The Consummata Read Free Page B

place where you were housed before? That was previously used to keep our limited treasury.”
    My eyebrows went up. “Your treasury’s pretty damn empty, if you can fit me in there.”
    Now the smile disappeared. His face grew tight, his eyes black with hatred. “Once it was...what is the word? Flush. A small treasure a pirate such as yourself might find well worth...raiding. Treasure that would have bought the safety of many lives.”
    “What happened to it?”
    “Money that can be the source of much good is often a lure for evil. It was stolen, señor .”
    “Who did it?”
    “His name is Jaimie Halaquez. A bad man, señor . A devil that walks the earth. A man I would kill with these hands, if I had the chance, with no fear of losing my place in Heaven.”
    He held his hands before him and strangled the air.
    Then his grip loosened into fingers and the bitterness that etched his face disappeared and he smiled again.
    “Come, Señor Morgan—you must eat. It has been a long time for you, between meals, no? But there was no other way. You need to seem to be gone. Vanished. And we needto appear as simple, unknowing peasants, not harborers of fugitives. And I do apologize for you having to stay for so long in that...that coffin.”
    “It’s okay, Pedro.”
    “It is?”
    “Yeah. Any coffin you can crawl back out of? That’s one of your better coffins.”
    This joke he got, and he led me into the next room, where a small feast awaited. I may not have been the hero they made me out to be, but I wasn’t about to turn down this delicious a hero’s welcome.

CHAPTER TWO
    The federal prosecutors had not been shy about discussing the criminal-style activities I’d conducted for my country during the war. That was the heart of their case against me, after all. The shipment of currency from the Washington mint to New York consisted of forty million dollars in common bills, a paper volume that filled a medium-sized armored truck.
    Why the G had made me for the heist was simple—I had pulled similar scores twice, during the war, getting troopmovement plans and coordinates on German blockhouses from their armored cars—utilizing booby-trap gimmicks to stop vehicles at given points, D-Y gas to knock out the drivers and passengers, with the means of entry a compact torch unit the Allied command had executed for me from my schematics. Complicated heists, requiring six-man teams.
    Those two hits provided the template for the money truck score, right down to the torch.
    So all these years later, a grateful government sent me to maximum security...only they hadn’t been able to keep me there; and the next time the “militia” had caught up with me had been dumb luck on their part, and rotten luck on mine.
    They’d tried to do it through know-how and technology— first the NYPD, because the Big Apple was where the hijackingwent down, then every great government agency you ever heard of and several you haven’t, and all the resources that implies.
    And they hadn’t been alone—private investigators lured by the reward got in the fray, and Mob types who figured they could slam me in a chair, give me a blow-torch refresher, and get the location of the hidden loot out of me.
    Nobody had succeeded.
    Luck had prevailed where skill had failed. Luck in the form of a coked-up kid in a stolen heap in a high-speed chase with a squad car that spooked the driver into making too wide and wild a turn, sending himself over the curb and the heap onto its skidding side, taking one not-so-innocent bystander along for the ride through a store window in a shower of glass.
    Luck.
    You can’t buy it. And you can’t avoid it. It finds you, and does its capricious thing, a coin flip coming up tails and giving you the bad luck of getting clipped by that coke freak, only to come up heads and let you survive, with just a minor concussion, cuts, abrasions, and a couple broken ribs. No internal injuries at all.
    Luck.
    The coin flips again, comes up