Chapter twenty-seven Threat Assessment
Chapter twenty-seven
Threat Assessment
WRAITH
The conference room monitors glow with stills from security feeds, all of them featuring Kenneth Shaughnessy either alone, or with someone else, when I walk in.
The rest of my core crew is already here. This is my team. The soldiers I relied on most and trusted as a captain are the same men and woman that will make up my inner circle as a lieutenant.
McLaren's feet are propped on the table her fingers flying across the keyboard on her laptop. Noah is halfway through a breakfast sandwich. Torch leans back in his chair watching something on his phone while Ethan leans against the far wall observing the room.
Making a damn production of looking at his watch, Dagda drawls, "Look at the lieutenant arriving exactly on time. Promotion's gone to his head already. I remember when Wraith was always the first one in the room."
"It's easy to be early when you live on site." I make a beeline for the coffee station.
"How's that going, you living in that little apartment with all those X chromosomes?" Tomas asks.
It's a hell of a lot more challenging than I expected it to be. Not because the girls are noisy, or Maureen is nosy, but because my balls are so blue they've got their own spot on the color wheel.
As fucking busy as I am, I crave my new wife, all of the damn time. But sex in a house with three girls and mother-in-law is as common as combat action officially acknowledged by the government.
"Has its moments." I pop the pod of dark roast in the maker.
Dagda gives a low, rusty chuckle. "Don't tell me fatherhood is harder than knocking those banjaxed gobshites into shape you inherited from Kenneth."
"Fuck off." Fatherhood isn't the issue.
Privacy is.
And I don't need the reminder what a bunch of dipshits I've got working for me now.
Noah points at me with half a sandwich. "That sounded very managerial."
Torch nods solemnly. "Disturbing development."
Like a bunch of chuckleheads, they all laugh at the lame ass joke.
Normal.
As normal as mob soldiers discussing internal betrayal at 6:30 in the morning gets anyway.
McLaren finally looks up from her laptop and glares at Torch. "Where's my coffee?"
He nods toward a to-go cup to the right of her crossed ankles on the table. "Iced brown sugar latte with oat milk just like her highness demanded."
"Why didn't I get coffee?" Dagda demands.
Noah squints at the cup. "What's oat milk?"
"Grounds for execution," Torch mutters.
McLaren flips him off as she grabs the cup. "Oat milk has a lower environmental impact than almond or dairy milk."
Everyone stares at her.
She shrugs. "What? I have to compensate in some way for my larger than normal consumption of electricity."
"You're a menace." Noah tosses the crumpled wrapper of his breakfast sandwich into the trash before clamping down on his ever-present cinnamon toothpick.
"Correct."
I take my mug of black coffee and sit at the head of the table. "Report."
"I've got news about one of the FBI agents that interviewed áine six years ago." McLaren taps on her computer and the images on one monitor change to phone logs with certain calls highlighted. The other monitor shows a map with overlapping location markers.
"Special Agent Raymond Fisk," she says, as a headshot of a man with a receding hairline and sallow complexion pops up on the screen with the phone logs. "And congratulations to Kenneth Shaughnessy for apparently believing burner phones become invisible if you put them in your other pocket."
Dagda barks out a laugh.
Thomas shakes his head. "No way he's that stupid."
"Oh, he's absolutely that stupid." McLaren enlarges the map. "His primary phone and burner track together constantly. Home. Meetings. Restaurants. Even now." She points toward a blinking marker. "Probably carrying both phones on him as we speak."
"Confident bastard," Torch mutters.
"No," I say. "Careless."
McLaren nods once. "This particular burner number goes back 18 months, but the two men have known each other since university."
"It's not a coincidence that he's one of the feds who talked to áine six years ago," Dagda says.
"Kenneth was setting her up as his patsy," I growl.
Thomas hums. "You think his plan was to turn Mick in to the feds and then blame her for it?"
"So, what stopped him?" Dagda asks.
"He wasn't ready." Ethan pushes off the wall and joins the rest of us at the conference table, sliding a file folder in front of me. "He's been building connections with syndicates that are not our allies."
I open the folder and spread the surveillance photos across the table. Kenneth leaving a steakhouse in Midtown. Kenneth meeting a union rep in Queens. Kenneth entering an apartment building in Brooklyn none of us officially own.
Kenneth looking over his shoulder in every damn frame like he knows someone's coming for him.
Good instincts.
Too bad they can't make up for his lack of brains.
"Kenneth's movements have gotten more erratic since the demotion," Ethan says quietly. "He's changing routes more often and rotating drivers."
"Smartest thing he's done so far," Thomas mutters.
"Not smart enough." McLaren makes a disgusted sound. "He's still carrying both phones together."
Dagda shakes his head slowly. "The man thinks he's a mastermind, but he's a muppet."
"He thought family ties would protect him," I say flatly.
Noah leans back in his chair. "So, he's been planning some kind of underboss takeover against Mick? For six years?"
"Looks like it," I agree.
Thomas swears quietly in Yoruba under his breath. "That's treason."
The atmosphere in the room changes. The easy camaraderie drains away leaving only cold operational focus behind.
We all knew that was the probable scenario, but the calculated long-term plan to get Mick out of the way is betrayal of the brotherhood. Punishable by death.
That I will administer.
Because áine is mine and he planned to use her. If he had succeeded, she would have been killed for ratting Mick out.
Ways I want to torture the man before he begs for death play in my head while I go through Ethan's surveillance photos.
"I don't know why you didn't just send me the images so I could throw them up on the monitor," McLaren bitches.
Ethan doesn't bother to answer. But we all know he has a preference for analog over digital. McLaren never lets an opportunity to razz him about it pass her by though.
I stop on a photo of Kenneth standing outside a cigar club talking to a blond man in a charcoal coat. Wary posture. Hard eyes.
Dagda leans forward. "Shit."
"You know him?" I ask.
"Lars Nystrom."
Torch whistles low. "The Swede?"
Dagda nods once. "Enforcement and contract work for the Swedish mafia. Last I heard, he was handling operations tied to Malmo and Stockholm."
"You sure it's Nystrom?" I ask.
I've heard of the Swedish assassin. Who in our world hasn't? But I've never seen him.
Dagda nods again. "Saw his file during some joint security work overseas. Man's a psycho."
"That's saying something, coming from you lot," Torch says dryly.
Dagda flashes his teeth. "Thank you."
Thomas studies the photo again. "The fuck would Kenneth be doing with a Scandinavian hitter?"
Ethan crosses his arms. "Wish we had audio."
McLaren grimaces. "Would've if someone hadn't dragged me to Anaheim for a surprise wedding."
Noah grins. "Worth it."
She considers for half a second. "Yeah. Fair."
I look back at the surveillance photo.
Kenneth talking to a Swedish mafia hitter isn't random. Men like Nystrom don't do social calls.
"What Kenneth wants with a hitter is pretty damn obvious," Torch says. "He wants Mick out of the way and if it takes killing him to get that, he will."
I agree.
"But what could Kenneth be offering the Swedish syndicate that would make risking running afoul of Brogan Shaughnessy worth it?" Thomas asks.
"They want access to Vanta." Noah's the youngest member of my crew but he's damn smart.
"Sweden rolled out gunshot detection systems years ago," Dagda says grimly. "A weapon that bypasses acoustic tracking?"
McLaren frowns. "Access to the Whisper guns would be worth their weight in antimatter to the Swedish mafia."
With no muzzle flash, minimal sound signature and no detectable ballistic pattern conventional systems can reliably track, the Whisper guns are our most lucrative product in our weapons catalog.
"Swedes aren't on the approved distribution list," Torch says.
"No," I agree. "They're not."
Me and my team know more about the Vanta guns than the rest of our mob outside Mick's inner circle—which I guess I'm part of now—because we run logistics for delivery.
The Vanta is the first model of the Whisper guns and we've kept the client list short, only dealing to a few select allies.
Ethan says, "Kenneth met Nystrom twice this week."
That smacks of desperation.
I lean back slightly in my chair, looking around the room. "Threat assessment."
"Kenneth's isolated but still operational," Ethan says.
Thomas looks down at the photos on the table. "He's still making plans, trying to build allies."
Or maintaining connections with the relationships he's already built.
Either way, Brogan's wrong to believe that demoting his cousin detoothed the threat Kenneth represents. Mick's not that short sighted, but then, that's why we're all here.
Our assignment is still to assess how deep the rot of sedition reaches into the brotherhood. My personal assignment is to neutralize Kenneth.
His death will do that nicely.
"Which means he's scared," Dagda says.
"No," I correct. "He's desperate." Scared men hide. Desperate men gamble.
Which makes him more dangerous.
"My wife and daughters stay under full security rotation." Right now, two of the men who worked with me on Brice's crew before I got promoted are watching them. "I'll be taking the girls to school with áine this morning," I tell Thomas, who is on the rotation to do it.
"Copy that." He gives a credible salute.
"Allies within the mob?" I ask my team.
Noah, Thomas and Dagda report that though there is grumbling, there's no evidence of deeper involvement in the coup attempt by other members of the mob. Even when the talk juice was utilized to loosen tongues.
McLaren and Ethan confirm the findings of the others when they finish reporting on Kenneth's interactions for the five days we spent in Anaheim and the week since we got back.
"He seems to be relying on allies outside the mob, like his friend the fed.
" McLaren's fingers start moving over her keyboard again.
"I'll keep digging into Fisk. Financials, travel, communications, offshore transfers.
Dirty agents are basically raccoons. They always leave fingerprints in the trash eventually. "
Noah blinks. "That metaphor got away from you."
"I stand by it."
I pull my phone out and glance at the newest text waiting for me from áine. Joy wants to know if narwhals are real because her teacher says yes but she thinks he's lying.
Something tight eases in my chest.
"áine texting you?" McLaren asks in a teasing tone.
"Yeah."
"Figured." McLaren rolls her eyes. "You've got that goofy look on your face."
I do not have a fucking goofy look. "You found Bás ó Na Scáthanna yet?"
"Not yet." And the failure to do so is pissing McLaren off.
I raise my brow.
She scowls. "Touche. I'll leave you alone about my bestie. For now."
I call Mick from the SUV on my way back to the apartment.
He answers on the second ring. "Talk."
I give him the overview. "Do you want me to take Nystrom out?"
"You've got enough on your plate right now, boyo. I'll take care of the Swedish assassin. I haven't been hunting in a while." The same anticipation I feel before a hunt thrums in Mick's voice.
"Kill or collect?" I ask with professional curiosity.
"Collect. To begin with. I want to question him." Mick pauses and then says, "Hex finalized Vanta V2 yesterday."
That gets my attention. "Yeah?"
"It can fire twenty-four rounds before cool down." I can practically hear Mick's satisfaction through the phone.
That's a big improvement over the seven-round limit between cool downs for Vanta V1.
Meaning the V1 can now be expanded commercially without losing the weapons edge for us and our closest allies. "You're widening distribution."
"Time to monetize broader demand," Mick agrees. "No one's managed to back engineer the Vanta in six years. The risk of broader expansion is minimal."
"Kenneth knows enough to be dangerous already," I say.
"He always has."
Yeah.
But now he's desperate enough to sell pieces of the kingdom to save himself.