22. Vadim
VADIM
I wake before Sloane does, and for several minutes I remain exactly where I am because moving would require acknowledging what I did last night.
She’s asleep on her stomach beside me, one arm folded beneath the pillow and the sheet tangled low around her hips. Her hair is everywhere, dark against the white linen, and the room still carries the evidence of the night in a way that makes pretending it was a lapse in judgment impossible.
Clothes are scattered across the floor. One pillow is near the foot of the bed. The sheets look as though someone tried to fight their way out of them. I know exactly how that happened.
Sloane shifts in her sleep and turns her face slightly toward me, but she doesn’t wake.
I should feel satisfied. Instead, guilt settles in almost immediately.
It has nothing to do with the fact that I slept with her. I wanted her, she wanted me, and there was nothing unclear about that by the time we ended up in this room.
The problem is everything surrounding it.
I still don’t know who put the tracker in her bag.
I still don’t know who arranged her assignment to my aircraft, whether the timing was coincidence, or there’s more to it.
Last night I let myself forget all of that because she was beneath me, touching me, looking at me as though there was nothing in the world she wanted more.
That was irresponsible.
I have survived this long because I don’t confuse desire with trust.
With Sloane, I seem determined to do exactly that.
I look at her again. She appears harmless asleep.
That means nothing. Some of the most dangerous people I have known looked harmless until the moment they were not.
I get out of bed carefully, retrieve my trousers from the floor, and dress without waking her. Before leaving, I pull the sheet higher over her back because the room has cooled during the night. Then I stand there for several seconds, irritated with myself for doing it.
By the time I reach the lower floor, Anton, Marek, and Iosef are already waiting in the smaller dining room beside the study.
Iosef has recovered enough from his dramatic hospitalization to look almost normal again, although there’s still a faint pallor beneath his skin and he has a glass of water in front of him instead of coffee.
Marek notices me first. His eyes move over my shirt, then toward the staircase behind me. Then he looks past me again, as though he expects someone else to appear. “Good morning.”
I sit down. “Don’t start with me right now.”
“I only said good morning.”
“You were about to say something else.”
Marek looks wounded. “I’m offended by the assumption.”
Anton opens the folder in front of him.
Iosef doesn’t bother pretending he’s not looking toward the staircase. “What happened here?” he asks, looking around the office. “This room definitely looked more organized yesterday.”
“Nothing that concerns you,” I say coolly.
He smiles. “The housekeeper passed me on the stairs and looked traumatized.”
“She will recover.”
“I hope so.”
Anton exhales. “Can we discuss the actual problem?”
“Yes.”
Iosef reaches for a tablet on the table. “We have found something concerning.”
That removes the humor from the room.
“What?”
“Sloane’s payment for her assignments last month cleared yesterday,” Iosef says, sliding the tablet across the table toward me.
I look at the figure on the screen and frown almost immediately. “What is this?”
“Like I said, the payments for the flights she took.”
“No.”
I look at it again. The transfer came through the aviation staffing company that handled Sloane’s assignment, which would ordinarily make it unremarkable, except that I own the company and know exactly what its contractors are paid.
“This is too high.”
“Much too high,” Iosef says. “Her agreed rate was entered correctly when she was booked, but the amount that actually left the agency account was several times larger.”
Marek leans forward to look at the screen. “How much larger?”
Iosef tells him.
Marek’s expression changes. “That is not an administrative error.”
“That’s what concerns me,” Iosef replies. “The agency records show the correct amount until the final payment authorization, and then someone manually altered it before release.”
I look at him. “Who approved it?”
“That’s what we’re tracing now. The authorization credentials belonged to someone inside the company, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the person whose credentials were used actually made the change.”
Anton folds his arms. “So somebody with access to one of Vadim’s own companies quietly pays Sloane far more than she is supposed to receive on the same day a tracker hidden in her bag leads Petrov’s men to the aircraft.”
“Yes.”
The room goes still.
I look down at the transfer again. That is no longer something I can dismiss as unfortunate timing.
If an outside company had paid her, there would be dozens of explanations worth examining. This payment came from an account I control, through a company whose payroll structure I understand, and somebody interfered with the amount after Sloane had already been assigned to my flight.
Marek watches me. “She knows you own the aviation company?”
“Yes.”
“And she knows you can see its payments?”
“I doubt she has thought about it.”
Iosef shakes his head. “If she arranged this herself, doing it through one of your own companies would be remarkably stupid.”
“That doesn’t make it harmless,” Anton says.
“No, but it changes the question,” Iosef replies. “We are no longer asking only whether Sloane was paid. We need to know who inside the agency altered the payment and why they wanted the extra money to appear as legitimate wages.”
I look at the number again. The implication is obvious. If someone intended to frame her, this is useful evidence. If she is involved, it’s equally useful as payment disguised inside an ordinary transaction.
Either way, somebody expected us to find it eventually.
Marek picks up the tablet and studies the authorization trail again, his earlier amusement gone now that the problem has moved from Sloane’s bank account into one of our own companies.
“So either someone inside the agency is compromised, or someone with enough access to imitate an internal authorization wanted the payment to look legitimate,” he says. “Neither option is particularly comforting.”
Anton leans over his shoulder and looks at the entry. “Can we identify the account that changed it?”
“Eventually,” Iosef says. “The credentials belong to a payroll manager in New York, but she says she never touched the file after the original amount was approved. Her log-in was used remotely less than an hour before the payment batch closed.”
“From where?”
“We’re still tracing that.”
I look at him. “How long?”
“Not long.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
Marek glances at me. “He has been out of hospital for six hours and you are already bullying him.”
“I was admitted for observation, not resurrected,” Iosef sniffs.
“You fainted.”
“I didn’t faint.”
Anton looks at him. “You slid down a wall.”
“My blood pressure dropped,” Iosef says. He ignores Anton and looks back at me. “The payment matters because it was changed after she was assigned to your aircraft. Whoever did this knew she was going to be there.”
That silences the table.
I look at the authorization time again. He’s right.
“It’s likely she’s being set up,” I say.
“Or there’s something else we can consider, something that makes her obviously guilty,” Anton says. “Which is the fact that she had inside help.” I look at him. He doesn’t back away from it. “We have to consider that.”
“I know,” I say, slightly irritated.
Iosef watches me for a second too long. “You slept with her.”
Marek turns toward him immediately.
Anton closes his eyes.
I stare at Iosef. “That has nothing to do with this.”
“It has everything to do with how you interpret it.”
“I’m interpreting evidence.”
“You’re trying to,” Anton says. “And failing spectacularly.”
“Careful now,” Marek says. “You’re still talking to the Pakhan.”
I can tell he wants to argue against that. But he says, “I apologize, sir.”
I hate when they do that.
I turn back to him. “You have something else to say? Speak freely.”
“Yes. You are walking into dangerous territory, and I don’t mean because she might be involved,” Anton says.
“Then what do you mean?” I say.
“You want her to be innocent,” Iosef says. “If this were anyone else, you would already have them separated, questioned, and monitored by people who were not emotionally involved. Instead, she’s sleeping upstairs in your room,” he says.
“She’s not a prisoner.”
“That’s not the point,” he says, shaking his head.
I pick up the tablet before the conversation deteriorates further. “What do we know about the staffing manager who called her?”
Iosef shifts back into business immediately.
“Her name is Claire Bennett. Eleven years with the agency, no financial problems we can see, no unusual travel, no known connection to Petrov. She says Sloane was selected because the original attendant cancelled at the last minute and Sloane was one of the few experienced people available on short notice.”
“Why did the original attendant cancel?” I ask. “The first time we met her.”
Iosef glances down at his notes. “Food poisoning.”
“Have we verified that?” I ask.
“She used her medical insurance when she got admitted, so yes,” Iosef says.
“Check the cameras before Sloane got on the plane, and after,” I say. “We need to get to the bottom of this, there should be no room for ambiguity.”
Anton and Marek exchange a look.
I catch it immediately. “What?”
Neither answers fast enough.
My patience disappears. “What are you not telling me?”
Anton closes the laptop halfway and leans back in his chair. “The cameras on the aircraft were scrubbed.”
For a moment, I think I’ve misunderstood him. “Scrubbed how?”
“The onboard surveillance archive was wiped sometime after landing.”
I stare at him. “How is that possible?”
“The aircraft system keeps a local copy of the cabin feeds and uploads portions to a secure server depending on the flight profile,” Marek explains. “Someone accessed the administrative side and cleared the local footage before our team locked everything down.”
I look between them. “And you waited until now to tell me this?”
“We were confirming it,” Anton says. “I wasn’t going to walk in here and tell you someone erased footage until we knew it was intentional.”
“And now?”
“Now we know.”
I feel my jaw tighten. “Who had access?”
“That’s the problem,” Marek says. “Not many people. Someone would need flight-level credentials, familiarity with the onboard system, and access to the operational logs for that specific aircraft. This was not someone guessing passwords from a hotel room.”
Anton reaches for an evidence envelope on the table. “We also checked the access panel in the forward service compartment. It was opened manually.”
“Prints?”
“One usable partial.”
I look at Anton. “Whose print?”
“Hale’s.”
The room goes very quiet.
I look back at the photograph. Captain Warren Hale had access to the cockpit, the flight logs, the aircraft systems, and enough authority aboard that nobody would question him moving through restricted compartments.
He also deliberately created a false turbulence warning so he could isolate Sloane, which means we already know he was willing to manipulate the aircraft’s procedures for his own purposes.
Now his print is on the panel connected to erased surveillance footage.
“Are you certain?”
Anton nods. “The match is strong.”
I lean back against my chair. Jesus.
The drunk, lecherous bastard I had written off as nothing more than a predator may have been sitting inside the conspiracy from the beginning.
And now there’s no way to ask him.