Chapter 15 Kat
KAT
PLAYLIST: LOVE SURROUNDS YOU – RAMSEY
Ilove the thrill. My entire life, I have been balancing on a parapet, tempting fate to push me over the edge. Always have. Always will. Never happened.
The part of me that loves the thrill wanted me to be caught by Hannigan when I dropped off my little gift. It’s the same part that wants to find out if Lilian really would live up to her words: Kill me.
My mouth tilts into a daring smirk.
She wants to kill me.
And I have to kill her.
Sounds about right to me.
The gift took me three days of tracking to find out who fired the shot at her. Another two to get to him. One to get everything I needed out of him.
And now, I am no closer to any resolution than before.
I know the Lords targeted Lilian and Sutton under contract, but I don’t know why or who exactly is behind it.
The only way to find out is to confront one of the most dangerous groups in the country, possibly the world.
They are extremely good; they kill without hesitation, leave no trace, have friends in high places, and vanish like ghosts.
I have circled around them for a reason, and so has my mentor.
It was she who taught me stay as far away as possible.
What I am about to do will end badly, I know it, but there is no other way, because no one touches Lilian. If someone kills her, it’ll be me, and no one else. They already took Sutton from me; I will have her. A dangerous predator growls in my chest right now, one that is ready to lose everything.
Maybe it’s a good thing I still have a cover right now—I’ll use Ella to go after the Lords, even if it means I have Hannigan and Zeus breathing down my neck the moment anything connected to Ella surfaces.
“Rosalia,” I say when I dial the number.
“Are you in trouble?” she asks me.
“No, yes, maybe,” I say. “No. But I need you to tell me everything you know about the Lords.”
Silence.
“Don’t do it, hun,” she says.
“I have to,” I say. “I have to.”
“Sutton is dead,” she says. “What else is there?”
I don’t know what to tell her. She will call me stupid and crazy if she ever finds out why I am going after the Lords.
“Oh, honey,” she says with a sigh. “I hope she’s worth it.”
Rosalia has trained me year after year, after year. She knows me. And I cannot lie to her.
“Just tell me what you know,” I say.
“The Lords’ work is decentralized and conducted via a network in the shadows. They have a broker who makes the deals and acts as a bank. No money trails, no names, no nothing.”
A broker.
“Do you know how I get to him?”
“No. I have never encountered him. There is only a rumor I heard.”
“What rumor?”
“You cannot find them until they want to find you.”
I understand. I need to put myself on their radar.
“Thank you, Rose,” I say.
“Be safe, Kiddo,” she says and hangs up.
What neither Rosalia nor the Lords know is that I now have something they won’t see coming: Zeus on a closed system.
The laptop I took from Lilian's office. By doing so, I not only broke her trust but now also officially conspired against the government of the United States—but it was a one-in-a-million chance, one I had to take.
Lilian does well to hate me.
I take every precaution I can before I open the laptop. Meaning I use an open network in a cafe with no surveillance, wearing a hood pulled deep over my face and glasses to conceal myself even as Ella.
I don’t know Zeus's code, so I don’t know which parts are on-device and which use cloud computing and require closed server access.
What I know is that there will be security mechanisms in place to handle external requests within the closed system, so I am ready to either vanish quickly or defend myself.
My plan is to act as quickly as possible, fetch what I need, and become a shadow again.
I have to crack the password first, but since I saw nine of the sixteen digits she typed, my cracking tool cracks it in under ten seconds.
Lilian's search for the employee is still open, and I cross-reference him to everything I got from the man I killed. First and foremost, locations and contact overlaps.
Zeus gives me four results. Three communications to the same number, one time in the same place. A warehouse in New Jersey, owned by a company named Iscariot Industries. It makes me suspicious. Because Judas's last name, the one who betrayed Jesus, was Iscariot.
I make Zeus give me a movement map of both of them and let it overlay, because I get suspicious. The movements are almost identical, with only three outliers, and I wonder if Zeus could find other people with a similar movement map.
It takes ages, and I glance around nervously, watching the street outside through the cafe’s glass doors. My breathing is agitated. I didn’t plan on being here that long, and every minute bears more risk.
Just when I think I need to stop it, I get a result.
Four more people. All with a contact named Wes Peter, but with different numbers.
And I finally understand.
Wes Peter is the broker. It has to be.
I set Zeus to generate a list of all the numbers it can find for known persons with a contact named Wes Peter; it’s quite long, and I’ll handle the rest with my tools. I pull it onto an external drive. I need to leave.
One name draws my attention, and I freeze.
Robert Grand-Hives. The UK Prime Minister.
“I’ll be damned,” I whisper as I understand that everything is connected. Everything.
I close the laptop and slip out of the cafe’s back door as a precaution, enter the subway two minutes later, and become a nobody among the everybodys.
While I ride the subway, my mind sorts and stacks the new information.
I change subways at the last possible moment at 6 Av, and check if anyone follows me, but no one does.
I pull out my laptop and check what I can find about the building and the company the employee went to.
From what I find, it smells like a shell corporation. The people running it don’t have any digital trail, nothing.
I can hack into the camera system from a building across the street to see part of the warehouse, but nothing appears out of the ordinary.
I’ll take a look in person. Afterwards, I’ll go after the four people with the same movement map.
It takes me an hour to get there, and I walk past the building, checking the entrances and exits.
There are several, many of them have no cameras.
I can’t see anyone in the warehouse and hear no movement, nor do I get any signal from an open Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection, so I choose an unsurveilled door and pick the lock.
Inside, I draw my gun and have a second magazine, a second gun, a tear gas grenade, and a knife ready.
I walk silently through the building, corner by corner, and find absolutely nothing. I even check for trapdoors, secret rooms, or any kind of bodily traces, like blood or hair. But there is nothing. It is almost too clean.
They might’ve had cleaners wiping down the building. I need to check whether there are any camera recordings of the building across the street. Maybe it got an image of someone entering.
I walk back to the exit I came through and put my gun back.
I open the door, and three guns are pointed at me.
“Hands up!” shouts a man with shaved hair and piercing dark eyes. The first thing I notice about him is an SS Siegrunen tattoo on his neck, which confirms this building has something to do with the Lords.
I move my hands up as I assess the situation. I could jump away and close the door in their faces, but the chance of success is too slim. I also want information, so I’ll let them take me. Coming this close to the Lords is as dangerous as it is intriguing.
Another one of the guys steps up to me, grabs my arms, handcuffs me, and pushes me inside.
“Who are you?” asks the man with the neck tattoo while I am dragged inside. He seems to be the leader of the three, because the others do what he says.
I keep my mouth shut.
Both my guns are taken.
“Talk,” shouts the man, and pushes his gun into my chest. Men like him are all the same.
Power-hungry idiots with an ego issue who try to get up the food chain by violence.
They are the ones who absolutely hate it when women don’t do what they want, lose their shit, and make themselves vulnerable by it.
I am ready to provoke him by ignoring him.
I get hit full in the face with the gun, so hard I almost trip over.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
I spit some blood on his shoes when I get up. Pain throbs through my cheek into my eye, but it isn’t the first time I've been beaten up, and won’t be the last.
I let him hit me, so he doesn’t see I am fumbling with the handcuffs, and I also analyze his way of moving. He reveals his way of attack and interaction, and the next time, I’ll use it to my advantage. I’ll kick him and strangle him with my legs alone.
“Talk now, or you’ll wish to be dead soon,” he threatens me. I continue to ignore him. I have already fumbled the standard handcuff key out of the hidden pocket in my sleeve.
At that moment, he shoots my left arm. The key almost slips from my fingers as my hands clench into fists, and I gasp away the pain.
I am so going to murder him now. My body switches into attack mode.
I quickly assess the situation and plan my move. One of the other guys is watching the door, and the other positioned himself in the back, thirty degrees to my left. It’ll be a close call and needs absolute perfection to hit them all in a matter of three seconds.
The handcuff on my right arm slips open. I chose to free my leading hand, although I have trained my left hand very well.
“Your choice,” says the leader, his arm outstretched, gun pointing at me. I duck, grab his arm with the gun in his hand, and pull, so he stumbles. He is unprepared, and I use it to my advantage.
I shoot the two other men with the gun in his hand before I kick the back of his knee, bring him down, pull his arm back, and push my full weight, knee first, into his back.