“If you’re here to play, you’re welcome,” Vasile told Hunter, when the latter had arrived, shivering and desperate, on his doorstep. “I don’t know about blood, but poker is definitely thicker than water.”
“Thank God for that,” said Hunter.
“I’m hosting a game this Saturday as it happens. Some very interesting players. High stakes.”
“Good,” Hunter said. “I need the money. I’m . . . in a bit of a tight spot right now.”
Vasile laughed. “We may be a backwater, but we do watch the news here, my friend,” he told Hunter. “The whole world knows about your ‘tight spot.’ ”
A look of panic crossed Hunter’s face.
“Don’t worry.” Vasile clapped him on the back. “My friends are discreet. No one’s going to turn you over to the CIA, or Group 99.
Unless of course you lose, and you can’t pay. In that case they’ll turn you over to the highest bidder.”
“Right.”
“Once they’ve finished torturing you.”
“Gotcha.” Hunter grinned. “I guess I’d better not lose then.”
“I would try very hard not to,” said Vasile. He wasn’t smiling.
Hunter didn’t lose. After three days at Vasile’s, enjoying the first home-cooked meals and hot baths he’d had since he was kidnapped in Moscow, he’d managed to win enough money to fund at least another month on the run.
Keeping one step ahead of the Americans, Hunter realized now, would be the easy part. It was Group 99 that worried him, in particular Apollo. The sadistic guard was bound to view Hunter’s escape as a personal humiliation, one that he would stop at nothing to avenge. If Hunter so much as glanced at a computer, Apollo would find him. That meant no emails, no credit card, no cell phone, no rented car, no flights, no electronically traceable presence of any kind. From now on, until his story was finished and in print all around the world, Hunter must live entirely under the radar.
Luckily, poker provided the perfect opportunity to create this new, cash only, invisible version of himself. Poker players were natural secret keepers, with an inbuilt sense of loyalty towards one another. Through poker, Hunter had “friends” like Vasile Rinescu scattered all across Europe. He could flit from safe house to safe house, earning enough to live, and work on his story between games. Of course, without a computer or a phone, research would be tough. He couldn’t do this without Sally Faiers’s help. But he knew Sally would help him.
She may not trust me as a man. But she trusts me as a journalist.
She knows this is big.
Once he’d published his story—once the truth, the whole truth about Group 99, was finally out there—he would turn himself in to the Americans. He’d have some explaining to do, of course. But then so would a lot of people.
Wrapping his scarf tightly around the lower half of his face, Hunter headed across the bridge to the mansion.
Vasile Rinescu had been a wonderful host, but his friends were getting tired of losing.
Tomorrow Hunter would move on.
CHAPTER 7
JEFF STEVENS EYED THE girl sitting at the end of the bar.
He was at Morton’s, an exclusive private members club in Mayfair, and he had just lost heavily at cards. But something about the way the lissome blonde returned his smile gave him the feeling that his luck was about to change.
He ordered one glass of Dom Pérignon 2003 and one glass of Perrier and crossed the polished parquet floor to where she was perched, her endless legs dangling deliciously off the end of a taupe velvet barstool. She was in her early twenties, with high cheekbones and the sort of glowing skin that only youth could produce. If her silver dress got any shorter it would be in clear contravention of the sales descriptions act.
In short, she was Jeff’s kind of girl.
“Waiting for someone?”
He handed her the flute of champagne.
She hesitated for a moment, then accepted, locking her dark blue eyes on Jeff’s gray ones.
“Not anymore. I’m Lianna.”