“If she had any brains, she’d have stayed away from Louis Duval and his crew. Instead, she’s sitting in a hotel in Lima with an ugly purse in her lap. That spells dumber than a box of rocks,” Bennito declares.
Garcia shakes his head in disagreement. “She’s smart. Look at how she acts. She knows she’s being watched because she undresses under the covers. She sleeps close to an escape route but has her head toward the door to watch for intruders. Those are better preservation instincts than ninety-five percent of the population.”
“Why doesn’t she ditch the bag? I’d pitch that sucker and be out of that room in a heartbeat.”
“It’s clear there’s something important there and she can’t,” Garcia replies with annoyance.
Garcia is right. Ava’s smart. When she arrived at the hotel, she looked for listening devices, cameras, sensors. She found a couple of them but not all. Devices are so tiny these days that it takes an electronic sweep to discover all of them and even then some can be missed.
“Still . . . why’d she even come here with Duval?” Bennito asks sourly. He knows it all—or at least thinks he does.
“Because of Rose.” I break my silence with a concept that Bennito can understand. “She’s there because of her friend . . . her family.”
The lightbulb turns on for him. Bennito’s research for this current mission resulted in thousands of pictures of Rose Waverly aka Rose Wastkowski. Currently a middle-tier runway model, Rose has social media accounts filled with photos of her lying on the beach, out in nightclubs, and more recently, on the arm of Louis Duval. Duval is a French businessman who makes most of his money on the black market selling information. He has a fondness for blond models and Burgundy wine. His one true love is money.
Of Ava, Bennito found almost nothing. At the age of eighteen, she moved to New York City with Rose. There are no Internet hits with pictures of Ava, and her background check revealed a shared lease with Rose, two credit cards with low balances, and a modest checking account. Her parents are still alive but their connection seems tenuous. There are no phone calls or emails or text messages exchanged between them.
After reading the one-page dossier on Ava that Bennito had compiled, it was clear to me that Rose is not only her friend, but the only person in the world Ava has to call her own.
All of us standing in this room can understand Ava’s desire to save her friend because that’s why we’re here. One of our own is being held as ransom. Our charge is to steal whatever it is that Louis Duval is trying to sell to various criminal factions. If we do that, we get Davidson back. If we fail, Davidson dies.
“Every one of us would strap dynamite to our bodies if we thought it’d save Davidson,” I say quietly. “Stupid or not, we’d do it just like Ava’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep Rose safe.”
Chastened, Bennito returns to his duties. Despite his brash words and lack of thinking, he’s a good kid with a gift for coding and computers. He has a feel for it that can’t be taught. I pulled him out from under a prosecution in the United States after he’d hacked into a big computer website to impress a girl. Now he does more productive things that are far more dangerous.
But we back him.
Because that’s how family works. Bennito is part of our brotherhood, the one Davidson, Garcia, and I formed when we realized that only by relying on each other would we survive the hell that the army was putting us through.
The smart thing for Ava to do would have been to walk away. When she came home with her arms full of groceries and saw Duval and one of his goons sitting in her small apartment instead of Rose, she should have dropped her bags and ran. Instead, she marched in and placed her bags on the counter and demanded to know what was going on.
Duval told her, quietly, that she was to help Rose carry out a task or Rose would be hurt. Ava resisted at first. Which is smart.
But then Duval pulled out his phone, swiped his finger through a few pictures that our secretly placed cameras couldn’t pick up, and things got real quiet. Next thing we knew, Duval was telling Ava that she needed to fly to Lima. And Ava?
Ava packed her bag and went.
? ? ?
In the seven days she’s been here in Lima, she’s had one visitor—Redoine Fouquet. Fouquet is rumored to be Louis Duval’s younger brother. Whatever family resemblance there once was has been eliminated by countless plastic surgeries as both Duval and Fouquet attempt to evade the law.
No, Ava wasn’t dumb. Whatever her mistakes are, I don’t think lack of intelligence is one of them. She’s beautiful. That can often be a problem. Maybe she’s too trusting or too kind but not dumb.
I walk over to the floor-to-ceiling windows in our hotel and look across the way at Ava’s room. Clad in a tank top and yoga pants, she climbs into bed. The other men crowd around the table of monitors to watch. I fist my hands in my pocket.
I hate that they watch her.
I hate that she’s in danger.