Chapter 11 #2
Barys began yelling, and I grimaced. “Is that Russian or Belarusian?”
“Russian,” Storm said. She wasn’t fluent like Spider, but she spoke enough to get by.
I knew a few sentences, but I mostly used translation apps when I needed them.
Why would I want to learn Russian? Apart from pelmeni and caviar, the food there was shit.
I spoke French, Italian, and Spanish fluently because those were my favourite cuisines, and I was learning Japanese. But none of that helped me tonight.
Spider kicked Barys in the shin and snapped back at him in her first language.
“Govori po-angliyski! Ya znayu, ty mozhesh’.”
“I think she just told him to speak English,” Storm murmured.
Whether the instruction was for my benefit or to keep him off balance, I wasn’t sure, but I was pleased when he began dropping F-bombs like a teenage rapper. This time, it was Jez’s turn with the stun gun.
“Anyone else want to try me?” she asked.
Raban shook his head, and Kazik glowered as I switched view to Spider’s bodycam.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
My phone buzzed.
Nolan
If you hiked regularly, you’d stop aching.
Me
If I don’t hike at all, I also don’t ache, plus I don’t get bitten or risk falling off a mountain.
Love the sportswear, hate the sports; that was me.
Although it wasn’t as if I did no exercise whatsoever.
Several years ago, I’d taken a yoga class at Chase’s insistence and surprised myself by not hating it.
Group exercise wasn’t my thing, but I did fifteen minutes of sun salutations with an app most mornings, enough to keep myself flexible and stop my neck and back from aching.
“I think the more important question is ‘why are you here?’” Dusk said on-screen, her tone almost playful.
That was a bad sign, by the way. Of all the Choirgirls, Dusk pulled off the “girl next door” vibe the best, acting super cute and wholesome until she stabbed you in the eye with a chopstick.
No, really. I’d watched her do it. The chopstick lodged in the asshole’s brain, and he made this weird gurgling sound as the light in his remaining eye slowly dimmed. So gross.
“We did nothing,” Barys tried.
“Define ‘nothing.’”
“We just three nobody guys from Minsk. We never hurt people.”
“Are you sure? The brunette who ran out of here last night looked kinda bruised.”
Barys glanced sideways at Kazik. “She didn’t mind.”
“Did you ask her?”
“We pay her,” Kazik snapped. “What is this shit?”
Inwardly, I cringed. Kazik wasn’t coming out of this with all his body parts intact, no way.
Sin must have had the same thought because she raised her gaze to the ceiling and blew out a long breath.
Funny how Sin was cool with participating in an impromptu interrogation that may or may not involve blood, but if you ate chicken or beef or pork, she’d bitch about it for a week straight.
“Are you the Bible guy?” Dusk asked. “You’re the Bible guy, right?”
“You’re crazy. You’re all crazy.”
“We’re talking about you right now.”
“You like to include a little piety with your ransom demands,” Jez prompted. “Sound familiar?”
Ah, now he paled a shade, but he still tried to bluster. “I don’t know anything about that. You are typical woman—always wrong.”
“Bullshit.”
“Now, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Dusk told him. “We’re gonna bring you a laptop, and you can unencrypt everything you’ve ever encrypted and shut down your entire operation.”
Kazik was back to sneering. Barys looked nervous, and Raban was wisely keeping quiet. See no evil, speak no evil.
“And what if we don’t want to do that?” Kazik asked.
“Well, I took the liberty of learning a couple of Bible verses myself, just in case you took this attitude. Leviticus verses nineteen and twenty—sound familiar? ‘If anyone injures his neighbour, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.’ But I’m not so good at cybercrime myself, so I’ll have to substitute. ”
Storm leaned back in her seat and groaned. “Oh, hell. We’re back to the eyes again.”
“At least she doesn’t have a chopstick this time.”
“Fuck you, woman.” Poor, dumb Kazik had no idea what was about to hit him. “Get out of my house.”
Dusk didn’t have a chopstick, but she did have pliers, and to mix things up a bit, she started with the teeth this time. Sin kept Barys and Raban in line while Jez and Spider held Kazik down, and Dusk yanked out an incisor with practised efficiency. Storm winced when he shrieked.
“Should’ve lowered the volume,” I told her. “You knew what would happen.”
“Yes, Mom.”
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for Kazik to change his mind—just three more teeth and a threat to gouge out an eyeball.
Although it was actually Raban who did the work and decrypted everything because Kazik was crying too hard by that point.
Dusk and the girls hung around until I verified that Nolan’s data was fully accessible again, and then she patted Kazik on the shoulder.
“You should find a new career. Maybe something with orthodontics?”
“Th-th-thcrew you, bitch.”
She laughed and snapped her teeth at him. He jumped.
While the team extracted, I turned to Nolan’s laptop. It was an old model, a piece of shit, objectively speaking, so I’d be better off transferring the data onto the device I’d left with him in California. An easy task to carry out from Vegas, but…
“It’ll almost be a shame to miss Nolan’s nightly porn show,” Storm said, powering down her drone system. “That man is fine. Tell me you kept a copy of his home movie?”
My cheeks heated. “That’s none of your business.”
“Oh, you totally did.”
I had to; no matter how many teeth Kazik might have lost, I didn’t entirely trust the now-defunct Dark Descent. I’d have to keep monitoring the web for Nolan’s dick, and for that, I needed the video to compare against. Plus it was as fascinating as it was icky.
“Shut up. Go launch missiles at a foreign country or something.”
“You realise I hardly ever do that, right?”
“Whatever.”
“So, when do you go back to California?”
“You realise remote access is a thing, yes?”
“So you’re not going?”
I scoffed. “Of course not. I’m going to Italy.”
“I thought you were going to Oregon with Janus next week?”
“Right, I am.”
We were constantly looking at potential locations for additional data centres, and he thought he’d found a good one.
“So you’re going to Italy, and then you’re flying back to Oregon? You don’t even like flying. Weirdo,” she added under her breath.
“I don’t like flying in case the airplane falls out of the sky, okay? And what I meant was that I’m going to Italy with Chase after the Oregon trip.”
“Sure, whatever you say.”
“Shut your mouth.” I shoved my chair back and stalked out of the room. “Just shut it.”
I fired off a message to Nolan.
Me
Good news—I have access to your laptop. I can transfer the data whenever you want.
Although he hadn’t said as much, I could tell he’d lost faith in my abilities. And it had taken longer than I hoped to find the decryption key. But now the issue was resolved, and he’d know I was just as capable as I always had been.
I settled in at my laptop with the briefing pack from Jay and waited…