“Enough to make this interesting. Viktor, I need you back here. This isn’t something I can handle over the phone.”
He looked over at Anka, who was pretending to examine a silk scarf while obviously listening to his conversation. She caught his eye and mouthed “go,” gesturing toward the door.
“Give me an hour,” he told Kostya.
“Viktor—”
“One hour. Have everything ready for when I get there.”
He hung up and found Anka already walking toward him, her expression resigned but understanding.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Duty calls?”
“Something like that. I need to get back to the office, handle this situation before it gets worse.”
“Of course you do.” But she didn’t sound annoyed, just accepting. “Can you drop me off at home on the way?”
The disappointment in her voice was subtle, but he caught it. She’d been enjoying their afternoon out as much as he had, and now it was ending because of business that couldn’t wait.
“Actually,” he said, an idea forming, “how do you feel about seeing where I work?”
“Your office?”
“The war room, more accurately. It’s not going to be pretty—lots of shouting, strategic planning, and probably some creative threats against people who’ve made poor life choices. But you’d be safer there than anywhere else, and I wouldn’t have to cut our day short.”
She considered this for a moment. “You want me to come watch you work?”
“I want you to come sit in the most secure building in Manhattan while I handle a crisis that could determine whether we go to war with the Russians or just bankrupt a few people.” He shrugged as if it were no big deal. “Your choice.”
“Well, when you put it like that, how can I resist?”
Twenty minutes later, they were walking through the lobby of the Nikolai Building, a gleaming tower of steel and glass that housed the legitimate face of their operations. Anka’s eyes were wide as she took in the marble floors, the expensive art, the general atmosphere of power and money that permeated every surface.
“Impressive,” she said as they stepped into his private elevator. “Very respectable-looking for a den of criminal enterprise.”
“We prefer ‘alternative business solutions,’” he said dryly. “Criminal enterprise sounds so... criminal.”
“My mistake.”
His office occupied the entire top floor, with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a commanding view of the city. Anka made a slow circuit of the room while he fired up his computers and pulled up the files he needed, clearly impressed despite herself.
“You can make yourself comfortable anywhere,” he said, gesturing toward the seating area by the windows. “This might take a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Two hours, maybe three. Depends on how reasonable everyone decides to be.”
She settled into one of the leather chairs with a book she’d pulled from her purse, looking perfectly content to wait. “Take your time. I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
For the next ninety minutes, he was completely absorbed in crisis management. The situation in Chicago was worse than Kostya had initially reported—their contractor had not only brought in Russian muscle but was actively trying to play them against the Kozlov family, hoping to start a bidding war for his services.
It took a combination of financial incentives, thinly veiled threats, and some creative problem-solving to untangle the mess. By the time he’d finished the last conference call, it was nearly six o’clock, and his head was pounding from the stress.
He looked over to check on Anka, expecting to find her dozing or absorbed in her book. Instead, she was sitting at his desk, reading through a stack of shipping manifests with the kind of focused attention most people reserved for bestselling novels.
“Finding anything interesting?” he asked, walking over to see what had caught her attention.
“These numbers don’t add up,” she said without looking up. “Container shipment from Hamburg, departed October 15th, arrived in Newark October 22nd. But the customs declaration says it cleared inspection on October 20th, two days before it actually arrived.”
