Page 94 of Dark King Daddy

“Upstairs,” he said. “Maksim has the footage ready.”

The operations room on the upper floor of 91 Beard Street was windowless and cold. Two long tables. Wall monitors. Maps of the waterfront and trucking routes that Mikhail Orlov had hung years ago and that nobody had removed. The room smelled of stale coffee and the faint chemical tang of old carpet.

Maksim stood beside the central monitor. He was perhaps thirty-five, with short dark hair and the compact build of a man who had once been military and had since learned to occupy less space. A laptop connected to the display. Three image files waited on the desktop.

Anton closed the door.

Nikita set his tablet on the table and took a position where he could see both the monitor and the door. Habit. I did the same from the opposite side.

“Show us,” I said.

Maksim opened the first file.

The footage was from Volna’s third-floor corridor camera. Timestamp: the evening of the assassinations. Twenty-one-fifty-seven. The image was grainy but legible—the particular grey-green of commercial security cameras, every face slightly distorted, every movement carrying the stuttered quality of low frame rate.

Leonid Gusev entered the frame from the left. He wore a dark jacket, shirt beneath, nothing unusual. He walked with the measured step of a man who knew where he was going and did not want to appear hurried.

The next clip was timestamped eighteen-forty. The entrance to Volna. Two of our security men stopped Gusev at the door. One patted him down. Standard procedure. Hands along the sides of the jacket, under the arms, across the waist. The other checked his name against the guest list.

Gusev stood still during the search. His arms were slightly out from his body. His expression was calm. Not the forced calm of a man concealing something — the settled calm of a man who knew he had nothing to find.

“He enters clean,” Maksim said. His voice was low, precise. “No weapon. Nothing concealed. We reviewed the search from three angles. It was thorough.”

“Continue,” Anton said.

The third clip was timestamped twenty-one-fifty-eight. Gusev in the third-floor corridor again. He passed the Birch Room, still empty while Lev and Mikhail finished dinner. He did not pause. He continued to the end of the hallway, turned left, and stopped in front of a narrow door.

A service cupboard. I recognized it. Metal shelving. Cleaning supplies. Junction boxes for the building’s electrical system. A space no guest should have had reason to enter.

Gusev keyed in a four-digit code. The keypad’s green light blinked. The door opened. He stepped inside.

The timestamp on the footage advanced. Less than a minute. Fifty-three seconds.

Gusev emerged. He closed the door behind him. His right hand hung at his side, and the fit of his jacket had changed. The fabric sat slightly differently across his right hip. Subtle. The kind of difference you would not notice unless you were looking for it.

Twenty-one-fifty-nine. He walked back down the corridor.

Twelve minutes later, at twenty-two-eleven, the first shot was fired inside the conference room.

The room in the operations center was silent. The monitor glowed. Maksim’s cursor hovered over the frozen image of Gusev walking away from the cupboard, the slight distortion at his hip the only evidence of what he carried.

“The gun was already inside,” Nikita said. His voice was flat. No charm. No insinuation. The smooth surface stripped back to the mechanism beneath. “Planted before the meeting.”

“I found adhesive residue.” Maksim opened a photograph on the laptop — a close shot of the underside of the second shelf inside the cupboard. A strip of heavy-duty mounting tape, partially peeled, the foam backing compressed. “Handgun was secured here. Pressure-mounted. One pull and it comes free. Whoever placed it knew the shelf dimensions and the exact position for a clean draw.”

“How long before the meeting was it placed?” I asked.

“Impossible to determine precisely. The cupboard has no internal camera. But Volna’s maintenance logs show the third floor was cleaned at fourteen hundred that day. The cupboard was locked afterward. Nobody could have accessed it without the code.”

The code.

I set my coffee on the table. I did not drink it.

“The code,” I said.

Maksim looked at Anton. Anton looked at me.

“After the Karpov raid, I ordered a temporary security code installed on every restricted access point at Volna,” I said. “Specifically for the meeting between Lev and Mikhail. Standard protocol. Four-digit. Changed the morning of the meeting and deactivated after.”