14. Conversations Between Killers #2
Something flares in his eyes. Triumph. Why would he feel triumphant?
I break his ring finger on the same hand.
The popping sound of bone tearing from cartilage is small. His reaction is not. The compound drags a harsh breath from him and sweat breaks out on his forehead.
"Why are you in New York?" I ask mildly.
"Learning his routines." Lars' accent thicker now, but his English is too good for him to have gotten the pronoun wrong.
His routines. Not your routines.
"Whose routines were you learning?"
He doesn't reply.
I break another finger. On his other hand.
The sound he makes is definitely one of pain.
"Procurement and retention of attention," I say. "That’s what the manuals call this part. Keeping you focused on my theme instead of your pain. I find the pain can actually help with focus if applied correctly."
He says something in a vicious tone in Swedish.
I don't ask for translation.
"Whose routines?" I ask again.
"Brogan." Lars swallows. "The boss."
"Why the fuck are you following Brogan?" Did we get this wrong? My mind works furiously as I walk around Lars, so I'm at his back. "Kenneth believes the FBI will arrest me."
So, Lars is not insurance. Not for me.
"Yes," the hitter agrees, revealing two things.
I am not the primary target.
He knows more than a mere lackey would do.
"Are you supposed to kill Brogan Shaugnessy?"
Silence.
Shifting for the right angle, I punch him directly in the liver. With my fist. Not the slapjack.
His body tries to fold forward against the restraints.
The compound magnifies every sensation.
I wait. Patience matters. Too many interrogators rush. Pain without purpose becomes noise. Eventually Lars looks up.
"Are you supposed to kill Brogan Shaugnessy?" The repetitiveness of interrogation is feckin' boring.
But necessary.
"No," he says, his tongue slow to form the single syllable.
"No?" Then why learn his routines? "Or not yet?"
His nostrils flare.
"When?" I demand.
I don't even have to hit him again before he slurs out, "After your arrest."
My arrest? Well, that's confirmation of our supposition. "By the FBI."
Head lolling, he nods.
My phone rings. It's Brogan's ringtone.
Deciding it won't hurt to interrupt my questioning at this point, I answer. "Aye?"
"I just got a very interesting call from Anders Holmqvist."
"Who the feck is that?" Though I can take a guess.
Lars' boss.
"The head of one of the Swedish syndicates," Brogan says, confirming my supposition.
"He looking for his lost man?" I'm surprised they noticed Lars is missing already.
I've only had him in custody a couple of hours.
Brogan expels a surprised breath. "You nabbed him already?"
"Aye." I told Brogan my plan to go hunting after I talked to Wraith.
"Anders claims that Kenneth approached him with an offer of Whisper Gun technology in exchange for offing me." Brogan's tone is cold, no emotion leaking into it to reveal how he feels about his cousin taking out a hit on him.
It should be a lot bleedin' easier to convince him of Kenneth's plans now though.
But paying with the Vanta tech? The product line that transformed our weapons division. Not just the guns, which is feckin' bad enough. But he offered the technology behind the Whisper guns. They might be our smallest volume category, but Vanta sales account for 42% of weapons revenue.
Our mob's holdings are diversified, but if he's stupid enough to give that up, Kenneth would destroy the mob from within.
Not that he'll get the chance.
No one is taking what's mine and the future that belongs to my son. Especially not Kenneth feckin' Shaughnessy.
"You being the target confirms what I just learned from Lars," I tell my father-in-law.
He curses viciously. "Take a break," Brogan orders. "I want to be there for the rest of the interrogation."
I look at my guest. His head is slumped forward, chin in chest, drool dripping from one corner of his mouth. I can dose him with adrenaline if I need to.
"Will do," I agree.
I leave Interrogation Room 1 without acknowledging Lars and find a quiet spot to call Kara.
She's livid about Kenneth offering the tech as payment for her father's death. "Why does he want to kill my father though? I thought his plan was to supplant you."
"I've got some ideas about the why of it, but I want to see what other intel I can drag out of him before I speculate," I tell her as a text from Rory apprises me of Brogan's arrival. "Your da's here. Time to finish this."
"Okay. I love you, Michael."
Something inside my chest twists when she uses that name outside of our lovemaking. Another person might call it a heart, but she's my heart. "I love you, too, mo chiste is a stór."
Brogan is dressed in one of his immaculate suits when he arrives. Ten minutes later, his suitcoat is off and his sleeves are rolled up. His tie is around Lars' throat and he's cutting off the other man's air.
All without saying a single word.
When he loosens the tie so Lars can suck in a breath, Brogan says, "I'm Brogan Shaughnessy. Apparently, you're in my city with the intent of killing me."
"Not kill you," Lars chokes out. "Watch you."
"Your boss said the plan was to kill me after my underboss got sent up by the Feds. That right?"
"Ja." Lars stares blearily at Brogan.
His slip into Swedish for the affirmative says all I need to know about how far past his mental barriers the drugging compounds have taken us.
The whole thing settles into place with a clean click.
FBI arrests me. Kenneth steps into the vacuum, not guaranteed underboss, but close enough if he can panic the right men and play on his family ties to Brogan. After a sufficient interval, Brogan dies and Kenneth blames it on the Swedish mafia wanting to steal our Whisper gun technology.
Kenneth starts a war with Stockholm and inherits what he could never earn.
The incident with Sadie and the boys was meant to damage Fitz, frighten Kara, expose weakness in my family, and force my hand in the wrong direction.
Instead, it pulled Kenneth into the light before he was ready.
It cost him his lieutenancy. It gave Wraith a family to protect and a reason to tear Kenneth’s operation apart from the inside.
Kenneth’s plan wasn’t stupid in design.
But after at least six years of meticulous planning and preparations behind the scenes, Kenneth rushed into action and it cost him. The question is: why?
"Did you tell your cousin about your plans to retire?" I ask Brogan as he constricts the tie around Lars' throat again.
Brogan's grimace is all the answer I need.
"You didn't learn a feckin' thing six years ago, did you?" I ask with bite.
What a lot of people within our mob don't realize is that Brogan has been pretty much a nominal boss since his loose lips nearly cost us all too damn much. He runs Shaughnessy Corp but I've been running the majority of the mob business since then.
Shaking his head, Brogan turns his attention back to Lars and extracts every atom of potentially useful information to our mob he has in his compromised brain.
We learn Kenneth provided information on Brogan's habits, addresses for the warehouse. Lars found the deeds to the apartment houses and traced the shell companies back to Shaughnessy Corp.
Not that difficult since the Shaughnessy's have never tried to hide that they owned the buildings. The shell companies are tax shelters in this case, not obfuscation. Though, we're naturally cautious about making our holdings public record.
Lars knows nothing about The Bunker, but he watched the apartment buildings to gather intel on the mob and our numbers.
He wouldn't have found out much since less than a quarter of our active soldiers make their homes in one of the buildings. But any information is more than we want another syndicate knowing.
He didn't just watch them, or note Brogan's movements either. He watched me. He watched Kara. He knows Fitz attends St. Patrick's.
I prepare a hypodermic with a lethal dose of Special K. No reason to waste another dose of the Triad or Greek's compound on execution.
"You done?" I ask Brogan.
"Yes."
I administer the Special K. Combined with the benzo compound already in his blood, it should stop his respiratory system in about fifteen minutes.
He'll be docile until then. I use the time to get Lars to unlock his cell phone and tell me where his computer is hidden. He's barely breathing by the time he tells me the security protocols for accessing it too.
Blood splatter staining his once pristine white shirt, Brogan washes his hands and forearms in the stainless steel sink against the far wall.
Turning, he dries his hands on paper towels that will go into the incinerator right along side Lars. "Anders accepted Kenneth’s offer long enough to send a man here."
"No alliance then."
"No."
"Why did he call you?" I wash my own hands. Twice.
"He figured out that either Kenneth was lying about giving him access to the Whisper gun tech, or he was too stupid to make a good ally."
"Or the intel Lars gathered was enough for him to know he didn't want to make an enemy of our mob and if Kenneth was stupid enough to offer such a valuable resource in exchange for the hit, he wasn't bleedin' likely to win the power struggle."
"He said something to that effect."
"Making him smarter than your feckin' cousin."
"Not smart enough to turn down the alliance in the first place," Brogan says sourly. "He wants to order Vanta 1s from us."
"I'll put him on the waitlist," I say sarcastically.