22. Clara
Chapter 22
Clara
I ’m too fucking tired for this.
I feel like I haven’t slept in days, my frayed nerves making me twitchy and unstable. This is no state for me to be operating in, especially when I need to work with Bea and comb through all the potential informants on her mother’s team.
She landed in Tokyo a few hours before Deniz and I made it back to LA, and in that short time she’s sent more information than I thought possible about the women on her mother’s team. The vast majority of it consists of hand-written notes and dictated voice memos, Bea’s quick, organized thoughts on specific strike teams, operations, and more. I’ve forwarded that information to Deniz, who is now holed up in his lair, pairing her insights with his data.
Deniz and I haven’t had time to discuss everything that happened this weekend. We were absorbed with work on the twelve hour flight back, and right now, I think that’s for the best. Bea’s strange interactions with him in that kitchen still stick in my mind, and I’m unable to shake the uneasy feeling they’ve left in my stomach.
I’ve chosen to trust them both. There are few certain things in this world, and even fewer in the shadowy version of it we operate in. We rely on confirmed information as much as possible, but a significant portion of our work relies on gut instinct. So even though unanswered questions still linger, strings of this web I can’t quite connect, I have to trust that I’m making the right decision.
The exhaustion isn’t making things any easier. Paranoia slips in like a poison, making me look over my shoulder at every turn. I’m behind on checking in with local informants, so I left Deniz to his sleuthing and had Lee drop me off in the Flower District. I stop by stalls and shops, chatting with owners and their families, both those who we’ve helped and who are on our payroll.
The canvas bag over my shoulder is filled to the brim with flowers, the leaves of a few reaching up to tickle my jaw, further overstimulating me. The Friday shopping crowd is loud and boisterous, the sounds ringing through my ears, making it impossible to sort through my thoughts. Too many smells, too many people bumping my shoulder. And all the while, the feeling of eyes on my back.
It has to be Deniz. He probably pulled up the feeds from the hundreds of cameras in this area and is following me through the crowd as he works. But like at the conference, the sensation is off. It itches at my skin like it never has before, even when I didn’t crave Deniz’s eyes on me. Despite the crowd, I feel isolated and alone, ill-prepared for whatever stalks me.
I need to sleep. I’m useless like this. It’s nearly two in the afternoon anyway, which means the market will be closing soon. I drop by one last spot, checking in on a young woman we resettled here after her family forced her into sweatshop labor when she was a teenager. Her daughter runs around the store, picking petals off the floor as we chat. She doesn’t know who I am—I wasn’t directly involved in the operation that closed that factory—but it’s good to see her happy.
It’s not even three o’clock by the time Lee drops me off, but the apartment is dark. All the shades are pulled closed, the dim shine from the kitchen skylight barely casting enough of a glow to make it through the apartment. I think about going to my room and sleeping for days, but that doesn’t seem fair to Deniz if he’s still working.
But when I enter his room, he’s crashed out on his bed, still fully clothed in what he was wearing on the plane. One arm dangles off the edge of the mattress, his face pressed fully into the pillow. The delirium makes me want to laugh aloud, but I head back to the living room to collect a throw blanket and toss it over him.
The door to his surveillance room is cracked open, the screens still active and his phone turned over on the desk, so he must have just fallen asleep. I slip inside, wondering if the feeds from the flower market are still up.
But everything I see is related to Gia’s team, each display dedicated to a member. It’s too much for my scattered mind to process right now, all the maps and notes and documents.
I sit down at the desk and stretch my arms over my head, my joints popping and muscles protesting. There must be a way to see which feeds he was watching as he followed me through downtown Los Angeles. Despite my exhaustion, I know I won’t be able to sleep until I confirm that it was Deniz’s gaze I felt this afternoon.
I click around lazily through folders and files, trying to find the most recently opened or modified ones. But there are too many to count, and as far as I can tell, all of them relate to the items already open on the screen. I recognize a program Deniz used in Bari to look up Bea’s movements on surveillance cameras, and open that up.
A huge world map pops up, little green and red dots flashing across the screen. I zoom in on a random city in Australia and realize they’re traffic cameras. Usually clustered in sets of four. Four-way stops.
I click on one, and a live feed pops up of cars driving through the intersection. The image isn’t particularly clear, especially in comparison to the cameras Deniz accessed in the Japanese bullet train stations, but it’s better than I thought it would be. There’s a bar at the bottom that lets me drag the feed backward in time. The cars reverse, and people walk backward on the sidewalk, as I scroll back in time twenty-four hours.
That must be how long the video is saved before it’s overwritten. I know Deniz has recorded feeds stored somewhere, but they’re mostly of his work, his parents’ house, and our residences.
I navigate out of this particular feed and find my way back to the big map, zooming out until I see Los Angeles. There are so many dots clustered so close together, I have to scroll incredibly far in to see them separately. I find the corner where Lee dropped me off late this morning and open the camera, dragging the feed backward. This one has more time available—maybe forty-eight hours. This program must be accessing all of the individual organizations that are responsible for these feeds and pulling them together into one dashboard.
This is impressive. If I wasn’t about to fall asleep sitting up, I’d be turned on by the fact that Deniz was able to create this.
I watch myself get out of the car and say something to Lee before heading down the street. It takes me a few tries to figure out how to navigate from camera to camera, but soon I can easily follow myself up and down the blocks of the bright Flower District.
I fast forward through an hour of walking until I see past-me standing in front of a coffee cart. My head lifts up, and I turn over my shoulder twice before paying for my cup. This is when I first felt the eyes on me.
There must be a recording somewhere in Deniz’s files. Or maybe he didn’t save it, only watched it in real time. I told him where I was going when I left, so it’s strange that he waited so long to pull up the feed, but he must have been distracted by his work.
Still, something feels off. I keep watching, speeding up the video and following myself until Lee picks me up.
It’s on my third review that I realize the problem. I’m not looking up . Each time I glanced over my shoulder, I didn’t look at the traffic cameras, but across the street. I felt the stare coming from the other side of the road.
My fatigue has evaporated, adrenaline pumping through my veins as I find the map again. I need the cameras facing the other way. My thoughts are unorganized and disconnected as I pull up the moment I first felt that discomfort.
Dozens of people are walking up and down the sidewalk, holding flowers, rolls of fabric from the Fashion District down the road, and food from street carts. But one person stands out in the crowd.
I know him. White-blonde hair shaved close to his head. Tall, thin, lanky to the point of malnourishment. Alabaster skin. Despite the video being in black and white, I know he has pale green eyes, the color of an angry sea.
Lev Andreeva. Close to the top of Konstantin’s chain of command, the Andreeva family and their influence in the world of drug running have been one of the main catalysts for Konstantin’s expansion of his own enterprise. Rumor has it that Lev’s brother, Ilya, was slated to marry Konstantin’s only daughter, making the Andreeva family next in line to take over his empire. But that was years ago, and while the Andreeva boys are still an integral part of Konstantin’s operations, I haven’t heard about the daughter for quite some time. It wouldn’t surprise me if she were dead.
An Andreeva brother being in Los Angeles does not bode well. They’re high on my list of suspects for people who actually started the fire in Istanbul, though I don’t see any burns on Lev. I follow his oversized fucking head through Los Angeles, cursing that I didn’t recognize him on the street. I need sleep , but now that I know he’s here, I can’t stop following him.
He gets into a car as soon as I leave, and I start to track it through the streets of Los Angeles, but it’s difficult. I don’t know how Deniz does this so quickly. I keep having to pause the feed, open it in a new window, and use the map to find the next camera. I should wake him up and ask for help, but logical brain function has ceased, a casualty of three days without proper rest.
It takes a long time, but eventually I watch the small white sedan merge onto the 110. There are a few cameras along the interstate, especially in the express lanes. It takes hours, my eyes painfully dry as I stare unblinkingly at the screens, tracking the license plate as far as I can.
To the Port of Long Beach.
Of fucking course. Konstantin has made a habit of setting up operations in ports. There’s so much space, so many staff, plenty of opportunities to smuggle in what you need and smuggle out what you want hidden. The Syndicate isn’t a stranger to using ports as sources of information and resources either, but it’s become Konstantin’s signature.
There are no traffic cameras inside the port gates, so as soon as the sedan pulls through, I lose Lev. Deniz might have access to private cameras, or know how to get it, but I don’t have time.
Lev went through Gate J. He could have gone anywhere after that, but it’s a good enough place to start. I leave Deniz’s surveillance room, hesitating as I pass his sleeping body. Maybe I should tell him where I’m going. We’ve built this fragile trust, and it might do more harm than good to take off without telling him now.
But he’d want to do more research, or talk it through, or come with me. But the urge to act quickly overrides logic. This is by far my best opportunity to figure out how to access the man who tried to kill my mother. To find him and kill him so slowly, it will take weeks for him to die. To make him spend as much time dying as it took my mother to heal.
A quiet voice at the back of my mind also reminds me that my trust in Deniz is blind and foolish. That I don’t know enough about him to bring him as my only backup. That he could still kill me.
I’m barely coherent as I change into more appropriate clothes, strapping a SIG to my ankle under my pant leg and a Ruger to my side. Smaller guns, but without backup and a planned cleanup crew, I need to make as little noise as possible.
I take Deniz’s keys out of the dish by the elevator and make my way down, focusing on the task at hand. I can’t kill Lev—he’s too valuable. I need to subdue him and capture him, and then call Charlie away from his honeymoon and have him extract the information we need. Maybe bring all the Costa cousins out to deal with this threat, to ensure we’re getting everything we need out of him. He won’t be an easy asset to break, but between the lot of us, I’m sure we can come up with some creative ideas.
I peel out of the garage, surprised to see the sun has already set. I make my way to the 405 and head toward Long Beach, ready to pull information about Konstantin from Lev by whatever means necessary.