Everyone turned to stare at him for his unusual outburst.
His emotional reaction made me even more nervous. If I hadn’t had the gum in my mouth, I might have actually puked.
Ever since the agents assigned to track Elek when he landed in Budapest had come up empty, Falcon had been a ball of stress. I didn’t blame him. Elek’s presence here was a wild card, something completely unpredictable for the by-the-book senior agent. I was sure it was the reason Falcon was so on edge.
It sure as hell was the reason I was.
For the third time tonight, I lifted open the top of the box that contained the real crown. The original Holy Crown of Hungary, also known as the Crown of Saint Stephen, glittered on a bed of black velvet. I couldn’t believe I was in its presence, much less holding it.
Agent Martin, the heavily armed agent from the plane now solely responsible for escorting the crown, sat on one of the side seats against the wall of the van eyeing me suspiciously. I didn’t blame him. If his job was to keep this thing safe, handing it over to anyone, much less a notorious thief, had to rankle.
The poor agent had done a piss-poor job of trying to sneak a bug and a tracker onto me when he climbed into the van next to me, but I’d recognized the “accidental bump” for what it was. The tracker could stay, but the bug was getting caught under my boot heel as soon as I was out of the van.
I looked at my watch again.
“Listen,” I said, “If something happens—”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Falcon ground out.
“No, but—”
He glared at me. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
I sighed and turned to Ziv. “If the Hungarian police get involved, get out of here. I can find my own way back to the hotel. That’s all I was going to say.”
“We’re not leaving you,” Falcon said.
“Don’t be stupid,” I barked, finally losing my cool. “It’s not good for any of us—for the fucking FBI and Interpol—to be caught at the scene of this fucking thing, and we all know it. If I get caught, I can fend for myself. There’s no need for you fuckers to get caught too. It will turn something manageable into a diplomatic shitshow.”
He knew I was right, but I needed him to know it was okay to protect his team.
Because the Hungarian police were definitely coming.
“I’m asking you to trust me,” I said to Falcon. “Promise me you’ll go if something goes wrong.”
I could see his jaw clenching in frustration. The man was caught between loyalty to his job and his country and a brand-new, delicate thread of loyalty toward me. While it warmed my heart to see his indecision, I needed him to know that he could have both if he would just trust me.
“We’ll go,” he finally said.
I nodded. “Okay, let’s do this.”
After slipping the crown box into the soft sack to sling onto my back, I winked at the agent next to me. “Thanks for this. I can’t wait to slide it on and pretend to be a king while I’m taking a bubble bath in my secret lair later tonight. I’ve always wanted a crown of my very own.”
The man’s nostrils flared as his eyes flicked up to Falcon as if to assess just how crazy the senior agent was for allowing a notorious thief to take off with a priceless artifact. Falcon rolled his eyes at me, but I could see the tiny quirk of his lip too. I just hoped to god it wasn’t the last time I saw him smile at me. With what I had planned, there was no way to know how he’d feel toward me in a matter of a few hours. I could only hope he’d understand.
I climbed out of the van and slid into the night.
31
Falcon
Watching King enter the Hungarian Parliament Building was excruciating and not because he was breaking the law. He was walking into danger, a situation in which he truly could get sent away to a Hungarian prison. If they charged him with stealing the crown, the people of Hungary wouldn’t be satisfied until they had his head on a platter.
I knew he’d done jobs like this a million times before. I knew he was good at it and had a very low likelihood of being detected, much less caught. But I also knew Elek was in town and would be doing everything he could to get his hands back on the crown. And if he couldn’t do that, I’d bet big money he wouldn’t hesitate to turn King in to Hungarian authorities.
“He’ll be okay,” Linney said softly from the seat next to mine. We were squeezed together at the bank of comms equipment against the back wall of the van with Ziv and Mouse directly behind us working the monitors on their side. We’d sent the extra agent to go wait in the other van with the secondary team which meant we could finally speak more freely about King without me worrying about saying something too revealing about my feelings for him.