Well, the old man was back on the battlefield, it seemed.
Devine stripped off his running clothes and changed into jeans, heavy boots, and a long-sleeved T-shirt, then grabbed his motorcycle helmet and went downstairs and out the back. In the one-car garage was Tapshaw’s hunter-green Mini Cooper. She was the only one with a car, for her one-mile jaunt to work. Speers took the train into the city like Devine did, and Valentine performed his heavenly hacking remotely from his room. Or the couch.
Next to the Mini was Devine’s BMW motorcycle. It was the only thing he had ever splurged on. He’d bought it used with money saved up from his Army pay.
He fired up the motorcycle and soared off into the night. He had been given a mission, and as a soldier, he had never liked to let time lapse between an order given and its execution. The problem was the file that Campbell had on Cowl and Comely was very thin. But there was enough there that Devine could understand someone like Campbell being deployed to see what was up.
And now I’m right in the middle of it, sink or swim.
He zipped along curvy roads going faster than he should have at night, but he didn’t really care. At least he was finally flying along with a purpose beyond making money for Brad Cowl, a man who already had far too much wealth.
Ten minutes later he arrived at Cowl’s private enclave, the rear of which he saw from his train every morning. It was ablaze with lights, like a movie premiere, for all to see. High-dollar showroom-level cars were parked in the palace’s motor court. Wrought iron gates kept out the uninvited, of which Devine was assuredly one. He took off his helmet and watched.
The people he had seen from the train earlier were filtering out now. No doubt they had to get back to their fabulous homes and do fabulous things before getting up the next day to continue being fabulous. But maybe he was just being fabulously cynical and envious.
As he continued to watch, his focus suddenly centered on one man. It was the thick-chested and skinny-legged Bradley Cowl in the flesh. He slid clumsily into the driver’s seat of a deep blue Bugatti Chiron that probably cost more than Devine would earn in ten years, even if he did make it at the firm.
Cowl fired up the engine, and it sounded like a Boeing 777 powering up to takeoff thrust.
He slid it into gear and in two seconds made it to the gates, which barely had time to open on the motion sensor before the muscle car blew past. He turned right and headed south. Devine knew Cowl had a penthouse on the top of the building where Devine labored every day. He might be going there tonight, swapping a palace in the burbs for sleeping closer to the sky.
Devine kicked the bike into gear and raced after the Bugatti.
He had a second job now. It was called serving his country once more and keeping out of prison.
CHAPTER
9
THE BUGATTI AND THE MOTORCYCLE breached the island of Manhattan from the north and wended their way south like synchronized swimmers. Traffic was light at this hour, and Devine had no trouble following the super-car. The damn thing seemed to glow in the dark. It would have made the Dark Knight’s ride look like a drab Ford Escort puttering along.
Devine had met Brad Cowl exactly one time. Well, he hadn’t really met the man, but it was the closest he was ever likely to get. It was Devine’s recruiting class’s official first day, and the company’s leadership and the “great man” had been rolled out to greet them. They were gathered in one of the conference rooms where huge deals were routinely closed and enormous amounts of wealth changed hands. Devine could almost smell the money in the air.
Forty-five strong, the incoming class was looking spit-and-polished and serious and focused and grateful for this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with a world-class organization, blah, blah, blah.
Then in came the man himself followed by an eight-person platoon of anal-looking people dressed in corporate armor right down to the slash of pocket squares, precisely knotted ties, and, for the sole woman in the group, a black business suit, black stockings, black pumps, and a rigid face heavily lined from years of toil in this place. She was just like the buzz-sawed male lieutenants on that score.
Cowl’s pocket square seemed to have been mitered to an impossibly perfect angle with the horizontal line of his breast pocket on his twenty-thousand-dollar custom-made suit. Devine wasn’t guessing about the cost, because the man told all of them that was what the Italian tailor had charged him when Cowl had him flown in from Milan on his private wings to mold twenty of these suits to the investment king’s stocky frame. And he made sure to share with them that the talented paesano charged Robert De Niro and George Clooney and Brad Pitt the same price.