Page 91 of Gone Before Goodbye

“Old? The Tourbillon debuted this year. It’s brand spanking new.”

“Wow.”

“Nice ride, right?”

“Not 4.1-million-dollars nice.”

He grins.

“I’m Maggie McCabe, by the way.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m Bob.”

“Nice to meet you, Bob.”

“Same.”

She notices the telltale lump in his suit jacket. Bob is carrying a gun. He also has that calm, that stillness, Maggie has seen only in the best trained of soldiers.

“What can you tell me before we arrive?” she asks.

“Not a thing,” he says.

“Is Bob even your real name?”

His answer is just a smile.

Charles Lockwood had flown down with her on the private plane, but he stayed on board, explaining that he had to return immediately to Russia. The flight time was six hours. He’d spent almost all of it with her going over the “plan”—as generous a use of that term as Maggie had experienced—yet again:

“Your cover is one you’re already playing: concierge surgeon for the superrich, this time for a family in Dubai. I can’t give you their name. That’s part of the discretion. But the client is described as a ‘retail magnate.’ Here are two passports. Yours, of course. Use that. The other is made out in the name of Emily Sinclair, a pseudonym,just in case. When you arrive, they’ll give you the details on what cosmetic work they want. Your mission—man, I hate that term: I sound like I’m M in a Bond film or something. But the mission is pretty simple. We are trying to find Trace Packer.”

As the Tourbillon revs closer to the city, the famed skyscrapers of Dubai start to come into view, like shiny mirages rising from the desert sand. The site is like something out of a futuristic movie—a blend of nirvana and dystopia, which, when you think about it, can appear to be the same thing from a distance. Maggie had been to Dubai maybe a dozen times during her years in the military and with WorldCures. She and Marc had tolerated the visits, while Trace dove into the city and all its excesses.

She remembers Trace explaining the appeal to her and Marc:

“You can’t have an up without a down. You can’t have a left without a right. You can’t have good without evil…”

“Are you getting to the point?” Maggie had interrupted.

She had heard these philosophical musings from Trace many times over the years. It’s one of the things she’d most enjoyed about Trace’s company—he always said something that made her think. What they don’t tell you about serving in combat zones is that the rare spikes of adrenaline are made far more potent because of the hours of mind-numbing boredom—which, when she thinks about it now, is a lot like what Trace was saying with this no-up-without-a-down stuff.

“And,” Trace finished, with his rakish smile, “in my case, there can’t be altruism without debauchery. You two, well, you have each other. You’ll spend the night in some high-rise hotel bed with a billion-count threads and do what you should do. Me? I plan to visit a risqué nightclub and imbibe and ingest and flirt and end up with a strange beauty in my bed, one who will see my innate wonderfulness and not charge me and it’ll be passionate and romantic and even love—no, not what you two have because, well, almost no one has that—and then, poof, it’ll be gone with the morning sun.”

Maggie just sits in that memory for a moment.

Trace Packer.

From the driver’s seat, Viking Bob asks, “Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

The car makes a sharp right turn. In her head, Maggie rehearses the “plan”—again, the word deserves quote marks—remembering her first question when Charles Lockwood had told her the destination:

“Why Dubai?” she asked.

“Before I answer, I just want to remind you,” Lockwood began. “You don’t have to do this. This isn’t your fight. You don’t have to help—”

“Why Dubai?”