Present Day
Island of Cacatra, Indian Ocean
Two hours to departure
Reuben straightened the knot on his tie and checked his reflection. He was set. He was Reuben van der Meyde and this was
his
party. Nothing—
nothing
—was going to go wrong.
So why did he look so bloody peaky? Beneath his tan, his skin was yellowish and damp, waxy as cheese. He had the shits—he always got the shits when he got nervous. Five times he had visited the bathroom since Jax Jackson and his entourage finally departed: there surely couldn’t be that much left to come out. His ass certainly felt like he’d shat out a truck.
I’m one of them. Tomorrow the truth comes out
.
It was a practical joke, he kept telling himself. He ought to be less concerned over the message’s content than the
fact some clown had managed to hack his account. That was the real threat. Not what the message said.
Not what the message said
.
Reuben was due on the yacht, scheduled to brief this evening’s crew and make sure they understood they were playing with the big boys now. It wasn’t his style to employ a new agency but it was for a charitable cause, disadvantaged kids needing a break, and wasn’t his island all about rehabilitation? He had to at least be seen to be giving back to the community.
I’m one of them
.
In the air-conditioned solitude of his office, Reuben logged on. There the message was, just as it had been yesterday, mocking him.
I’m one of them. Tomorrow the truth comes out
.
JB hadn’t understood the implications. This person was bluffing, he’d said. Reuben might have thought the exact same thing, were he in the Frenchman’s position. But he wasn’t. There was a lot JB didn’t know about the scheme. He didn’t know about the vast cheques Reuben pocketed each month. He didn’t know about Reuben’s failure to wire the money to the poverty-stricken surrogates to whom it was promised. He didn’t know about the insurance Reuben had to take out against the paupers, threats to their livelihood and their families in case one saw fit to blab. He didn’t know that to get to where van der Meyde was you couldn’t always play Mr Nice and sometimes that meant playing Mr Downright Fucking Evil.
Reuben didn’t lie awake sweating it out. Business was business.
But this was different.
This was a revelation he knew he had to take to his
grave. It ran deeper than the surrogate agency, deeper than the fortunes not exchanged and the broken guarantees. It was the only thing that, from time to time, made Reuben stop whatever he was doing, heart racing and breath caught, and think, just for a moment:
I’ve gone too far
.
Oh, there was a lot JB didn’t know.
I’m one of them
.
As if this could be any child. As if this could be one of the standard set who’d been placed and bought and sold and paid for. Christ! That would be bad enough.
But not this.
I’m one of them
.
Reuben was the only man alive who knew what that could mean. Not JB, not Rebecca, not Margaret, not any of his scouts. This was a secret he had kept entirely to himself.
Only now it seemed that someone else knew it too.
Rebecca Stuttgart ran her hand over the gowns laid out on the bed linen, jade and cobalt and crimson, like a cast of exotic butterflies. She slipped one over her head and brushed her red hair loose around her shoulders.
JB was fastening his tie at the window. He was normally adroit; she could tell he was distracted.
‘Do you want me to do that for you?’
He didn’t say no and so she went to him, looping the ends over each other and tightening the knot. Up close he smelled of an aftershave he’d worn in the early days, one she hadn’t known in a while. Patting the tie smooth, she fought down a swell of tears. If only things had been different for them. In another life, at another time, perhaps …
But that was like wishing black were white, and God only knew she’d done enough wishing over the years.
The way her husband’s jaw was set betrayed his anxiety. It was Rebecca’s own fault. It was the lie she’d told, the horrible lie. She’d been acting out of desperation, a last-ditch attempt to rouse her marriage from the ashes. Now she saw it had lain there too long for rescue.
‘You’re more beautiful today than you ever were,’ JB said, with a tenderness she hadn’t heard since the beginning. The compliment was unexpected. Over the past few months they had barely spoken to each other at all.
Rebecca ran a hand over the crisp shoulder of her husband’s suit. She looked up at his face, into the blue eyes she knew would haunt her till the day she died.
I’m not beautiful. I’ve done a terrible thing
.
But in him she saw the resignation that matched her own: an unspoken understanding that they had reached the end and that tomorrow it would be over. It would all be over.
‘So are you,’ she replied.
And before she could change her mind, Rebecca reached up and kissed JB’s mouth. Only briefly, but enough to remember.
Enrique Marquez, known back home as Rico, slipped out on to the megayacht’s main deck the instant his cell beeped.
‘What the fuck you doin’ callin’ me?’ he demanded, ducking behind an abandoned crate of table centrepieces. ‘I thought we agreed no contact! ’
Margaret Jensen sounded nervous. ‘I wanted to make sure you’d arrived,’ she hissed, barely audible as she endeavoured to keep her voice down.
‘Course I’ve fucking arrived. Where the fuck else am I gonna be?’
‘Is everything set?’
‘Jeez, lady, you sound like you’re dealin’ with an amateur.’
‘Just answer the question.’
‘It’s set.’
He heard her expel breath. ‘Mr V’s on his way.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’ A uniformed man approached the crate and Enrique made off, talking loudly so it sounded legit. ‘It’s what I was waitin’ on when you
called me.’
‘You’d better go.’
‘No shit.’ He hung up.
Returning the cell to his pocket, Enrique made his way through the galley and into the saloon. A group of identically dressed crew were milling anxiously, awaiting instruction and straightening their uniforms, determined to make a good impression.
Enrique had struck gold when the employment agency secured him the van der Meyde gig. It was his knowledge of boats that had swung it. That and the false ID he’d had an acquaintance supply him with. Prison had been good for at least something.
A sharply tailored white suit, gold braiding at the collar and cuffs, concealed the hardened, heavily tattooed body beneath. Two years behind bars for a crime he had never wanted to commit had changed Enrique beyond recognition. Finally, his appeal had been granted—he had been acting on behalf of his brother, the notorious Diego Marquez, whose ever-elusive whereabouts had been exchanged for his own release in a backhanded deal set up
by the LAPD, whose drugs squad had been tailing Diego and his crew for nearly a decade.
Enrique didn’t feel bad about it. Had Diego taken the rap when it all went to shit? Had Diego come to visit and say he was sorry and pay his fucking respects? No. Instead he’d set his only brother up, quitting town and sending word that a rival gang was planning a hit on their mom. Sure, he’d done it. Sure, he’d gone down for his trouble. What else was he going to do?
Only, now, gone were the gentle eyes, the ready laugh and the dimples of humour. In their place, hostility against the world that had wronged him since the day he was born. Anger—no, too weak:
rage
—at his betrayal by the woman who had promised she was his.
Loriana Garcia Torres. Once so innocent, a virgin. Not any more. These days her body was there for the taking, a hooker masquerading as something else but a hooker all the same. He’d seen her parading her boyfriends, splashed across magazines like she hadn’t a care in the world. Didn’t she give a crap? Didn’t she think of him? Clearly not.
He’d heard what happened at Lori’s salon—Diego had made one lame attempt to get him out, at least. He and his gang had paid Lori a visit and asked for the alibi that would set Enrique free. Had she given it? Course not. The woman who’d vowed she loved him had turned her back and walked away, without a second thought, leaving him to rot like an animal in a cage. And, more—
worse
, because he’d always suspected it to be the real reason she was holding out—her boyfriend had shown up, some sharp suit with a fist and an attitude.
Prison had been agony for a whole host of reasons, but those first few weeks were easily the lowest. Imagining
Lori—his girl, his
woman
—with another man, one she’d chosen so swiftly over him, was torture. No wonder she had always refused to put out, she’d been getting it elsewhere the whole time. She’d broken his heart, and instead of waiting for it to mend he had done away with it altogether. He didn’t need a heart any more. All it caused was pain.
Reuben van der Meyde was descending the spiral staircase into the atrium. A hush fell over the crowd as he surveyed the assembly with jumpy eyes.
Enrique despised him on sight. Van der Meyde was exactly like the rich bastards he used to work for at the harbour at San Pedro: arrogant, limp-dicked creeps who expected the world to bow and kiss their feet. Van der Meyde was sweating, mopping his brow like a kid who got caught jerking off. Enrique felt no remorse. It would bring him pleasure to witness this man’s demise. Along with all the other Hollywood sons of bitches without a clue how real people lived, suffering, struggling, every day a mountain. No damn clue. Well, they were about to get a lesson in that suffering. A very fucking serious one.
With their money and fame and vanity, those people could never understand what it felt like to be locked up. Enrique’s cold stare was a badge of the horrors he had faced. Incarcerated with monsters, it had slowly turned him into one of them. Days and weeks and months of abuse and pain and loneliness had stripped him of pride and dignity and the faith that, beneath the layers of hurt, the world was fundamentally a good and forgiving place. Like hell it was. The world had showed him nothing but cruelty—and it was about time he paid some of it back.
Lori Garcia
.
He twisted the silver band on his finger.
So much for promises
.
She had forsaken him when he had needed her most.
Tonight, she would pay. They all would.
‘No mistakes, no excuses,’ van der Meyde was saying. For the Very Fucking Powerful Entrepreneur he was meant to be, the guy looked like he was cacking himself. ‘Every drink you serve, every smile you give, will be observed …’
Enrique wanted to laugh. He’d be giving them more than a smile tonight.
Van der Meyde closed the brief. Enrique had scarcely listened to a word of it. He didn’t need to. He had his own brief. And the big man’s rules counted for nothing.
Book Four
2011-12
43
Lori
‘At least meet him, would you?’
Lori came to a halt, bent and put her hands on her knees, catching her breath as Jacqueline Spark slowed up next to her.
‘What’s the point?’ She drank from her bottle of water. ‘I’m not interested.’
A jogger passed, the first they’d met, his dog leaping in the spray. It was early and Venice Beach was deserted, the lilacs of dawn still hazy in the sky.
‘Maximo Diaz is a
nice guy
,’ promised Jacqueline. ‘He’s not like Peter.’
‘I thought Peter
was
a nice guy. Until he stole my panties.’
Jacqueline smiled and tamed a strand of blonde hair that had escaped her ponytail. She was determined to get Lori to say yes to the meet. A bounce back after Peter was exactly what her profile needed, and no one better fitted
the bill than the new kid in town. Maximo Diaz was from royal stock, the cousin of a nephew of a prince or some such, and last year had played the love interest in two acclaimed movies (he was good to look at but he wasn’t exactly versatile). Jacqueline understood they’d been burned by Selznick, but the fact was that if Lori wanted to stay pure as driven snow, someone had to make sure, at least romantically speaking, that other things were getting driven—namely, her PR machine.
‘All I’m asking,’ she said, ‘is that you let me set you up. And I’m doing it as your friend, not your publicist.’
‘Thanks, but no.’ Lori resumed the run. Jacqueline moved to catch her up.
‘Come on, what’s the problem?’ She came level and they slowed the pace. ‘In honesty, it’s a bit of both—the publicist/friend thing, I mean. I really think you’ll like him, I really do. And, yeah, while it wouldn’t exactly be
bad
for you to start dating one of the most handsome men I’ve
ever
laid eyes on—’
‘He’s still an actor, and it’s still in the interests of his career.’
‘You’re right on both counts. But what I’m saying is you might find you want to see him again regardless of anything else.’
‘I doubt it.’
Jacqueline appraised her sideways: the wild black hair pulled back in a ponytail, gaze fixed on the beach with a contained sort of determination. What was going on? If she didn’t know better she’d say Lori had a boyfriend hidden away. She certainly had that glow—the first flush of a new affair?—and kept zoning out while they were talking, her eyes misting over, remembering some past encounter. If
this were true, they were going to have to work harder than ever to protect her virginity—or the illusion of it. Her innocence went hand in hand with her appeal. If the press caught on that she was jumping into bed with an unsuitable man, most likely someone working down the local minimart (for judging by Lori’s distaste for celebrities, it had to be), they’d have a nightmare on their hands. Deceptions like this one were magic tricks. They needed to be practised, managed and delivered with precision timing. They also needed to exist under a controlled environment, meaning her wild-card lover, whoever he was, had to take a step into the wings. And enter Maximo Diaz.