While Kitsune’s talents lay in physical extractions—it was said she had the softest hands in the business—Mulvaney was getting older, and his natural aptitudes had become slightly more cerebral. Corporate espionage paid very well, and Mulvaney designed many of the tools he used to gain information himself. Kitsune made heavy use of them in her jobs as well.
She inserted a thumb drive into the terminal and copied over Lanighan’s hard drive. The thumb drive contained a nifty little virus Mulvaney had cooked up that deleted the master files and all the backups from the host computer as it transferred. Not only would she have the information on the art collection, her thumb drive would be the only link to his company’s files. Payroll, insurance, assets, everything. It would take great effort to re-create—effort, time, and money.
She counted down as the files deleted themselves from his system, whispered to herself, “Come on, hurry, hurry.”
Two minutes to go.
She took a lap around his spacious office, bigger than her flat in London, with a spectacular view over the city. She stopped to admire the paintings on the walls. He had a small Cézanne she was tempted to cut from its frame, just to be spiteful. It would serve him right.
The thumb drive beeped, and she pulled herself away. Maybe another time.
Back out the door, silent and careful. She reset the alarm, relocked the glass doors, ran down the two flights of stairs, and grabbed the elevator down.
Less than three minutes, all told. Not bad.
She walked out the front door, waggling her own mobile phone over her head as she walked past the guard. He ignored her, and she was gone into the night.
81
Ritz Paris
15 Place Vend?me
Saturday, early evening
Nicholas was deep into rereading Lanighan’s file when there was a knock at the door to the suite.
Mike was combing the files from the French authorities on the elder Couverel’s mugging and murder. She set her laptop aside and said, “There’s the coffee. I’ll get it. I’m telling you, Nicholas, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing useful in these files. The case went cold thirty years ago, and no one has done any work on it since.”
She crossed the room and opened the door. Nicholas heard a strangled cry and bolted from the couch to see Mike hurled backward into the living room and slammed against a chair. A dark-skinned man burst in after her, a suppressed Beretta 92S in his hand.
The man ran into the suite, his eyes on Mike, his Beretta aimed at her head. Nicholas came in hard from the side, buying him a moment of precious surprise. He kicked out at the man’s knee, but the man whirled about and leapt back, only taking a glancing blow to his thigh. He grunted in pain, but it barely slowed him. He brought his gun to Nicholas’s chest, Mike forgotten.
Nicholas whipped his leg up to kick the gun out of his hand, but the man pulled his arm back in time. Nicholas jumped into him, slammed his fist into the man’s neck. The man’s head flew back, and as Nicholas spun around he grabbed the man’s arm and sent his elbow into his gut, once, twice. He grabbed the man’s wrist and clamped his fingers hard into the soft flesh. The man screamed and the gun went off, an obscene sound, then fell and skidded across the floor. The man’s fist hit Nicholas’s forehead, and he staggered back, seeing lights.
Nicholas heard Mike shout, “Get away from him, Nicholas!” He knew she wanted to shoot the man. And the man did, too, because he grabbed on to Nicholas, trying to use him as a shield, dragging him toward the door of the suite. But he couldn’t hold him.
Mike watched the fight turn into a vicious brawl. She had her Glock out, but the men were moving too fast to get a clear shot—blocking and countering each other’s strikes as they destroyed the furniture in the suite, and themselves.
Nicholas took a hard blow to the shoulder. He pivoted and grabbed the man’s neck with one arm as he punched him in the kidneys, vicious blows that would fell a giant, but the man managed to squirm away—how, Mike didn’t know, he was that good. He stared at Nicholas for a split second, then took off at a dead run out of the suite. Mike fired once, twice, but missed him.