Four men had walked into the warehouse from that hallway.
Flicka and Alina stood in the center of the crowd of men, holding hands.
Alina’s baby eyes were huge as she looked around, and she moved closer to Flicka’s leg.
Flicka’s eyes were slitted in anger. She picked Alina up and heldher tightly against her chest, trying to comfort her or preparing to shield her. Alina’s hand closed around the gold and black brooch Flicka wore pinned to her blouse, his old alpine mountaineering pin.
There could be only one reason why they had been brought here, which meant that neither the Geneva police nor the Rogues had rescued them.
Damn it.Even Raphael’s redundant rescue operationshadn’t been enough. The Rogues and the police should have been standing over them, arguing over who got to save them, but it hadn’t been enough.
Raphael’s hand flew across his chest to where his gun should have been under his other armpit, but his father’s guards had stripped him of all his weapons in Las Vegas and frisked him after the Rotterdam operation. He didn’t even have a damned ballpointpen.
Hands grabbed Raphael. He blocked arms and slapped them away, fighting a vicious but doomed melee for mere seconds before guns were pointed at his head, and at Flicka’s head, and at Alina’s.
And so he stopped fighting.
Like they knew he would.
Raphael raised his arms and laced his fingers behind his head.
Someone kicked him in the spine, a bright spike of pain from his skull to his legs.
He fell to his knees.
Piotr Ilyin’s bodyguards moveden massewith Piotr as he walked over to Raphael. Piotr would never shout across a warehouse.
Raphael waited, watching carefully for any sign that either Rogue Security or the police had arrived, but he saw nothing.
Piotr stopped in front of him and leaned down slightly. “It seems you have many names, don’t you?”
“I’m just Raphael Mirabaudnow. Dieter Schwarz was a pipe dream.”
“But you have another name, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It would have been difficult, even fifteen years ago, to change your identity so completely, obtain a passport, and even enlist in the Swiss military without proper, registered documents.”
“The dark web is a mysterious place, and you can buy anything you want there, even fifteen yearsago, if you knew where to look.” Raphael jerked his head toward the group of fifteen young girls standing beside the van. “Anything.”
The creaks of the bay doors died away as the men wrestling them stopped and stepped inside to watch what was transpiring between Raphael and Piotr.
Piotr asked, “But you didn’t buy a new identity from the dark web, did you?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talkingabout.”
Piotr bent at the waist a little more, leaning in conspiratorially. “The Ilyin Bratva survives because we infiltrate. We have sources everywhere, even local Swiss police departments.”
Ice and fiery panic washed over Raphael, but he didn’t move.
“It’s astonishing how quickly Basch Favre rose in the police department after being discharged from the military, isn’t it? In not even tenyears, he climbed the ranks from a street officer to the Colonel of the Cantonal Police. It’s surprising how quickly he was promoted, even shocking. It should have taken at least twenty years of service for anyone to rise so high. More like thirty. Many officers in that department were eager to earn a bit of extra money by writing a good report on a fellow officer or recommending them for an awardor a promotion. We have always wanted to know who the Archangel source was, but even Favre couldn’t unseal the records. When you identified yourself to him, we knew who you were.”
The world tipped on its axis. Raphael’s fingers clenched behind his head, digging into his scalp.
“Before that, I was never sure.” Piotr gazed at the steel beams spiderwebbing the ceiling, musing on the uncertaintiesof the universe. “How could a teenager, who had been so loyal and avid in his work, have been a plant at so young an age? Should I burn a man, one with such a promising past, for running away when the police descended, killing and arresting so many of us?”
Raphael looked downward at Piotr’s shoes. Instead of wearing his usual shined dress shoes that he had worn to the restaurant and even to thesnowy park, he was wearing steel-toed boots under his suit trousers.
