A Man of Lies, page 28
The man turns the case to face himself, and his guard moves in closer, using both his body and the umbrella to block the view of anyone who might be watching. We didn’t bother to spin the code-wheels on the briefcase’s lock, so it clicks open as the man presses in the buttons, and he slowly raises the lid.
Inside is the Nécessaire, the lost Fabergé egg from Novak’s safe.
The man smiles and closes the briefcase. After a glance at the lock to memorize the combination, he muddles the numbers and lays his hands flat on top.
“I have a question,” he says. “You have no obligation to answer. Our business is concluded. But if you would indulge my curiosity—you could have gotten far more than twenty-five million for this at auction, perhaps even twice as much. Why sell it to me?”
It’s a fair question. Pickens is silent, waiting for me to respond. The man is correct. I don’t have to answer. But I do anyway. I want him—and the people he represents—to feel at ease. They have gotten a treasure at a bargain, and might be concerned. There are very few things in the world that are purely good luck.
“Because we would have had to go public,” I say. “As far as the world is concerned, this doesn’t exist, and I am dead. I see no reason to disabuse it of either notion, and my understanding is that your client will keep their ownership of this private.”
“They will,” the man says, and he rises from the chair. “Gentlemen, it has been a pleasure.” He offers his hand, and we each shake in turn, and then he leaves. The five men in suits fade back into the mist of the morning rain, leaving me and Pickens alone at the cafe table, slightly richer than we were when they arrived.
“We did it,” Pickens says, not quite believing it, hoping that saying it out loud will cement it in the universe as a true statement.
“We did.” I smile, but the relief I had looked forward to isn’t there. I want to laugh and shout and whoop in celebration, but all I can do is feel his absence.
“What are you going to do now?” Pickens asks.
I have no idea what my plan is. I’ve spent so long working for this moment, working to be free of Scarpello’s grasp, that I haven’t had time to think about what comes next. “Go somewhere new,” I say. “Try to start over, live the life he wanted for us both.”
“He would have been proud of you. You pulled it off. We pulled it off.”
“No,” I reply. “He wouldn’t be proud of me. Not yet.”
CHAPTER 72 A Conclusion
So you might be a little upset right now, but don’t worry. It’ll all make sense. The plan really was simple. Pickens would go and work for Holzmann. He’d get the safe as close to open as he could without the key, and then he’d wait. My job was to get him out of there. Get him and the safe to a place where he wasn’t observed. Once he was there—in the bedroom of Vic’s abuela’s house, as it turned out—he’d send me a signal, and I’d find him.
He’d done it while Jonny Boy and I talked about sandwiches, and Cass grew increasingly more nervous that I was just stalling. She was closer to the truth than she’d thought. I was stalling as I circled the house, waiting for Pickens’s cough, the sign that I and the key I held were close enough. Then I stood there while he finished opening the safe and swapped out the real egg. Pickens’s drill had been heavier and larger than it needed to be. Inside it, he was hiding a cell phone to contact me with and the rest of our money, converted into a lump of gold and porcelain and a handful of jewels. He tossed that into the safe, then threw the real egg out the window and into the murky waters of the algae-filled pool, where it waited for him to retrieve it once everything had settled down.
Then I made sure that when the safe actually got opened, it wasn’t the real key that was used, but one of my fakes, and we let the safe’s security measures cover up all the evidence of our little swap.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence and say that we’d planned out every step of the whole thing from the beginning. I’ll admit it was real fucking touch-and-go for a minute there. Hell, we’d actually meant to give the thing to Scarpello in the end. But you gotta remember, a con isn’t about perfect planning. No plan survives contact with the enemy. A con is about improvisation. Recognizing opportunity and daring to strike when the moment is right. Besides, right at the start of all of this, I gave you two things to remember.
Nothing I said was the truth, but nothing I said was a lie. I’ve kept my word. Go ahead and check. I’ll wait.
EPILOGUE
The rain starts in earnest as we walk toward the street. My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I shield it with my jacket as I pull it out. The only person who has this number had just driven away, our business concluded. But he’s sent me a text message. Pickens stops to look at me, the concern surely obvious on my face as I look down at the words:
From one professional to another. A warning. You are being watched.
“What’s wrong?” Pickens asks.
“Stay calm,” I say, trying to get myself to heed my own words. Who could be watching us? Nobody knows I’m alive. Or at least, nobody should. If anyone does, it’s going to get back to Scarpello, and then no amount of money, not twenty-five or fifty or a hundred million dollars will be enough to guarantee my safety. If somebody knows I’m alive, I need to find out now and silence them.
I hate the thought. I hate that my mind immediately goes there. This was all supposed to be over. I’ve not left that life behind for five minutes, and I’m already planning to murder somebody in cold blood.
I force myself to slow down. If someone is watching me, I need to find out who they are without them knowing. I make a show of stretching my neck, turning my head left and right to check over my shoulders. I don’t see anyone, but visibility is terrible in this rain, and there are windows all around that could hide interested eyes.
But whoever is watching, my buyer made them, which means I should be able to spot them as well. As I lead Pickens through the gate and out to the street, I take one last look behind us.
The streetlights had reflected off the cafe windows at our table, keeping us from seeing in through them but doing nothing to obscure us from someone inside. From this new vantage, there is no reflection.
Laia Quintana waves through the window with her left hand, beckoning us to join her inside. Her right arm is strapped to her body while it heals from the gunshot.
“How the hell—” Jim starts to ask.
“She’s Laia Quintana,” I answer before he can finish. “Who knows how she does what she does.”
“Do we run?”
“No. There’s no point. Besides, if she wanted us dead, we’d be dead.”
“Then what does she want?” Jim asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But there’s only one way we find out.” I close the gate, and we start back toward the cafe.
The cafe is warm and dry, and the barista waves to us as we come inside. “It’s a bit wet out there, huh?” she calls. “You guys want a top off?”
I shake my head no, not trusting my voice to stay steady as I walk, dripping slightly, across the room to join Laia at her table. Pickens stays beside me, as silent as I am.
“Hello, Barrett,” she says once we’ve settled in. “I figured Pickens here was hiding something, but I gotta admit, I was not expecting to see your face when I started following him.” Her tone is casual, almost friendly, and she keeps her voice low. To anyone walking past, we’re just three old friends getting coffee together.
“Does he know yet?” I ask. I want to build to the question more indirectly, but instead I just blurt it out. So much for my masterful subtlety.
Laia laughs and wipes a drip of coffee from her lip. “I hear you two have come into quite a bit of money recently,” she says.
“So that’s what this is?” Pickens asks. “You’re shaking us down to buy your silence?”
She laughs again, as though he told the cleverest joke. It is a strange sound coming from her. “No,” she says. “I don’t want you to buy my silence. I don’t even begrudge you lying to me. I gotta respect the play, though Barrett promising to pay me if he made it out alive was a bit too cute.”
She’s toying with us. I’m recovered from my concussion. I’m rested, and she’s injured. I could end this now.
“I feel like you two have the wrong impression of me,” she continues. “I can be a bitch, sure, but only because that’s my job. I’m not totally heartless. My friends even think I’m kind of fun to be around.” I can’t picture Laia Quintana with friends.
“What do you want?” I press her. I don’t want to spend any more time with her than I have to.
“I want you to hire me,” she says simply, and sits back, folding her hands in her lap.
“To do what?” Pickens asks.
“To give you information. Maybe even to help you out. The two of you are good. You’re clever, and you think well on your feet, but you’re also sloppy. You’re going to need to be perfect if you want to pull this off.”
“Pull what off, Laia?” I ask. I’m losing my patience.
“Another heist,” she says. “You’re going to be stealing something even more precious.” She slides a picture across the table. It’s a bit grainy, taken in a dark room under less-than-ideal lighting, but I can see well enough what it shows. There’s a newspaper, a few days old now but still recent enough. Beside the paper is a man’s face. It’s both swollen with bruising and gaunt with hunger, and a few of the ever so slightly crooked teeth are missing, but I would know that face anywhere. It has lived in my dreams and my thoughts every moment since I lay on a carpet and failed to look up.
“You see, Barrett,” Laia is saying, but I barely hear her. All I can hear is his breathing. His voice. “You’re not the only one who can fake a death. And your boy needs help.”
It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why or how. I can’t see the pattern. But none of that matters. All that matters is his face. His eyes.
Mickey is alive. And I’m going to get him back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photograph by Aaron Brock Dehn.
BEN CRANE wanted to be an architect until he was seven years old—then the carefully plotted fort in his parents’ basement collapsed after ten minutes. He is a former film executive whose credits include the Jack Ryan and Equalizer franchises. Ben lives with his partner and their two dogs in Los Angeles. He writes novels and comics.
A MAN OF LIES
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2023 by Ben Crane
First Pegasus Books cloth edition July 2023
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
Jacket design by Derek Thornton / Notch Design.
Imagery by Arcangel and Shutterstock Images.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-63936-409-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63936-410-7
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
www.pegasusbooks.com
Ben Crane, A Man of Lies
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Inside is the Nécessaire, the lost Fabergé egg from Novak’s safe.
The man smiles and closes the briefcase. After a glance at the lock to memorize the combination, he muddles the numbers and lays his hands flat on top.
“I have a question,” he says. “You have no obligation to answer. Our business is concluded. But if you would indulge my curiosity—you could have gotten far more than twenty-five million for this at auction, perhaps even twice as much. Why sell it to me?”
It’s a fair question. Pickens is silent, waiting for me to respond. The man is correct. I don’t have to answer. But I do anyway. I want him—and the people he represents—to feel at ease. They have gotten a treasure at a bargain, and might be concerned. There are very few things in the world that are purely good luck.
“Because we would have had to go public,” I say. “As far as the world is concerned, this doesn’t exist, and I am dead. I see no reason to disabuse it of either notion, and my understanding is that your client will keep their ownership of this private.”
“They will,” the man says, and he rises from the chair. “Gentlemen, it has been a pleasure.” He offers his hand, and we each shake in turn, and then he leaves. The five men in suits fade back into the mist of the morning rain, leaving me and Pickens alone at the cafe table, slightly richer than we were when they arrived.
“We did it,” Pickens says, not quite believing it, hoping that saying it out loud will cement it in the universe as a true statement.
“We did.” I smile, but the relief I had looked forward to isn’t there. I want to laugh and shout and whoop in celebration, but all I can do is feel his absence.
“What are you going to do now?” Pickens asks.
I have no idea what my plan is. I’ve spent so long working for this moment, working to be free of Scarpello’s grasp, that I haven’t had time to think about what comes next. “Go somewhere new,” I say. “Try to start over, live the life he wanted for us both.”
“He would have been proud of you. You pulled it off. We pulled it off.”
“No,” I reply. “He wouldn’t be proud of me. Not yet.”
CHAPTER 72 A Conclusion
So you might be a little upset right now, but don’t worry. It’ll all make sense. The plan really was simple. Pickens would go and work for Holzmann. He’d get the safe as close to open as he could without the key, and then he’d wait. My job was to get him out of there. Get him and the safe to a place where he wasn’t observed. Once he was there—in the bedroom of Vic’s abuela’s house, as it turned out—he’d send me a signal, and I’d find him.
He’d done it while Jonny Boy and I talked about sandwiches, and Cass grew increasingly more nervous that I was just stalling. She was closer to the truth than she’d thought. I was stalling as I circled the house, waiting for Pickens’s cough, the sign that I and the key I held were close enough. Then I stood there while he finished opening the safe and swapped out the real egg. Pickens’s drill had been heavier and larger than it needed to be. Inside it, he was hiding a cell phone to contact me with and the rest of our money, converted into a lump of gold and porcelain and a handful of jewels. He tossed that into the safe, then threw the real egg out the window and into the murky waters of the algae-filled pool, where it waited for him to retrieve it once everything had settled down.
Then I made sure that when the safe actually got opened, it wasn’t the real key that was used, but one of my fakes, and we let the safe’s security measures cover up all the evidence of our little swap.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence and say that we’d planned out every step of the whole thing from the beginning. I’ll admit it was real fucking touch-and-go for a minute there. Hell, we’d actually meant to give the thing to Scarpello in the end. But you gotta remember, a con isn’t about perfect planning. No plan survives contact with the enemy. A con is about improvisation. Recognizing opportunity and daring to strike when the moment is right. Besides, right at the start of all of this, I gave you two things to remember.
Nothing I said was the truth, but nothing I said was a lie. I’ve kept my word. Go ahead and check. I’ll wait.
EPILOGUE
The rain starts in earnest as we walk toward the street. My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I shield it with my jacket as I pull it out. The only person who has this number had just driven away, our business concluded. But he’s sent me a text message. Pickens stops to look at me, the concern surely obvious on my face as I look down at the words:
From one professional to another. A warning. You are being watched.
“What’s wrong?” Pickens asks.
“Stay calm,” I say, trying to get myself to heed my own words. Who could be watching us? Nobody knows I’m alive. Or at least, nobody should. If anyone does, it’s going to get back to Scarpello, and then no amount of money, not twenty-five or fifty or a hundred million dollars will be enough to guarantee my safety. If somebody knows I’m alive, I need to find out now and silence them.
I hate the thought. I hate that my mind immediately goes there. This was all supposed to be over. I’ve not left that life behind for five minutes, and I’m already planning to murder somebody in cold blood.
I force myself to slow down. If someone is watching me, I need to find out who they are without them knowing. I make a show of stretching my neck, turning my head left and right to check over my shoulders. I don’t see anyone, but visibility is terrible in this rain, and there are windows all around that could hide interested eyes.
But whoever is watching, my buyer made them, which means I should be able to spot them as well. As I lead Pickens through the gate and out to the street, I take one last look behind us.
The streetlights had reflected off the cafe windows at our table, keeping us from seeing in through them but doing nothing to obscure us from someone inside. From this new vantage, there is no reflection.
Laia Quintana waves through the window with her left hand, beckoning us to join her inside. Her right arm is strapped to her body while it heals from the gunshot.
“How the hell—” Jim starts to ask.
“She’s Laia Quintana,” I answer before he can finish. “Who knows how she does what she does.”
“Do we run?”
“No. There’s no point. Besides, if she wanted us dead, we’d be dead.”
“Then what does she want?” Jim asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But there’s only one way we find out.” I close the gate, and we start back toward the cafe.
The cafe is warm and dry, and the barista waves to us as we come inside. “It’s a bit wet out there, huh?” she calls. “You guys want a top off?”
I shake my head no, not trusting my voice to stay steady as I walk, dripping slightly, across the room to join Laia at her table. Pickens stays beside me, as silent as I am.
“Hello, Barrett,” she says once we’ve settled in. “I figured Pickens here was hiding something, but I gotta admit, I was not expecting to see your face when I started following him.” Her tone is casual, almost friendly, and she keeps her voice low. To anyone walking past, we’re just three old friends getting coffee together.
“Does he know yet?” I ask. I want to build to the question more indirectly, but instead I just blurt it out. So much for my masterful subtlety.
Laia laughs and wipes a drip of coffee from her lip. “I hear you two have come into quite a bit of money recently,” she says.
“So that’s what this is?” Pickens asks. “You’re shaking us down to buy your silence?”
She laughs again, as though he told the cleverest joke. It is a strange sound coming from her. “No,” she says. “I don’t want you to buy my silence. I don’t even begrudge you lying to me. I gotta respect the play, though Barrett promising to pay me if he made it out alive was a bit too cute.”
She’s toying with us. I’m recovered from my concussion. I’m rested, and she’s injured. I could end this now.
“I feel like you two have the wrong impression of me,” she continues. “I can be a bitch, sure, but only because that’s my job. I’m not totally heartless. My friends even think I’m kind of fun to be around.” I can’t picture Laia Quintana with friends.
“What do you want?” I press her. I don’t want to spend any more time with her than I have to.
“I want you to hire me,” she says simply, and sits back, folding her hands in her lap.
“To do what?” Pickens asks.
“To give you information. Maybe even to help you out. The two of you are good. You’re clever, and you think well on your feet, but you’re also sloppy. You’re going to need to be perfect if you want to pull this off.”
“Pull what off, Laia?” I ask. I’m losing my patience.
“Another heist,” she says. “You’re going to be stealing something even more precious.” She slides a picture across the table. It’s a bit grainy, taken in a dark room under less-than-ideal lighting, but I can see well enough what it shows. There’s a newspaper, a few days old now but still recent enough. Beside the paper is a man’s face. It’s both swollen with bruising and gaunt with hunger, and a few of the ever so slightly crooked teeth are missing, but I would know that face anywhere. It has lived in my dreams and my thoughts every moment since I lay on a carpet and failed to look up.
“You see, Barrett,” Laia is saying, but I barely hear her. All I can hear is his breathing. His voice. “You’re not the only one who can fake a death. And your boy needs help.”
It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why or how. I can’t see the pattern. But none of that matters. All that matters is his face. His eyes.
Mickey is alive. And I’m going to get him back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photograph by Aaron Brock Dehn.
BEN CRANE wanted to be an architect until he was seven years old—then the carefully plotted fort in his parents’ basement collapsed after ten minutes. He is a former film executive whose credits include the Jack Ryan and Equalizer franchises. Ben lives with his partner and their two dogs in Los Angeles. He writes novels and comics.
A MAN OF LIES
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2023 by Ben Crane
First Pegasus Books cloth edition July 2023
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
Jacket design by Derek Thornton / Notch Design.
Imagery by Arcangel and Shutterstock Images.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-63936-409-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63936-410-7
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
www.pegasusbooks.com
Ben Crane, A Man of Lies
