Nick
Dmitri is waiting for me in the study when I come downstairs at six, a folder clutched in his right hand, his face pinched into disdain. He puts it on the desk without ceremony and stands back with his arms folded while I open it.
"Alexei's financials," he says. "Last sixty days."
I sit down and read.
The first page is unremarkable. Salary from the organization, paid into the same account he's held for nine years. Mortgage. Car payment. Groceries. The life of a man who earns well and spends within his means.
The second page is where it gets interesting.
A wire transfer. Forty thousand. Routed through a holding company registered in Delaware that doesn't trace back to anything in our books. The company was incorporated eight weeks ago, around the time my father deteriorated badly.
I look at the name on the incorporation documents. Bettina Zhirinovskaya.
Viktor's daughter.
I close the folder.
"The meeting with Viktor's lawyer," I say. "The one at the funeral. Did you get it?"
"Pasha got close enough to catch fragments. Viktor's lawyer was talking about a trust restructure. Moving assets into Bettina's name. The word 'contingency' came up twice."
"Contingency?"
"That's the word."
I sit back in the chair. The leather creaks. Outside the window the east lawn is wet with dew and the sky is the pale grey of early morning, and I think about my father in this chair, in this room, reading files like this one and making decisions that kept the family intact for forty years.
Viktor is building a parallel structure. That's what this is. He's not coming at me directly, because he knows what that costs. He's building something beside me, something that looks like family business, legitimate transfers, a daughter's trust fund. He's positioning Bettina as an alternative heir, which means he's positioning himself as an alternative power.
It's patient work. My father warned me about that.He is a snake.
"What do you want to do?" Dmitri asks.
"Nothing. Yet."
He raises an eyebrow. It's the closest Dmitri comes to disagreement.
"He's making moves I can see," I say. "That means he wants me to see them. He wants me to react, to make a play before I'm ready, to show the men that the new Pakhan panics. I'm not going to give him that."
"And if Alexei flips?"
"Alexei took forty thousand from a holding company eight weeks ago. That means Viktor has been grooming him since before my father died. That's not loyalty to Viktor. That's a man hedging his bets because he wasn't sure who was going to end upin the chair." I turn my coffee mug in a slow circle on the desk. "Now he knows. So the question is whether the forty thousand was an investment or a down payment. If it's an investment, Alexei will come back on his own when he realizes Viktor's play is losing. If it's a down payment, there's a second transfer coming, and we'll see it."
"And then?"
"And then I deal with Alexei." I leave the sentence where it is, because Dmitri knows what it means and doesn't need the details.
He nods once and leaves the study, pulling the door closed behind him.
I finish my coffee. I make three calls. The first is to Ivanov, who confirms the trust transfers are complete and the will is bulletproof. The second is to Gregor, who tells me the shipment from Vladivostok has cleared customs and is being held at the warehouse on Fourth. The third is to a man named Luka in Brighton Beach, who I've never met in person and who controls a distribution network that my father spent fifteen years building a relationship with.
Luka is sixty-three, speaks Russian with a Georgian accent and doesn't trust anyone under forty on principle. I need him to trust me. I need his network for the Vladivostok pipeline, because the volume coming through is twice what our current channels can handle, and if I can't move it fast, it sits in a warehouse and becomes a liability.
"Your father and I had an arrangement," Luka says. His voice is gravel and cigarettes. "Thirty years. You understand what that means."
"I understand it means the arrangement was built on respect, and I intend to honor it."
