Chapter 21
Port of Aden, Yemen
“These are…different. Wrong.” Fingers flying over the keyboard, Cove opened another browser. “I am going to remote-access my system at home because…”
Dark eyes considered her for a long second. “Enzo getting you to doubt yourself again?”
It infuriated Cove that she had all but handed Enzo the means to rip the confidence from beneath her feet as if it were an old, tattered rug. “Perhaps,” she conceded, “but as I said—I want to be very careful before accusing someone again.”
“Trust yourself, Gelato.”
Wisdom said double-checking facts should be done before she again took a strident position.
But she appreciated Dillon’s belief in her.
It was…rare. A gift. As juvenile as it sounded, he made her swoon.
“I need to be sure I’m remembering correctly.
” Once she’d remote-accessed her files at home, she pulled up the very documents Enzo had said she misremembered.
They were in a batch that had been scanned in, along with some digital receiving files.
“The only reason I remember this file”—she looked over to the other doc browser she had open—“is because I studied this, memorized it, after that nightmare. I kept staring at it, confounded that Enzo told me it wasn’t what I thought. That I was misremem—”
Words left her as she stared at the file retrieved from her home system. Her heart jostled in her chest, pulse rapid as she flicked her gaze between the two. “I was right.” The breath whooshed from her tight chest. “I cannot believe it.”
On a wheeled chair, Dillon rolled over to her station. “What’d you find that proved what I already knew?”
“It has been falsified or altered or something.” She pointed to the lading numbers. “Look—same numerical sequence…”
Dillon shifted toward the screen, taking in the information, the two different documents. “Idiot altered it and forgot to adjust the bottom line.”
“I believed that mostro.”
Dillon looked up at her with a smirk. “Glad you’re using that word on someone else now.” A ding from the other terminal made him roll back to that computer. “My friend’s in the system.” Typing, he said, “I’m having him find the security feeds from that night.”
He fell silent as he reviewed files, and Cove kept working, more determined than ever to not only prove Enzo wrong but that he was complicit in whatever was happening with Papà.
She pored over the data, digging through countless customs forms, manifests, and accounting documents.
A solid hour or more into it, something pinged in her mind. “Wait…” Her heart drummed.
“You good?” Dillon asked from her left.
“This name…” Why did she know this name? “It is familiar, but I cannot recall how or why. I think…Rasulov. Where…” In her mind’s eyes flashed a face.
“My friend Yusif Rasulov.”
“That’s right…” she breathed, her mind racing to connect the dots.
“Cove?”
She flinched and looked at him. “What?”
“It seemed like you found or figured out something.”
“I…” She shifted her gaze back to the logo on some documents, the initials on a few others. “On several ladings, there’s an RHB… Rasulov Holdinql?r Birl?sdirilmisdir—”
“Gesundheit.”
She frowned at him.
He waved her on. “Lame joke. Go on.”
“At the Paris event—”
“I remember Paris,” he said with a wink, no doubt insinuating the near-kiss into the conversation.
“Would you stop flirting with me!”
“Never.”
“Dillon—”
Understanding her mood, he snapped an unrepentant salute.
“At that event in Paris, the Georgian minister my father has done business with for years introduced me to a man I had not invited, a man GIS certainly had not done business with—at least to my knowledge…” Again she considered the evidence trail.
“One Yusif Rasulov, an Azerbaijani National Assembly chairman.”
Dillon jerked straight, his amusement gone, dark eyes intense and focused—finally.
“Hold up. Georgia…Azerbaijani…this port…” Brightness flashed on his screen along with another ding, drawing both of their gazes.
It was an image of a well-lit warehouse with two men standing mere feet from the camera angle. One was Enzo and the other—
Cove sucked in a hard breath. “That’s him! That’s Rasulov with Enzo!”
Dillon’s complexion went near-white. “This?” he asked, pointing to the Azerbaijani. “Unibrow is Rus-o-lot? You sure you saw this guy?”
Anger sprouted through her chest that he would question her, doubt her. “I did not just see him,” she bit out. “I talked to him and shook his hand—made my skin crawl.”
“Holy fire, Cove.”
“What? Don’t you believe me?”
His dark eyes widened. “No, I do—but I don’t want to.”
She scowled. “Why?”
“Because this man you called Rasulov?”
“Yes? What?” she spat, growing angrier.
“This guy has been dubbed Qanli Qilinc, the ‘bloody sword.’ He’s the mastermind behind Yanan Gün?s, the Blazing Sun Project.
He’s the one pulling together all necessary resources, experts, materials—you name it—to insure the viability of Iran’s nuclear program.
After that war between Israel and Iran in 2025, he’s been in high gear.
There are more people under this man’s toxic thumb than any in the course of history. ”
She let the information sink in, more than a little dumbfounded. And sick to the stomach too. “Did you see him in Paris?” she asked, heart pounding. “He was there—he was there with mio papà just before I spotted you. Did you—”
“No, thank God,” he said, looking pale. Then recognition wavered in his eyes. “Wait—I…I saw some men heading to the bar with your dad that night. Didn’t see faces… It’s a good thing he didn’t see me either.” His expression darkened. “I barely escaped his henchmen in Armenia.”
Cove started. “Why would he be chasing you? How do you even know of him?”
“Besides that fact he’s Satan’s spawn?” Dillon gave a grave shake of his head. “He wants me dead because for a while there, I was convinced he’d taken my dad.”
Heartsick, Cove realized something that, in a twisted sense, gave her hope. “This means our paths are more aligned than we believed. That me coming here with you was—is—important.”
“I think you mispronounced dangerous.”
A couple of dings made them both glance at his computer.
Dillon shifted closer, then grunted.
Nerves aflame at the discoveries they were making, Cove struggled to stay calm. “What? Something wrong?”
“More than both of us being on a collision course with Qanli Qilinc?” He furrowed his brow, then clicked the image of Rasulov. He zoomed in.
“What is it?”
“My friend,” he murmured, “said to look in the background.”
“It’s the interior of the warehouse…” Uncertain what this friend noted, she kept looking because she only saw stacks of—
Dillon shot to his feet with a strangled shout. Bent closer to the monitor. “My dad!”
Heart in her throat, she leaned closer, searching the grainy image. “Where?”
He tapped the screen’s upper right corner. “Here.”
Sure enough. Looking beyond Rasulov’s shoulder, far down into the warehouse and ensconced in darkness, lurked the ghosted image of a man. “This is so good! Actual footage of what he was doing here!”
“He sent the feed.” Dillon double-clicked the icon of an MP4 file and played the footage. This was from a different angle. “Strange that Dad didn’t worry about the cameras…” he murmured, watching.
“It’s dark in the bay on this one,” Cove noted. “Must’ve been after everyone left.”
“Still, he would know cameras are there…”
“Maybe he was hurrying?” An idea struck Cove. “Remember, you had mentioned the photo of our fathers was taken during the day.” She indicated to the computer. “Is this proof he was still alive after your government says he died?”
Tightening his jaw, Dillon frowned. Bobbed and shook his head. “Maybe. But I already knew he wasn’t killed in that car explosion because he showed up in Tanzania after they said he’d died.”
“Right.”
Dillon watched his dad stalk up and down the rows of pallets. “It’s like he’s looking for something specific,” he noted.
Finally, his dad stopped at one in the corner that was in perfect view of a camera and glanced around. Vanished into a darkened spot out of shot of the camera, but returned a moment later with a metal bar and a—
“Backpack,” Cove murmured, her heart skipping a beat.
“Explains how he got it.”
Next, his dad used the steel bar to break into the enormous crate, then he pried open an inner container.
“Son of a flaming-hot biscuit,” Dillon breathed. “Weapons cache.”
“GIS does not ship weapons! That cannot be…” Cove balked.
“Say what you want, but they’re right there.” He frowned, squinting as he angled closer again as his dad started loading up the backpack. “What the…?” Palming the desk, he strained to see. “Those aren’t weapons he’s grabbing…”
Cove felt out of her depth. “What is it?”
Dillon shook his head, scowling. “No idea.” He grabbed the keyboard and typed in a chat box at a site that had pizza slices all over it.
SAVE ALL THIS.
A reply appeared:
ALREADY DID.
GOOD.
WHO’S THE WOMAN?
Cove started. “How does he know I’m here?”
Fingers freezing over the keyboard, Dillon drew back. “Good question.”
YOU SEE US?
PSYCHIC.
But then an image came through of them both staring down at the terminal.
“Where…?” Dillon’s gaze raked over the room, angling this way and that, clearly trying to locate that camera. His gaze hit on something. “Freak!”
That’s when Cove saw the open laptop on the desk near the front, angled straight toward them, the green light glowing. “Oh no…”
“Your friend is watching us?”
“If he can, anyone can,” Dillon muttered even as new letters tracked along the bottom of the screen.
INCOMING. GO!
After a few keystrokes that killed the pizza page and then a few more, Dillon rushed to the front area and peered through the slats. “We’ve got company, G.”
“This way!”