There’s a show on the Cooking Channel, and they’re making ketchup cake. Not sure whether to be intrigued or grossed out.
Me
I tried it in Canada, and it doesn’t taste as bad as it sounds.
Nolan
Is there anywhere you haven’t been?
Me
Plenty of places—Antarctica, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Mali, Burkina Faso… If I can’t get a reliable internet connection, I’m not going.
A tiny lie. Very occasionally, I did head into the field with the Choir if a system needed analysing or troubleshooting on-site, but I tried to avoid those situations as much as possible. Cobbled-together military accommodation and the yuckiness of communal showers took me back to the time I’d spent living on the streets, and I very much wanted to forget that period in my life.
Even if things had turned out mostly okay in the end.
Jez didn’t mind roughing it, though. She’d crossed into Belarus from Vilnius four days ago, accompanied by Dusk, and headed to a rental property in Minsk, one I’d secured using a false identity. Sin had arrived from Poland a day later, and they were joined by Spider, who’d travelled on her Russian passport.
There’d been times when, deep down, I feared I’d never find a location for Dark Descent. They were careful but, it turned out, thin-skinned as well. I knew that because I also used to have a tendency to react first and think later, but Jez had drilled the importance of the seven Ps into me: Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. And Chase’s endless calm rubbed off on me too.
So last month, when DD finally noticed every video they put up was disappearing, they’d escalated. One video per day became ten, and I co-opted a couple of acquaintances to help with the takedowns because I had to go with Priest to fucking Idaho, where an Air Force base kept suffering security breaches and they couldn’t work out why.
In the end, I’d tracked the issue to a smart refrigerator in the base commander’s office, a unit he’d installed himself so he didn’t have to walk to the mess hall every time he wanted a cold Dr Pepper. Technologically, it was a neat little thing that offered voice-activated temperature controls, live images of the contents, and an automated ordering system. Too bad it also listened in on conversations and sent the recordings to fuck knows who. And the kicker? The colonel had hooked it up to the base’s secure network, so whoever controlled the fridge could ferret through all kinds of other data too.
There was a reason most of the appliances at Casa del Gato were dumb as fuck. The few smart appliances we had—Marcel said we could take his streaming services over his dead body—were hooked up to a separate network, and I’d also patched their firmware. Jez and Dusk had actually been cool with the “dead body” solution, but the others overruled them because Marcel was a better cook than anyone else in the house.
Anyhow, the fuckup in Idaho had wasted a week of my time, and then I’d had to do some corporate work because, like it or not, I was still the CTO of a multinational company, and even though I had an excellent team of ethically challenged underlings working for me, I had to get my hands dirty sometimes. All of which meant I was running on empty, plus I had the jitters, and I wasn’t sure whether that was due to too much caffeine, not enough sugar, or the fact that the op in Belarus made me more nervous than any other I could remember.
Because it mattered.
Not in the usual national-security or corporate-scandal way, but personally.
Because Nolan mattered.
The Choir had spent several days watching the big house hidden away behind high walls on the outskirts of Minsk, first remotely and then in person—a property I’d found when DD lost their cool and messaged Nolan’s laptop with another Bible verse and an order to stop screwing around and pay up.
James 4, verse 17: So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
Dark Descent hid behind VPNs and stolen accounts in their public activity, but in private, they got sloppy. With the arrival of their self-righteous message, Nolan’s computer gave up their IP address and their location along with it. We’d seen enough to know it was real. Thanks to never-ending tensions with Russia and the former Soviet states, there were plenty of satellites watching the region, sufficient for us to monitor the comings and goings of the occupants.
Meanwhile, Sin and I took a look at their backgrounds, and the information didn’t add up.
The three appeared to have met at college—we could find no connection between them before that. And they’d all studied computer engineering. After graduation, the trio had started a consulting firm, but we couldn’t identify any actual clients, just a slew of glowing reviews on Yandex written by users who never reviewed anything else.
Whatever they did with their time, it was enough to buy them a lineup of luxury cars, the services of the women who showed up at the compound each evening, and nightly dinners at fancy restaurants. Yesterday while they were stuffing their faces with steak, Spider, our B&E expert, had let herself into their house while Sin made friends with the two half-starved German shepherds that patrolled the grounds. The place was full of laptops, designer clothing, and motorsport memorabilia, plus Spider found a small quantity of cocaine, which possibly accounted for their security lapse.
None of that evidence was damning, but it did help to build up the picture. So why were we so convinced of the men’s guilt?
Because of the Bible.
The Bible sitting beside one of the laptops with certain paragraphs highlighted, including the two sent to Nolan. Were they genuinely religious? We weren’t sure, but Kazik Dovhal’s father was a pastor. And they were certainly assholes.
Nolan messaged back just as Sin launched a bird-sized surveillance drone. She could fly it herself if necessary, but for now, she handed control to Storm, who was sitting alongside me wearing a leopard-print onesie.
Nolan
I guess you wouldn’t like Cuba, then?
