Chapter 15
Introductions were made and Daisy watched Chicago PD Detective Tobias Granger send Jordan a wary look as he held out his hand. She felt strangely protective of the big, tough Hostage Rescue operator, and she wasn’t sure why.
Agent Crabtree watched them avidly. Had the director sent him to spy on them?
“It’s been a long time, Jordan. How’ve you been?” Granger asked.
“You two know each other?” She was surprised, maybe because she knew so little about Jordan that didn’t relate to HRT.
“From all the way back in high school.”
High school? She’d never thought about Jordan being a child.
“Tobias joined the Chicago PD same time I went into the Army.” Jordan shifted his weight as he quickly withdrew his hand from the other man’s grasp.
“And we both somehow ended up in law enforcement.” The detective shot her a strained smile.
“When Tobias heard I’d joined the FBI, he put in a request to the Chicago Field Office that they set me up with a fake background and kick me straight undercover in my hometown.”
She cocked her head. “I thought undercover agents avoided working where they were known?”
“Yeah, to protect their homes and their families.” Jordan’s voice was flat, devoid of emotion.
Foreboding crawled over her skin.
“It was my call. My poor judgment,” Tobias admitted with a tight swallow.
“We’d been chasing Bocharov for years. CPD tapped me when I was a beat cop because people me and Jordan both knew from school were working for the Russian Mafia in West Town.
We needed someone on the inside, but the asshole wouldn’t accept anyone unless they were personally vouched for by one of his contacts. ”
“If they got it wrong, they died.”
Granger’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
“Bocharov?” Daisy hadn’t heard that name before.
A slight sneer twisted Jordan’s lips.
The detective winced.
So Bocharov was the name of the man in the photo. The man Jordan believed killed Francois. The man Jordan thought might want to harm her.
Steve McKenzie—Mac—who was apparently the boss of this group sent the detective a quelling look.
“Ms. Montana, you can temporarily consider yourself a civilian consultant assigned to this task force, but you can’t talk about anything you hear outside of these confines, understood?”
Daisy eyed the tall man. “Understood.” She wasn’t stupid. “But I don’t have much time to spare you. I have work to carry out for my thesis next week, so you’ll have to do without my expertise then. And, no, I can’t put it off.” She gave a humorless smile. “Nuclear reactors wait for no woman.”
She was more interested in why Jordan had gone rigid like a piece of hardwood when Detective Granger had walked in.
There was something going on there. Something important from their shared history, and she wanted to know what it was.
“You persuaded the FBI to allow Jordan to come work undercover in Chicago?”
“Yeah.” The detective was a good-looking guy with thick, black hair and thick brows, but something nameless and heavy rode his features.
“A lot of our friends from school ended up on the wrong side of the law. Dealers. Thieves. Fixers. Enforcers. It was well known I’d joined the force, so I wasn’t a good fit for undercover work, but not many people knew what happened to Jordan after he left, except that he’d enlisted.
I happened by his family’s bakery to buy bread for my wife who was pregnant with our first child at the time. ”
Bakery?
She shot Jordan a look, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“No one baked bread like Jordan’s baba.” He sucked in his upper lip as if suppressing emotion.
“She, er, knew we’d been tight back in school.
We were both on the basketball team and competed in track.
Hung out. Knew I was a cop. Took me aside and told me Jordan was at the academy.
She wouldn’t have told just anyone. The family is told to keep it a secret, and being associated with the FBI wasn’t something she’d have talked about in that neighborhood, no matter how proud she was of him. ”
Jordan flinched.
“FBI agreed with the request as it was believed Bocharov was moving military-grade weapons across state and international borders and had links to major money laundering outfits and probably the Kremlin. They rewrote Jordan’s background from after he left the Army.
Put him in fictional lockup for a while.
Kept it down south where the records can be spotty and depend on the local sheriff as much as anything else.
Spoke to the right people with the right things so the backstory was thoroughly backstopped.
He came back to Chicago and accidentally-on-purpose bumped into a guy we’d both gone to high school with at a local bar.
Asked him if he knew of any jobs going. Micky introduced Jordan to Bocharov. ”
“Apparently, I was a very convincing bad guy and worked for Bocharov for six excruciating months before the DA finally decided we had enough evidence for RICO charges to stick. Plan was to move my family into protective custody”—he shot her a grim smile because he knew how much she hated forced confinement—“and put the bakery under police guard while we served warrants and swept up Bocharov and all of his cronies and put them in prison where they belonged. Other gangs in the city wouldn’t cry any tears.
He supplied them with weapons, so they tolerated him, but there was no love lost.”
Daisy gripped Jordan’s hand like she was hanging off a cliff. She had a terrible feeling she knew where this was going.
Jordan’s expression hardened. “The police department fucked up.”
Tobias hunched his shoulders, shook his head but not with denial. “We don’t know how, but somehow Bocharov discovered that Jordan was undercover FBI.”
“What happened?” Looking around at all the faces, she realized they all knew. Everyone except her. Even Agent Crabtree knew.
Tobias opened his mouth to answer, but Jordan dropped her hand and took a step forward, fists clenched. “Enough. You don’t get to talk about my family. Hell, you don’t even get to utter their names.”
She knew then.
They’d died.
Because of this Bocharov monster.
The ghosts in Jordan’s eyes were his lost family.
She tried to take his hand again, but he pulled away. Then he paced in a tight circle with his hands clasped behind his head, clearly distressed.
“You going to be able to handle this, Operator Krychek?” McKenzie asked quietly. “There’s no shame if the answer is ‘no.’”
Crabtree’s eyes darted, gathering information, presumably to report back to Ursula Rhodes.
Jordan took a moment to compose himself.
“I can handle it. I just don’t think what happened to my family needs to be openly discussed.
It’s in the files. Read it if you need to remind yourself what’s at stake and whom to trust.” He pointed straight at the cop.
“But he doesn’t get to talk about them as if CPD didn’t sign their death warrants. ”
The knife-edge tension in the room made Daisy’s heart squeeze in sympathy.
“Well, if introductions are finished, let’s get started, shall we?
” Mac announced. “I’m going to speak to Ms. Montana about how the type of work Francois Tremblay did could be weaponized.
Regan and Cisco will be setting up equipment to examine all the footage from the hotel and the surrounding area in Mexico in the days prior to Tremblay’s death, while simultaneously running the facial recs on the image we have, plus the sketch from the sketch artist, and then any other images we find.
They’ll be crosschecking with legal points of entry just in case we get lucky.
Alex Parker has kindly offered some of his own time to see if we can track Bocharov’s activity on the Dark Web.
Jordan, you’re with him, giving any breadcrumbs you can think of.
Parker also plans to trace whoever shut down the camera system during that vital time period at the hotel. ”
Daisy intercepted the look Florence Cisco sent Jordan. Jon Regan crossed his arms and stared pointedly at his feet.
Daisy didn’t know what to make of that exchange.
“Detective Granger is going to work with Agent Crabtree and start runs on the conference delegates and anyone else staying at the hotel. Looking for possible connections to Bocharov. I have a couple more agents joining us later this afternoon, and they can help with that. Plus, we’ve recruited a former CIA officer with Russian expertise to come onboard as a consultant. ”
Alex Parker narrowed his gaze.
Daniel Ackers cleared his throat. “HRT would like to be involved as long as we don’t get a call out. We plan to check Operator Krychek’s house for explosives, etc.”
Jordan addressed Regan and Cisco. “Hoping TacOps could reactivate all the bells and whistles you guys set up last month.”
Regan shrugged. “Sure. Cisco can handle that. You aren’t idiot enough to actually plan to stay there, are you?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Daisy asked.
“Well, because if Bocharov knows the location, what’s to stop him hitting it with a drone strike?”
Her eyes popped wide.
Jordan rubbed his brow as he swore. “We need to draw this sonofabitch out, but I won’t place others in danger.” He sent her a look of apology. “If he thinks I’m alone and unprotected, he won’t send a drone. He’ll try for me himself.”
“And, what?” she snapped. “You’ll just fight him?”
Agent Crabtree leaned forward.
Jordan’s mouth tightened. “Arrest him.”
“What’s to stop him sending a mini army?”
“We’ll have HRT positioned nearby.”
Daisy took a step back. “You’d endanger yourself in order to confront him? Endanger your teammates?”
“To put this guy out of commission?” His expression turned mean. “Hell, yes. And my teammates are not civilians, and neither am I. This is what we do. You know that. But don’t worry, we’ll keep you somewhere safe.”
Keep you somewhere safe?