Honestly, the man is giving me emotional whiplash. When I’m around him, my focus splinters. My carefully constructed walls crack. I feel things I have no business feeling for a man I’m using for information. Although, I haven’t successfully done that yet.
But now I have something new to go on. A name I didn’t have before. I don’t know if it’s her real name or an alias, but either way, it’s a starting point.
I stumble to my desk and wake my laptop. I’ve hidden everything important under layers of encryption, so it takes me a moment to pull up a browser and start routing through VPN servers in different countries to mask my location.
First stop is the Russian government archives. Birth certificates, identity records, anything official that might have “Voronin” attached to it. Voronina is the female form, but the patriarch would be Voronin.
A common enough Russian surname, though it’s not a name I’ve come across often.
The security on these databases is basic, the firewalls poorly maintained. I’m through in under five minutes.
I search for Marina Voronina, born between 1975 and 1985 in St. Petersburg and surrounding regions.
Nothing.
My mother’s birthday was May 15, 1982. At least, that’s what I always believed. But if she changed her name, she probably changed her birth date too, so best to be thorough.
I widen the parameters. 1970 to 1990. Then to all of Russia.
Still nothing.
I sit back and crack my knuckles, forcing myself to think, pulling my robe tighter around me.
If Marina existed and there’s no record of her in the standard databases, that means someone with significant power scrubbed her from the system. The kind that belongs to organized crime.
I need to go deeper.
I pull up the FSB’s classified intelligence network—Russia’s Federal Security Service. It’s harder to access than the government archives. Russian intelligence doesn’t fuck around with cybersecurity, but there’s always a vulnerability if you know where to look.
It takes me forty-five minutes to find a backdoor through their contractor network—a third-party IT company thathandles file transfers and has outdated security protocols. I route through their system and into the FSB database.
My pulse speeds up. I have maybe three minutes before automatic security detects the intrusion so I need to work fast. I search for the surname Voronin.
It takes less than a second for the name to bring up a hit. Aleksandr Voronin, head of the Voronin Syndicate.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
Files populate with decades of surveillance, intelligence reports, suspected criminal activities. I download everything I can, grabbing documents at random, racing against the clock ticking in my head.
Two minutes. One minute. Thirty seconds.
I pull out as the system locks down behind me, severing my connection and triggering alerts that will have analysts scrambling to trace the intrusion.
They won’t find me. I covered my tracks well. But my hands are shaking as I open the files I managed to download.
Most are heavily redacted intelligence reports, but there’s one dossier that has more detail.
VORONIN SYNDICATE
Base of Operations: St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
Primary Operations: [REDACTED], weapons trafficking, [REDACTED], criminal enterprise.
Leadership: Aleksandr Voronin (deceased; car bomb killed his wife as well)
Status: Defunct. Organization no longer active.
Family Members: Svetlana Voronina (wife, deceased), Marina Voronina (daughter, deceased at 19. Drowning accident, body never recovered).
