Chapter 6
ADRIAN
Istay in the private room for three minutes after Aurora leaves. I button my shirt, buckle my belt, and finish the whiskey I poured two hours ago and never touched. It’s warm, but I drink it anyway because I need something to do with my hands besides remember what they were doing ten minutes ago.
I can still smell her on my skin. That’s the problem. I force my focus back to the room, the evening’s remaining business, and the intelligence Viktor is probably waiting to deliver downstairs. The distraction is a liability. I correct it.
Except I don’t. I’m standing at a window staring at my own reflection, and what I should be doing is assessing the exposure and the risk.
What I’m actually thinking about is how she pulled me closer instead of pushing me away at every point where a different woman would have stopped.
Aurora Moore knows exactly what she did.
My mother would be furious. Viktor will be insufferable. I note both thoughts and move on. I straighten my jacket, check my reflection, and leave the private room.
Viktor is at table one nursing a club soda. He takes one look at me as I sit down, and his face moves from recognition to assessment to something close to resignation. “You look like you just made a decision you can’t take back.”
“We’re not discussing it.”
“I wasn’t going to discuss it. I was going to point out that mixing attraction with business means business stops being efficient.” He takes a sip of his club soda and sets it down precisely in the center of its coaster. “I suspected as much, which is why I didn’t interrupt your meeting.”
I give him a look that should end the sentence. He ignores the look but drops that touchy subject. Instead, he introduces something worse.
“Grigor flagged something forty minutes ago.” He slides his phone across the table. “I would have pulled you out of that room, but the information needed verification, and you were clearly occupied.”
The screen shows a message from Grigor, one of our digital operatives who monitors communications in and around venues we use for sensitive meetings. The message is three lines long, and each one makes the warm whiskey in my stomach go cold.
He’s given us intercepted data fragments matching details from Bugrov meetings at Echelon. There are times, names, room selections, and security staffing levels transmitted to address linked to Karpov financial network. The source is internal to venue.
I read it twice. “How accurate is this?”
“Accurate enough that I ran a preliminary check while you were upstairs.” Viktor pulls up a second screen on his phone.
“The data fragments go back at least six weeks. Somebody inside Echelon has been transmitting meeting details to Karpov with enough precision that they’re either in the room during our conversations or recording them. ”
“Recording.” I don’t need to think about it. Karpov wouldn’t trust a human source inside the club when technology is cheaper and more reliable. “He’s using recording devices in the rooms.”
Viktor nods. “That’s my read.”
I look across the club toward Dominic’s office. The door is closed, and the light underneath it tells me he’s inside. “Pull the room maintenance logs for every VIP suite. I want access history, technical service records, and any modifications to audiovisual equipment in the last three months.”
Viktor already has his tablet out. “I’ll have Grigor run the access logs remotely. He can pull the maintenance history from Echelon’s management system if I give him Dominic’s network credentials.”
“You have Dominic’s network credentials?”
“I’ve had them since our second visit.” Viktor doesn’t look up from his tablet. “I cloned his admin login the night he left his tablet unlocked on the bar.”
That’s Viktor. He prepares for betrayals I haven’t imagined yet, and he does it without being asked.
Within twenty minutes, the picture comes together.
Grigor’s analysis of the maintenance logs shows three of the four VIP suites had unauthorized technical modifications within the last two months.
Miniature recording devices were installed during routine maintenance windows, embedded in the ceiling ventilation panels where they wouldn’t be visible during casual inspection.
The installations coincide exactly with a cleaning crew rotation that Dominic personally authorized, replacing the regular crew with a contracted team that worked two shifts and never returned.
Viktor reads the analysis over my shoulder. “The contracted crew was hired through a staffing agency in Hialeah that Grigor linked to one of Karpov’s shell companies. Dominic didn’t even bother using a clean intermediary.”
“He didn’t think he needed to.” This took time and confidence that nobody was watching. He brought in outside contractors under the cover of a routine cleaning rotation and installed surveillance equipment in rooms where I held private meetings. He was wrong about the watching part.
The devices captured audio from every private room meeting held during that period, including two of mine.
The recordings were transmitted to a cloud server accessible through an encrypted link, and Grigor has already traced partial access to an IP address associated with Karpov’s shipping brokerage in Fort Lauderdale.
“How much did Karpov get from the two meetings of ours?” I keep my voice even, but Viktor hears the edge underneath.
“Enough.” Viktor scrolls through the file. “Lenkov’s name, the Bahamian routing changes, your directive to monitor Meridian Freight, and that I cloned Dominic’s admin credentials. If Karpov is smart, and he is, he now knows we were already watching Dominic before tonight.”
That changes the timeline. Karpov won’t wait for more recordings. He’ll move on whatever intelligence he already has, which means every decision I made in those rooms is now compromised.
Dominic sold recordings of my meetings to Damir Karpov, and he did it while shaking my hand, adjusting his watch, and performing the role of grateful subordinate every Thursday night.
I stand, and Viktor stands with me. We don’t need to discuss what happens next. Seventeen years of working together means certain conversations happen in silence, and this is one of them.
Dominic’s office is at the end of a service corridor behind the bar, past the kitchen entrance, and through a fire door the staff uses as a smoking exit.
The corridor is empty. The music from the main floor is muffled here, reduced to bass and percussion that I feel through the floor more than hear.
A dishwasher clatters somewhere in the kitchen, and a line cook shouts an order in Spanish that echoes off the tile walls.
I pass the door to the private room where I was inside Aurora thirty minutes ago.
The thought arrives uninvited and unwelcome, because what I’m about to do in the next five minutes will put her at risk in ways I haven’t thought through, and I’m going to do it anyway because Dominic’s betrayal can’t survive the night.
I open the office door without knocking.
Dominic is sitting at his desk reviewing receipts on a laptop. He looks up with the reflexive smile he uses for anyone who walks through his door, and the smile freezes when he sees Viktor close the door behind us and stand in front of it.
“Adrian.” He recovers fast. He stands, adjusts his jacket, and comes around the desk with his hands open and his palms turned upward in a gesture he probably thinks looks cooperative. “I didn’t know you were still here. Is everything all right with the room?”
“Sit down, Dominic.”
He sits. The smile is gone. He reads the situation in the same two seconds it takes Viktor to lock the door, and the color drains from his face one shade at a time. He looks at Viktor standing against the door, then back at me, and plants both hands flat on the desk.
I put my phone on his desk with the screen showing Grigor’s analysis. “Explain this.”
He reads through the data, and his face shifts from confusion to recognition to panic. He opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again. “That’s... Adrian, I don’t know what…”
“Those are three recording devices in three VIP suites, installed during a maintenance rotation you authorized personally. The resulting audio from private meetings was transmitted to a server with access traced to Karpov’s network.
” Anger is wasteful. Anger gives Dominic room to maneuver, play the victim, and stall.
I give him nothing except the facts and the silence that follows them.
“How long have you been selling my conversations to Damir Karpov?”
Dominic’s face falls apart in stages. He grips the edge of the desk, and his fingers are trembling. His posture collapses from his usual proud erectness into something hunched and small. Then he makes a choking sound as his shoulders slump.
“It was insurance.” He says it quickly, and the rehearsed quality tells me he’s imagined this conversation before and prepared a version of the truth that would make his actions seem rational.
“Everyone records in this business. Everyone keeps backups. I wasn’t selling anything. I was protecting myself.”
“Protecting yourself from what, exactly?”
“From everyone.” He gestures broadly with both hands.
“You, Karpov, the feds, and whoever comes through that door next. I’ve been running this club for nine years, and every powerful man who sits in those rooms treats me like I don’t exist until they need something.
Nobody looks out for Dominic, so I look out for myself. ”
I keep my tone cold and each word crisp. “By selling recordings of my private meetings to the man who is trying to dismantle my organization.”
“I didn’t sell everything.” He leans forward and presses both palms flat on the desk. “I gave him pieces but nothing operational…nothing that would…”