Page 101 of Sins of Arrogance

I don’t bother to say any­thing to him giv­ing me one of the most com­mon Slavic names for a man. I sim­ply slice one of his nip­ples off.

“Ilya,” he screams. “It was Ilya Darakov.”

So, the lit­tle piece of shite knew all along who his un­cle was talk­ing to.

Ilya Darakov. Shite. A weapons dealer, Darakov does busi­ness with my fa­ther. But he does busi­ness with a lot of peo­ple in our world.

“I’m done play­ing. Tell me ev­ery­thing you know about the mis­sion, or the next thing I’m cut­ting off is your dick.”

Gjon is cry­ing so hard, he strug­gles to the get the words out, but he man­ages.

“Some­thing about a pro­to­type gun. High-value. Ilya wants it and any­thing stored with it.”

Darakov knows about the whis­per gun? Con­sid­er­ing the en­gi­neer who showed it to us the first time was Rus­sian, that’s bet­ter news than it could be. It’s en­tirely pos­si­ble Darakov was at the demon­stra­tion too and tracked the orig­i­nal tech down to us.

But it would have been bet­ter news if they’d been af­ter some­thing else en­tirely.

“Where did you get in­tel on our tun­nels?” I ask.

“Ilya knows about them. Said they’ve been around for over a cen­tury. He told us about a build­ing in Queens to watch.”

Bro­gan isn’t go­ing to like hear­ing that, but be­liev­ing the Bunker is so se­cret no other syn­di­cates know about it is fool­ish. I al­ways fig­ured some­one knew, even if I didn’t be­fore Bro­gan in­ducted me into the Shaugh­nessy Mob. Which is one of the rea­sons I up­graded se­cu­rity.

“We didn’t think they’d have se­cu­rity like the Pen­ta­gon. We thought it was a tun­nel that led to a base­ment the mob used to use as a hide­out, not a whole un­der­ground fa­cil­ity.”

Those words just might be Gjon’s death sen­tence. Right now, the in­tel is lim­ited to old mem­o­ries and hearsay. I aim to keep it that way.

Whether I do that by killing him, or not, is un­de­cided.

Too bad the lit­tle pis­sant is Besnik’s nephew.

“That doesn’t ex­plain how you found the en­trance.”

“Wraith made us stake out the build­ing un­til he found a sol­dier to plant a track­ing de­vice on.” He snivels some more. “It was bor­ing as hell and he wouldn’t even let us go out at night.”

Ev­ery­thing Gjon is say­ing is re­in­forc­ing my view of Wraith.

“Who did you put the tracker on?” It has to be some­one who comes to the Bunker reg­u­larly.

“I don’t know his name.”

“What did he look like?”

“He’s slick. Wears suits. He has brown hair. Oh, and he car­ries a brief­case.”

A pen­cil pusher? But which one?

Not many come to the Bunker, much less of­ten enough to be tagged.

Wraith will know the name of our man, of that I have no doubt. What I don’t know is if he will share that name.

“You think he’s talk­ing about that prick, Patrick Ma­honey?” Brice asks.

Gjon’s eye twitches when Patrick’s name is men­tioned. The lit­tle fecker has been ly­ing to me.

“You know who it is.”

“No.” Now his eyes are so wide with alarm, the whites look anime sized. “I just re­mem­bered! I swear. He said his name into his phone when he an­swered it.”