20. Deniz
Chapter 20
Deniz
“ W hat do you mean, she looked intense ?” Emily asks yet again.
I rub the bridge of my nose, trying incredibly hard not to lose my mind. Some switch has flipped in me now that I’ve been inside Clara, and now it’s all I can think about.
“She was watching Clara intently,” I repeat, leaning back in my chair. We’re holed up in Emily’s room, which is about as far away from the still-raging wedding party as possible. “And when Bea walked toward her, she was focused. Dangerous.”
Clara and Emily share a look, communicating silently the way only family can. Briefly, a memory of a similar moment between Kerem and I swims to the front of my mind. Trading rolled eyes and smirks over our father’s complaining about something. The corners of my lips tug up into a smile, warmth spreading through my chest at the thought of him mimicking Baba’s stride down the sidewalk, rambling about street sweepers.
It takes me a second to realize there’s no sorrow associated with the memory. Just…happiness. Bittersweet, yes. But there’s something be autiful about how clear the recollection is, how easily I can hear my brother’s voice whispering behind Baba’s back.
“Hey,” Emily snaps at me, shaking me out of the trance. I swallow hard, trying to focus on the task at hand. “Can you do it?”
I glance at Clara, expecting her to be rightfully annoyed by my lack of attention, but there’s something soft in her eyes.
“Can you look into Bea? We need to determine if she’s connected to the people who tried to kill my mother.”
All the warmth from Clara’s touch disappears, my heart stilling in my chest. If Beatrice was involved in the attack on Lucia’s life, it means she’s responsible for Kerem’s as well.
“I’m sorry, does he not know about this?” Emily asks incredulously, her head swiveling from me to Clara.
“I hadn’t told him yet, no,” Clara admits, her gaze not leaving mine. Emily scoffs, throwing herself back on her bed.
“Look, I know you guys got off to a weird start with the whole blackmail thing, but clearly you’ve found some sort of understanding, based on Clara’s fucking hickeys,” Emily says, not bothering to sit up. Clara brings her hand to her neck, and I can’t help but feel a little possessive, staring at the marks.
“She knows?” I ask Clara, and she gives me a tiny shake of her head. So Emily knows about Clara blackmailing me , but not the stalking.
“This silence means I’m missing something, and at this point, I really don’t want to know,” Emily groans, rolling over to face us. “You going to tell him, or do I have to?”
Clara sits down in the chair across from me, pulling her lip between her teeth.
“Almost two years ago, my mother nearly died in an assassination attempt by an arms dealer named Konstantin.”
Konstantin . The name she searched for in my records. She tells me a story I know, but from a new perspective. Of Lucia’s trip to Istanbul to meet with a confidant from Oman, the fire that nearly killed her, and the unsurprising revelation that Konstantin ordered the hit to remove a barrier from his growing operations. I learn brand new information dragged unwillingly from informants Charlie has tortured, pieces of the puzzle that Emily has gathered through her research and contacts.
“If Konstantin is an arms dealer, why does he care about your work in trafficking prevention?” I ask, trying to keep my temper under control. I assumed that The Syndicate had some idea of who was responsible for the fire, but they know exactly who to blame, and they’ve failed to hold him responsible.
“He wants to expand his enterprise, create a sort of trade empire,” Emily explains, tapping away at her phone as she talks. “Drugs, guns, humans. He’s a renaissance man.”
“And you haven’t killed him.”
I can’t look away from Clara. There’s a familiar rage in her eyes, twin to what I’ve felt for so long about Kerem.
“If wishing made it so,” Emily grumbles, oblivious to the tension strung between me and Clara. “He rarely leaves Vladivostok, and he’s surrounded by spies. They report anyone who comes in and out of the city, and when he actually does leave Russia, he does so surrounded by dozens of armed guards. He’s paranoid, but he’s also ridiculously rich, so he pays to keep himself protected.”
There’s a few beats of silence where Clara and I stare at each other. She wants him dead, as much as I do. In the few times I’ve seen her interact with Lucia, it’s clear how much she loves and respects her mother, and how her brush with death shook Clara.
We have a common enemy. And while I can’t say I don’t blame the Costas at all for the events leading to Kerem’s death, at least for now, I can help both of us.
“Why do you think Beatrice is involved?” I ask.
Emily and Clara go back and forth, filling me in on Bea’s history, including the treatment by her mother, her father Enzo’s death, and her involvement in Gia’s team.
“Bea’s always been secretive. It’s a part of her job, and she does it well. But I need to be certain we can trust her, and we can’t do that until we know she’s not the mole Charlie and Gwen’s informant told us about,” Clara sighs, slumping back in her seat. She must be exhausted—she didn’t get the rest I did.
“You’re a computer expert, right? Surveillance and shit. You can look into Beatrice’s movements and figure out if she’s meeting with Konstantin’s people.”
Emily’s request seems simple, but Clara knows better. Because I already have looked into Beatrice, into the entire Costa family. Doing this research with Emily in the room is out of the question, if Clara wants to avoid her cousin quickly realizing that this isn’t the first time I’ve looked into the Costa family.
“Fine, but I need to set up in our room,” I agree, standing and holding my hand out to Clara.
“Ugh, just don’t spend all your time fucking each other.” Clara rolls her eyes, but I can see a slight blush crawl across her cheeks. “Bea will be gone tomorrow morning, and if we need to contain her, now is our best chance,” Emily says, leaning over to her nightstand and grabbing her laptop. Clara and I leave her room, hand in hand.
Clara stands behind me, leaning over my shoulder as I pull up endless scanned documents and files on my laptop. This would be so much easier with multiple screens.
“Beatrice was the hardest Costa to track down when I first started looking into your family,” I say, and Clara shudders lightly. I can’t tell if it’s revulsion or attraction to the stalking, but I leave it be for now.
“Can’t you just like, hack her or something?” she asks, probably to annoy me.
My fingers still on the keyboard, and I take a calming breath. The last twenty-four hours have been so ridiculous, my emotions are worn ragged.
“Or you could give me access to Costa records. Finances, medical documentation…” my voice trails off as I catch the look on her face. “That’s what I thought.”
The room is silent, save for the hum of the computer’s fan and soft tapping of the keyboard. I move quickly as the hours pass, filtering from video to document, trying to piece together some sort of logical trail.
“She’s got an apartment in Tokyo, and I think her mother still keeps a room for her in her home in Spain,” Clara tells me, giving me more to go off.
“What about close confidants? Other than your family.”
Clara’s silent, staring blankly at the screen.
“She spent a lot of time in East Africa a few years ago, but I don’t know who with,” she admits, cracking her neck in discomfort.
“I’ll start in Spain and work from there.”
She paces the room for over an hour, watching me open and close files, search databases and access accounts that I barely glance at. I’m aiming for efficiency, like a magnet hovering over the sand, picking up treasure to examine and leaving the rest to be discarded.
I leave a few tabs open. The deed to Bea’s loft in Tokyo. Records of utility usage that show ebbs and flows based on when she’s in the city. Flight paths with layover times highlighted. Her college transcripts from Georgetown. Soon the screen is filled with so many records and documents, videos and photos, that I go cross-eyed trying to piece them all together.
“What’s in Kobe?” I ask, suddenly pulling a pattern out of the video footage I’ve been fishing through. Clara stares at the screen, trying to piece together everything in front of us.
“What do you mean?” She asks, leaning against the couch arm and watching a video of a packed bullet train, Bea nowhere in sight. “I know she’s been to Japan a few times, but from what I remember, she prefers Nagoya and Tokyo.”
“She’s been going to Kobe three to five times a year, for at least five years. Maybe more. I have to keep digging,” I reply absently, scanning another document on the screen before closing it. The train video keeps playing up in the corner.
Clara blinks at the screen, seeming a little shocked. “How do you know that?”
I pull the video up to full screen, tapping the bottom corner of the recording.
“That’s her,” I say, pointing at the back of Bea’s head.
Her expression is incredulous, but I’m confident in what I’ve found.
“That could be anyone,” she scoffs, watching the screen again as I fast forwards through the video until the person walks off the train at Shin-Osaka. “See, you never see their face.”
“Clara, there are dozens of cameras, in the trains and at the stations. And at every one,” I explain, bringing up more and more feeds until tiny boxes fill the display in front of us, “her face is hidden from the camera. No one does that by accident.”
I pull up more footage, not always from the San’yō Shinkansen line, but also from the Nishi-Kyūshū, Tōkaidō, and Hokuriku ones. Each time, a slight figure buries herself in the hustle of bodies, refusing to lift her eyes from the ground. She avoids cameras when she can, clearly knowing where they’re positioned on the trains, but also hides her face and body with oversized coats, scarves over her hair, sunglasses concealing her eyes.
I pull up a slew of documents, mostly scanned papers and captured emails.
“Usually she goes when she’s already in Tokyo, but she’s not at that apartment very often,” I say, gesturing to the utility meters. “When she comes from abroad, sometimes she flies commercial, but private airline records are easy enough to access.” Clara raises her eyebrows again. “Bored luggage handlers and flight attendants are more likely to click phishing emails than vigilante crime syndicate members. Anyway, she’ll fly into Tokyo, or sometimes Busan or Shanghai and take a boat, but she always ends up at the Shin-Osaka train stop.”
“Okay,” she acquiesces, drawing the word out as she scans through the customs reports. “Where does she go once she leaves the train station?”
I click my tongue against my teeth, my focus unbreaking as I track her through security cameras.
“Different hotels, for the most part. Sometimes restaurants. I can’t find a clip of her meeting anyone in public yet, but I’ll keep looking. It would be helpful if I knew who she might be meeting.”
“The Yakuza have operations out of the Osaka Bay,” she says, pulling the mouse from under my hand and zooming in on the map of the Port of Kobe. “They work with our family sometimes, but only as it suits their needs. We’re not allies.” She pauses. “They also work with Konstantin.”
I pull the mouse back and continue searching, breathing through my nose to control the anger bubbling to the surface once again.
“Unless she’s doing Syndicate work under my mother’s direction, there’s no reason I wouldn’t be aware of a mission in Japan, especially one that has lasted at least five years. She could be there for personal reasons…” Clara trails off as I pull up a video with much grainier footage.
“Ten years,” I say quietly. On the screen a sliver of a much-younger Beatrice disappears into a spa resort, her face mostly shrouded by the hood of her raincoat.
“We have to confront her. Now,” Clara murmurs, staring unblinkingly at the image. “Emily’s right, we might not get a better chance.”
“You think that’s safe? In a house filled with your family?” I ask, reaching for her hand. She doesn’t pull away when I slip my palm against hers, and I think it’s a shock to both of us.
“My mother’s the one person who could—or would—intervene, but we’ll keep this quiet,” she says, reaching into the nightstand and pulling out a pistol. I didn’t even know she’d been in this room before now, much less hid a weapon here. “We need to change. Time to go interrupt the bride and groom.”