CHAPTER FIFTEEN
All good things must come to an end, and our haven in the mountains did as well. Three days before our arranged meeting, we made the final decision to trust Paride tentatively, because with no access to his resources, we’d be ducks without a pond. Besides, he was risking just as much by willingly stepping on Tarasovich’s radar. Our mutually assured destruction sealed the deal.
We broke down our camp and packed up our belongings. It was sad when they hauled the tub back into town. It’d gotten quite a bit of use the few days we’d had it, and I’d soaked up every minute, literally and figuratively, with the guys. Some deep conversations and heavy confessions had occurred in that bath, and it felt wrong not to leave it as some proof that all this had happened.
Even as we boarded the final train after two consecutive days of traveling, our time spent camping in the woods felt like a distant dream. I smoothly transitioned back into the role of staying low-key, avoiding notice, and clocking cameras’ locations. It’d been a suit they’d forced me into from my teens, so it slipped on with familiarity—a reminder I’d given when more than one person commented on how natural I was at living on the run.
“What’s new,” I explained as we disembarked the train in a run-down, nearly nonexistent station just outside Belgrade as arranged, “is having multiple safe houses.” I hopped down the single step from the platform.
“Don’t stare a gift horse in the mouth, Callie-Cat,” Corbin teased.
“I suppose, but there’s usually a reason they are a gift.”
Which circled us around to Paride and his suspiciously endless ability to acquire the resources we needed. Brock spotted him first, parked in a muddy gravel lot. He’d secured some large van that probably served as a public bus in poor, remote areas throughout the country. I’d taken one such minivan through Poland once during my first year with Veseli, dead convinced that we’d misinterpreted the situation and were boarding someone’s private vehicle with a handful of church goers or something.
We waited until the train departed, since we stood out like a sore thumb as such a large group of Americans in this modest village far removed from any tourist attractions. When the last car disappeared around the bend, we crossed the rusty footbridge.
As we approached, Paride cranked the driver’s window down.
“Hop in. It might be a tight squeeze, but it’s a ten-seater,” was his greeting. In short order, we crammed our packs into the microscopic trunk space—Tetris, eat your heart out—and hit the road. “It’s been a long two weeks. There’s a lot to catch up on. What did I miss?”
“Not much on our end. CJ and Callie put together a working plan to mask any communications with Petrov,” Jace supplied. “Apart from that, we just camped.”
Corbin leaned forward between the front seats. “Uh, yeah, question. Does whatever safe house you’re taking us to have running water? Because I could go for some plumbing right about now.”
“Yes, there’s running water,” Paride replied, glancing up in the rearview mirror after he yielded the right-of-way. “You think whatever you coded will work?”
CJ shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out. We’ve left Callie’s disposable phone off until we get somewhere with working internet to test it.”
“Wait, her burner phone?” Paride questioned. “The one I gave her? There’s no way to trace that to her. Use away. At least see if he has sent anything since he was supposed to get back to you after two weeks, right?”
CJ and I shared a glance.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Well, the satellite phone he left us could act as a hotspot to piggyback off of, or… or we could test it out fully on your replacement computer. You already put your protocols in place.”
Payton, overhearing our discussion, asked, “How far away is the safe house?”
“Just across the Bosnia-Herzegovinian border in a city called Bijeljina, so about two hours, give or take, depending on Corbin’s need for plumbing.”
“Hey!” Corbin protested. “Why’d you have to call me out like that, Parade Day?”
Paride shrugged. “You’re the one who brought it up, and it’s Par-ee-day.”
“If you think I’m fixing what I call you after you threw me under the bus, you’d be mistaken, you shifty little seagull.”
Paride barked out a laugh. “Yeah, you can’t fool me. You weren’t changing your ways no matter what.”
Corbin turned to Payton. “He’s sharp. Can we keep him?”
Disregarding the question, Payton faced us. “Would it be better to test your theory on the road so that we have a chance to lose any tails if something malfunctions?”
“That’s a better idea,” Paride commented, adding his two cents. “I know it might seem like it since I pulled an Airstream out of a proverbial hat, but the number of secured locations I have are finite.”
With that working plan, Brock began pulling apart our carefully stacked supplies, unable to completely repress his smile when he “accidentally” knocked Aleks upside the head with each one.
“Ouch,” Aleks hissed when the corner of my bag caught his temple, retribution in his arctic blue eyes as he switched to Russian. “Hit me in the head with another bag, and your life is forfeit, Boulder.”
Brock smirked, held the irate Russian’s gaze, and did so one more time.
“That’s it,” Aleks barked before he dove at Brock, dislodging Bryce who’d been unfortunate enough to be stuck sitting between them.
Their tussle threw the lightweight van across the lanes, forcing Paride to curse as he scrambled to correct the veer. “Hey, watch it, you two! We’re flying under the radar, not trying to get reported to the local police for drunk driving.”
“Enough!” Payton yelled, his British accent leaking through more heavily in his irritation. He never yelled, but the fact that he did stopped even the childish bickering they’d been reduced to after Paride’s reprimand.
Silence descended.
Payton inhaled a slow, deep breath and glanced at CJ and me. “Now, Callie, Mr. Tate, do you have everything you require to accomplish your task?”
I licked my lips. “Uh, yes, I think so. CJ?”
“Yep, all good here.” He’d been oblivious to any of the tension, absorbed in setting up his gear. My laptop had been the last thing unpacked. It was most likely that the sharp corner of the device’s lid was the catalyst to Aleks’s failed patience, so I rushed to boot it up.
“On the topic of Gulfstreams,” Corbin continued, propping his chin on his folded arms atop the front row’s backrest. “How did you end up ditching that?”
The blinker sounded as Paride merged onto the highway toward Kuzmin. “It’s a harrowing tale involving a shocked Grecian farmer when I crash landed in the middle of his olive groves, an angry Albanian fisher when I co-opted his boat, and then probably a pleasantly surprised Croatian coastal owner when I illegally docked at his run-down but private boathouse. Although, I guess he could have also been mad since I boosted his car immediately after. It’s hard to say with people, and that leg of the journey happened late last night.”
Corbin lifted his hands off the seat as if it were diseased. “Wait, is this van that vehicle? Are we all accomplices?”
“Nah, I never would have made it here in time if I took the whole way by car. I rode the train and wired this puppy up at the train station before our meetup.”
“From some cozy goat herder?” Jace quipped.
“Do you want to walk?” Paride countered.
Apparently, they didn’t.
CJ broke the silence. “Hey, guys? If you’re interested, Callie and I have been connected to the internet for about five minutes now, and black ops hasn’t rained down on us yet.”
“Well, there’s that,” Jace remarked, his sarcasm in full force. He must have needed an outlet after Paride cut his fun short with the threat of hitchhiking.
“We were getting ready to have her log into her usual message center to see if anything happened,” CJ informed them.
“By all means, have at it,” Paride replied.
I manually entered the dark web address. TOR network didn’t have a search engine since that would defeat the point of their illegal websites being difficult to track, but that hadn’t stopped the CIA from clocking the fact that I’d emailed Petrov, so my fingers shook with nerves as I clicked “Go.”
“I’m in,” I whispered, seeing the programming built specifically to communicate with people I’d shared the URL with.
“Okay, how long do you think we should wait before we know—”
Black windows generated over my screen, filling the monitor in a blink and cutting off CJ’s question since he’d been supervising from his own device.
“Oh no,” I uttered softly as a cool wash of dread rocketed my stomach with nausea.
“What?” Brock demanded, leaning forward from the rear row to look.
“Tarasovich,” CJ and I whispered in tandem.
He’d somehow hacked through our protections and found my computer—again.
We were so screwed.