Dani stared at her, and then stepped into the doorway. Without taking her eyes off The Wolf, she swung around the hand she’d been holding behind her back. In it was a gun, pointed at The Wolf.
“Hold on, Dani,” Quinn said. “Think about what you’re doing.”
“My father?” Dani said to The Wolf. “You think I care about your relationship to him? I hate him for who he was, for the harm he did. My real family — my mother and sister — are dead because of him. You were his partner so you are just as responsible.” She pushed the muzzle against The Wolf’s cheek.
“Dani,” Orlando whispered calmly.
“How many hundreds of thousands of lives are you responsible for taking already?” Dani asked as if no one else but The Wolf was there. With her free hand, she gestured behind her. “And how many more would you be responsible for after you took everything my father had stashed here?” She pressed the gun deeper into The Wolf’s skin.
Quinn tentatively placed a hand on her shoulder. “Dani, you don’t want to do this.”
She shot him a quick look and then focused back on The Wolf. “Tell me one reason why she doesn’t deserve to die.”
He took a step forward and put a hand over the gun. “Even if there isn’t one, you’re not an executioner.”
He pulled gently on the barrel, her resistance holding it in place for another second before she relaxed.
The Wolf smiled. “I guess you’re not your father’s daughter after all.”
“That’s probably the nicest thing you could have said to her,” Orlando said, before she smacked the grip of her gun into The Wolf’s cheek.
Orbits came to as they finished zip-tying him to one of the pipes running up the side of the silo.
“Are you going to leave me here to die?” he asked.
“I wish,” Ananke said.
“Then what’s going to happen to me?”
“That’ll be up to our client,” Quinn said.
“Your client? No, no, no. There’s no reason you can’t just let me go now. You’ve got The Wolf, man. Your client will be more than happy with her. And don’t worry about me. I’ll strike this place from my memory.”
Ananke looked at him as if he were a child. “Ricky, you auctioned off a human being.”
“Well, okay, sure, but ultimately I didn’t. In fact, if anyone should be in trouble for that, it should be The Wolf for stiffing me.”
“I’m sure she will be aptly punished,” Quinn said.
Looking less than satisfied with the answer, Orbits said, “That won’t get me my money, though, will it?”
After the two men Daeng had taken care of on the stairs had been carried into the room with The Wolf, Quinn had everyone gather back in the level-one storage area.
“So…what now?” Ananke said. “We call Helen and let her deal with everything?”
“Soon enough,” Quinn said. He looked at Dani. “We’re going to have to tell our client, you realize that, right?”
“What will she do with everything?”
“See that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”
“Who decides whose hands are right and whose are wrong?”
He paused for a moment, and then said, “I can only tell you that I trust her.”
Dani nodded. “I guess that’s the best I can hope for.”
“Can I ask a question?” he said.
Dani looked at him.
“When you were, um, talking to The Wolf, you mentioned your father. Who was he?”
She looked at Orlando and back at Quinn. “Charles Hayes. He was an arms dealer.”
Quinn had heard the name before but it had been years. “And The Wolf was his partner?”
“Yeah.”
“So all this,” Nate said, looking around, “was what? A shipment that didn’t get delivered?”
“Backup supply. He’d skim a bit off other jobs and deposit it here. He once told my sister it was his retirement plan.”
“You were trying to get here when Edmondson caught you, weren’t you?” Orlando asked.
A nod. “I thought…I thought there’d been enough time. I thought everyone would have forgotten.”
“What do you mean?” Nate asked.
“I’d stayed out of the country for ten years, living under a false name. For the first few years, people tried to find me. There were rumors, you know, about my father’s ‘treasure.’ After a while, they stopped searching. I promised myself I’d wait a full ten years. I guess it wasn’t enough.”
“But why come back at all?” he asked.
“Because I had to.”
No one said anything, all waiting for her to go on.
“My mom didn’t know what my dad really did until after my sister and I were born. When she found out, it scared her to death. She wanted to leave him, but she was afraid he’d take us from her. So she stayed, and secretly brought us up to hate everything he stood for. Marianne and I were scared of him, too, and it wasn’t hard hiding from him how we really felt.
“When Marianne turned sixteen, he said it was time to start showing her the business. I was ten then. The idea that he would expose Marianne to his world finally set off my mom. They argued for nearly two weeks, night and day. Then one morning Mom was gone. Our father said she was visiting a friend or something like that, I don’t remember exactly. But she never came back.”
“He killed her?” Nate said.
“There was never a body, but, yes, I’m sure he did. Marianne told me not to worry. That she would take care of me. She let our father teach her the business. He showed her everything, even this place. She acted interested but she became even more revolted by what he was. We would sit up nights and sometimes think of ways to destroy him, but it was all just wishful thinking.
“That was until I turned fifteen, and he said it was almost time for me to join the business. Marianne had no intention of letting that happen. She told me she had a plan. She laid it out and then taught me my part, going over and over every detail for months, including the backup plan in case things went wrong. Turned out the main part of the plan was just a smoke screen, and the emergency plan was what she’d intended for me to carry out all along. A month shy of my sixteenth birthday, she killed him in his office. Later that night she died in a one-car accident that wasn’t an accident at all. My father’s people were responsible.”
“The Wolf?” Orlando asked.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Dani said. “I think Marianne knew she wasn’t going to get away with it. That’s why she worked so hard to prepare me. She’d even arranged it so that immediately following the funerals, I was sent to a boarding school in London. The day after I arrived in England, a friend of Marianne’s took me to France and helped me disappear.”
“There’s something I still don’t understand,” Quinn said. “The gear here has got to be worth hundreds of millions, but it’s older stuff. On top of that, getting it out of here without attracting attention won’t be easy, not to mention getting it out of the country. Transportation costs, bribes — even if we ignore The Wolf’s fifty-million-dollar bid for you, the next highest was in the upper forties. That’s too much for this.”
“That’s because everything you’ve seen is just the icing,” Dani said.
Without another word, she led them to the elevator. Even though the car was sitting there and the door was open, she stepped over to the call button and ran her fingers along the edge of its metal faceplate.
“Ah, there,” she said with a grin as the plate swung out.
In addition to the wires leading from the button, a key sat in a small space at the bottom.
“Who’s coming with me?” she asked as she stepped onto the elevator.
“Daeng, Ananke, if you don’t mind staying here and keeping an eye on things?” Quinn said.
“Of course,” Daeng said.