Page 48

“He didn’t say. Three weeks and no name. Whoever built it is better than the wolf-crown trace made them look.”

“Or the wolf-crown trace was built to be found,” she says. “Draw everyone toward Greek territory while the real operation runs somewhere else.” She crosses something out and writes over it. “Santiago is the clock. He gets to the shell trace before you’ve framed it and he goes straight to Adrianos. He’s been looking for a reason.”

“A week,” I say. “Maybe less if Declan talks to him.”

She closes the laptop. “Then the contact number is the priority.” She says it to the pad, not to me, pen still moving, and I get the sense she’s been saying it to herself for two days already. “If I can identify whoever directed my father, we have something real to hold the council together. Right now we have a trace pointing the wrong direction and irregularities that haven’t resolved to a name.”

There it is. She heard me coming and got there first. Always three moves ahead. Useful and a problem at the same time.

“The drive,” I say.

Her chin comes up.

“I need it,” I say. “My analysts can work the contact number while you finish the rest.”

“Your analysts will break it,” she says. “My father didn’t use standard encryption. He built his own logic into the layers. Your people go in blind, and they’ll corrupt everything that’s left.”

“Then walk them through it.”

“Give me two days,” she says. “I’m close to the contact number. I crack it myself, you get everything intact.”

I look at her across the desk. Chin up, hands flat on the legal pad, Berezin’s daughter asking me to wait two more days so she can finish on her own terms. She doesn’t trust me with it. Can’t blame her for that. I put her father in the ground.

Two days also means she cracks her father’s encryption with everything she knows about how he built things, and she hands me a name instead of a corrupted mess. She’s more useful on this than three of my analysts combined, and we both know it.

“Two days,” I say.

She nods, pulls the laptop back open, and picks up her pen. Already past me. Already back in the files. She’ll make the deadline. She does what she says she’ll do, which makes her both reliable and dangerous.

22

Evelina

“Get your coat,” he says, and walks out before I can ask why.

I’ve been at the desk for four hours with the same encrypted string and nothing to show for it except burning eyes and the growing suspicion that my father built his logic to be deliberately cruel to anyone who came after him. I close the laptop. The drive isn’t going anywhere. My head is, if I keep staring at it.

I get my coat.

Marka drives. Twenty minutes south through Brooklyn, nobody talking, the window cold under my fingers. The waterfront comes up before I see it, salt and oil in the air. We pull into a marina with no signage and a gate Volkov opens with a key he carries on the same ring as everything else.

He walks down the dock without explaining, and I follow him because explanations from Volkov arrive after the fact, if at all.

The boat surprises me. Solid, well-kept, taken out regularly rather than stored for appearances. He steps aboard and extends a hand back without turning around. I take it, and he lets go the second my feet are on the deck.

“You have a boat,” I say.

“Da,” he says, already at the console.

“You never mentioned it.”

“You never asked,” he says.

He’s right. Weeks pulling apart his financial networks and it never once crossed my mind to ask what he does when he isn’t running people’s lives.

He gets the engine going himself, casts the lines off himself, and we ease out into open water. The Manhattan skyline comes up across the river, lit up and enormous. I grip the rail and breathe cold air into lungs that have been living on recycled estate warmth for too long. My ribcage expands three millimeters more than usual. It’s not much, but it’s enough to be noticeable.

“Come here,” he says.