Chapter 17
Maksim
Theglowofthreescreens turned my office into something clinical. Blue light washing over everything—my hands, the cold coffee I'd forgotten hours ago, the particular tension in my shoulders that came from chasing ghosts through digital architecture. I'd been at this for three hours. Long enough that my eyes burned. Long enough that the city beyond my windows had shifted from afternoon gold to evening grey.
Elena Voss.
The name sat at the center of my investigation like a spider in a web. And at first glance, she looked real.
Her gallery website was polished. Professional. The kind of clean design that cost money and communicated taste—white space and elegant typography, high-resolution images of exhibition openings where well-dressed people held wine glasses and pretended to understand conceptual art. Voss-Laurent Gallery, established Chelsea presence, specializing in emerging artists.
The social media presence backed it up. Instagram with three thousand followers. LinkedIn with appropriate connections. Even reviews—actual reviews from artists who'd supposedly worked with her, praising her eye for talent and her commitment to emerging voices.
If I'd been anyone else, I would have believed it.
But I wasn't anyone else.
The website was my first thread.
Domain registration. A simple check that most people never thought to run—why would they? But I'd been running checks like this since I was nineteen, building the surveillance infrastructure that kept my family alive. The Voss-Laurent Gallery website had been registered eight weeks ago.
Eight weeks.
A gallery that claimed to be established. That spoke of a spring collection with the casual authority of a business that had weathered multiple seasons. Registered eight weeks before reaching out to an artist whose work had only recently appeared online.
The timing made my skin prickle.
I pulled up the social media photos. Started running them through facial recognition, through reverse image searches, through the particular algorithms I'd built for exactly this purpose—finding stolen identities, manufactured personas, the digital paper trails that criminals thought they'd covered.
The woman in Elena Voss's photos existed.
Her name was Margot Hoffmann. She ran a gallery in Berlin called Galerie Hoffmann. Real gallery. Real person. Completely unconnected to Voss-Laurent or anyone named Elena.
Her photos had been lifted wholesale. The exhibition openings, the professional headshots, the candid moments of someone who actually lived the life Elena Voss was pretending tohave. Margot Hoffmann had no idea her face was being used to bait a woman in Brooklyn into walking into a trap.
The ice started forming in my stomach then. A cold that had nothing to do with the air conditioning and everything to do with what I was finding.
The email was next.
Tracing email origins through VPNs was tedious work. Layer after layer of misdirection, each one designed to make the sender untraceable. Most people gave up after the first redirect. After the second. By the third, you needed serious resources and serious patience.
I had both.
The first layer bounced through a server in Amsterdam. Standard privacy measure—nothing suspicious on its own. The second routed through somewhere in Eastern Europe, harder to pin down, the kind of infrastructure that existed specifically to make tracking difficult.
The third layer led me to a shell company registered in Cyprus. Financial architecture I recognized—the particular pattern of money and data flowing through jurisdictions that didn't ask questions.
By the fourth layer, I knew.
Moscow.
The server that sent Elena Voss's email—the email that had made Auralia cry with joy, that had dangled her deepest dream in front of her like candy before a child—routed back to infrastructure I'd flagged eighteen months ago.
Deshnev.
My algorithm had tagged it during our ongoing surveillance of Belyaev operations. Anton's people used Deshnev digital architecture the way they used Deshnev financial networks—borrowed power, borrowed cover, the particular alliance ofconvenience that connected Moscow's untouchables to Anton's expansion ambitions.
I sat back in my chair.
