Chapter 24 - Mikhail
There is a room in the secure facility we maintain in Athens that was built for exactly this.
A rectangle of concrete and controlled light that could belong to any number of institutional purposes, except it’s sealed, soundproofed, no windows, or ambient sound from the city. No indication of time passing. A room in which the normal rules of the world beyond its walls do not apply.
Timur has been held inside in it for exactly twenty minutes when I push the door open, locking it behind me.
He is seated unrestrained. I didn’t see the point in restraining him, because Timur Sokolov has fifteen years of experience and muscle memory of men trained in the same school I was trained in. And what does it matter if I restrain him or not?
His eyes were empty, and the gun he had angled inside his mouth had been fully loaded, pressed at the correct angle to blow his brains out once and for all.
He’s a prisoner, sure, but what he’s done is far more personal.
His eyes fall onto me when he hears the creak of the door.
His face has changed since the street in Athens. The composed mask is cracked, like a coat sitting on a person who has been wearing it too long.
I loosely sit across from him.
I do not speak immediately. I have spent years in rooms like this one, on the other side of the table, extracting information from people who had decided not to give it, and the first and most important lesson I learned was that what you do with the silence determines everything about what follows.
I give him thirty seconds of it.
Then I say, “Sokolov. Start speaking.”
He resists for two minutes, deciding whether it’s worth the cost, running the numbers in real time, arriving at the conclusion that I am waiting for.
Then he begins, and it isn’t the defense I expected it would be. He doesn’t justify himself first, nor reframe his actions. He begins flatly, like narrating the ending credits of a movie.
Three years ago is when it started. Not with the Irish syndicate directly like I expected, but with a contact inside a financial network that had overlapping interests with both the Korovin operation and the Irish, a man who came to Timur not with the intention of an offer.
He simply had information about what the Korovin Bratva's trajectory looked like from the outside, from the perspective of people who had been watching its evolution for years and had opinions about the direction it was heading.
“They told you what you wanted to hear,” I state.
“They told me what I had already been thinking for two years,” he corrects me. He hasn’t done that in a long while. Maybe that’s where things went wrong—when he stopped playing the game with the Bratva at all.
The arrangement went like this: the information he began supplying wasn’t particularly threatening to us, but was shit that over time gave the Irish significant positional advantage. Small things like security rotations, route communications.
The structural information that only someone inside the Korovin organization would have access to.
“Like the car ambush in New York,” I mutter.
“Yeah.”
“And Dubai.”
He nods.
“And tonight,” I finish, eyes boring into him.
He only blinks in affirmation.
Fifteen years.
Fifteen years of conducting operations beside this man, years taken to form the trust that only comes when you work at close range through high-stakes situations repeatedly, who you have stood in rooms like this one on the same side of every table.
Timur Sokolov, who was present at the Moretti operation, who has sat in the Bratva’s most sensitive planning sessions, my right hand through which I have extended my authority across this organization for a decade and a half.
I don’t feel any fury. That is the thing about the deepest betrayals—they do not burn. The weight is cold, dead weight, like realizing the ground you have been building on was hollow the entire time.
“The messages sent to Zara. The warnings. You sent those.”
His brows twitch before he smooths his face down.
“Some of them,” he says.
“Which ones?”
“The early ones. The notes telling her to stop looking.” He pauses. “I needed her investigation to slow down. She was getting close to things that would have changed the timeline.”
“What about the package in the warehouse? The photographs in that, and the Ionian lead.”
He shakes his head, and the gesture is small and certain. “That was not me.”
I study his face, looking for his specific tells I have gathered since the betrayal and even before it.
There is nothing. The denial carries the same flat quality as everything else he has said tonight—a man who has decided that there is nothing else left.
“Then who…?”
“Someone wanted her to find them,” Timur offers.
“Someone who has been running a parallel operation to mine, with the opposite objective. They wanted her looking. They wanted her moving. They probably have different reasons than the syndicate does. I don’t know who though.
I have been trying to identify them for six months and I haven’t managed to find shit. ”
A slimy feeling crawls down my spine.
Someone is pushing Zara toward her parents from one direction while Timur and the syndicate are trying to stop her from the other.
She has been bravely running her investigation in between those two opposing forces, and tonight, both organizations probably got what they wanted: the Khans in someone’s hands and a note on the back seat of my destroyed car telling their daughter she is next.
“Where are the Khans?”
Timur blinks.
“I passed the route and the timing only. I don't have the location they were taken to. The syndicate operates on a compartmentalized system—I gave them access points, not destinations. The people who executed tonight's attack are not the people I have been in contact with.”
A ball appears in my throat.
He does not know where they are.
His face tells me that he is not protecting anyone. He genuinely must not have it, because the Irish understood that the most valuable component of his access was his position inside the Korovin organization. They were not going to compromise their security by giving him more than he needed.
“You have given me everything you have,” I announce. “This is all you knew.”
“You know it all now,” he replies, and there is something that might be, in a different life, relief.
I stand.
I have not brought anyone else into this room with me, which was a decision I made when we arrived at the facility. Timur must have understood the meaning behind it when the door closed behind me.
It’s in his eyes, as he looks up at me from the chair, a man who has made his peace with his choices.
“Mikhail,” he blurts out.
When I look at him with a brow raised, he only stares at me impassively.
Whatever he was going to say, he doesn't say it. He closes his mouth and he nods once, as if it’s an appropriate goodbye to everything we had and built together.
I give him the same nod back, because fifteen years does not become nothing in the face of betrayal, even a betrayal of this scale, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
If it was anyone else, any other traitor, they would have been made an example of. The Korovin Bratva is not to be played with, and everyone knows it like they know the sky is blue and the sun is hot.
But in the face of this man, with my pistol raised between the both of us, I can’t see the reason for making an example out of him. The weight of his betrayal has robbed my insides of a flame that fury feeds on.
When his skull rebounds, the chair toppling with the impact of the bullet, I stand there, all alone. His body lies there, a pool of blood appearing beneath him.
Then I do what needs to be done.
Nikolai is already waiting when I walk through the other secure room.
He looks at my face when I enter and asks nothing about the room I have just come from, because he knows by now.
“What do we have?” I say.
He opens the tablet on the table between us and turns it toward me.
“The syndicate's active safe houses in the greater Athens region. We have identified four, two are compromised by prior Korovin intelligence and would not be used for a high-value extraction. The remaining two are viable.” The tablet shows the first location.
“Warehouse facility, eastern port district, active utility connection registered to a shell entity we have traced through three layers to an Irish-linked holding company, and the second is a residential compound in the northern suburbs, purchased through a similar shell structure fourteen months ago.”
“The compound,” I propose.
“My assessment also,” he says.
The satellite image on the tablet shows the compound's footprint, the perimeter, the access routes. I run the approach options quickly.
“How long till the team assembles?”
“They're already assembled,” Nikolai says. “I began the process when you went into the room with Timur.”
I nod once.
“Good,” I say.
Studying the compound's layout for four more minutes, I glare at the screen intensely because I cannot get this wrong.
Zara's parents are inside that perimeter, or somewhere connected to it, and Zara herself is in the room at the end of this facility's corridor, ridden with grief that has been building for fifteen years.
I think of her face on the street, her voice echoing in my head: the exact night I finally had them.
I set the tablet down.
“We move in two hours,” I instruct Nikolai. “I want darkness and the eastern approach. The perimeter has a structural gap in the northeast corner. Whoever planned the compound's security did not notice the sight line difference at night.”
“Understood,” Nikolai says.
I move toward the door.
The facility corridor is clean and fluorescent, and at the end of it is a woman who is going to ask me when I come through the door whether I know where her parents are, and I am going to tell her the truth.
I am going to find them.
Two hours.