Captured By the Pakhan (Dark Mafia Daddies #4)

1. Raven

Raven

"I'm just saying it's a hell of a lot of trouble for a photograph."

Reyes has been chewing on that point for the past eleven miles. I let him get to the end of the sentence before I answer, a man who's been talking that long usually runs out of road on his own.

"It's not a photograph. It's a face." I don't look up from the tablet.

" One that we don’t know right now. Right now, we've got four attacks over the past eleven months, and nothing to put in front of a judge but a nickname.

You get me a face, I get you a name. We get a name, I can get you everything he's ever signed right down to his first drivers permit. "

"And what if the intel is wrong? What if this isn’t the right place?"

"Then we search the entirety of that house –quietly, quickly– and find nothing worth finding."

The truck hits a seam in the asphalt and everybody's teeth click as we’re jolted against gravity.

There are six of us crammed in the back, incognito is the name of the game tonight, black clothes from head-to-toe, bullet proof vests overtop.

Every one of us sweating beneath the thick composit of the vests because the heater's stuck on.

Foster's voice comes through the earpiece from the vehicle following behind. "Twenty-two minutes out."

"Copy that."

I thumb the tablet awake again and put the map up where they can all see it.

"Let’s look at what we know one more time.

In Baltimore, October of last year his group hit a container yard, nothing was taken, four guards were found dead, all of them on somebody’s payroll.

In Newark in February, similar trend. Then the Kowalczyk plant in March, and then Pittsburgh eight weeks ago.

Four hits, four cities, no territory claimed, no tribute demanded, nobody standing up afterward to say that was us.

Just bodies dropped and left to be found without a calling card. "

"Which is the part that doesn't make any sense," Perry says. “Why bother?”

“Mercy killings?”

“Retribution perhaps.”

Several of the men spout off various theories, and I wait for them to settle before I continue.

"That's the same part that makes it interesting.

" I zoom the map out until all four pins fit on one screen and the shape of the locations stops being four dots showing them the way they line-up.

"You hit a rival to take his corner. You hit a port to control moving product through it.

But nobody hits four cities in four states and then goes home. "

"Unless he's not taking corners."

My thoughts exactly. I look up at Perry, he’s twenty-nine and I've had him assigned to me for six weeks and each week I see a little more potential.

"Unless he's not taking corners," I agree.

Louis snorts from the bench across from me. He's got his balaclava rolled up on his forehead like a fisherman's cap, a bowing knife in his hand, he's been cleaning the blade for the last ten minutes. An anxiety behavior pre-infultration I assume.

"Or he's a Russian with a grudge like any other, and we're building him a personality because it's more fun than simply doing paperwork."

"Then he's a Russian with a grudge,” I chide. “Either way, I'd still like to know his face. Serial murder is still a crime in this country."

"The Hellhound." Louis says, chewing on the name the way you'd say a kid's nickname. "Somebody had to have made that up in a holding cell bidding for a plea deal."

"Ya well, you can bet that somebody didn't come home from work," I say. "So either it's nothing, or it's the only true thing we’ve ever been told about this guy. Either way we're going to find out, and I'd rather find out with my mouth shut, unseen, and unheard if you chatter boxes don’t mind."

The stale tone does exactly what I want it to. Reyes looks at his boots. Louis goes back to the knife, Perry examines his hands, and the rest of the truck goes quiet enough that I can hear the tires change pitch when we come off the state highway onto the side streets.

I've had this team for six weeks. Four of them were assigned to me, which is a polite way of saying somebody upstairs looked at my roster and deemed it necessary to add to it.

Two of them, Foster and Perry, I'd take anywhere. The other four spend a lot of energy on the arithmetic of my rank versus my gender, and at this point I’ve stopped spending any energy at all on theirs.

My mentor's motto runs through my head for the hundredth time. ‘You get what you get. You run what you're given.’

"Comms quiet from the fence line," I say.

"Channel two, callsigns and directives only. Perry, you're on the box. Reyes and Ortiz clear the ground floor ahead of the rest, Louis and Boyd take the east wing, I’ll take the office and the upper floor. Nobody opens a drawer they don’t put back exactly as it was.

Nobody moves a chair. If it's got a lens on it, assume it's live even after Perry says it isn't. Be cautious, be vigilant. "

"And if somebody's home?" Ortiz asks.

"Then we're agents standing in a Russian's living room in the middle of the night with no warrant and no jurisdiction with a very interesting, very unpleasant conversation ahead of us." I pull my own balaclava down around my neck. "So let's hope nobody's home."

The house feels wrong before I ever get inside it.

We come up through the tree line on the north side and lie in the wet grass for eleven minutes watching it, and every minute makes it stranger.

It's a private residence. Two floors, stained cedar and pretty stone, the kind of place a dentist retires to.

There's a swing set on the lawn, tilted askew where the ground's gone soft under one leg.

But beneath the beauty and simplicity of the place it's wearing a security perimeter that would put a federal courthouse to shame.

"Tell me what I'm looking at," I murmur.

Perry's got his laptop balanced on a tree root, screen dimmed to almost nothing, eyes lit blue from the visible light.

"I'm looking at three redundant loops on separate power.

Cameras are commercial but the controller isn't. There's a cellular failover and a landline failover and something else — an additional safety mechanism I don't recognize. "

"Is it beatable? Can you get us in?"

"Everything's beatable." He doesn't look up as he says it, eyes locked on the screen, fingers flying over the keys. "But it’s going to take me a while."

"How long is a while?"

"I’ll let you know in a while."

I roll my eyes, great answer.

I get my elbows under me and go back to examining the setting before us through the scope. No vehicles. No body heat reflecting in any windows. Two lights burning that are almost certainly on timers. It appears that our intel was right. Nobody's home.

Still my back teeth won't unlock.

Because here's what experience tells me: you don't put a secure perimeter with multiple levels of fail safes around a place you don't care about. Wealth alone doesn't do that. Fear does.

Somebody spent this much on a house in the middle of nowhere because there's something inside it that can't be replaced.

It takes Perry nineteen minutes to bypass the system and find a way to get us in. When he finally sits back his hands are shaking a little, which I don't hold against him.

"When I do this, three loops go down together and the controller reports a power laps event.

Which is fine — that happens up here, it's the back country. But it alerts somebody the second it comes back online, and it comes back up on its own utilizing back-up power if the main source line doesn’t reconnect.

" He looks at me gravely. "Five minutes.

Maybe five and a half if the generator's slow to kick in. But that’s all I can do.

I can't give you more, and I can't give you a second window, because the second time it happens it isn't a power fluctuation anymore. They’ll know someone's here. "

I nod, accepting the intel. Sometimes, you have to work with what you’ve got, no matter how little it is.

"Five minutes." I key the comms. "All units. Perry's going to buy us three hundred seconds and everyone better make them count. When I say sixty, you're already moving toward the door. Copy?"

Five voices come back through the small comm.

I look at Perry once more, nodding. "Do it."

"Going dark in three. Two–"

The little red constellation along the eaves blinks out all at once, and the house goes blind.

"Go." I say in the comm, my feet already under me. We run, shadows moving through the night. The back door takes Ortiz nine seconds and we're in.

The smell of the place registeres first, it's so aggressively normal that it throws me off — laundry detergent and floor cleaner and, under it, the residual smell of food.

Somebody cooked here tonight. I glance around the room, taking in its features.

There's a small coat on a hook by the door, and two sets of shoes beneath it.

The team splits off in their assigned directions, silence following each of them like wraiths.

The upper corridor is dark, carpeted, and clean. I move down it the way they teach you to — weight rolling through the outside of the foot, weapon low, checking each doorway, not lingering in any of them.

Guest room. Linen closet. Bathroom with a bathmat that’s still damp.

Someone’s here.

“Eyes open.” I whisper into the comm. Code for ‘we’re not alone’.

The office is the fourth door on the right and it's a real office, not just staging.

Two computer monitors, a landline, a printer with a low paper light blinking.

I pull out the digital camera from my vest pocket and photograph the desk before I touch anything, then start searching the drawers, top to bottom, left to right, one hand flat and stabilizing against the front of each so nothing shifts unless I want it to.

The documents I find inside give a plethora of information about potential targets. Freight manifests. Port schedules. A folder of customs brokerage in three languages.