One of the men stood up and smiled. “Agent Falcon, I’m Agent Martin. Nadine sent us to escort your team safely back to Paris.”
25
Falcon
My hands went immediately to King’s hips and squeezed in hopes he’d somehow be able to interpret that as my holy shit, this was not expected gesture.
“Nice to meet you,” I said politely, reaching an arm over King’s shoulder to shake the other agent’s hand.
The new agent introduced his fellow agent before leaning toward the cockpit and telling the pilots we were good to go.
King moved awkwardly past the agents, clearly trying to keep his sack from being spotted. It was a little silly since the men had to know we wouldn’t be there if we didn’t have the crown with us.
When we reached the sitting area farther back in the plane, the rest of the team was waiting for us.
“What’s with the extra muscle?” Linney asked softly over the sound of the engines ramping up. I glanced out the window but didn’t spot any crazed Hungarians peeling into the lot. “Security for…” She glanced at King and back to me. “The crown?”
“No idea,” I admitted just as softly. “But Nadine was acting strange earlier on the phone. I was hoping we’d be able to get out of here before she had a chance to do something like this.”
I realized it was the first time I’d admitted to blatantly defying orders from a superior. It wasn’t a great example to set for my team, and it made me pause. Had I completely lost my mind?
“Why would we need extra agents?” Ziv asked. “It’s not like…”
He caught himself before admitting we’d been retrieving a fake the entire time.
I turned to look at King and found him glaring at me. “Yeah, Dirk. It’s not like… it’s real or anything.”
“Fuck,” I muttered before looking back at my team and stating the obvious. “He knows.”
“Damn,” Ziv said. “Sorry. But it was bound to happen. The man’s a forger for god’s sake.”
“I wasn’t allowed to tell you,” I said to King. “I’m sorry. I wanted to. Believe me.”
Linney added, “He did. It was driving him crazy.”
King’s walls were coming up before my very eyes. “Yeah. Just doing your job. I get it. We were here to do a job. And now the job is done. Mission successful.”
He moved past me and dropped into a seat by the window on the other side of the aisle from the rest of the team, removing the soft bag from his shoulders and tossing it into the seat next to him like it was holding nothing more than a paperback and candy bar for the flight ahead. I took it and put it in an overhead compartment before slipping into the seat.
“King…”
“We don’t need to talk about it,” he said without looking at me. “I’m going to get some sleep. Adrenaline crash, you know.”
I was reminded of what he normally liked to do after an op.
Sometimes after an op, I wish someone would hold me down face-first and fuck me into the mattress.
Memories of doing just that flashed in my mind before I could stop them. I wanted to reach out to him, touch him and reassure him just how much it had killed me to keep the forgery details secret from him.
But was that true?
Because I’d already broken the rules when reassuring him about the undercover agent in Hobie. Why not this? Was it because I truly didn’t trust him?
“What you know about the history of the crown?” I asked him.
He was silent for a long time, and I wondered if he truly had slipped off to sleep that quickly. But then I remembered the flight from California and MJ telling me he was faking it.
“King. I know you’re not asleep. What do you know about the history of the crown?” I repeated.
King huffed out a breath and shrugged. “I mean, I know it was used in coronations. At one point the US had it. And it normally lives in the Hungarian Parliament Building. Which is, like, insane with security. There are armed guards around the clock, and some are in charge of watching the crown.”
I nodded. “So the part about the US… We had it for several years between World War II and President Carter’s time in office.”
King’s eyes opened long enough to roll. “Yes, I know that.”
“The US was originally pressured to return it to Hungary when the Hungarian government was still unstable. Hell, when the entire region was still unstable. So someone took it upon themselves to requisition a forgery in case we ended up having to return it before we fully trusted the Hungarians to keep it safe. The problem is, when the crown was finally returned in the seventies, we returned the wrong one by accident.”
King’s eyes widened as the implication of it sunk in. “Wow. Can you imagine if Hungary had held on to one of our national treasures for safekeeping and then returned a forgery?”