“Do you know who Patrick Boniface is?” he asked her quietly—much too quietly for Riley.
She turned the name over in her head. It seemed kind of familiar, like she might have read it in the paper, or heard it in passing, but it didn’t seem to have any real connection to her. “Is he that French singer?” she asked.
Riley shook his head. “Not hardly. Patrick Boniface is the biggest, richest, most badass top-dog arms dealer in the world.”
She stared at him in horror. “Jesus Christ, Riley—you tried to steal something from him?!”
“No,” he said. “That would be a cakewalk compared to this.” And Monique could tell this was not the usual Riley Wolfe line of egotistical bullshit. He was dead serious.
She swallowed. “Tell me,” she said.
He did.
He started with finishing a job, getting zapped, waking up on the wrong boat in the wrong ocean. And he ended with the job Boniface had given him, and the clear threat that made it kind of important to pull off successfully.
When he had finished, she stared at him for a long time, before she finally managed to say, “A fresco. He wants you to steal a fucking fresco.”
He nodded. “From the fucking Vatican,” he said, with a small trace of his normal cheer.
“A fresco is embedded in a wall, Riley.”
“Yup.”
“I mean—it’s actually a part of the fucking wall—!”
“I know it.”
“So he wants you to steal a wall.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Steal a fucking wall from the fucking Vatican—with some of the best security in the world.”
“Pretty much.”
Monique stared a little longer. “It can’t be done,” she said at last.
“I know,” he said.
“I mean, for Christ’s fucking sake, this is really simple—it absolutely cannot be fucking done, Riley! And I don’t want any of your usual cocky dumb-ass look-at-me bullshit about, ‘That’s why I’m going to do it!’ This categorically, positively, no-fucking-doubt-about-it cannot be fucking done! You cannot steal a fucking wall from the fucking Vatican!”
“I know,” he said again.
“Well, what the fuck are you going to do about it?” she demanded.
“I guess,” he said—and he seemed weirdly deflated, very un-Riley as he spoke—“I guess I’m going to find a way to do it.”
“Riley—”
“Monique, I have no choice here. I can’t run. This guy can find me wherever I hide. And if I don’t do this he will find me, and take me back to his island, and he has a friend there who will make sure it takes me a couple of weeks to die.” He actually shuddered, which was something Monique had never seen before. “And she scares the shit out of me. You just look at her and you can see the things that she wants to—” He stopped, shrugged, and, with a very small smile, added, “Spending time with that woman? That seems a lot harder than stealing a fresco.”
“Shit,” she whispered.
“Yup.”
“Holy fucking shit, Riley.”
He nodded. Then he looked away, and in a voice so very soft, so very not Riley, he said, “There’s more.” He looked at her, looked away. “It’s worse.”