CHAPTER THREE
Tarasovich, after months of radio silence, had popped his ugly head up from whatever hole he’d hidden in during the aftermath of Nikolai Ivanov’s destruction and the wake it left behind in the bloody power grab in Russia’s criminal underworld.
“A firefighter, you said?” I asked as a close-up shot of the mechanism for shooting out the fatal flames appeared on the screen.
“Yes,” Greg replied, stiffening and stilling in the same breath.
CJ and I made eye contact, in sync with one another. CJ voiced our thoughts. “Uh, Greg?”
“It’s Director Miller to you,” Greg corrected. CJ’s eyes rounded, and the director relented. “I’m joking. What are you two thinking?”
“You had Callie hack into the NSA to retrieve a recorded phone call about a fire chief. What was his name, Callie?”
“Hannover.”
“Right. That. Does that have anything to do with this female firefighter who saved the day?”
“That was supposed to be confidential. How did you hear about it, I wonder?” Greg began.
CJ shrugged. “Her own souped-up computer got destroyed the week before in that scuffle with the Macedonians, so she needed to borrow Jarvis Junior 2.0. Anyway, I forced her to explain why she needed so much firepower since I thought our team was on leave, but I really pestered her for the details when she looked so shaken after accomplishing her task.”
Hearing the death of that stranger shook me, but not as badly as the sounds the woman made when she realized someone obviously close to her had been shot and killed. CJ had refused to let me leave his company until I’d divulged every last detail.
Greg looked chagrined. “I hadn’t considered… Callie, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
Payton was far less forgiving. “You solicited one of my teammates without consulting me?”
Greg sighed. “Yes, I did. The matter was time sensitive—”
Payton cut him off. “From the sounds of it, she experienced something traumatic, and your gag order would have ensured she was left adrift, lacking the support of her team.”
“I realize—”
“These protocols exist for a reason, Director.”
Greg collapsed into the chair behind him, scrubbing a hand down his face. His weariness showed when he finished, and I wondered how much of a toll the position he’d been thrust into was taking on him. “Emerson, believe me, I realize now what a huge mistake I made. I’d like to say it won’t happen again, but Callie’s…” He trailed off.
Payton’s jade green eyes landed on me, the sharpness in his jaw softening. “The best.”
“Pretty much.”
“Hey,” CJ protested, though his voice lacked any actual heat.
Jace turned to him. “Don’t worry, baby brother. Callie just has more experience as a black hat hacker, no matter how unwillingly she gained it.”
CJ grumbled under his breath. “I’m barely five minutes younger than you. I’m not your baby brother.”
Jace clapped him on the shoulder. “Then try not to whine so much.”
Greg climbed back to his feet. “Considering you believe this is Tarasovich, you’ll likely need to be debriefed on the situation that pulled me away for months, so I feel comfortable admitting that yes, the phone call and this incident are related.”
He gave a quick sitrep on the time he’d been missing, helping a sister agency, Gamma, get their affairs in order while attempting to disband a large drug cartel that had set up camp in a small, isolated mountain town.
By the time he finished, we’d been apprised of the crucial details. At that point, he broke up his spiel to roll the ball into my court. “Callie? CJ has all the files with him you fought so hard to bring with you when you escaped Ivanov. He found your folder on Tarasovich, but rather than have him muddle through everything in there, why don’t you tell us yourself? Based on the amount of documents you compiled, you’re the expert authority on him.”
Tell them about Tarasovich?
Where did I start?
“Uh, sure. Yeah, I can do that.” After a bit of thinking, I glanced at CJ. “Can you click on the file labeled ‘MG-Compil?’ It’ll probably be the easiest to go chronologically since not all of us had time or a team of workers to prepare a presentation,” I joked weakly.
Still, it garnered some chuckles, likely because they hadn’t yet realized how deep we’d have to dive into depravity to glimpse inside Tarasovich’s head.
“Click on the one that says ‘family.’” The file popped up, boasting large Cyrillic letters above a professional portrait of a husband, wife, and three young children. “Family of four found slaughtered in own home—search for third child underway. As far as I’ve been able to piece together while working backwards from cases I knew he was involved in, this was Tarasovich’s family. It doesn’t say it in this article because it was too gruesome to print for the masses, but I dug up the coroner’s report. The parents, twelve-year-old boy, and nine-year-old girl were hacked to death with an ax in the dead of night. Now, the newspaper assumed the other son, eight, was missing, but we know him to be—”
“Bokaryov Tarasovich,” the director murmured in horror. Taking his chair once more. He shivered as if overcome with chills. “Jesus Christ.”
We were only getting started.
“From there, he lived on the streets for a couple of months. If he killed anyone in that time period, I haven’t been able to determine it. He was living off the grid, probably flying under the radar, and scared of being caught. I don’t think he was active though, because I know he was taken in by the Zakowicz brothers, two Polish thugs who used his thirst for killing, and killing loudly, to make a statement to their enemies.”
“Scare tactics,” Brock surmised.
“Yes. They gave him a home and shelter—things he would have struggled for as a young child wanting to stay far away from any authority figures—and the brothers got a bloodthirsty killer. They encouraged his creativity. The gorier, the better.”
I directed CJ to the correct files, knowing the sequence like the back of my hand.
Most of the research consisted of newspaper clippings I’d cropped and saved, so I gave a brief statement for each or interpreted the ones not in English. “Two members of a well-known street gang found decapitated.” Another photo. “Money launderer and famous warlord burned to death.”
With each subsequent file, the room’s aura darkened.
“Father and son of long-time crime syndicate discovered with heads on pikes.” The pointer icon on the screen trembled beneath CJ’s control, and I hated that we had to subject our most happy-go-lucky soul to such depravity.
I sped up, eager to get to the next chapter but not wanting to skip anything since it showed Tarasovich’s progression into the monster he was today. “Entire cell wiped out, suspected organized hit, all using some medieval form of torture.” My palms sweated, and I rubbed them on my shorts. “Tarasovich seemed to move beyond exploring history’s greatest hits and took another turn in his development with more modern methods.”
Each time CJ clicked, I explained further.
“Man found eviscerated. Man stabbed over one hundred times. Neighbors report bad smell, police find man with hands chopped off by garbage disposal. At this point, he began to really perfect his craft. From there, his fascination with machines and contraptions blossomed. There were several beheadings via a wire contraption. Some men were drawn and quartered with a device of his own creation. On separate occasions, he used a gas chamber and buried someone alive, but never revisited either method. He likes his victims bloody.”
I took a deep breath, needing the cleansing feeling of life to wash away the stench of death. “Within two years, he earned the nickname Meatgrinder. That was a mixed blessing. Becoming so well-known to have a moniker meant he was getting several dozen independent contracts from others. Fortunately, that removed the guesswork from tracking his history. Unfortunately for the Zakowicz brothers, the monster they’d helped create turned on them. Tarasovich, at age ten, killed the Zakowicz brothers using a spinning blade contraption that sliced pieces off of them from the bottom up until they perished.”
Corbin didn’t utter one of his funny alternatives to cursing once, Bryce hadn’t drawled a single sarcastic quip, and the silence from the normally most vocal of the bunch—Brock and Aleks—was telling.
I hesitated on the next part before instructing CJ on what file to click.
“Callie?” Payton murmured. “What’s the matter?”
I licked my lips, staring at the one-way mirrored windows, not seeing any of the bright Norfolk skyline. “With Tarasovich gaining such notoriety for himself, he also dinged on the local government’s radar. People began connecting dots. His actions created mass hysteria in Poland, where he’d wound up after the brothers stumbled across him in Russia. To keep the panic to a minimum, they began censoring the news.”
“So you weren’t able to track his movements?” the director guessed.
“Oh, no, don’t forget I parsed out his whereabouts before he became a big name.”
“Why are you hesitating then?” he asked.
“Are you kidding?” Duane demanded, his eyebrows high in incredulity. “After hearing just the first two years, it makes me sick to think Callie got close enough to breathe the same air as this psycho. If she needs a second to gather her damn thoughts, then we’re giving her a second.”
Greg frowned. “That’s not what I was implying. I’m concerned something else is causing the stall.”
I cleared my throat, interrupting the argument. “Only autopsy and crime scene photos existed for his next dozen victims. They are pretty gruesome. I wasn’t stalling. I was thinking.”
CJ, bless his big heart, squared his jaw and said, “We can handle it, Callie.”
The director held his hand up, halting me. “It isn’t that I’m not thrilled with all the gore—I love me some good gore before I’ve had my afternoon coffee—but perhaps you can recap with fewer details. You’ve already done all the legwork. I’ll have some grunts comb through this later—people not directly involved—and they can generate a list of the important highlights. There’s no need to put yourself through this. Let’s focus on other aspects. For instance, why are all of these files randomly labeled when you’ve clearly put so much stock into building a timeline of his whereabouts?”
“I compiled most of my research when I was with Ivanov.”
Almost on cue, the subject materialized, reclined against the wall with his hands shoved into his pants pockets. “Did someone say my name?” he questioned in Russian.
Resolution filled me, and I kept my gaze locked on the living. “Ivanov hired various hackers to scan my records from time to time.”
“Checks and balances.”Ivanov nodded, sounding pleased with himself.
“Of course, I combated most of their snooping by keeping such a vast amount of documents that even the most determined would give up sifting through the chaos and resort to running keyword searches. As long as I used my coded system for naming files, only I would know the significant, incriminating data.”
“You what?”Ivanov seethed, his presence pulsing out into the room and stealing the air from my lungs. No one reacted to him but me.
“Oh,” CJ whispered, his eyes lighting up. “Like the TOR network on the deep web. You can only find something if you have the direct address. There’s no search engine.”
With effort, I shook off Ivanov’s influence to beam at CJ. “Exactly! The idea—”
Jace had grown accustomed to reining in our tangents, and he cut us off. “Before you two fall into a babbling discussion of techy nerd lingo and leave the left of us commoners feeling like puppies trying to work a telephone, why don’t you continue your recap?”
“Recap of what?”Ivanov demanded.
“Right, of course. Sure, I’ll do that.” My fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on the lacquered tabletop.
When the silence stretched out, the director nudged me in a direction. “Perhaps start with why you have so much research. You said you compiled this list while under Ivanov’s thumb. That seems risky.”
“It was. If he ever discovered these files, he would have killed me immediately—maybe even by his own hand.”
Aleks growled, which I’d always assumed was something reserved for animals and fictional characters. Brock’s hand covered mine, squeezing me once as if he needed the physical reassurance.
I changed topics. “While I’ve relabeled and organized most of the parent files in English since joining Delta, I didn’t want to delve too far into the subsidiaries of this particular history.”
“Why ever not?” Jace quipped. “This is heaps of fun.”
My breath eased out, taking the tenseness from my shoulders with it. His return to sarcastic humor lessened some of my nerves, even if the attempt fell flat with the rest of the room. “As for your second question, Direct—”
“Greg.”
“Er, Greg. Why did I conduct this research when doing so carried a surefire execution? I weighed the risks and decided it was more prudent to know about the threats Ivanov was throwing at me.”
Payton turned to me, his jaw locked. “Explain that.”
I shrugged. “When Ivanov wasn’t tossing me in the tank or ordering Dell to beat me half to death, he liked to say he’d hand me over to Tarasovich, though he called him Meatgrinder. Since I knew nothing about that person, I looked into it.”
“At what age did he threaten you with that?” Payton gritted out.
“I’m not sure.”
“Lie.”Ivanov smiled. “You know how old you were. It’s good to know Meatgrinder was such an effective threat.”
I cleared my throat. “Younger than you probably want to hear.”
“And Tarasovich was obsessed with you, even then?” Greg questioned.
“Well, yes. I didn’t discover this until Tarasovich himself told me when we crossed paths in Chernobyl.” I glanced at Duane since that was where Corbin and I encountered the elevator from hell and gained an inconvenient phobia. “But that wasn’t the first time we met.”
Ivanov’s eyes gleamed. “Ah, I love an entertaining story, especially one as terrifying as this. Go on, Callie.”
Oh, I so didn’t want to, even if it was just to spurn the figment of my own imagination. His transparent face was flushed, as if he derived enjoyment from my hardships.
No, scratch that, he definitely did.
“Byte-syzed?”
I glanced up, meeting CJ’s gaze. His golden, honey-colored eyes had dulled to a sad whiskey brown. After a bit of internal debate, I mumbled, “Click on the file that says, ‘VesAnd.’”
His brows furrowed, and he wasn’t the only one who understood the significance. They were all aware of the men responsible for starting me on this walk of life. “Veseli and Andrea?”
A sardonic grin slashed across my face, hurting as much as a knife wound. “It’s not my best naming code, but I didn’t add this to the file until after Chernobyl.”
What was implied but went without saying was I’d had no need to hide anything. I’d been with these wonderful, perfect men.
“When Veseli and Andrea kidnapped me to have this impressionable, moldable hacker they could use to build their empire, they still lacked any credibility to back up their newfound talent, so they hired an assassin to take out their biggest opposition—someone who would leave a big impact.”
“Tarasovich.”
I’d missed who said it, but I nodded at the article. Three bad guys were in a bottomless pool of greed and corruption, but these held significance to me. They were the catalyst of my life. “Tarasovich. He brutalized the trio and delivered on his promise. It helped launch Andrea and Veseli’s two-man empire. When Tarasovich came for his payment, I was around. I didn’t know who he was then, and I don’t think Veseli quite did either, not until he demanded me as compensation.” Someone hissed. “He said I intrigued him. He believed he was the lone child in the industry, and there I was, the same age as him.”
“And the opposite sex,”Ivanov added.
Unable to help it, my eyes widened and shot in his direction.
He scoffed. “Oh, don’t look so surprised. He was an eleven-year-old boy who’d surpassed his makers—both sets—and was on the verge of manhood. Surely you’ve learned of the pistils and the stamens, what with all your boyfriends.”
“Wait, the birds and the bees?” I blurted, feeling nauseous.
“What?” the director asked.
My cheeks burned. “Nothing, I just had a thought. Could it be that his fixation began because I was a girl?”
“Without a doubt.”
“Of course.”
“Quite right.”
“I’ll kill the bastard.”
The simultaneous voices blended together, but I hazarded a guess that the death threat came from Aleks. It was a sure bet since it was grunted out in Russian, and Brock, the only other person who spoke the language, had gone deathly still beside me.
The idea sickened me, so I moved on, shelving it to examine later—or never. “Veseli never mentioned this and went to great lengths to avoid having our paths cross. As we know now, this ‘coddling’ drove a wedge between Veseli and Andrea. What we didn’t know was that it also provoked Tarasovich to seek other ways to get his hands on me, namely by reaching out to Ivanov—a bigger, badder force. Andrea’s betrayal might have only been possible because Ivanov reached out to him, sniffing out a weak link. We’ll probably never know.”
“Oh, it was. Everything ties back to that kid psychopath,” Ivanov informed me almost cheerily, if the monster were capable of things like happiness.
“But that plan backfired because Ivanov kept me for his own uses instead of handing me over to Tarasovich.”
“The fuck?” Brock boomed.
I frowned at him. “You knew this. I was Ivanov’s pet hacker.”
Brock sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in a manner reminiscent of our team leader. “Sorry, du?o, ignore me. Forgot who was talking.”
With trepidation and one last glance at Brock, I continued. “While Ivanov threatened me enough to know of Tarasovich, he sent me away when Tarasovich was scheduled to stop by. That’s why I never connected the eleven-year-old boy I met once, who I couldn’t even understand because I only spoke English, to the boogeyman behind all the atrocious actions I began unearthing over four years later when Ivanov got his hands on me.”
Silence settled over the room.
Eventually, a knock sounded. The director sighed, “Well, that’s a good launching point, I’d say. Don’t kill me, guys. Remember, I’m the director now, and that would reflect poorly on your yearly evals. So, since we’ve lanced the worst of the sores, let’s bring your new team liaison up to speed.”
There was a collective breath before Payton demanded, “Pardon me, but our what?”