Free Smoke and Mirrors by Ella Skye

means. As for Sammy and Nigel, it was not your fault. None of it. You didn’t restore that car incorrectly or put the wrong fuel in it. It
wasn’t
Nigel’s job or Sammy’s connections that got them killed. It was a terrible accident that could’ve happened to anyone.”
    His eyes moved to the starlit darkness above us. “Do you think they’re together?”
    “Are you asking me if I think there’s a heaven?”
    His hand flickered against my toes like a butterfly passing. “I just wondered if you thought they were together.”
    “Nothing could separate that love.” And the more I thought about them, the more I knew, somehow, it had to be true.
    He turned from the view and studied me for a long minute. His mouth held no mirth. “I’m going to destroy Sanchez and this whole fucking operation if something happens to you.”
    It was more than a bit unsettling to realize it wasn’t Giovanni speaking.

Chapter Ten
    D e Torres’s driver, a gift from Trades and Services, picked me up at nine o’ clock. I was wearing a ludicrously expensive Ralph Rucci gown, reveling in the silky touch of its grey-blue silk. My hair was long and straight, my makeup elegant and transforming. I had taken the cue from Alberto’s file back at SIS, and used it as a sketchpad of ideas that I had in turn presented to Alasdair, who had fine-tuned my legend.
    When we arrived at the villa’s gates, I had to refrain from gaping. Two local boys, dressed in the old style, held lanterns and directed the sea of oncoming cars. Seeing De Torres’s Mercedes approach, they moved aside as he turned into the curved driveway. A butler I had never seen before, opened my door and held out a white-gloved hand.
    “Buonasera, Dottoressa.”
    “Buonasera, Signor.”
    He led me up the stairs, a hand outstretched under my own, half-a-step behind me, until I reached the top. Then, bowing graciously, he stepped back to help the next guest alight her vehicle. I gathered the left side of my dress, and lifting it off the immaculate floor, glided in the direction of the atrium.
    The guests were, as one would expect: striking, prosperous and ferociously competitive. The men wore women who might have stepped from the runways of Milan, and the women wore jewelry the Queen would have coveted. It was the ultimate place to people watch, and that was exactly what I was there to do. Taking a flute of champagne, I sipped from it and let my eyes wander the flower bedecked inner sanctum of Giovanni De Torres’s empire.
    Several of the more recognizable guests were big hitters in the diamond mining industry. De Torres supplied them with raw emeralds he purchased from Alberto Sanchez. It was the perfect cover for their primary transaction of money for drugs.
    C had laid it out for me and made the world smaller than I’d imagined. Nigel’s Russian mob work had led him to a thread that pulled enough marionette strings to make men on six continents dance. He’d nailed Ivan Drasnov and several of his top men for their part in a ‘cocaine for arms’ deal. It had also led to the arrest of a handful of Jordanian airport officials paid to look the other way when the huge, hollow Russian IL-76 cargo planes touched down to refuel on their way back and forth between the Columbia and Siberia.
    Ivan’s arrest and Nigel’s coup had not only dealt a blow to a powerful arm of the Russian mafia. It had been an even bigger accomplishment outside of Europe, where it led to the arrest of Columbia’s EPIC leader, a left-wing extremist named Raul Fernandez.
    Fernandez, the eldest son of a displaced Andean landowner, had risen to power alongside other Marxist based organizations like FARC and ELN. His own group, Ejército Pueblo de Colombia (the People’s Army of Columbia), made a name for themselves by blowing up foreign owned oil lines and kidnapping workers all in the name of ‘equal distribution of wealth amongst native peoples.’ It had gotten them noticed and tagged as a terrorist