One Man's War by Steven Savile

Author:Steven Savile [Savile, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Tempted Fate

I’d known Fate for most of my adult life. At times I joked that I knew him better than I knew myself. I was wrong, obviously. He still had the capacity to surprise me, but did I have what it took to surprise him?

A confidence trick exploits basic characteristics of the human psyche: dishonesty, honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, naïveté, or greed. One of them, all of them, or some of them together. It depended on the mark. There were two ways it could work, but both came down to the same thing, getting the mark to trust us. Not necessarily the easiest, but the best way, was to get Fate to trust us by giving him our confidence. Exposing ourselves to him. Or at least making him think we were doing that. That meant he needed to believe we were trustworthy.

What did I know about Randall Fate?

I knew what he liked, and what he didn’t.

But more importantly, I knew what he couldn’t resist.

For one thing, he had a predilection for unconventional beauty.

That was the kind of detail you needed to know if you were going to bait a honey trap.

I wasn’t sure Tenebrae’s Nubian physique and hard polished ebony lines would do it for him, but he was a man, and she was what I had to work with. Plus, I’ll be absolutely dead straight, I couldn’t imagine anyone saying no to her—and not because of her exotic looks, but purely because of the force of her personality. The woman oozed power and confidence, two huge aphrodisiacs in my line of work, but it was the grace with which she moved that was absolutely contagious. So I had faith. But we had to do this without Fate working out I was the one pulling the strings in the background. That meant being clever. And given the fact that he’d had me chipped, one of us was decidedly more savvy than the other. I was banking on him not knowing that Tenebrae’s broker had paid a street urchin good cash to have the chip implanted subcutaneously, and then told to keep moving about the city to spread a false trail for me. The watcher becomes the watched and all that.

The best way to lure Fate out was a double whammy, hit him with the full package, the sex and the money. Present an opportunity that promised lots of both, and hope the fish took the hook. That would mean Mel needed to make our assassin credible, sorting out credentials that couldn’t be easily broken, and setting up Gant as her muscle. Given the color of her skin, Akachi was the obvious corporation, but we couldn’t go with the obvious because we couldn’t be sure Fate didn’t have a man inside there. There were too many suppositions for my liking, but I wasn’t a conman by nature. I’d heard the catchphrases, of course: ABC, Always Be Conning, and my favorite, win at all costs, lose if it helps you win, and always, always, cheat.

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