Spotless (33 page)

Oh God.
Killing people and kissing weren’t his only skills. He was also an accomplished back rubber. I closed my eyes, feeling the tension in my shoulders ebb under the pressure of his talented fingers. I just hoped he wouldn’t send me the bill.

Now, if you had to pick a twenty-digit code that would be both incredibly hard and incredibly easy to guess, what would you pick? Perhaps something involving the position of each letter of the alphabet? No, twenty-six letters, too many possibilities. I racked my brains for things that could be associated with the number. Fingers and toes? It could be, but how would that translate into a code? Dammit, I couldn’t think, even with the help of March’s backrub.

Even years after her death, my mother was still challenging me. I sighed at the memory of our games together, and how she would teach me how to play Find the Lady and bend the cards right, or napalm me at chess but always explain all her moves afterward so I could learn them. I hadn’t discovered Nutella until the age of thirteen because she had decreed I would only be allowed to have some if I could reproduce her favorite trick—solving a Rubik’s Cube with my hands behind my back.

So little Nutella, so many tears, so much frustration, and years later, I was exactly in the same place, except this was no Rubik’s Cube, just a fricking twenty-digit number.

A twenty-digit number . . .

A huge-ass number. One that conjured hours spent in the kitchen moping as I watched my mom eat Nutella spread on a slice of bread with a smug look on her face.

I raised my hand to type the first digit. Even if my guess was wrong, I had no other idea anyway. With a long exhale, I started filling the empty fields one by one.

43252003274489856500

When the safe’s door clicked, I nearly had a heart attack, and I felt March’s grip on my shoulders tighten. I craned my neck to look up at him over my shoulder, both terrified and excited.

“What is that number?” The astonishment was clear in his voice.

“The number of possible permutations for a classic Rubik’s Cube: forty-three quintillion or so.”

March let out a whistle of admiration as I pulled the heavy black door. There was a big metal case in the safe, which he took out carefully. I noticed the way he used both hands to support the case while carrying it to a small desk that stood against the room’s wall: whatever rested in there was heavy. He undid the clasps sealing the case and opened it. My heart skipped a beat. There it was. Uncut, but still shiny, with a few well-defined angles and looking every bit like a rough block of glass.

March and I were looking at four billion dollars.

Yes, four. You read that right.

There were two identical Cullinans in my mother’s case.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The Flowers

“An army of a thousand men couldna stop me if I’m fighting for ye, my love. I swear on my kilt that I’ll return to ye!”

—Diane MacRoth,
Claimed by the Impetuous Highlander

So. As I was saying, two Cullinans, and hopefully, at least one genuine diamond among them. I leaned conspiringly toward March, my voice down to a whisper. “That knife, the one you have on your leg, what is it made of?”

“Ceramic.”

“Wow, I thought they only made those for cooking!”

“Very resistant, won’t trigger metal detectors.” He shrugged.

“Good.” I nodded. “Then if one of these diamonds is fake, there’s a good chance we’ll know.”

“Scratch test?”

“Yup, go for it.”

Within seconds, March had bent to his side and produced that small incurved knife with the black blade—which reminded me of that poor guy at the Rose Paradise, and I cringed a little. He grabbed one
of the stones, steadied it with his left hand, and proceeded to scrape the knife’s blade against the smooth surface. There was no suspense. A visible scratch mark immediately appeared, like a white wound on the translucent material.

“Glass, very likely,” I concluded.

Taking the second stone, he carefully repeated the same experiment, except this time the shiny material resisted the blade admirably. We exchanged knowing looks. Two billion dollars’ worth of flawless natural diamond. That Queen person March worked for was going to be happy. “Well, that was an easy shell game!”

“No. The rules specify that you need three shells to make it a shell game,” March observed.

I shook my head with a smile as he concealed the knife back under his pants leg. Sakai turned to check on us; March slammed the case shut before our host could see what was inside and took it with him. I pushed the safe’s door closed.

Sakai led us out of the vault, and we were almost at the elevator when March stopped in front of one of the hallway’s windows to look down at the street. On the Harumi Dori, two black cars and a white van had stopped, the sleek black surface of their tinted windows reflecting the building’s glass facade. Several men jumped out of the vehicles. Black jackets, sunglasses. Those were
not
Jehovah’s Witnesses touring the neighborhood. I watched them stride toward the bank, and one of them gestured to the others to separate into two groups. March’s eyes narrowed, and he stopped me before I could enter the elevator. “We’ll take the stairs.”

Sakai shot us a suspicious look. “What’s going on?”

“Ring the alarm, order everyone to go to the top floors and stay there. Don’t follow us.”

I think our host was about to protest and say something like, “Who died and made you my boss?” but seeing March fish several dark gray objects from his pockets and start to assemble a gun before our eyes,
Sakai closed his mouth, nodded, and then ran down the white hallway before disappearing behind a set of French doors. A few seconds later, the shrill sound of the alarm started echoing rhythmically in the building.

I looked at March, panic rising in my chest. “Do you think they’re here for the Cullinan? Did they follow us?”

“I didn’t think I had been tailed, but I’m willing to bet that young lady downstairs is the one who called them.”

He took my hand and dragged me down the hallway. I couldn’t keep up with his pace, and most of the time, it felt like my feet were hovering over the floor. We passed a few worried employees whispering to one another while hurrying in the direction of the elevator. Once the floor appeared to be deserted, March pushed open the heavy door leading to an emergency staircase.

As soon as the door had slammed behind us, he handed me the case. “I’m going to need you to carry this.” Then, he removed his bulletproof jacket and offered it to me.

I tried to push it away and back into his hands. “March, it’s a bad idea—”

Ignoring my plea, he retrieved his cell phone from the jacket’s inner pocket, slid it into his own jeans’ back pocket, and helped me put the oversized garment on. He then placed a hand on my shoulder, locking his blue gaze with mine. “Listen to me, Island. We
have
to exit this building. We don’t have much time, and the men in those cars are going to shoot at us. Do you trust me?”

I nodded, my throat tight.

“Good. You stay behind me, move only when I tell you to, and hold on to that case. I’ll take care of the rest.”

I wanted to nod again but, instead, gasped when I heard the sound of a door blasting open eleven floors below. Those guys weren’t stupid. They were going to check the stairs first. March flattened against the concrete wall while climbing footsteps echoed all the way up to our floor. “Stay here and wait.”

I fought tears of anguish when I watched him proceed downward until I couldn’t see him anymore. For a while, all I could hear were those men’s footsteps getting closer and closer . . .

Until there was a loud thud. I registered swearing in English and Japanese, and I heard gunshots two, maybe three floors below. I covered my ears in terror and huddled against the wall, trembling like a leaf. Growls and brief screams echoed as someone got slammed several times against the staircase’s railing, sending ominous vibrations through the cheap metal all the way to where I stood.

The footsteps resumed, except this time it seemed to be only one pair of feet. Terrified by the prospect that they might not be March’s, I flattened myself against the wall and raised the case above my head with trembling hands. Whoever was coming up would get a two-billion-dollar nose job if he tried to get me.

A tall silhouette emerged from the staircase. I lunged forward, but the case was stopped by a steady hand before it could do any damage.

“Come here, biscuit.”

My heart skipped a beat. March flashed me a reassuring smile and extended his hand to me.

I couldn’t help but steal a worried glance at the blood on his shirt. He caught the direction of my gaze as we ran down the stairs and said, “Not mine.”

Not his, indeed. Two floors below, we passed the bodies of three men. Two Asian-looking guys lying on the floor with their necks twisted at an odd angle, and a third one whose short blond hair was covered in blood—probably the same blood that was smeared on the railing’s metal and all over March’s shirt. I gathered that those terrible vibrations I had heard were the product of his skull hitting the railing over and over . . .

When we reached the second floor, March stopped me and leaned against the heavy fire door connecting the staircase to the rest of the floor, whispering to me. “They’re all waiting on the first floor for their
reconnaissance team to return.” He checked his watch. “It’s been almost five minutes. They’re going to send more men in less than a minute. For a couple of seconds, they’ll be entirely focused on the first floor door. That’s when we’ll go.”

I gasped. “But how will we leave the second floor?” I asked, my hands tightening on the metal case I needed to hold on to at any cost.

“Did you notice the mezzanine when we entered?”

To be honest, I hadn’t taken the time to scan for all possible exits when we had first entered the building—which is probably why March was a professional killer and I wasn’t—but as he mentioned it, I pictured that huge spaceship lobby again. I nodded, remembering a long mezzanine with a nice glass floor that overlooked the hall and allowed direct access to the building’s second floor via a spiral staircase.

“This emergency exit opens on the mezzanine. On my signal, you go in and run to the spiral staircase on your left. Don’t go down into the lobby. Hide behind the coffee machine near the stairs until I’m done.”

Damn, I hadn’t noticed the coffee machine either. March got up, squeezed my shoulders, and racked the slide of his gun, the sharp clicking sound causing a painful shiver to course down my back.

His guess had been correct.

Beneath our feet, the first floor lobby’s fire door slammed open with a loud noise, and March shoved me through the second floor door at the same time. I landed on the glass mezzanine, but I was too petrified to run as he had ordered me to. He dragged me across the translucent floor and sent me sliding across the mezzanine and toward the coffee machine like a hockey puck, before the remaining men in the lobby realized we were no longer in the stairs and started shooting at us.

I screamed as several bullets hit the glass structure. It didn’t break, but delicate flowers made of cracked glass appeared on the underside of the thick transparent slabs. Under any other circumstances I would have found them beautiful, but people were shooting at me, and one
such flower had just bloomed a few feet away from the coffee machine with a sinister cracking sound.

I could see everything through the mezzanine, and it made the ordeal much worse than it had been back in the stairs. Their priority appeared to be killing March—something easier said than done, as our assailants soon discovered. He had shot two guys while running down the spiral staircase, and below me, I could see that he was now hiding behind the white desk. Three men remained, along with that treacherous receptionist, who was cowering in a corner of the hall, much like me. Near the elevator, the bodies of two security guards lay still. I gathered that Sakai had tried to call them, only to have those poor guys killed upon reaching the lobby.

I looked down to see that one of the three men, a bald Japanese guy, was holding an automatic rifle. He aimed at the desk and fired several rounds, perhaps in hope that a few bullets would make it through. I closed my eyes and begged Murphy’s law to cut March some slack, because I was wearing the bulletproof jacket and he wasn’t. March seemed to be still alive, waiting for an opening, but I was getting worried that the damn desk wouldn’t resist much longer.

I came up with an idea.

Opening the case with trembling fingers, I grabbed the fake Cullinan and started crawling away from the vending machine. I kept whispering to myself that I was going to be okay: The bullets those guys had fired obviously couldn’t make it through those thick glass slabs, and as long as I stayed close to the wall, they wouldn’t have the right angle to fire at me with a direct shot.

Except I was already halfway across the mezzanine, now perfectly visible to all of our friends, when I started to rethink the shortcomings of my plan to throw the fake stone at them so they would try to catch it and leave March alone.