Read Into the Crossfire for Free Online

records. But what the facts on file didn't say was
    how mind-blowingly beautiful she was. She was the kind of woman who should
    probably come with a warning sign--danger ahead.
    The Googleable facts didn't hint at just how fucking classy she was, either.
    The lady packed a double whammy Sam had never seen before. Throw-on-the-bed
    sexy and ice princess classy. Elegant, graceful, poised. He'd had to make a cage of
    his neck muscles not to swivel his head every time she walked by and had had to
    stop himself, through sheer will power, from sniffing after her like a dog, she
    smelled that good.
    And shit, did she have the princess-to-peon thing down pat. One
    fulminating look out of those large, uptilted cobalt eyes with the ridiculously long
    dark lashes, and she could reduce any male to a whimpering mass of protoplasm.
    On days when he'd looked particularly reprehensible, he got looks that would have
    killed a lesser man.
    But Sam was a tough guy. He liked challenges.
    A corner of his mouth tilted upward.
    Mostly because he always won.
    Grand Port Maritime
    Marseilles, France
    June 28
    24
    Jean-Paul Simonet, an aging, lowly clerk in the back office of the Port of
    Marseilles, knew the shipping company Vega Maritime Transport well. It was a
    small one, running only three ships, if that's what you could call the rust buckets
    flying Liberian flags that plied the seas in its name. The company's ships were
    known among the port staff for cutting safety corners, sailing understaffed, even
    smuggling in crates of contraband goods. Cigarettes. Twice, arms shipments.
    Once, packets of white powder.
    Which meant there was always money to get port authorities to look the
    other way.
    The shipping company was owned by a consortium of shady dealers who
    would close the company down and disappear in a heartbeat if one of their rust
    buckets ever caused an accident.
    Today, the Marie Claire was in port. The Marie Claire's crew had changed
    numerous times over the years. It currently had a Turkish captain and crew from
    twenty different countries, and it was on its last legs. Somewhere, in some office
    in some third-world country, a group of men around a table had decided that they
    could wring some more profit out of these rickety single-hulled ships, reckoning
    that if they stopped paying for maintenance, they could run the ship until every
    last penny could be squeezed out of it, and when it was no longer seaworthy, it
    could be scuttled at night in the middle of the ocean, out of sight of surveillance
    satellites, and they could collect the insurance money.
    Profit all around.
    Simonet's boss, that merde Boisier, always looked the other way when
    Vega Maritime's ships came into port.
    Simonet had no loyalty to the Port Authority. He was underpaid, was a year
    from retirement, and was heart-broken over the loss of his family. He didn't give a
    shit one way or the other.
    He got the trickle-down effect from Boisier--ten cartons of Marlboros, a
    box of men's sweaters made in China, once a dozen bottles of Glenfiddich. He
    knew it was nothing compared to what Boisier pulled in to look the other way, to
    not raise a fuss over any safety inadequacies and to expedite the shipping
    company's passage through Marseilles. That con Boisier drove a brand-new
    Mercedes S class on a civil servant's salary. Simonet drove a fifteen-year-old
    Citroen.
    The way of the world was right there.
    Taking care of the Vega Maritime shipments was Boisier's concern, but he
    wasn't here today. A violent case of the grippe, Simonet had heard. Served le con
    right.
    The only thing was, expediting the company's ship's transit through the port
    was now his concern. The captain of the Marie Claire had failed to file an F-45
    and Simonet had to go out to collect it because the captain wasn't responding to his
    cell phone. Without the form, the next port of call wouldn't accept the ship.
    It was the hottest day of the year so far, with 100 percent humidity. It