28
Lev
Tony drops an encrypted drive on the desk and says, “Tell me whether I’m wasting my evening.”
I look at the drive, then at him. “That depends. Are we talking about Morozov accounting or your personality?”
He pulls out the chair across from me and sits. “Funny. Turns out, Ruslan smuggled out a batch of files before he crossed over. We recovered the last dead drop this morning, and half of it is still encrypted. I want to know whether there’s anything in there we haven’t already used.”
That tracks. Ruslan didn’t hold anything back. He came here with what he had, and Tony has spent the last few weeks chasing down the rest. Dead drops, relay points, and backups buried under names no normal person would ever think to check. As I’m learning, this is the kind of work Morozov men do when they assume they’ll need proof later.
I lean back in the chair and eye the drive. “You really know how to show a man a good time.”
Tony snorts. “You know the system. You know the naming conventions. You know which folders are worth opening and which ones are there to waste hours. That makes you useful.”
“There it is. I was starting to think you respected me.”
“Don’t ruin the moment.”
The office off the main study is too small for the amount of work that gets done in it with two chairs, one desk, and one laptop that’s already open. Tony’s legal pad sits to the right with three pages of notes in block letters.
He turns the screen toward me. Folders line the monitor filled with dates, region tags, and internal labels I haven’t looked at this closely since I walked away from my father’s operation.
“Start with operations,” he suggests. “Flag anything current. Cross-check what you already gave us. Dmitri wants to know whether this changes anything.”
“It probably won’t.”
“We need to know that for sure.”
He makes a face as I plug in the drive and open the first folder. It’s filled with shipping routes, safe houses, and burner accounts. Most of it is old. Some of it is already dead. A few entries match what I gave Dmitri and Boris the first week I got here, right down to the account markers and courier names. Tony takes notes while I move through the directories.
“This one matches the Kazan facility map you gave us,” he remarks. “And this transfer chain?”
“Customs bribes and transport cover. It fed through Georgia for eight months.”
He writes that down. “You handed Boris the access points on that one.”
“I did.”
“So the recovered archive confirms your story.”
I glance at him. “Were you hoping it wouldn’t?”
Tony huffs a laugh. “You really are exhausting.”
“You say that like you haven’t been enjoying yourself.”
He ignores me and taps the screen with his pen. “Open the next one.”
I do. Then the next. Then another after that.
The rhythm turns mechanical. He asks. I answer. He writes it down. I kill three old routes in Rostov, flag one active contact in Tver, and identify two shell companies that should have been burned months ago. Tony writes every piece of it down.
By the time his phone vibrates, we’ve gone through half of all of it.
He checks the caller ID and swears. “Dmitri.” He rises and points at the screen. “Keep going. Flag anything live. I’ll be back.” He starts toward the door, then stops. “And Lev?”
“Mm.”
