36. Alexei
Alexei
“I confess, I’d been looking forward to the Bellini villa.” Mak opens a leather case and pulls out a cocktail shaker, glass, and mini bottles of gin and vermouth. “It’s a good thing I brought my own martini.” He casts a dry eye at a stray hen crossing the chipped tiles of the abandoned farmhouse.
“Booze isn’t an issue.” I open the door to an ancient refrigerator. “Jack’s men were staying here, so there’s a full bar lying around. Snacks, too.” I pull out olives and cheese.
Mak pours the mini bottles into the shaker, adds a handful of ice, gives it a brisk shake, then pours himself a glass and adds an olive from the dish. “Christ,” he says, closing his eyes briefly after the first swallow. “I needed that.”
He’s extremely suntanned, leaner than usual, and is sporting enough cuts and bruises to give a fair indication that wherever he’s been spending his time, it’s been less than peaceful.
“You look like you’ve taken a kick or two.”
He lifts a shoulder. “Busy time.” He’s unusually terse.
“I take it from our earlier conversation that the world is headed for some kind of shitstorm.” Oddly, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that it isn’t just my world going to hell.
Mak eyes me over his glass. “Ever heard of the Strait of Hormuz?”
“Nope.”
“You will.” His mouth twists wryly. “And buy some oil stocks. Actually, buy a lot.”
“Noted.”
“Now.” He takes another mouthful of martini. “Talk.”
“You asked me to look through the donations to Hunter’s campaign, because, as Lars put it, of my knowledge of the bodies in the swamp.”
It hurts saying Lars’s name. I mean it physically hurts, like I’m talking around a mouthful of broken glass. And at the same time, it’s easier to talk about him as if he’s still here, instead of thinking of him lying on that fucking table.
We should have heard something by now.
I realize my breath is coming short and that Mak is watching me. I clear my throat and fire up the laptop. “I found something.” My voice is slightly hoarse.
He doesn’t comment, but when he stands up behind me to look at the laptop screen, one hand comes down and grips my shoulder.
It’s a brief touch, there and gone. Coming from anyone else, I’d flinch.
But there is a toughness to Mak that is both understated and undeniable, a comforting sense that whatever one might have endured, he too has known.
“At first,” I go on, “all I could see is that every donation was somehow linked to a corpse, either one I dumped for the Orlovs or one I put in the swamp myself.” I begin flicking through the macabre graveyard of faces, explaining their stories to Mak.
“Some of them donated to his campaign directly. If they did, in most cases the donations were small—but following their deaths, the donations by their families or associates were both larger and more consistent. But when I cross-referenced those donations with the political donations of other victims of organized crime—those killed by the Luccheses, for example, or the cartels—the pattern was the same. It’s logical, really.
” I shrug. “People affected by crime donate to the politician who is running on a platform to clean up the city—or whatever bullshit slogan politicians use to pretend they will eradicate the same criminals who are their major backers.”
I click through to a multipage spreadsheet with corresponding graphs.
“I went back more than a decade for reference, and that pattern was consistent: victims of violent crime, or their relations and associates, donate to politicians promising to clean up their town. Marty Hunter Jr. was just one of many recipients, and not even the biggest one. This was long before he got anywhere near state politics. He was still a small-time Miami-Dade County Commissioner, taking bribes from small-time local businessmen. He had a messy personal life and a burgeoning cocaine habit. He was never going anywhere beyond a local office, and I should know—the Orlovs had such a low opinion of him, they’d made me his handler.
But things changed after this particular disappearance. ”
I pull up the face of Renata’s rapist.
“This piece of shit was a college kid named Carter Thorne.”
Mak’s hand tightens on my chair back. “Thorne,” he says grimly. “Go on.”
“I’d forgotten his name.” I glance at him. “Which is almost embarrassing, since Carter Thorne was the first person I murdered for my own reasons, rather than for the Orlovs.”
I explain the story to Mak, leaving nothing out, even Renata’s name. He pulls out a chair beside me, listening intently.
“In the months following Thorne’s death,” I finish up, “after the media dropped the story and public interest moved on, the donation pattern changed dramatically. At first, there were extremely large donations to a lot of Miami politicians, at a local, state, and federal level. All coming from faceless corporations outside Miami.”
“A fishing expedition.” Mak nods. “Someone wanted to find out what happened to Carter Thorne.”
“Bingo. I knew nothing about the donations at the time, but the fishing expedition I do remember, for obvious reasons.” I smile grimly.
“As it turned out, it was a lucky thing that Renata had come to me and that we’d kept Thorne’s death strictly between us, because nobody had any idea I was involved.
There were no rumblings on the street about who had taken Thorne out.
I was aware of people asking questions, but I was also confident.
I’d covered my tracks extremely well. The only loose end I could see was the lab tech I used to run Renata’s rape kit DNA test, so I went to pay him a little visit. ”
I meet Mak’s eyes. “Turns out he’d recently been found dead in his apartment—from an overdose of his own product.”
He sits back in his chair and pours another martini. “This didn’t raise red flags for you?”
I twist my head slowly. “Not at the time, no. The lab tech was dealing for the Luccheses. According to a senior member of the family, he’d been taken out for shorting them. I had no reason to doubt that story.”
Mak frowns. “Why would one of the Luccheses lie to you?”
“Good question. Unfortunately, it’s too late to ask him.” I pull up a picture of the Lucchese in question. “Because recently the Novikovs took his head off his shoulders.”
“Huh.” He raises his eyebrows. “Well, at least now we know the reason for Kiril Novikov’s sudden desire for Miami scalps.”
“Yep.” I click back into my spreadsheet.
“Back to the donations. A year or so after Carter’s death, we start to see a very distinct pattern emerge, although so slowly that at first it isn’t noticeable.
To everyone’s surprise, Marty Hunter Jr. launches a campaign for state congress, and the donation money starts trickling in.
Suddenly, there’s online buzz, donations to other politicians die off in favor of Hunter’s campaign, and chatter starts that Marty boy might actually go from city commissioner all the way to state congress.
The Orlovs and the Cardenas cartel thought all their Christmases had come at once, since I already had enough dirt on Hunter to ensure he would do exactly what they wanted.
” I click onto another graph. “By the time Marty made it to congress, we owned him completely—and I was his handler.”
I click out of the spreadsheet. “It wasn’t long after all this that I defeated the Orlovs.
The next few years in Miami were ugly, as you know.
A lot of bodies in the swamp, a lot of shifting allegiances.
Through all that, I kept Marty Hunter Jr. on the payroll.
His life got increasingly messy—an unfaithful wife, multiple mistresses, bad drug habit, and growing gambling debts.
Which is why I was so surprised when you mentioned his campaign for governor—and where all this finally comes together.
” I type a name into the search bar. “You might have heard the name Meridian Network. It’s a digital media company. ”
“Founded by one Silas Thorne.” Mak stares at the screen. “Who is Carter’s daddy, I take it?”
“Yes.” I glance at him. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“I know Silas Thorne,” he says unsmilingly. “I ceased being surprised by his zealotry—and the depths to which he will sink to advance it—long ago.”
“Zealotry?” I look at Mak curiously. “Interesting term to describe a media company.”
“Meridian isn’t just a media company,” he says coldly. “It’s a fucking information warfare apparatus. The real miracle is that you managed to even connect Silas Thorne’s name to it. He’s a master of hiding behind shell companies.”
“It was a joint effort.” My throat momentarily closes over at the recollection of bantering with Lars on the phone, just days ago. “It’s also the reason we were meeting here.” I still can’t bring myself to say Lars’s name.
“I see.” Mak’s face is grave. “You stumbled onto a dangerous target, Lex. Make no mistake: Thorne’s crusade to remake the world order is as fanatical as any religious belief, and he’s not above presenting his twisted ideas as a divine plan, and himself as the righteous enforcer.”
“That much I’ve already seen.” I bring up the headlines Dima and Lars showed me weeks ago: “The Pakhan’s Plan,” “The Biscayne Butcher.” “A thousand untraceable bot accounts. All citing nonexistent news articles. I couldn’t work out who was behind the campaign at the time, which is why I shut down my entire operation. ”
“Classic Thorne.” Mak’s mouth is a hard line. “The Meridian Network is a psyop infrastructure that specializes in mass media manipulation, via the creation and viral spread of disinformation.”
“There’s more.” I click onto the Compass Initiative, Kristy Hunter’s college campus organization.
“You already know Kristi Hunter. She’s Marty Hunter Jr.’s nightmare of a daughter, the one who set me up with a fake drug buy in my club.
Well—guess who’s the cofounder of her not-so-little college campus outfit? ”
“Tyler Thorne.” Mak leans forward. “Another one of Silas’s sons, I take it?”