The Russian bratvas recruit anyone from anywhere and allow them to rise in the organization as long as they are loyal and effective."

Blaze glanced back at her. His eyebrows must have been on top of his head because she shrugged and said, "Books, and I was listening to those guys on the plane talk about that and more."

Yes, she had something to tell him, and if they could just catch a break for five minutes, he'd figure out how to get that information from her without being overheard.

The back of Micah's head nodded. "She's not wrong. I've been trying to open my organization up to non-Sicilian talent, but the old-timers believe that blood is thicker than water, even though that's not what that quote means."

Blaze asked Micah, "So what is more important to you, me and Twist, or the vows of omertà you took with Mary Varvara Bell?"

"I didn't take omertà vows with Mary Varvara Bell. She wanted to do business on a handshake, so no vows. Besides, my loyalty lies with you two assholes who I grew up with and the members of my organization who are and always have been loyal to me, not some upstart c—"

"Whoa!"Twist exclaimed at Micah's vocabulary, and Sarah's mouth had dropped open.

Micah grumbled, "Sorry. I've been spending too much time in London. The guys in the pub drop that word like we say dick."

"But you're working for her," Blaze said.

Micah growled, "I'm going to destroy that fucking White Holdings organization. How dare she coerce me and my organization and Twist and you into doing her fucking bidding? How dare she threaten my wife? I will fucking show her who she's messing with. Fuck around and find out."

Micah was shouting at the wall by the time he was finished. The back of his pale neck had turned red under his blond hair.

That much emotion from the normally reserved, preternaturally calm Micah Shine was shocking and convincing.

Blaze asked him, "She threatened Kylie, too?"

"Yeah, she fucking did, and her Russian rats have infiltrated my organization. I can't even keep my wife safe from her."

"If we take her down, both your wives will be safe. This fucking nightmare will be over, and we can go back to our lives."

Twist nodded, saying, "Hell, yes."

Micah said, "I swear on the vows of omertà that I will stand with you against Mary Varvara Bell, and we will burn White Holdings and her goddamn bratva to the ground."

Blaze said to Twist, "Yeah, untie him."

Twist took the knife from Blaze and walked over to pop the tough plastic ties binding Micah's wrists behind his back.

Blaze would still keep an eye on the two of them to make sure their loyalties did indeed lie with him and the side of the angels, but this behavior from them was consistent with the boys Blaze had grown up with and the men he'd known since.

Twist straightened and consulted his phone. "We have some time. Logan is still at Dr. Bell's office."

"And you know this, how?" Blaze asked.

He waggled his phone. "My spy app is on their phones. I can see everything they can and some things they don't know about."

"Speaking of your phone and its fucking apps," Blaze said, staring right at Tristan "Twist" King, that asshole. "Put my fucking money back."

"Oh, that. Sure." Twist ducked his head, embarrassed, and twiddled with his phone. "It'll post tonight and show up in your accounts tomorrow. Sorry about that."

"Yeah," Blaze muttered, still pissed about it. "Sure, you are."

When that money hit his accounts, his options would expand a thousand-fold. Von Hannover had spotted him some, but there's nothing like a literal billion dollars to make problems go away.

Twist had better be telling the goddamn truth about his assets, or Blaze would shove his boot right up Twist's ass to make his point.

Micah jutted his chin toward Blaze and looked down, indicating where hot blood was seeping through the towel and his trousers' leg again. "That looks like it's not closing up," Micah said. "You need a doctor."

Blaze flipped his hand in the air, gesturing to the locks bolted to the exterior of the bedroom door. "I can't go to an emergency room."

"I can get a doctor to make a house call. I know a lady. She can be here in an hour."

Blaze didn't trust him. "The mafia has doctors that will make a house call?"

Micah shrugged. "We're in New York City. We got mafia doctors, mafia priests, mafia lawyers. We've got a lot of lawyers."

"Okay, fine. But for now, we plan," Blaze said, staring the two of them in their eyes, one set brilliant blue and the other a shifting opalescent gray, watching for any sign of betrayal.