28. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
Rico’s first call comes in at eleven forty-seven.
I’m at my desk when the phone goes, and I know from the way he starts talking before I finish saying his name that something has gone wrong.
The east side fund. Hit within the last hour, financials frozen, two of my men on the ground intercepted before they could move.
He’s still talking when the second call comes in on the other line.
I put Rico on hold.
It’s Vlad. The port warehouse, the one I walked through two weeks ago, the one I checked myself. Compromised. The Tuesday rotation intercepted. One man down.
I put Vlad on hold and pick Rico back up. “The third front,” I say.
A pause. “How did you?—”
“Is it the northern route or the Brussels account?”
Another pause. Longer. “Northern route. We just got word. They moved on the distribution corridor an hour ago. Took the whole Tuesday shipment.”
I set the phone down on the desk without hanging up, and I sit very still for a moment.
Three fronts. One hour. The east side, the port, the northern route: three operations that share no physical location, no staff overlap, no common external-facing structure.
The only thing connecting them is the information required to hit all three simultaneously, information that exists in exactly one place.
My world.
My house.
I pick the phone back up. “How many men?”
“Two confirmed.” Rico’s voice is flat. “Fyodor Larin and Pavel Sorokov.”
Fyodor Larin has been with the port operation for six years. He has a nine-year-old daughter in Queens who sends him drawings on his birthday. Pavel Sorokov is twenty-eight, the youngest man on the northern route, the one who asked me three months ago if there was room to move up. I told him yes.
I look at the wall across from my desk.
“Get everyone off the streets,” I say. “Shut down all active operations, every front, every rotation. Nothing moves until I say so.” I stand up.
“Get me everything you have on the timeline. When each front was hit, what intelligence did they use, and how specific was the targeting. I want it in an hour.”
“Already pulling it.”
“Rico.”
“Yes.”
“I want to know how they built their map.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “We’ll find it.”
“I know you will.” I hang up.
I walk to the window and look at the grounds. The afternoon light is flat across the garden. Nina is not on the path, which means she’s inside, probably in the library, probably at her laptop, the private document she has been building for weeks sitting open on the screen.
I turn away from the window.
The hour that follows is the kind of hour that doesn’t feel like an hour. Rico’s people pull records, trace channels, and map the intelligence back to its source.
I sit at my desk, managing the immediate fallout, calls to the right people, decisions that need to be made before the day is out, the machinery of a crisis that has been trained for exactly this moment.
I work through it the way I work through everything, methodically, without letting the shape of it distort the thinking.
But underneath all of it, the trace is running.
And I already know where it ends.
Not because I’m certain. Because I’m paying attention.
Three fronts hit with a precision that requires sourced intelligence, the kind that doesn’t come from the outside.
It comes from someone who has been inside this world, who has had access, who has been building something quietly over weeks and feeding it outward through a channel I thought I had closed.
Rico comes back at one fifteen with the full picture spread across four pages.
He puts it on my desk and stands back, and I read through it without speaking.
The timeline, the intelligence used, and the exact details of each front that were hit.
The port rotation schedule. The east side fund flow.
The northern corridor distribution timing.
All of it sourced from the same time window.
All of it connected by a thread that runs back through the months before I intercepted the Reeves channel, before I wiped her laptop, before I closed every outside line.
The intelligence was already out. She had already fed it. Six weeks of careful, deliberate reporting, building a case she believed was going to a federal agent, and every piece of it went somewhere else entirely.
I close the file.
Rico is looking at me. “The trace leads back to?—”
“I know where it leads,” I say.
He stops.
“Reeves,” I say. “The FBI contact. The channel I closed two months ago.” I look at the file on my desk. “He was never running a federal case. He was running the faction’s intelligence operation. Everything she sent him went directly to the people who hit us today.”
The room is very quiet.
“She didn’t know,” I say. It’s not a question.
It’s not a defense. It’s simply the truth, and I know it’s the truth because I know Nina Morozov and what deliberate betrayal looks like and what it does not, and this does not look like it.
“She thought she was building a case. She was building a weapon, and she didn’t know it. ”
Rico says nothing.
“Find Reeves,” I say. “Everything about him. Who he’s actually working for, how long he’s been on their payroll, and every communication he’s had in the last year.” I stand up. “And find out how much of what she gave him they have left to use.”
He nods and goes.
I stand at the window for a moment. Somewhere in this house Nina is at her laptop building something she doesn’t know has already been gutted and used and turned into a weapon against the people she was trying to protect.
She’s going to find that out tonight. From me. Before she finds it anywhere else.
I button my jacket and go to find her.