3. Maksim
MAKSIM
The morning of the shipment came, and it was immediately clear that something wasn’t going as planned. No amount of double-checking details the night before mattered.
I arrived at the mansion to ride with Adrik to supervise the receipt of all the weapons down near the border.
A crew was already prepared for the flight and short drive.
Ample security would come with us. I routinely checked over large shipments to make sure everything was moving as it should.
Adrik didn’t need to come with me, but with this being the first major arms shipment since our father’s stroke, I suspected he wanted to be seen as in charge and hands-on, in case another could assume we didn’t have a leader for the time being.
Staying in the relative public’s eye—at least in our world—was a smart goal.
I was early, but from the look on his face, my punctuality wouldn’t matter.
“Ready?” I asked him as a greeting, entering the mansion.
He gave me a stony glare. “Ready for what?” he asked tersely.
Elena winced, walking with him. “Morning, Maksim.”
“Morning. What’s going on?”
“Well, um…” She bit her lip and glanced up at Adrik. He was in a mood, clearly, and she was her usual quiet and timid self. I was sure she’d eventually grow out of her shell and be less skittish and nervous, but right now, something was clearly on her mind.
“I was checking some things in the accounts this morning—earlier this morning, I mean.” She cleared her throat and glanced up at Adrik again.
“Don’t tell me there’s more bullshit about insufficient funds for this shipment,” I replied, deadpan.
“No!” She shook her head. “No, no. That’s not it. And that can’t happen anymore. Not when I’m supervising the accounting and…”
She didn’t need to remind me of why else there wouldn’t be any bogus excuses for any of our business commitments not going through.
Her father was the one who was playing with the accounts when we were still letting him think we were using Morovov Financials as our banking provider.
Adrik had killed him, and unless John Morovov was back from the dead, no one would be messing with our accounts again.
Elena was running the accounting now with Sacha and Igor’s help.
But something was clearly wrong if they both appeared stressed like this.
“The money was moved for today’s shipment.”
I nodded, respecting her wishes to not know all of the details about what we did. She knew. She wasn’t that na?ve. But she slept better by only seeing the numbers and labels in her spreadsheets. Sparing her the fact that this shipment was for guns wasn’t a hard accommodation to make for her.
“And it was processed, but within ten minutes of the money being sent, it was refunded.” She paused, wincing again while I tried to process that.
“Why?” I glanced from her to my brother, then back again.
She shrugged.
“They took the money and gave it right back,” Adrik said.
I shook my head, not following. “Did they want it sent to an alternative account or something?” I never dealt with the intricate mechanisms of the banking end of what we did.
Delegating those tasks to the proper people or service providers was how my father kept our empire profitable like a well-oiled machine.
I just knew that they would see to it that things got done.
“No.” Elena shook her head. “Sacha’s been looking into that and reaching out to the, um, the…”
“Cartel,” Adrik finished for her. “He’s been trying to contact them, and no one from the Garcia outfit is answering.”
I sighed, reaching for my phone and ready to intervene and ask what the fuck was going on. He held up his hand, though, making me pause. “That’s not all.”
I narrowed my eyes, bracing myself for more trouble.
Right then, Viktor and Lev entered the house, joining us. Viktor shook his head, scowling, as they approached. “Dean just called.” He faced me but deferred to Adrik before he opened his mouth to speak.
Adrik cleared his throat and sent him a warning look. “Elena?”
She nodded and backed up. “Right. Um, yeah. I’ll go. I’ll be in my office if you need me. But as of right now,” she said, frowning at me, “no money has been collected for this shipment.”
We moved outside under Adrik’s guidance. He probably wanted to avoid going up to his office, which would be nearer Elena. If he was trying to keep things out of her earshot, stepping outside onto the wide porch was quicker.
“Dean called,” Viktor repeated. “The shipment’s been compromised.”
“Fuck.” I turned away for a second and scowled. “How? When?”
“The guns never showed up at our handoff site,” Lev said.
I furrowed my brow. “Why? It’s the same one we’ve always used with Garcia.
” The Garcia Cartel was an old alliance and a solid business partner.
My father had arranged the lucrative trade deal with Miguel Garcia when I was just a boy.
“Are they fucking with us because Father’s no longer in the lead and he’s taking over? ” I shared a look with Adrik.
“No.” Viktor shrugged. “At least, not as far as I can tell.”
“Dean’s at the handoff site,” Lev said.
I nodded. “Yes. I wanted him there early, just in case.”
Sometimes, the logistics of getting things over the border had to be flexible. Deliveries could happen sooner or later than expected. The presence of the border patrol and any Feds at the sensitive area between the countries made the exact timing of shipments an unpredictable variable.
But that was nothing new. We weren’t testing this out as a first-time endeavor.
“And he’s seen no sign of the Garcia runners,” Lev added.
“Instead,” Viktor said, “they’re being spotted further east. They’re heading to hand off the guns we wanted to the Hernandez Cartel.”
“What?” My anger and frustration spiked into a maelstrom of fury. “They’re all the way over in fucking Texas?”
“Dean sent a couple of men out to investigate. They’re still on the road, but it looks like Garcia changed something last minute. He’s sending our guns to the Hernandez crew in Texas.”
What the fuck?
What the actual fuck?
I paced, trying to process and slot this new information as quickly as possible. Any change in the delivery should have been given to me, in advance. I had just gone through the texts and emails that I had with the Garcia liaison. Everything was set up to go as planned.
Arturo Garcia somehow deciding to swap the delivery location and give the guns we expected to a rival Cartel didn’t add up.
“It must be some kind of error or something?—”
“No.” I cut off Lev’s guess. “This isn’t a fucking error.
Everything was planned.” Nothing about this was new or different.
We’d bought guns from the Mexicans too many times to count.
Our father had done business with both Miguel and Arturo Garcia.
Nothing should’ve been different with this run.
“I doubt this is something as simple as a fucking mistake.”
Adrik caught my attention, watching me closely. “What are you thinking this is, then?”
“It stinks like goddamn sabotage. Like he is up to something, reneging on a standard deal that we’ve gone through before.”
Adrik rubbed a hand over his face, not losing his stony glare. A hit of guilt filled me with the fact that he was relying on me to make this go smoothly. I was letting him down.
“It’s clearly an issue with the sender,” I said, shoving aside the guilt and focusing on solving this. “We have the funds. They accepted the funds. It’s not a flaw on our side.”
“Maybe there is, though,” Viktor said. “Maybe they were heading to bring the guns as expected, but something went down near the border.”
Again with the concerns about the Feds. He’d just brought it up last night with me. Worrying about the Feds was something we’d always have to do, but any increased presence of federal agents at the border wasn’t something the Garcia Cartel or our runners couldn’t handle.
“If they had to reroute temporarily, fine,” I said. “But to end up with the Hernandezes and give them the guns instead? No. Something’s fucked up with this.”
More than anything, loyalties should’ve held firm. The Garcias did business with us so we could distribute on the West Coast. If they were taking guns toward Texas, which would mean distribution to the East Coast, they had to have a whole different arrangement going on.
My phone rang, cutting them off from adding anything else.
Seeing that it was Dean, I hurried to answer. He was my go-to for this run.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. I’d insist that every one of the men beneath my direct supervision tell me everything, all facts as they were revealed.
“The fuckers changed the plans. At the last minute,” Dean replied. The distant sounds of traffic on the highway filled in the background of his end. “Garcia decided to swap the locations and we’ve got nothing here.”
“The Hernandez Cartel got the shipment?” I asked.
“Yeah. They fucking did.” He cursed but got ahold of himself quickly, too good under the pressure of his job to let his emotions get the better of him. “I’ve got a scout hiding near their handoff. They’ve got our shipment.”
“Were there any issues with the Feds or Border Patrol?” I asked.
“No. Nothing other than what we’d expect. It’s like they didn’t even fucking plan to head north to us like usual. They went over on Route Twenty, and they had to have left yesterday for the different drive.”
What in the fucking hell?
Why are you messing with us?
Arturo Garcia must have had some reason to change plans that would end up with our shipment of weapons landing in enemy territory. While the Garcia Cartel were old partners and associates in trade, the Hernandez Cartel firmly was not a friend of the Bratva.
A thought struck me almost instantly, but I didn’t care for the implication.
Arturo Garcia knew that we were good for the money and a solid partner. But something else must have motivated him to change his plans out of the blue.
Not something, but someone.
I shared a look with Adrik, convinced his brain was firing the same as mine was, such that he’d reach the same conclusion.
Is someone else competing with us? Another power trying to push us out of this tried and tested smuggling operation?
Only one name came to mind.
The mere notion of my uncle interfering with our business—again—pissed me off.
“I’m going to meet with him,” I told them all. I directed my intentions to Adrik, but they could all assist me as they saw fit. “Arturo Garcia owes me an explanation for this last-minute change.”
And if he didn’t persuade me that the relationship between his Cartel and our Bratva was still in good standing, he would soon learn the lesson of what happened when someone was designated as our enemy.