-A.
I turned away from Valentin, crushing the note in my fist. The anger swelled in my chest, spinning faster and faster until it was a scorching hurricane. That scheming, sneaky little?—
It wasn’t the money. A couple of hundred thousand dollars: we’d make that back in a week. It was the embarrassment. I’d have to tell Radimir.
I’d made her look bad. So she’d made me look bad.
It was even worse because I knew that she hadn’t just kept the money, like any normal, corrupt cop would. Then I could have at least blackmailed her and gotten her on my payroll. No, I knew Alison: she’d handed every single bill in as evidence, building the case against me. How do you fight that kind of...honesty?!
I opened my fist and stared at her signature, at that teasing little ‘A’, and the anger built and built...and as it peaked, I felt it sear something permanently into my soul: a grudging respect.
I wanted to obliterate her for doing this. But I couldn’t deny how slickly she’d pulled it off. I wasn’t even sure how she’d done it.
Alison Brooks wasn’t any normal cop. She was my equal.
What was it the Americans said? I’d met my match.
10
ALISON
“You sure you’reup for this?” asked Calahan for the fourth time. He twisted around in the driver’s seat and looked at me, worried. “There’s still time to change your mind.”
I rolled my eyes. “How many undercover operations did we do together, back in the day? It’s fine.” I’d only arrived in New York an hour ago. My old FBI partner, Sam Calahan had picked me up from the airport and brought me straight here, to a backstreet in Little Odessa. Calahan needed someone to go into a strip club undercover, and all of his female agents were too well known to the local Russian mafia, so he’d called me and asked for my help. “Who is it you’re after?” I asked.
Calahan showed me a photo of a man with a mostly-bald head and a thick, messy beard. “Amvrosy Inkin,” he told me. “He’s Bratva, been running the club for years. Not a very nice guy, violent, but strictly small time, not really of interest to us. But he has a brother, Daniil, who weareinterested in, because we think he’s selling explosives to a domestic terror group. He’s gone off the grid, but we know Amvrosy is pretty close to his brother, so we’re hoping he’ll lead us to him.”
I nodded. “So what do you want me to do? Go into the club and plant a bug?”
“No,” said Yolanda, his girlfriend, from behind me. “We’ve got something much better.” She leaned forward from the back seat and passed something over my shoulder.
“A phone charger?” I asked, turning it over in my hands.
“It looks like a phone charger,” Yolanda said proudly. “But it doesn’t just charge your phone. It sucks all the data off it and sends it through a transmitter hidden in the plug. Everyone’s always looking for a phone charger. If you leave it in the office, sooner or later, Amvrosy is going to plug his phone into it. We’ll get all his contacts and messages.”
I turned and stared at her, amazed. “That’s pretty freakin’ cool,” I said with feeling. Yolanda flushed and smiled, and I smiled back. I still remembered when I’d encouraged her to go for it with Sam, together with ayou’d better not break his heartspeech. I was so glad they’d gotten together.
“It should be pretty easy to get inside,” Calahan told me. “The club is closed during the day, so there’ll just be a couple of people there: cleaning staff, mostly. Amvrosy only hangs out there at night, when he can stare at the strippers. Say you want to dance there, then sneak downstairs to the office and leave the phone charger there.” His jaw set, and his voice became a protective growl. “And don’t worry, I triple-checked: they do scheduled auditions on Saturdays, when Amvrosy is there. You’re not going to have to actually strip or anything.”
I smiled affectionately. He’d always been like a big brother to me, and even now, he was still protecting me. Inside, my chest ached a little: this whole thing reminded me of the weird little family I’d had, back at FBI New York. I didn’t have that in Chicago, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever find it again.
I looked down at myself. I hadn’t been sure what a wannabe stripper would wear, but I’d eventually settled on black leggings, a ribbed white sleeveless top that was cut high to show my navel, andthe highest heels I owned. “See you in five,” I told them, and climbed out of the car.
Calahan had parked a few streets away from the club so he wouldn’t be spotted. It was a beautiful August day with a bright blue sky reflected in the puddles of last night’s rain. I was smiling as I click-clacked down the street in my ridiculous heels, on a high from confiscating Gennadiy’s drug money a few days before. I couldn’t link the cash definitively to him, so it still wasn’t enough for an arrest warrant, and I was still running out of time on the case. But every time I thought about how furious he must have been when he found his money gone, I couldn’t stop grinning. Why did baiting him feel so good?
The Black Cat had stood on the same street corner for over twenty years, and its age was showing: the glossy black paint was peeling, the window sills were rotted and crumbling, and the vertical neon sign of a cat swishing its tail was askew. When I knocked on the door, a heavyset man in a white tee opened it an inch and looked at me suspiciously. That was weird: he looked more like a bodyguard than a cleaner. “I want to dance here,” I told him.
He frowned and had a brief conversation in Russian with someone across the room. Then he reluctantly cracked the door open and let me in. He parted the velvet drapes behind him, and I saw the bar that occupied the first floor. “Leave number with him,” he told me, pointing to the bartender. His voice was tight with stress.
I nodded obediently and strolled across the bar, my mind working overtime. Something was up. Why was there a bodyguard on the door? And why was the bartender there, in the middle of the day? Next to the bar were a set of stairs leading down to the basement, where I needed to be. The drapes had fallen back into place behind me, so the bodyguard at the door wouldn’t see me if I tried to sneak down there. But the bartender would.
The bartender was Russian, too, but he spoke English better than the bodyguard. He handed me a notepad and a pen. “Write your number on there. Auditions are on Saturdays. We’ll call you and tell you what time to come in.”
I scrawled a fake number. “Can I sneak a look at the club?” I gave him my best pleading eyes. “I’m really nervous. It’d be nice to see where I’ll be dancing, before the audition.”
The bartender glanced at the stairs and shook his head. He sounded stressed, too. “Not today.” He snatched the notepad and waved me towards the door. “We’ll call you.”
Fuck.Something was definitely off. He couldn’t get me out of there fast enough. I knew I should abort and go back to the car. But then Calahan wouldn’t get the information he needed. And his case sounded serious…
