Details of the Next Shipment
Raphael Mirabaud
The devil is in the details.
That night, Raphael walked through the same alleyway, into the same restaurant, through the same forbidding corridor to meet Piotr Ilyin as he had for the last meeting.
Shouldn’t Russian mob bosses have several restaurants they liked to eat in? Surely the police would catch on eventually ifhe held all his business meetings in the back room of the same restaurant week after week. It was terrible operational security.
Piotr should have hired Dieter Schwarz and Rogue Security to advise him on security and operational protocol.
Raphael nearly chuckled aloud.
Except, of course, Piotr now controlled Rogue Security through Raphael, and that wasn’t a laughing matter.
The steak had beengood, though. Raphael could understand wanting to come back there for another one of those butter-tender steaks.
Piotr Ilyin had arrived at the restaurant before them, like last time, and was seated in the small room while his security staff stood at the walls. He was eating a slice of bread from the basket on the white-covered table.
As before, Raphael and Valerian sat, they ordered, and theymade small talk while they dined for two hours until nearly the end of the meal.
Piotr pushed his plate away. Smears of the cream peppercorn sauce remained on the snowy porcelain. “You’ve been shepherding commodity shipments into the country very well.”
He meant drugs. Raphael nodded.
“We need to discuss your next operation, however. We’ll have larger shipments entering from Russian territoriesto run through Italy or the Netherlands. From here, they’ll proceed to the rest of Europe.”
“Where is it coming from?” Raphael asked, steepling his fingers in front of himself.
“The United States, oddly enough,” Piotr laughed.
The United States exported very few things that were of interest to European organized crime syndicates. Drugs came from the Middle East and Asia. Asia and Africa producedcheap counterfeits of watches, purses, and prescription drugs.
Guns.Lax gun laws in the United States made it the world’s supplier of small firearms. Using fake identification to purchase an army’s worth of handguns and rifles was simple, and international gun runners took advantage of it.
“And we’re selling them to?” he asked.
“Some friends with very pronounced opinions, but that’s none ofour concern. We aren’t racists. We’ll sell guns to anyone.”
So the buyers were jihadists, Nazis, or another terrorist group. Before Raphael had run away, he’d shepherded a large shipment of automatic weapons to a Finnish outlaw motorcycle gang, the Cannonball MC, which had used them to annihilate a rival organized crime gang.
More weapons in Europe meant more violence in Switzerland, as always.Inwardly, Raphael cringed, but he twitched one eyebrow up and smiled with one side of his mouth.
Valerian was watching Raphael with a straight, level gaze, examining him. Raphael had seen that lack of expression thousands of times. It meant judgment.
When Raphael had been very young, his father’s judgment had been violent when Raphael was found lacking. He hadn’t been young or small for a longtime, not since he had grown and bulked up at the age of thirteen. Valerian had tried to punch him one last time when he was fourteen. He’d knocked his father’s fist away and slammed him against the wall, shouting that Valerian would never hit him again.
And he hadn’t.
Piotr Ilyin said, “We’ll need to activate that rather interesting network of yours to ensure this rather large shipment getsinto the right hands. It will arrive at the Port of Rotterdam in three days.”
Raphael frowned. “We can hire dolts with strong backs without recalling Rogue personnel from their current, contracted operations.”
“There might be some problems with it.”
“What should my men prepare for?” he asked.
Piotr smiled. “It’s not addressed to us.”
Ilyin wanted to use Rogue Security tosteala shipmentof guns from some other organized crime syndicate.
Raphael forced his smile wider. “Now that’s interesting.”
The Ilyin Bratva didn’t need to steal guns. Buying them was simpler and easier, maybe even more profitable in the long run. By stealing them, Raphael and Rogue Security would be implicated in a crime and targeted by a rival crime syndicate. If they tried to leave the Ilyin Bratva, theywould be vulnerable to both revenge from that other syndicate and to arrest.
“I’m so glad you think so,” Piotr said. “It looks like this is the beginning of a long, fruitful career for us.”
