Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Yana
Annika ties off the bandage at Kirill’s shoulder and pats it once, gently, with the flat of her palm.
“There,” she says. “Try not to lift anything for two days.”
“I will try not to.”
She rolls her eyes and turns to me.
“Let me look at the arm.”
“It’s fine, Annika.”
“Yana.”
“It’s fine. The doctor stitched it last night. It’s already healing. You don’t need to do anything.”
She studies me for a moment. Then she sighs and sets the bandage roll down on the table.
“Fine. Both of you, fine.” She pauses at the door. “But if it gets red, Yana, you tell me. Not the doctor. Me.”
“Yes, Annika.”
She leaves. The door clicks shut behind her.
The study goes quiet.
Kirill rolls his shirt sleeve back down over the bandage and reaches for the cup of coffee at his elbow. His face has not been still since I came in. There is a tightness at the corner of his mouth that he has been carrying since the car ride home.
“Half of them,” he says.
I look at him.
“Half of the people here are compromised. I confirmed this morning. They are Mondi’s payroll, plus drivers, cooks, gardeners.”
I exhale.
“How long?”
“Over the last year. Mikhail is handling them.”
Kirill looks perplexed.
“How could this happen?” he asks himself.
He looks up at me. “You called in fast enough that I had time. The men with us were compromised. You gave us a head start.”
I ask the question in my chest. “The shipment, we lost it—”
“There was no shipment.”
I sit up.
“What?”
“There was no koshka. There was a truck, crates, and a great deal of paperwork that would convince anyone watching the dock that the shipment was real. But the actual product was moved through our family in Moscow three days ago. They will route it through the northern corridor next week.”
Kirill planned to catch the Italians in their plot.
“It was never about the shipment. It was about finding the leak. Mondi could not resist a target that size. I knew he would move on it.”
He turns the laptop on the desk toward me.
The screen is showing the inbox of one of his secure home accounts. It does not exist on any public network, and fewer than ten people in the world have it. There is a single new message at the top from an anonymous sender, time-stamped at six this morning.
The subject line is a warehouse address.
The body of the message is two sentences.
A meeting. Two days. 3 p.m.
There is an address underneath.
I look up at Kirill, then I sit back in the chair.
“Pakhan. We know where he will be. We know the time. We have two days to plan. Let me take him.” I lean forward.
Kirill is shaking his head before I have finished.
“It is too risky.”
“Pakhan —”
“He is not Esposito. He is not Vitale. He is Mondi, and the Mondi name still carries weight in five countries, and the old families in Sicily will treat the assassination of their Don as an act of war, regardless of what he was doing in New York. There are alliances I cannot afford to lose. There are favors I am still calling in.”
“Then we let him keep coming?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
He stands and walks to the window. He looks out for a moment.
“I need to know what he wants.”
“He wants a war.”
“No. He wants something. Men like Mondi do not burn this much oxygen on a feud they cannot name. He wants something I have. I need to know what.”
“And once you know?”
“Once I know, I decide. If we stay defensive, strike, or make peace.” He turns from the window. “But we do not commit to one of those three things without knowing the answer because the wrong choice on any of the three loses me the family.”
I nod.
He looks at me a moment longer.
“You did well last night, Yana. You were faster than they were. You called in before they had a chance to take you. That is the entire reason we are still standing here this morning.”
“Yes, Pakhan.”
“Go sleep. The doctor said you need it.”
“Yes, Pakhan.”
I stand. I go to the door.
“Yana.”
I turn.
He is at the window again, back to me, the morning light cutting hard across his shoulders.
“In two days,” he says, “we go to the meeting. You and me. We listen.”
“Yes, Pakhan.”
I close the door behind me. I walk back, thinking of the masked man. I do not know him. And yet there is a place behind my breastbone where the memory of his eyes has lodged and will not move.
* * *
Kirill is in the passenger seat with his gloved hands resting on his knees and his eyes on the road ahead. There are two cars behind us.
The warehouse sits at the edge of a loading yard, back facing the water, the kind of building that has been many things over the years. I pull in and cut the engine. I get out and draw my weapon. Kirill goes around the front of the car, and the man steps out of the warehouse.
“We’ve been waiting,” he says. His eyes move to my gun. “If you’d hand that over —”
“Absolutely not,” I say.
“Yana.” Kirill’s voice. I look at him. He nods.
I hold out the gun.
“This is a dialogue,” the man says, taking it. “Nothing more. You have my word.” He steps back and gestures toward the door. “Come.”
Inside smells like old water. The space is large with industrial lighting that leaves the upper edges in shadow. And in a cleared area, with his back to us, a man is shooting arrows at a paper target roughly twenty meters away.
“Don, they are here.”
The Don has a bow I recognize the make of, something custom by the look of it. He is wearing black trousers and a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. I find myself holding my breath without knowing why.
He turns, and our eyes meet. It’s Giorgio, and—I see on his collarbone the body of a snake in ink — he’s the man from the dock. He winks at me, and I look away.
It’s him; it’s been him all along. From the gallery to the container. No wonder he could replace our people without our knowledge. He was always close.
“Pavlovich.” He addresses Kirill directly, as if greeting someone at a dinner party. “It’s a genuine pleasure.”
Kirill shoots him.
He doesn’t flinch. The bullet hits the concrete floor two inches from his right foot, and the sound of it cracks through the warehouse and comes back at us from every wall.
He still has the bow in his hand. He looks down at the hole in the floor, then back up at Kirill and smiles.
From the shadows along the upper edges of the walls that I had seen came the sound of weapons being readied. I look up. There are about seven men I cannot see clearly, positioned at every angle of the room.
He spreads his hands. The bow hangs loose from his fingers. “Do you want to play this game, Pakhan?”
Kirill looks up at the ceiling. He lowers the gun.
“What do you want?”
“I am Giovanni Mondi. A pleasure to meet you.”
“What do you want from me?” Kirill asks again.
“You see, this is why I respect the Russians.” He sets the bow down on a crate beside him. “Straight to the point. The Italians, God love them, but they’d spend forty minutes on pleasantries first.”
He rolls down one sleeve. “The Castellano port access. The southern corridor route. It belonged to the family I inherited from, for forty years before your predecessor acquired it through certain arrangements.” He says arrangements the way you’d say a word in a language you don’t speak. “I want it back.”
“You couldn’t hold it,” Kirill says. “It’s not yours anymore.”
“Si.” He nods. “I inherited an incompetent man’s mess. But I am not that man, and I want what is mine.”
Kirill is quiet for a moment. Then he snaps his fingers.
The doors behind us blow open.
Our men pour in, spreading around the perimeter, weapons up, and in the space of ten seconds, the room’s geometry has inverted completely.
Kirill’s men on the ground outnumber his ceiling significantly.
Someone presses a gun into my hand, and I bring it up and aim it at the center of Giovanni’s chest. He looks at the barrel, then at my face, and arranges his expression to convey hurt feelings.
He is succeeding at nothing except making me want to pull the trigger.
“I thought we were friends, Miss Yana?”
I remember the parking lot, his hands on my back; I’ll see you soon in my ear in the dark. I almost slap myself back to reality. My finger rests on the trigger and stays there.
“I have,” Kirill says, very quietly, “a good mind to end you permanently."
Giovanni steps back. He smiles and says, “A year ago, my men attacked your cruise ship. I hear you traced us already. Damn! You are as meticulous as they say you are.”
“I guess you know already that for a few months,” he continues, “my people inside your organization have been feeding me everything. Your schedules, your routes, and security rotations.” He grins.
“When you shower and when you sleep.” He takes one more step back and looks at Kirill over the barrel still aimed at him. “I know everything about you, Pakhan.”
Kirill points a gun at him. “I guess you have to die then.”
“You’re too intelligent to be that impulsive,” Giovanni says, and he’s not even blinking. “Kill me now, and you start a war that ends with both of us losing. You know that. I know that. So let’s not.”
“I have never lost,” Kirill says.
“And I have every intention of letting you continue that record.” He smiles. “At the cost of one small concession.”
He holds out one hand, and the man who led us in, who has been standing in a corner, places a tablet in it, and he turns the screen to face us.
The image loads, and I feel Kirill go still beside me with a stillness more alarming than any movement he could have made.
The feed is from inside the mansion; it’s the basement.
There is a device I don’t recognize, and beside it a timer that isn’t running but could be.
The timestamp on the feed is live. My heart sinks.
He wasn’t bluffing; he had his people in the mansion.
“I’m told your wife is home,” he says. Kirill raises his gun.
“Only I have the detonation code,” Givovanni says. The smile stays exactly where it is. “Kill me, and she comes with me. So.” He lowers the tablet. “Let’s talk like men.”
The room is very quiet.
I lower my weapon. I look at our men, and I look at Kirill, and after a moment, Kirill does the same, and the sound of our men standing down moves through the warehouse.
“One month,” Kirill says. “I’m currently using that route. I’ll hand it back at the end of the month.”
“This is not a bargain, Pakhan. Don’t make me press the button.”
“Then you’ll have no routes; either that or have a route with no active infrastructure and no established contacts. One month and you get it back intact and operational, and I retain access twice annually.”
The man looks up at his men in the rafters. He looks back at Kirill. He looks at the ceiling again as though consulting it.
“Is the route worth your wife?” he says.
“I just told you what the route is worth to me,” Kirill says.
Then Giovanni opens his hands and addresses the ceiling. “We have a deal.”
There is silence.
“Clap,” he thunders, “you fools!”
Scattered, uncertain applause from the men above. He throws his head back and laughs, and the laugh echoes off the concrete walls and the high ceiling.
He comes to Kirill with his hand out, pointing to me.
“She stays.”
Kirill looks at him. “What?”
“As collateral.” He says it like it’s the most reasonable word. “I’m offering this in good faith, Pakhan. I think it’s fair to ask for some in return. Your most trusted person. A guarantee that you’ll hold your end.”
“Not her.”
“I’m a fan of Miss Yana,” he says. “She’s the perfect collateral. You hold your end and hand over the route?” He looks back at Kirill. “She comes home.”
“I’ll give you anyone else,” Kirill says.
“I want her.”
“No,” Kirill says.
“Deal,” I say.
Kirill turns to look at me.
I meet his eyes, and I hold them, and I try to put into that look everything I can’t say out loud: I know what I’m doing. I know what he is. There is no negotiating with this madman, and I know it, and Annika is in that house, and Dimitri is in that house. Kirill’s jaw tightens.
He says nothing, which is, from Kirill, the same as yes.
The man turns back to his audience on the ceiling. “Clap,” he says again, louder this time with a kind of furious joy, “you absolute fools —”
The applause is more committed this time. He turns back to Kirill and takes his hand again and shakes it with both of his with enormous warmth, as if they’ve just agreed on something wonderful.
“A genuine pleasure, Pakhan Pavlovich,” he says. “Truly.”
Kirill points at the tablet, and Giovanni laughs. “Oh yes, you have about six hours before it automatically explodes. Just cut the wires, and it goes off.”
He says it causally. He is crazy. Over Kirill’s shoulder, his eyes find mine.
Kirill turns, and his voice comes. “Pakhan, if she doesn’t show up in two days… you don’t want to know the tricks I can pull out of my sleeve.”
Kirill rushes out, and I follow. He was right under our noses the whole time, and all I had was a vague nudge. I resist the urge to look back at him. Annika and Dimitri first.