Page 46 of The Battle of Maddox
We were doing this.
Aaron
The whole band was nervous as hell. I could feel the nerves on top of the performance excitement. The plan was insanely elaborate, and involved using fake passports.
Now, I not only had a new, nearly unused one, I had a fake one.Johan Petr Wolinski,resident of Poland.
In the same envelope as my fake passport, and the one Maddox was going to use, were two more fake US passports. One for Hazel and one for Ginni, but they had our names on them. Ginni was Maddox and Hazel was Aaron, and holy crap, they weregoodfakes.
This was terrifying.
Josef had a lot of interesting contacts. He’d found out the group that had been arrested wasn’t yet being processed. They were trying to starve them out, and get them to admit to wrongdoing, so there were close to a hundred forty people just milling in these cells.
While we were on stage, Hailey and Dietrich were going to head down to the local jail and bribe the officers on duty. Through contacts, they had set it up so these two men at the jail were the most willing to take money and look the other way.
Ginni and Hazel were going to take our place on the commercial flight out of Moscow one hour after the show. We were due in Italy in four days. The road crew would break down the sets and get to Milan for our show.
Maddox and I would have four days to get there as well.
He grabbed the back of my neck in a careful grip. “You good, kid?”
“As I’m ever going to be,” I answered. “I mean…I didn’t expect to play James Bond on the way out.”
“Me either.” He glanced at his watch, we had about two minutes until we took the stage. “I claim Timothy Dalton.”
“You have his looks. I’m going with Daniel Craig.”
“Ah, the new look. I like it.” He took a deep breath. “We’ll go over everything after the concert.”
“We’ll be gone after the concert.”
He nodded. “Right.”
“You are nervous about this.”
“I have a face, man. People know it.”
I grinned. “I can fix that.”
He turned slowly and looked very, very nervous.
“Thirty seconds! Lights down. Get up there.” Hailey grabbed each of us and planted a kiss on our cheeks. “See you in Milan.”
She shoved us to the stage and I ran to the drum set.
Showtime. In more than one arena.
Thankfully, my brain was used to music enough that once I tapped the sticks together to get everything going, it shut out all the other thoughts and distractions. It was me, and percussion. That was it. I took cues from the guys, from the vocals, and drummed my way through two hours of songs for the audience in the arena with us.
It was only as the last song, the last few notes echoed out into the space the full force of the butterflies came screaming back into my stomach.
I didn’t know butterflies could be so violent.
Maddox bowed off Rand, then Ora, then Holland, and finally called me to the front.
He pulled me in for a bro-hug and whispered in my ear, “Get ready, show starts in two minutes.”
The smirk slipped onto my face—I couldn’t help it. He turned back to the audience with his signature grin and waved with his arm around me. “Thank you, Moscow!”
