Chapter 1 #3
To my horror, I realized I could answer it, but wouldn’t.
When I had been twenty, I had wanted love.
We reached Foundry Street at twelve-seventeen on Thursday morning.
The industrial corridor south of Newark’s freight yards was dead at that hour.
Streetlights spaced too far apart. Chain-link fencing topped with razor wire running along both sides of the road.
The buildings on either side were low, flat-roofed, marked with faded signage for businesses that had closed or operated only in daylight.
The air tasted of diesel, standing water, and something chemical I could not identify.
Karpov Auto Export sat at the end of the block. A single-story cinderblock building with a corrugated steel roof, a paved yard enclosed by eight-foot fencing, and four vehicle bays facing the street. The sign above the entrance was unlit. The fence gate stood open.
Karpov had taken the lease before he went to work for the Voronins. A Sokolov company still owned the building. The sign was his; the deed was ours.
I told the driver to kill the headlights. The first vehicle stopped fifty meters short. The second pulled in behind us.
Through the windshield, I studied the yard.
Dark. No floodlights. No work lamps. The four bay doors were open — all of them, rolled up to the ceiling, exposing the interior to the street.
At midnight, a functioning chop shop should have been lit and busy.
Engines running. Music. Men working. The whole point of running an illegal operation at night was that you worked through the hours when legitimate businesses slept.
Open bays meant the work was done. Or it meant no one had come to work.
Or it meant someone wanted us to see inside.
“Half the team stays outside,” I said into the earpiece. “Perimeter. Nobody approaches the building until I call. Arkady, you’re with me. First group, on me. Second group, hold the gate.”
Arkady was already out of the vehicle. He had his jacket off, his weapon drawn, moving with the low, efficient gait that made him most dangerous — controlled, not reckless. Six men fell in behind us. The remaining six fanned out along the fence line.
We crossed the yard on foot. Gravel and oil stains. No vehicles in the lot. The bays gaped open, showing concrete floors, lift equipment, tool chests against the walls. Empty.
I entered through the second bay. Fluorescent tubes hung dead from the ceiling. The floor was clean — swept recently, too recently for a working garage. The tool chests were closed. No parts. No tires. No evidence that anyone had worked here in days.
“Building is empty,” Arkady said from the first bay. “Cleared.”
“It’s not empty,” I said. “It’s staged.”
The gunshot came from above.
A single round from the metal mezzanine at the back of the building.
The round hit the concrete floor three meters to my left and ricocheted with a sound like a cracked bell.
I dropped behind a tool chest. Arkady was already moving — not toward cover but toward the mezzanine stairs, taking them two at a time, his weapon up.
Two more shots from the gunman. Both wide. The shooter was firing fast, undisciplined, scared. He reached the top of the stairs as Arkady came through the railing, and Arkady put him down with two rounds to the chest.
The man fell backward onto the mezzanine grating. The metal rang.
I was up and moving toward the stairs. “Arkady, I wanted him alive.”
“He was shooting at you.”
“I wanted to question him.”
“He was shooting at you.” Everything was so simple to Arkady. Black and white. Alive or dead. No nuance, no subtlety.
Nikita’s voice came through the earpiece, steady and precise. “Daniil. The building’s internal camera feeds were looped twenty minutes ago. I’m watching playback, not live. Whoever set this up had access to their security system.”
Twenty minutes. The loop had been activated before we arrived. Someone had known we were coming.
I stopped on the mezzanine stairs.
The gunman lay on the grating. Young. Early twenties. Voronin soldier — the tattoo on his forearm was visible where his sleeve had ridden up. He carried a pistol and nothing else. No phone. No identification. A man left behind to fire a few rounds and die.
He was not the trap. He was the distraction.
I came back down the stairs. Arkady followed.
“Outside,” I said. “Everyone outside. Now.”
“Daniil — “
“Move.”
I crossed the main floor toward the office at the back of the building. The door was metal, dented at the handle. I pulled it open. A small room — desk, filing cabinet, a calendar on the wall two months behind.
And behind the office, a second door. Unmarked. The smell hit me before I opened it.
Gasoline.
The storage room was six meters by four. Shelves on the left wall. A water heater in the corner. On the floor, between two red fuel cans with their caps off, sat a device. Wires connected to a phone. A timer on the phone’s screen, counting down.
Fourteen minutes.
Beside the device, a man lay on the concrete floor.
His hands were bound behind his back with zip ties.
His ankles too. A rag had been stuffed in his mouth and secured with duct tape.
His face was swollen — both eyes, the bridge of his nose, his jaw.
His shirt was torn and dark with blood that had dried in streaks across his chest.
He was alive. His eyes were open, rolling, white showing at the edges. He was making sounds against the gag — muffled, desperate, rhythmic.
I crossed the room in three steps. I pulled the rag from his mouth. He gasped and coughed and tried to speak.
“What’s your name?”
“Sergei.” The word came out broken. “Sergei Petrov. Please. Please, I can’t — there’s a — “
“I see it. How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. Hours. They brought me — they said — “ He coughed again. Blood came up. “They said Lev Sokolov authorized it. They said — they had a card, a union card, they put it in my jacket — “
I looked at the jacket. Sokolov Freight union card, tucked into the breast pocket. Planted.
“Can you stand?”
“I don’t think — my legs — “
I cut the zip ties on his wrists with my knife. Then his ankles. I pulled him upright. He was heavier than he looked — dense, muscular, a man who worked on docks for a living. His legs buckled. I caught him under the arm and took his weight across my shoulders.
“Nikita,” I said into the earpiece. “Incendiary device in the rear storage room. Fuel cans. Phone-based timer. We have fourteen minutes. Less now.”
“Get out.”
“Already moving.”
I carried Sergei toward the office door. His feet dragged. His weight pressed down on my shoulders and his blood soaked through my jacket. He was conscious but fading, his head lolling, his breath coming in shallow pulls.
Arkady appeared at the bay door. He looked at Sergei, at me, at the blood.
“The building is going to burn,” I said. “Get everyone back. Now.”
“How long?”
“Less than twelve minutes. Move.”
Arkady turned and shouted into the yard. His voice carried — raw, commanding, the voice he used when the situation had passed beyond discussion. I heard boots on concrete, men pulling back from the building, engines starting.
I carried Sergei through the bay and into the yard. The night air hit his skin and he groaned. I adjusted my grip and kept moving. Twenty meters. Thirty. Forty. The second vehicle was waiting at the gate with the rear door open.
I was already at the vehicle. I loaded Sergei across the rear seat. His head fell against the window. His breathing was ragged but present.
“Drive him to the clinic on Coney Island Avenue,” I told the man behind the wheel. “Tell them he fell. Don’t leave him alone.”
The vehicle pulled away. I turned back toward the building.
Arkady stood thirty meters from the bay doors, silhouetted against the dark interior. He had not moved farther. He was watching me.
I reached him. We stood together. The building gaped open, dark, quiet except for the faint hiss of something I could not identify — fuel vapor, or a fuse, or the sound of a structure waiting to stop being a structure.
The timer had still been running when I left it. I was not waiting to find out whether it could be trusted.
“Get in the vehicle,” I said.
“You get in the vehicle.”
“I’m getting in the vehicle. So are you. Now.”
We moved.
The vehicle had moved fifteen meters when the world turned white.
The blast came from behind — a deep, concussive thud that I felt in my teeth before I heard it with my ears. The rear window of our vehicle blew inward. Safety glass scattered across my neck and shoulders like coarse sand. The driver swerved, braked, and we stopped sideways in the yard.
The countdown had been a lie. I turned.
Flames poured from the roof of the building.
The corrugated steel had buckled upward, peeled back in two places, and through the gaps I could see fire climbing the interior walls.
The bay doors acted as flues, drawing air in and pushing heat and smoke upward in a column that turned the night sky orange.
Windows along the side of the building — the ones I had not noticed, small and grimy and set high — blew out in a sequence, each one a small pop followed by a spray of glass that caught the firelight and fell like sparks.
The heat reached us thirty meters out. A wall of it, dry and acrid, carrying the smell of burning fuel and melting plastic and something else underneath — rubber, maybe, or insulation. My eyes watered. I blinked it away.
“Everyone sound off,” I said into the earpiece.
Responses came in order. Twelve men accounted for. No injuries from the blast. The second vehicle — the one carrying Sergei — had stopped at the gate.
I was already walking toward it.
Arkady fell in beside me. His face was lit orange from one side. He had a cut along his forearm where the window glass had caught him. He had not noticed it yet.