Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
Sofia and Dante parked two blocks east on Passyunk Avenue at nine forty-five.
“Twenty minutes,” he said.
“Twenty minutes from when I leave the floor.” She reached into the back seat for the bag—lighter than the hard-sided case, built to pass a casual search.
Everything she needed to get into Borya's security room, and take apart the sanitization protocol that would erase the basement before the feds could touch it.
“I go in first. You wait five minutes, then come through the front.” She looked at him.
“Don't come in looking for a fight. Come in like a man honoring an arrangement.”
“Because I am.”
“Yes. Whatever happens in there, whatever Borya does before the signal, don't let him go back up to the mezzanine. If he gets to the back room, he gets to the kill switch. And if he hits that switch, everything I've spent four years building disappears in four minutes.”
“He's not going upstairs,” Dante said.
“Good.”
A couple walked past on the pavement, close together, laughing at something.
“After the FBI comes through,” Dante said. “After the building's secure. Where will you be?”
She reached for the door handle. “Do the twenty minutes, Cruz.”
She got out without looking back. He watched her walk west toward the freeway noise, her pace unhurried, the bag over one shoulder, and he thought about what she'd said in the motel—that's not something you need to plan for.
She was telling him she'd already made her decision, and it wasn't the kind that included an exit.
He gave it five minutes. Then he got out and walked west.
The Dollhouse looked exactly how he remembered it—a black building with no windows, the freeway throwing a permanent grey haze over everything.
Popeyes across the street still doing business.
AutoZone next to it, closed. Thirteen years and the block hadn't moved an inch.
Like it had been sitting here waiting for him to come back and finish what he'd started.
Sonny Fai was on the door.
The Samoan saw him coming from half a block away and went still.
Dante kept walking, holding his hands out slightly from his sides.
Sonny watched him all the way to the door.
“Daniel,” he said quietly.
“Sonny.” Dante stopped in front of him. “I'm expected.”
Sonny's eyes moved over him—his jacket, hands, the pocket he couldn't see into. A long moment passed, then the big man stepped aside and opened the door.
The bass line and the pink light hit him like a wall, and Dante walked into the Dollhouse.
Special Agent Marcus Cole had been sitting in the back of a dry cleaning van on Wharton Street for forty minutes, and the coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago.
The van was parked between a dumpster and a delivery truck, angled so the rear windows faced the service alley that ran behind the 1400 block of South Broad.
The Dollhouse was four buildings north. From where he was, he couldn't see it.
He could see the mouth of the alley and the grated service entrance that, according to Sofia's schematics, connected to a tunnel running beneath the sidewalk and into the basement level of the club.
That entrance was currently locked from the inside. When it wasn't, his team would go through it.
Six agents were in the van with him, tactical gear, no markings.
Another four in a second vehicle on Broad Street, positioned to come through the front on his signal.
A third unit was staged on Passyunk, three blocks east, holding the perimeter.
Eighteen federal agents on a Friday night in South Philadelphia, sitting in vehicles, waiting for a phone call from a woman most of them had never met and one of them wasn't entirely sure existed.
Cole had met her exactly twice. The first time, fourteen months ago, in a parking garage in Arlington.
He'd taken her intel back to the field office and spent a week going through it with two analysts and a federal prosecutor, and by the end of that week he'd understood two things: first, that the material was genuine, and second, that the woman who'd gathered it had been doing so at a level of personal risk that made his own career look like desk work.
The second time was three days ago, a phone call.
Short. She'd given him the date, the time, and the conditions. The service entrance would be unlocked remotely. The basement operation would be running—servers live, rooms active, everything she had described in documentary detail now available in physical form for a federal evidence team to walk into and catalogue. She’d told him the signal would be a call to his phone from a number he wouldn’t recognize. One ring. That was it.
He’d asked her what happened if the call didn’t come.
“Then I’m dead,” she’d said, “and you’ll need to find another way in.”
He’d spent the three days since building a contingency for that scenario and hoping he wouldn’t need it.
The contingency involved a battering ram and a lot of noise and the probable destruction of the very evidence they were there to preserve.
The quiet version—Sofia’s version—was better in every way except that it depended entirely on one woman getting into a room, doing a job, and making a phone call, all while a man who’d been running a criminal empire for three decades sat one floor below her.
Cole checked his watch. Nine-fifty. The club would be filling up. Sofia would already be inside. The man she’d described—Cruz, the one walking in through the front to hold Sokolov’s attention—would be going in shortly.
He looked at his phone. Dark screen. No missed calls.
Ramirez, the agent nearest the rear doors, shifted in his gear. “How long do we give her?”
“As long as it takes.”
“And if it takes too long?”
Cole looked at the mouth of the alley, the grated service entrance barely visible in the dark.
Somewhere behind that grate, beneath the bass line he could feel more than hear, was a basement full of evidence that would put Borya Sokolov away for the rest of his life and dismantle a network that stretched across six countries.
All of it protected by a system designed to erase itself in four minutes, controlled by a switch that one woman was, right now, trying to reach.
“Then we go loud,” he said. “And we hope there’s something left to find.”
He picked up the cold coffee, took a sip anyway, and settled in to wait.