Chapter 43 #2
My vision floods with crimson. I clutch the edge of the counter until my knuckles pop. My jaw locks as I try to keep from howling.
Cole tugs my headset free. “Destroy that lying motherfucker,” he orders into the mic.
Bennett sweeps to the far side of the room.
When he comes back, he’s gripping a pair of pliers.
Tarasov cringes, shrinking into his chair, but he still loses the nail of his unbroken thumb.
Bennett waves his bloody prize in front of the pakhan’s milk-white face and says, “Last chance. Give us enough for WITSEC. No Pyotr. No lies. No editorials. Or you’re out on the street, minus the rest of your nails. ”
Richardson stays very still, smart enough not to upset the balance. Tarasov whines like an animal caught in a trap.
Snorting in disgust, Bennett captures Tarasov’s left hand. He goes for the broken thumb.
Tarasov howls, “No! Wait! Please!” And when Bennett doesn’t give up, the Russian shouts: “The Tarasov bratva runs Crash in Baltimore.”
Bennett freezes.
Tarasov says, “Under my command, the Tarasov bratva runs Crash in Baltimore. We sell from Patterson Park to West Baltimore. Our corner boys target the schools.”
Bennett and Richardson know exactly what to do. Bennett burrows deep, excavating precise dollar amounts. Richardson soothes, layering on whiskey and velvet. They both have the same message: They need more—data, details, specifics. More. More. More. They always need more.
That massive barrier finally breached—Crash—Tarasov abandons all restraint. He’s given up too much now to ever be safe in Baltimore again. His only hope is the purifying fire of confession. He needs to bare his soul. He needs to pray for the dubious protection of the law.
Beside me, Cole works with the precision of a machine.
The recordings he prepares are longer now, several minutes of confession bundled into each packet.
He does one for drug trade and another for prostitution.
He grits his teeth as he pulls together a stomach-churning account of the bratva’s human trafficking.
“No, no, no,” Tarasov snaps at Bennett in the boardroom. “Women are housed in the old asylum. Boys and girls stay in a rowhouse on Butchers Hill. One room. One bed. That way they start training fast. They learn together.”
“Goddamn him to fucking hell,” Cole mutters. Setting aside the camera footage, he opens a window on his computer and starts to type at breakneck speed. I recognize the steady rhythm of intense coding, the short, sharp lines and the rapid returns.
In less than a minute, Cole says, “The rest of this goes out live.”
He angles his monitor toward me. The camera feed displays like a live-action television show, its black-and-white footage dulling the effect of the blood on Tarasov’s face. The pakhan’s mangled hands are out of the picture, blocked by a frame that bears both the FBI and Homeland Security logos.
Cole says, “This motherfucker is never getting out of DC alive. Where are we with distribution?”
I update my screen. With my attention torn between Tarasov’s sickening admissions and my sending out updates to Ariadne’s Daughters, I haven’t had time to monitor how far our message has gone.
But all our preparation is paying off. Social media is on fire with the story. Videos are showing up on SparkChat, on CampFire, anywhere users can post and comment.
I send my team the live feed Cole created. They react faster than I ever imagined they could, channeling the data to an even broader network than the one we painstakingly planned.
Cole watches the spread multiply like a blizzard of individual snowflakes. “You’ve built a fucking miracle,” he says. Before I can answer, he reaches for his mobile.
“Megan,” he says, still eyeing the screen. “Are you seeing this?” She must be, because he doesn’t have to explain. “Give us two more hours,” he says. “And then have the breakdown team ready to go.”
We watch for thirty more nauseating minutes.
Tarasov is openly weeping now, wriggling in his chair, begging Bennett and Richardson to believe him.
Without any prompting at all, he lays out all the brotherhood’s finances.
He recites bank account numbers. He discloses every transaction he’s laundered through RedBear.
Cole vacuums up the cash until the total approaches nine figures. “Enough,” he finally says, backing out of the last account. “Let’s wrap this up.”
I send a final message to Ariadne’s Daughters: “Endgame.”
Within seconds, comments blossom under the most popular posts my team has distributed.
They appear to come from dozens of different accounts, then in short order, from hundreds.
I know they’re bot farms my team created, AI tools built to spread information fast, without regard to truths or falsehoods.
This motherfucker needs to die
Give me five minutes in a dark alley with that scumbag and he’ll never breed again
The video says FBI. Anyone know where?
Then a new set of comments gains sway.
If you or anyone you know is a survivor of sexual assault, Survivors of Sexual Sadists can help.
Survivors of Sexual Sadists popup rally in Farragut Park!
SSS peaceful march to K Street
The posts spread like the branches of a tree, repeating and repeating and repeating again, always reaching farther, always finding new readers.
Another hour goes by, with Richardson and Bennett plucking more and more limited confessions from Tarasov. The pakhan is spinning down like a wind-up toy running out of power.
Cole grabs the headset and speaks into the mic. “Excellent work, you two. That’s enough. Make sure everyone knows this building’s address, and you’re done.”
Bennett smoothly says to Tarasov, “Okay. Here’s what happens next. We’re on K Street in downtown DC, a block off Farragut Park. You know the location, right? The building with the Sunshine Bank in the lobby?”
Tarasov nods. Then he shakes his head. He’s from Baltimore. He doesn’t know lobbies in DC. His eyelids droop as if he’s about to fall asleep at the table.
Bennett slams his fist down. “Listen up! This is important! We’ll have a car waiting downstairs in half an hour. You’ll be taken to a secure location.”
“Secure location,” Tarasov mumbles.
Richardson croons, “Give us a few minutes, okay? We just have to finalize that transport.”
Tarasov nods, muttering something to himself. His interrogators leave him rocking in his chair. Cole kills the camera feed as Bennett and Richardson knock on the observation room door.
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Bennett says. “There isn’t a long enough shower in the world to wash away that asshole’s stink.”
Richardson stretches her neck left, then right, cracking her vertebrae. “Anything else you need from us?”
“Nothing,” Cole says. “You two were brilliant. We’ll take fifteen minutes before we bring him downstairs. Give the crowd a little more time to build.”
Bennett looks at Tarasov’s slumped body with a sneer of disgust. “He’s out of it. He won’t know if we wait a couple of hours.”
I step onto the main floor of the office. It’s eerie, with all the cubicles abandoned. But it’s far from silent.
Crossing to the wall of windows that overlook Farragut Park, I see that a large crowd has already gathered on the sidewalk. Some carry signs. Others raise their fists in the rhythm of chants I can’t make out.
Cole comes up behind me. “Megan’s on the loading dock with the movers. I’ve hacked into the lobby screens. Ready to go downstairs?”
I nod. “Let’s bury the shitehawk.”
We take the elevator down to the lobby where Drew Cameron and Tony Jacobson rise from a pair of leather-covered benches. They put themselves between us and the mob outside.
From this vantage point, I can read several hand-painted signs.
We will not be silenced
SSS unite!
Men can’t rape if their dicks are cut off
The building’s lone security guard is shouting into his phone. “I told you already, the doors are locked. But I need back-up. This crowd is out of control.”
As if on cue, something thuds against the glass. Cameron steps closer, almost blocking my view of a soggy sandwich sliding down the outside of the door.
The guard continues to argue. “I can’t turn off the screens.” He glares at the four monitors behind his desk. Each one shows a different feed of Tarasov’s confession, glowing with the FBI logo. “It’s some government thing,” the guard shouts. “You’ve got to hurry! I need help down here.”
A bell rings behind us, barely audible above the chaos of the crowd.
Cole and I turn as the elevator door opens.
Our trusty Sawgrass guards march Tarasov into the white marble lobby.
They’ve sponged blood from his face, but his hands are still a mess.
The hems of his soaked trousers drag against the floor.
The mob ignites like it’s been firebombed.
Tarasov cringes from the scrum, coming face-to-face with the videos. He staggers one step forward, his jaw literally dropping. His face flushes crimson, then drains to the color of a rotting fish’s belly.
“Tarasov,” Cole says, the deadly chill in his voice cutting through the madness. The pakhan whirls toward us like he’s been slapped.
“W— Wolf!” he says. He shakes his head, looking lost. “You did this?”
“Both of us,” Cole says, taking a half-step back to include me.
“But MAJAT—” Tarasov says.
“A false front,” Cole says.
“The FBI…” Tarasov groans.
“Nowhere near this place.”
“WITSEC,” Tarasov whispers.
“In your fucking dreams.”
Tarasov crumples in the arms of his guards.
I step close enough to make out the crimson spiderwebs of all the broken veins in his eyes.
“Years ago,” I say. “Pyotr gave me choices. And you get to choose now. You can take your chances with the crowd outside.” I take my mobile out of my pocket.
“Or you can call one your men to come fetch you.”
“I— I do not understand…”
“Choose, Nikolai.”
“I…”
“Choose!”
He looks at the seething crowd. He cranes his neck toward the videos playing at the security desk. “Not the bratva,” he finally says. “I leave here alone.”
At Cole’s decisive nod, the Sawgrass men march him to the door. Tarasov’s toes scrape the marble floor as the mob surges closer.
One guard trips the dead-man’s switch that opens the locked door. Dozens of hands yank the glass from outside. As the crowd surges forward, I raise my voice, determined to be heard. “Make. It. Hurt,” I call out over the rage of the throng.
I don’t know if the protesters hear me, but Tarasov does. He whirls back to face me, even as a can of soda strikes the back of his head. “You deserved everything you got, you goddamn fucking cunt!”
The crowd drags him out the door. My last sight of Nikolai Tarasov is his fighting to get free. He punches and he kicks and he bites at least one outstretched hand. The enraged swarm follows him down the street as he makes a break toward the subway.
Before I can decide if I want to follow, my mobile vibrates in my hand. The sound is loud in the almost-empty lobby, like a helicopter landing beside us. Surprised, I look down at the screen.
Mam.
I never want to talk to her again. But the well-trained ghost of my childhood demands to know how she’ll twist Nikolai Tarasov’s demise into a drama about her.
“Mam,” I say, just before voicemail picks up.
“Don’t listen to him!” she shouts.
“Don’t listen to wh—”
But my confused question is interrupted by a rumbling baritone, thick with an Irish brogue. “Kaitlín Minola Lynch.”
“Who is this?”
“I am Robbie Malloy, just off my plane from County Donegal. And it seems you and I are long overdue for a talk.”