Downfall Read Free

Austin, Boston. We’d flown down from my bar in Vancouver yesterday, at Mila’s insistence, because there was a problem.
    Mila knelt to tickle Daniel’s nose, earned a giggle from him, and then she completely ignored Leonie. Leonie ignored her back. They don’t like each other and I’m not entirely sure why. Leonie is not Daniel’s mother; she is, well, a nanny of sorts, an art student-turned-forger. She’d lost a lot in her life, and I’d saved Leonie from a criminal syndicate called the Nine Suns. The same syndicate that kidnapped Daniel and his mother, even before he was born, and destroyed my CIA career. Leonie had been good to Daniel and taken care of him when no one else would. She was deeply attached to my son, and so I’d asked her to stay in his life. We’d had a brief fling—under highly stressful circumstances—and were back to being just friends. Leonie had been nothing but perfect with Daniel, but I knew Mila thought I’d made a mistake, asking a former criminal to watch over my son.
    I hoped Mila was wrong.
    Mila slid the disc into a laptop on the desk.
    “Here he is.” She pointed. “Dalton Monroe.” She clicked with the mouse and a red dot appeared on Monroe, a tall, rangy man in his sixties. He wore a suit and seemed determined to meet and greet everyone in the room, which was at least two hundred people.
    In his right hand was a glass of bourbon.
    “It’s no easy thing to poison a man in front of two hundred witnesses,” Mila said. “I admire the nerve.”
    I picked up Daniel and sat next to her. He squirmed a little on my lap, eager to watch the red dot, like it was a game. Leonie stretched out on Daniel’s blanket and began to sketch in a pad aimlessly.
    “Two hundred people, but it gets pared down pretty fast,” I said. “Look. He has a bodyguard near him. Maybe five admirers in a knot around him. Beyond that, a few people watching him directly, angling for their chance to talk to him. Maybe fifteen, at any given second, looking at him. And looking at that same moment at the poisoner.”
    She accelerated the feed; forty minutes into the video, Dalton Monroe stumbled badly, clearly ill. He dropped the bourbon glass. The bodyguard hurried him out, Monroe smiling, waving off concerns from the other guests. He had then been taken to a private medical clinic, where it was diagnosed that he’d ingested a nonfatal dose of digitalis. The press were told he’d simply become ill at the party and had to leave. Dalton Monroe was worth a billion dollars and did not care to have it known that someone tried to poison him at a reception celebrating his latest business acquisition, a local software company he’d bought to fold into his empire.
    “He’s Round Table, right?” I asked Mila. The Round Table. My secret benefactors. A network of resource-rich and powerful people who want to be a force for good in the world, behind the scenes. They have Mila as their face to me; they gave me the bars to run, a web of safe houses around the world.
    They helped me get back my son. I know little about them, except that they started off as a CIA experiment that finally broke free to pursue their own agenda.
    “Yes,” Mila said. “Someone tried to kill a Round Table member. I want you to find out who.”
    “I said I’d run the bars for you all. Nothing more.” I settled Daniel on my knee.
    “Sam, perhaps Leonie wouldn’t mind taking Daniel for a walk,” Mila said. “The day is so lovely.”
    “I don’t mind.” Leonie was normally chatty with me, but always quiet around Mila.
    “No, would you leave him, please?” I got down on the blanket with him, wriggled fingers at him. I felt like I never got to see him enough, even when he was traveling with me.
    “Fine,” Leonie said. “I’ll go get an iced coffee.” I thought she already had the ice in her voice. She left. Mila stood at the window while I played and made bubbling noises at Daniel, and I figured she waited until she saw Leonie on