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“Briefly.” I slammed the menu on the table more than set it. “Why was it you summoned me? I’ve been in London less than twenty-four hours.”
“Your mother and I are hosting a dinner this evening. We expect you to attend.”
“I have other plans,” I lied.
“Cancel them.”
I folded my arms and waited until he lowered the menu to look at me, then said, “No.”
“Don’t be a chit. Your mother and I ask so little of you. You could at least agree when we do.”
“You give equally to what you ask, which is next to nothing. As I said, I have other plans, which I’m unwilling to change.” I pushed the chair from the table and stood. “Give my regards to Millicent.”
I stormed from the dining room, not caring at all that I’d caused a scene. In fact, I was happy I had. The bastard deserved the raised brows of those he considered his peers.
3
TYPHON
“Something’s going down in Shere,” said Hornet, an MI6 operative I was considering for Unit 23. As a test, Z and I had agreed to put him on Oleander’s detail. If he was able to track her undetected, he’d get the job.
“Elaborate.”
“According to Reaper, they’re moving out.”
While the man Hornet spoke of was an American, and thus a member of the coalition’s US task force, I’d been following his career for a few years. His code name spoke to his skillfulness as an assassin, and I had every intention of finding a place for him on my team. Not that he was aware of it. For now, he was far more useful inside the command center.
Z was the only person who knew Reaper was passing information on to Hornet and, ultimately, to me. If Oleander or anyone else discovered what he was doing, Z would run interference.
“Stay on it and update me as you learn more.”
“Roger that, sir,” Hornet responded.
Given the nature of the work Unit 23 did, when it formed, two decisions were made regarding our headquarters. First, they would not be in Vauxhall Cross, where the rest of SIS was housed. Second, we’d never have a home office in the traditional sense.
It was up to each leader to determine where and what kind of command center they wanted. I had two. One was in the most secure, private building in London. I’d purchased two apartments and had a door added between them. The access was almost cliché, given it was hidden behind a bookcase.
The building was in close proximity to Hyde Park, but more, to Claridge’s, where I dined almost every night I was in town. Since it was typically uncrowded and quiet, the Fumoir was my favorite spot for an after-dinner drink. The other thing I appreciated was that even though I was a regular at the hotel’s restaurants and bars, the staff knew better than to ask questions. Familiarity was not only frowned upon, but was a rule that, if broken, led to termination. Regardless of whether I ordered the same drink or the same meal each time I was there, which could be night after night, I was treated respectfully and as though I’d never been there before. If I chose to make friendly conversation, they were certainly permitted to respond, but then it was on me.
Anonymity, even though I was recognizable, given my stature, was paramount to my line of work. I used service entrances rather than the main lobby to arrive and depart, and rarely the same one.
When my stomach rumbled, I checked the time. I almost never ate lunch, but was hungry enough to do so today. First, I needed to do a routine check on active missions.
There was one agent who had gone dark, which was not uncommon for Unit 23, but that she hadn’t reported in prior or since troubled me.
Philippa Windsor was one of our best. Her regal disposition, along with her surname, had garnered her the code name Countess. She was lethal in her pursuit of the world’s worst, and her kill count was twice that of most of our team. Her mission was to insinuate herself into the UK’s largest drug trafficking cartel, then assassinate its leader. This type of assignment—infiltration of a criminal organization this powerful—wasn’t given lightly or to just anyone. In fact, she was the first, other than me.
Before I became commander, I’d gone undercover as an enforcer in not one but two Italian crime families—the Sicilian and the Calabrian syndicates. As adept as Unit 23 was at ending the lives of the world’s worst criminals, if the target was one of the good guys, we were equally good at proving he or she was dead when they weren’t. This went far beyond witness protection. In some cases, facial-reconstruction surgery was required.
I was still waiting for a reply to my emergency ping to the Countess when I received an update from Hornet.
According to Reaper, a woman named Bexli Everdeen, who was connected to the commander of the UK task force, was missing and believed to be in the hands of traffickers. Not just any trafficker and not just any abduction. Everdeen and nineteen other women were being offered on a high-end sex-slave auction site the team had discovered on the dark web.
Tracking the site’s IP address had led them to a compound on the Maltese island of Gozo. An organization called AMPS Incorporated was its registered owner.
A mission to rescue Everdeen and the other women believed to be held captive was being deployed immediately.
I ordered Hornet to get there before they arrived and to provide real-time updates.