Page 74 of Run

“For a chance at another career-making bust, she’ll get over her hard feelings,” Dimitri drawled.

Everyone looked at Callum. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “She’d understand the need to coordinate the response from different agencies before this information leaks. She’ll also get why we’re leery of trusting anyone, seeing as it was one of her boys who handed over Elle to the James Family. Which she’s still pissed about, by the way. I’ll sound her out, see if she’s willing to play this our way.”

“What about Abasi?” Elle asked. “He spent just as long looking out for me as Marcus did. And he watched my brother’s back. Shouldn’t we try to warn him the police will be closing in?”

David threaded his fingers through hers. “Not sure how we’d do that, Blue. He didn’t leave a contact number.”

“Oh.” She forced a smile for her team’s sake. “There must be a way we can get a message to him though, right? I mean, he gave us this information in the first place. Plus, I think, under different circumstances, Abasi and Marcus could have been better men. I want to give him a chance to have a different life.”

“We’ll do what we can to give Abasi a way out,” David promised.

“There you go again,” Callum complained. “Making decisions for the team. You have no idea how to work with others, do you?”

David did that one eyebrow thing at Callum, who wasn’t as impressed by it as Elle was. “Technically, I’m not part of this team. I’m not part of any team. I’m an independent contractor.”

“Aye, well, we’ll see about that. Seems to me you’d be a whole lot easier to handle if I was officially your boss.” Callum spun his chair around and headed for the door. “Elle, get the info packaged up for the cops. I’ll leave you to decide the best way to do that. And make sure Lake and I have access to everything in case this goes sideways. I’m off to call Tessa and Lake. Somebody order food that isn’t pizza. It looks like it’s going to be another late night, and we’ll get hungry. We’ll meet back here when it arrives.”

“No, we won’t,” Rachel called after him. “We have a canteen for dining. The food stays there, not in my boardroom.”

“Pity it’s the weekend,” Ryan said. “Otherwise, we could have eaten at the canteen. They do good noodles. Cheap too. We should have a staff canteen at our office.”

“For a dozen people?” Julia said. “That seems like an unnecessary expenditure.”

Ryan wasn’t listening, he was too busy waxing lyrical about all the foods their fictitious in-house chef could make for them.

Elle felt a tug on her hand and she tumbled into David’s lap. She put her arms around his neck and kissed his chin.

“I think Marcus planned to use this information to take Tommy down,” she told him. “I think he was going to get out of the business.”

His arms squeezed her tight. “I hope you’re right, Blue. I really do.”

Elle hoped so too.

29

They’d set up a meeting with Tessa and a couple of her trusted officers at the offices of Benson Security’s lawyers. It had been decided that only Elle, David, and Ryan would enter the building to hand over the information to the Metropolitan Police. Dimitri, Megan, Callum, and Harvard would act as their protection and backup. They weren’t taking any chances when Tommy was still searching for Elle, and they didn’t know who they could trust.

Joe, Julia, and Rachel stayed at the safe house to comb through the data Elle had decrypted so far. Julia wanted them to compare the names they’d found in Tommy’s records to the police staff rolls they’d acquired, hoping they might weed out his contacts inside the force. It was something Elle could have done much faster; once she’d written a program for the task. But Julia had insisted it was something they could do to help while they waited for Elle to take over. It was clear she wanted something to keep herself occupied, and as usual, Joe indulged her—dragging Rachel in to help too. Something she was super thrilled about.

“I don’t like this,” David said as they drove up one of the many narrow, winding streets that made up the City of London. “Most of the roads are one way, and the rest are pedestrian-only. Makes it too easy to predict which route your target would take.”

“Although, on the plus side, the buildings being that tall and close together makes it hard for a sniper to get a bead on us.” Ryan studied their surroundings.

“Will you two listen to yourselves?” Elle said from the back seat. “We’re in the oldest part of London, the part that was almost destroyed by the Great Fire of 1066.”

David grinned at her in the rearview mirror. “Think you might find that it was 1666.”

“Close enough. The point is, there are buildings here dating back to the Romans. Sitting next to skyscrapers built for international businesses. Down that lane”—she pointed to a dark, narrow passage—“there’s a pub that’s been around for three hundred years. For goodness’ sake, we just passed St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Old Bailey’s up there. We’ve got Fleet Street, famous for its newspapers on one side of us, and the best law courts in Britain on the other. We’re surrounded by history and culture, and you two are looking for places we can be ambushed or shot by a sniper.”

“How about I do the tourist bit when I’m not playing bodyguard, Ellie Blue?” David flashed her a smile. “Although, I do enjoy guarding that body of yours.”

“Yuck.” Ryan shuddered. “Don’t listen to her complaints. She’s probably Googling this stuff to distract herself. You’re reading it off your phone, aren’t you?”

Elle sighed and put her phone back in her pocket. “One day, you’ll wake up to discover I’ve legally changed your name to Rita Granger, Queen of the Desert, while you slept.”

“It has a nice ring to it,” he said. “I could make it work.”

“Coming up to a bottleneck. It’s clear from our end.” Callum’s voice came from the phone sitting on the dash. “Dimitri, how does it look from your end?”