Every day's a school day…
8
RAFE
Riley's already up working. She's been at this for an hour now while I sip my coffee and think about her strange challenge three days ago in my kitchen. The damn woman would probably freeze herself to death if it meant defying me and pissing me off. It makes me grin even now, how feisty she is. Something in the way she wants to press every button I have intrigues me. What does she get out of it?
I sigh and take a sip of my coffee while turning toward the window in my office to admire the snow that lines every branch and surface. Winter reminds me how even the ugliest of things can be concealed, which gives me a shred of hope that all of the nasty things Marco Lombardi did to try to sink me can be covered up, at least enough to get me through the end of this year and into a new calendar.
My phone rings and I look down at it with a scowl. I've given strict orders to handle things without calling me to every one of my men and every manager who reports to me. Getting a call means something isn't going well, so before I even pick up the phone, I'm feeling annoyed. But Feodor's face on my screenstares up at me, reminding me that he's at NextGen, our drug plant that handles logistics for actual pharmaceuticals while moving our street drugs in tandem. It's not something I can ignore.
I answer without greeting him. "Talk."
"The shipment got flagged, Rafe. Feds want to inspect it before it leaves the warehouse. We got a call about ten minutes ago."
I sit up and swing my chair around until I’m facing my computer, and my jaw is already tight. The pharmaceuticals were supposed to ship out yesterday morning. Their manifests were filed weeks ago, and to my knowledge, the reports were completely unremarkable. But Marco handled those filings, and Marco is dead.
It's like he's trying to sabotage me from the grave. Every day, I find another hole he left behind, another trap waiting to spring.
"When are they coming?" I ask, looking at the time stamp on my security feed readout.
"Ten o'clock. Maybe sooner if they process their paperwork faster than usual."
That gives me less than two hours to fix a problem that I never saw coming. I trust people to do this shit for me, and I don't have the first clue what to do to track down an issue in paperwork. I don't even know what could've flagged the Feds to want to see the shipment or paperwork.
"What's missing?" I ask.
"Carrier records say it’s headed to Seattle, but the paperwork in our system still shows Portland. Marco updated the routing in the warehouse system but never corrected the official manifest.The EDI scan caught it, flagged it as a discrepancy, and now the Feds want to compare the shipment to the paperwork before it moves.”
I stand and walk to the window to look out at the white powder dancing in the breeze. "Can we stall them?" I ask him, already spinning through a dozen ideas of ways to make this work. It was wrong to trust so much of my business to one person. With Lombardi dead, I need a new person capable of doing this shit, but who? And how can I find them quick enough?
"Not without raising more flags. If we push back, they'll assume we're hiding something."
"We are hiding something."
Feodor doesn't respond to that. We both know what's in that shipment. Our street drugs make the shipment heavier, but unless someone opens the truck prematurely, no one ever knows. The blend moves through our distribution network on the west coast, where it gets separated and sold through channels that keep our hands clean. And I become an even richer man day by day.
But if the Feds open those crates and run tests, we're done.
"I need the paperwork fixed," I growl and spin back around, glowering at the huge inconvenience I'm facing thanks to Lombardi.
"That's why I'm calling, man. The system requires admin-level access to backdate filings, and Marco was the only one with those credentials. I'd need someone who can hack into the database and make the changes look like they were filed weeks ago."
I close my eyes. Of course. Of course it comes back to Marco's access codes, his locked-down systems, his paranoid control over every piece of documentation that kept this operation running.
"How fast can we get someone in there?" I ask.
"We can't. Not in two hours. Even if I had a name, I'd need time to vet them, bring them in, explain what we need. We don't have that time."
Feodor is right. Vetting alone could take days we don't have. "Dammit!" I shout, kicking my chair and toppling it. I'm in the water holding an anchor and sinking fast.
And then I think of Riley.
She hacked into the bank's system two days ago and rerouted a vendor payment that should've been impossible to access, and she did it in under three hours, bypassing firewalls and spoofing credentials. This should be child's play compared to that.
"I have someone," I say.
Feodor pauses. "Who?"
