49. Mat
MAT
The kitchen at Kir’s brownstone has become a war room.
Jillian’s laptop sits open on the marble island, the cursor blinking inside a half-drafted email to a contact at ProPublica.
A second screen on the dining table, hooked up via HDMI, displays a printable PDF of the DeMaris ledger with the most suspect rows highlighted in yellow.
Afon is at the window, smoking out into the courtyard against Jillian’s wishes, his back to us.
I’ve been on my feet for ninety minutes straight.
Plan A, as it stands, looks like this: tomorrow night, there’s a fundraiser at the Lotte Palace for DeMaris’s reelection committee, a swanky affair that’s costing its attendees thirty grand a plate.
I’ll be on the guest list courtesy of an obliging hedge fund client who owes me a favor.
By hook or by crook, I’ll get DeMaris alone in a corridor or a coatroom.
Then I’ll produce a recording device and a weapon at the same time.
Ultimately, the choice will be up to him. He can either confess to his many crimes, most importantly the murder of Raymond Snyder, or I’ll kill him, make it look like a suicide, and plant a confession on his body for the morning cleaning crew to find.
I won’t tell him which to choose, but let’s be very clear: I have a strong preference for one over the other.
It’s a shit plan, full of what-ifs. But it’s a plan.
“The recording is the part I’m worried about,” Jillian says, chewing the cap of her pen. “Even if you get a clean confession, the chain of custody is going to be?—”
“I’m not handing it to a prosecutor,” I tell her.
“I’m handing it to you. You’ll know what to do with it.
There are a lot of ways to win a court case, and not all of them involve a judge or jury agreeing with you.
Reasonable doubt—that’s all we need. From there, shit will snowball, and we’ll get the openings necessary to get Cass out of prison. ”
She nods, slowly. Then something occurs to her and she sprints back to her correspondence with ProPublica to keep building out our story here.
I see my phone sliding around the kitchen table. I reach over and snag it to see Kir is calling.
That’s strange. He’s been cooped up in the war room with Lukas all day long, preparing for the worst-case scenario, if this plan goes to shit and they’re forced to batten down the Bratva hatches to fend off the incoming Vainakh onslaught.
I answer the call. “What’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“Your kitchen.”
“Put me on speaker. Afon there?”
I set the phone on the island. Afon turns from the window, cigarette pinched between two fingers, and steps closer. Jillian closes her laptop halfway. The room goes quiet, all of us holding our breath.
There’s just a sense that something bad is coming.
“Listen to me,” Kir says. “I just got off the phone with Yasha. You remember Yasha?”
“Refresh me.”
“Local 339. Service workers’ union. He staffs intake, laundry, food service at half the city’s correctional facilities. He’s been on the Bratva’s payroll for the better part of a decade, whenever we need someone inside the system to do us a favor or keep us alert to a situation.”
The dread deepens. Whatever Kir is about to say, it isn’t good. It isn’t good at all.
“He just called me because he caught something on a roster sheet that didn’t look right. A special visit was booked at Rosie’s this morning. Inmate’s name is Snyder.”
I plant a hand on the marble to keep myself level. “Fuck. When?”
“Two hours from now. Maybe less. The paperwork came down from the warden’s office directly.
The visitor’s name is redacted on Yasha’s copy, which by itself is interesting, because nothing gets redacted at his level.
Not unless there’s some serious political muscle pulling strings.
The room booked is one of the conjugal suites in C-wing.
” He hesitates. “And the guard assigned to walk her down is a woman named Francesca Collins, whom Yasha has flagged before. She bought a beach house in Sea Bright last summer on a C.O.’s salary. Fishy, to say the least.”
My head is swimming like I’ve been plunged under ocean waves. To recap, someone who can force things to happen has ordered Cass into a meeting in a private, unmonitored room so she can meet with… technically, we don’t know who.
But I have my fucking guesses.
“Mat?” Kir says. “You with me?”
I shake my head to clear the cobwebs. “Yeah. I’m with you.”
“You know what this means. He’s on the move. Today. Whatever you’ve got cooked up for tomorrow, scrap it. You don’t have that long.”
I close my eyes for one second and picture her. He doesn’t get to touch you. Not now. Not ever again. I made her that promise barely a week ago.
I am going to be very, very angry if I have to break it.
I open my eyes. “Plan A is dead,” I announce.
“So what’s B?” asks Jillian.
“B’s dead, too. So’s C, D, E, the rest of the fuckers. We’re on Plan Z now.”
She winces. “Dare I ask what Z implies?”
“Z is shoot first and ask questions later.” I’m already moving.
My coat is on the stool by the door; I yank it down and shove my arms in.
The Glock is at the small of my back where it has been since I left the hospital yesterday, and when I check the magazine, I see that it’s full and ready.
The sonogram, folded along its old creases, sits against my ribs.
“I’m getting in a car right now and driving to the detention center.
Kir, tell Yasha to do whatever the fuck he needs to do to give me a way in. ”
“Hold up one sec,” she protests. “Let’s just think this through and?—”
“Did you not fucking hear him?” I roar, whirling around on her.
“DeMaris is going for her! We don’t have time to think anymore, goddammit!
I will not stand by while one more man touches a woman who’s been through the shit that she has been through.
No. No fucking more. Not one fingertip on her.
I made her that vow, and I have every intention of keeping it. ”
Jillian is not one to show fear, but even she has shrunk back in her chair a bit at my outburst.
I soften. “You’ve been a saint to me and to Cass, Jill.
I won’t forget that. What I need you to do now is get eyeballs on this.
The more, the better. ProPublica, CNN, the Times, whoever.
I wouldn’t be mad if you took out a goddamn billboard in Times Square.
But you start sending emails as fast as you can, so everyone in the world knows who DeMaris is and what he’s done. Am I clear?”
She hesitates. “But if we’re wrong, or if he’s outmaneuvered us somehow, then?—”
I shake my head to stop her. “Then the heat falls on me. I’ll bear the burden. I’ll pay the price. If DeMaris wants to crucify me, he’s welcome to try. But until that happens… I’m coming for his motherfucking throat.”
It’s only when I hear a heavy sigh that I realize Kir is still on the phone.
“You hear all that?” I ask him.
“Unfortunately,” he replies. “You’ve been waiting your whole life to be a damn martyr. I’m glad you’re finally getting your chance.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I fire back, though I say it with love.
Kir has been my brother-in-arms for a long time now. If I lose today, I may never see him again. So much hangs in the balance.
“There is one more thing,” I say. “If I don’t make it out of that building, you finish this for me. Cass and Afon are the only ones that matter anymore. My life isn’t so important.”
A long beat of silence. I can hear Kir breathing on the other end.
“We’ll do it,” he promises quietly. “I’ll make sure of that. But you don’t get to die today, brother. Not when she’s been waiting for you.”
“Don’t worry; I don’t want to die, either. I’m way too fucking handsome to kick the bucket this young.”
I hang up before he can get a retort in.
Call ended, I jam the phone in my pocket and charge for the door as the route takes shape in my head. It’s forty minutes in light traffic, twenty-five if I drive like I intend to.
I’m in the foyer when I hear Afon’s loafers behind me.
“You stay here,” I say without turning around. I yank the door open, and February air surges in, wet and miserable. “Help Jillian work the phones.”
“You may think you’re a hero right now, nephew, but I’ll be cold and dead before I take orders from you.”
I turn around in time to see him flipping up his collar against the cold and stubbing out the last quarter inch of his cigarette into a piece of decorative pottery on the side table.
“No,” I object, “I’m not dragging you into this. You’re free of your debt either way. There’s no point in you risking your?—”
“I really wasn’t asking, plemyannik.”
“And I’m really not?—”
“ Matvei Gervasievich. ”
That, of all things, stops me cold. Afon hasn’t used my patronymic, my father’s name nested inside my own, since I was a boy. Not since the night he hauled me out of that alley with my father’s blood on the front of his shirt and showed me how to wash my hands in a puddle.
I look him in the face for the first time in a long time.
Up close, I can see the gray in his stubble, the broken capillaries at the corners of his eyes, the deep line that’s been carved between his brows for fifteen years.
The toll that time, grief, and hard work has taken on him. The price he’s paid.
“You listen to me,” he growls, low. “You think I did the things I’ve done for the last decade and a half just to waltz off into the sunset when my kin needs me? You think that is what I bought with my service to the pakhan ?”
“Uncle—”
“I’m not finished yet . ” He grabs me by the wrist hard, a reminder of what his scarred hands are capable of. “I gave Gervasii my word that I would protect you, and I have kept that promise for fifteen years. I am not breaking it today. Where you go, I go. Konyets. ”
His eyes are damp. I have never, in my entire life, seen Afon Satyrin cry.
I swallow and nod. There’s nothing to say.
He releases me, smooths my lapels down, and pats me once on the shoulder. Then he strides past me out the door.
Over his shoulder, in his normal voice as if nothing ever happened, he says, “And give me the keys. You’ve never been able to drive for shit.”