"I know," he grins a boyish grin at me and winks through his pain. I open the door, the wind kissing my hair, and jump.
The ground is hard and rocky, and pebbles bite into my skin as if someone had taken their time to sharpen each and every one. My shoulder was already screaming in pain from the gunshot; now it's just going numb as I roll through the dirt, praying the Mexicans missed my black form in the dark. Otherwise, everything will be for nothing.
Nico is already a cloud of dust down the road. I stop the roll, get into a crouch, and make it up the airplane steps. The cargo is gone. With my gun in hand, I check the plane quickly for any Mexicans, but there is nobody here.
From the cockpit, I see Nico still driving, still leading the Mexicans away from the plane, zig-zagging now to keep them from advancing. From here, I count at least twenty vehicles. Jeeps, trucks, and Hummers. They'll have him in minutes. Once they do, it'll take them another ten tofigure out thata) I'm not with Nico andb) leaving them to guess if I'm dead, still at the mine, or on the plane. I keep the lights off; the Cessna will be loud enough to alert them that it's running, but the lights will only give them a target.
I have no real skin in this game, but I don't like failure. And I like Nico more than any other person I've met lately. He also saved my life, and he's a mission I consider incomplete. I don't do incomplete. So as the plane makes its way down the runway, I vow, "Ya vernus' za toboy."—I’ll come back for you.
The next day…
The bag swingslike a pendulum I keep trying to break. Leather. Sweat. Bone-deep rhythm. Everything narrows until the world is just my fists and the chain in the ceiling begging for mercy. I hit harder than I need to because slowing down would mean thinking, and thinking has been a liability lately.
My phone starts buzzing on the desk. I ignore it. Too much shit has been happening too fast lately, and I’m trying to clear my head enough to think through the clusterfuck. The Venezuelans keep testing our borders, Don Edoardo’s playing God while pretending not to, and Raf’s an enigma. I still don't know if he's a friend or an enemy. On top of that, he's cleaning up messes we’re not supposed to know about. Marcello's upcoming Vegas wedding is supposed to be a celebration, but it feels morelike a ceasefire with good champagne. Yeah, I have enough rage bottled up in me to take it out on the bag. No wonder I've been sleeping like shit.
Leandro—Dre—Serra, the only man I know who can make a computer look scared, looks up from the computer screen he's been staring at. "Boss." There’s something in his voice—tight, cautious—that gets through the noise. "You need to see this."
I drive a final combination into the bag, feel it jump, then still. I strip the wraps off my hands and cross the room. Once, it would’ve been Raffael sitting there. Now I trust no one but my second-in-command. Dre is all edges and economy, sleeves shoved to his elbows, jaw scar tugging when he concentrates. No banter. Just war.
"Ping again," I tell him. We've been trying for days to get through the Venezuelan firewall.
He does. Three seconds of access, then Caracas boots us like a bad habit. The console spits an obscene little message in Spanish and kills the tunnel.
"Fourth boot in an hour," Dre mutters.
"They’re learning," I say. "Run the Spain mirror."
For nine-point-two seconds, we’re inside. Routing tables. Hashed credentials. Until… Dre whistles under it. "That’s not cartel-grade. That’s… us."
I see it too. The tag flashes like a fingerprint you don’t forget: CONTI_SYS_4.2.
"Not a copy," I exclaim. "Motherfuckers! That's ours."
"So somebody took your kernel, Frankensteined it, and now they’re locking us out with our own software." Dre swivels to look at the man zip-tied to the chair in the corner. Gino doesn’t look up. The server lights wash his face in sickly blues and reds.
Two years. For two years, this man has worked for me—since I was twenty-four, since the family’s cyber operations stopped being an afterthought and I turned it into a weapon, leaving fraud to dear old dad. People learned that if they wanted money to move, records to vanish, or systems to break, they came to me. I crouch until I’m in his line of sight.
"The lockout that bounced us three nights ago was my algorithm," I tell him calmly. "Different coat of paint. Same bones. It needs a seed it can only generate if it’s seen my key material." I tilt my head. "So. You fed them my keys. Or the ghost who replaced you did."
His throat bobs.
"Who recruited you?"
"I—I can’t?—"
The wire-cutter knife I picked up kisses the soft place under his jaw. Not a cut. A promise. "Yes, you can."
Gino isn't a made man. He might work for the cartel, but in reality, he's only a computer hack. He breaks fast. "Don Aurelio. El León Valverde."
The name lands heavy, like a door slamming shut. Don Aurelio is the head of the Venezuelan cartel. He's also behind the killing of our bookkeeper for reasons we have yet to figure out.
Gino swallows and keeps talking, words spilling now that the dam’s gone. "I don’t have master access. Nobody does. We’re compartmentalized—Cells. No names. No hierarchy you can map. You only ever see your slice."
Cells. Of course. That’s how you survive infiltration. That’s how you rot a house from the inside without anyone noticing until the beams start to fail.
"And the handoffs?" I ask.
Gino licks his lips. "Churches. Hymns."
