CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Friday, June 23
Hank sat in his office and looked over all the intel that had been gathered. There was a stack for Firtash, a stack for Sergey Belikov, and another for Anton Vazov. Lucky and Sam would be here any minute and he expected them to come up with a solid strategy that would end this once and for all.
Checking his phone, he saw the red light blink and knew which workroom Stazi was currently working in at the Art Institute. He’d kitted her up with a thin GPS disc that he’d adhered to the back of her neck. It was almost invisible to the eye and was good for forty-eight hours.
The other thing he’d given her was the citrine ring that she wore when they’d gone to see Firtash. Everything that was said within a foot of her was being fed back into Lucky’s computer with certain words being pinged and going directly to his phone. They’d done something similar on an op last year and it had proven to be successful, so he saw no reason to reinvent the wheel.
What he’d really wanted to do was bring her to SAI and have her sit in his office until they took care of the threat. The fact that Stazi laughed hysterically when he’d suggested it didn’t bother him a bit. In fact, she could pee her pants in hysterics and it wouldn’t have changed his mind.
Looking at the intel, he felt satisfied that they’d completed SALUTE, which was an acronym for a log that they’d kept on the Teams when reconning a target. They knew the size, activity, location, unit, time, and equipment of Sergey Belikov and Dmitry Firtash. Now they were going to put an assault team in place and take action.
Lucky walked into his office and slumped into a chair. “When is Sam supposed to arrive?”
“Five minutes,” Hank responded. Taking a moment to study Lucky, he noticed she looked exhausted. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m at mile twenty and I hate everyone and everything, but I can’t give up because I can see the finish line and I’m crossing the sucker. Also, I would never let anything happen to my best friend.” She stood, fixed her shorts, and then tightened her ponytail. “Come into the bat cave when Sam gets here.”
“I’m here,” Sam announced from the door. He walked in and shook his head. “Nice to see you took time to get yourself together this morning, Lucky.”
“Unlike some people, I have more important things to do than worry about my hair.” Looking him up and down, she crossed her arms. “When you get a real job, you may find that you have to give up your beauty routine and actually do something worthwhile.”
“Children, play nice,” Hank said from his chair.
“Sam wouldn’t know how if he read a book about it.”
Hank saw Sam open his mouth and then close it as he watched Lucky stalk out of the room. “Why do you poke her?”
“I can’t help myself.” Taking a chair, he sat down and crossed his leg over his knee.
“I have a pretty good idea what that means, but I doubt you’re ready to hear it, so I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Any chance the FBI might be willing to bring Firtash in to question him sooner as opposed to later?”
“We’ve done all the questioning we can right now, and his fate rests in the hands of the Justice Department. My sources tell me that he and some associates are about to be charged in sealed indictments for paying $18.5 million in bribes to Indian officials so they could mine titanium and then sell it to Boeing for use in the build of the 787 Dreamliner passenger jet. Firtash is the alleged leader of the scheme and could face up to fifty years in prison as well the confiscation of his wealth. They also want him on money laundering, but they don’t have all the pieces in place yet.”
“So why don’t they grab him now, before he flees the country?”
“That’s a good question and one I can’t answer because the Justice Department moves at their own pace.”
“What if we let them know that he’s obsessed with Stazi and might want to take her with him if he decides to leave the United States?”
“Won’t change their agenda. They don’t deal in possibilities.”
“Fuck.”
“Lucky’s been digging into Sergey Belikov and I think he may end up being more of a threat than Firtash. It’s his shestyorka that are following you and Stazi around,” Sam said.
“You think it’s Sergey giving the orders and not Firtash?”
“Possibly. Right now, we don’t know who the king of the pile is. Firtash has a lot more money than either of the pakhans, not to mention a better veneer of respectability. His money is relatively clean and he moves about society with ease. But none of that means a thing if Sergey and Anton decide to make a move. They’d kill a member of their family with little hesitation, so right now we’re looking at them as being the biggest threat.”
“Why could they possibly be interested in Stazi?”
“If we could answer that definitively, then we could arrest them and bring them in.”
Hank stood and grabbed his phone. “Let’s go over to Lucky’s office and see what she has.”
***
Lucky stood in front of the wall-sized monitor and enlarged a map that she was studying. Stepping back, she grabbed her tablet and started typing commands. “Gotcha,” she said quietly.
“Who do you have?” Hank asked as he and Sam walked into the room.
“Firtash.” Turning, she looked at both men. “I’ve taken the Shodan map and written a program to image-search using facial recognition. Fortunately, all our people of interest have pictures on file, so it was relatively easy to write the parameters.”
“This shows every digital device connected to the internet…right?” Hank asked.
“Correct,” Lucky answered. “After Dmitry showed up at the Art Institute yesterday, I decided to ping all his devices and keep a closer eye on him. My gut is telling me he’s only part of the problem, but I should’ve done this from the start.”
“Do I want to know how you acquired the IP addresses for all of his electronic devices?” Sam asked as he rubbed his head.
“I’m sure that you don’t. If any of this makes you feel uncomfortable, please feel free to skedaddle.”
“Who says skedaddle anymore?”
Lucky let out a loud breath. “Sam, I’m working on about four hours of sleep and I have about ten seconds of patience left in me. You’re dry humping my last nerve and I’m seconds away from stabbing you with a pen. If you can’t play well with others, please just give us what you have and hit the road. This is my best friend that we’re talking about and I can’t take one more smart-ass remark.”
Hank watched the two face off and wondered if Sam was going to leave. There was nothing keeping him here and he had no reason to cooperate, other than wanting to prevent a crime. “She’s right, Sam. This doesn’t really concern you. If we get something valuable, we’ll pass it on. No need to compromise your career.”
“Screw that. I’m not going to let Sergey or Anton get away with any more shit. Chicago leads the country in heroin overdoses, and Sergey and his Bratva distribute well over fifty percent of that. If I can help take them down, then I will.”
“Now that we have that cleared up,” Hank said, “let’s figure our next step.”
Lucky nodded, went over to the Microsoft Hub table, and started typing in some information. “The audio devices you placed inside Firtash’s home have proved to be invaluable. I wrote a program so that what we receive is translated immediately and then I’ve flagged it for certain words or phrases. It allows my team not to waste time on reading the complete transcripts. What we’ve got so far is that Sergey Belikov wants Firtash to make his private plane available as well as a warehouse in Bedford Park. What he wants to do with those has not been spelled out, but based on his business interests, we can guess that he wants to move either heroin or cash.”
“Do we have eyes on the warehouse in question?” Sam asked.
“Not yet. They have decent security systems installed, so I don’t want to raise a red flag and mess with it unless I have to. Having a drone survey it would be our best option but it’s ten minutes from Midway Airport and it’ll get called in and taken down before I can gather enough intel for it to be meaningful.”
“Leave that to me,” Sam said. “I’m going to put a team on the warehouse and see what we can pick up. Worst case, we get something we can use in the future. Best case, we intercept whatever shipment he’s got. I have people on Belikov most days of the week and we’ve never been able to tie him directly to a heroin shipment. His bratoks or street soldiers usually handle the retail trade and we leave their arrests for the CPD to handle. We need the big fish and that’s either Belikov or his brigadiers. Getting them is the only way to make a real change in the landscape of criminal activity in Chicago.”
“How many brigadiers does he have?” Hank asked.
“Belikov has six that we know of. Two for the heroin business, two for the prostitution ring, and two for money laundering. Which is where Anton Vazov comes in. He’s the master at money laundering. The fact that he was here in Chicago tells me that something more is going on or about to. The man doesn’t leave Brussels unless there’s a significant amount of money involved.”
Lucky flicked some pictures and spreadsheets up to the monitor and frowned. “I’ve been doing some digging on Vazov and he’s into some interesting activities. His money laundering business is only part of his empire. He also brokers arms deals.”
“Have you been reading Interpol files in your spare time?” Sam asked with a smile.
“I’m not going to answer that,” Lucky replied. “I’m an upstanding citizen and would never avail myself of information illegally.”
“Moving on,” Hank said firmly. “Anything new on Firtash that might help us determine why he’s interested in Stazi?”
“Yes,” Lucky replied as she sent up a half-dozen pictures to the monitor. “Remember I told you that Stazi resembled Firtash’s first wife?”
“Of course,” Hank replied.
Sweeping her hands up, she frowned. “Look at his daughter. Stazi is a dead ringer for her.”
Hank walked over and looked at the pictures and felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. There was a picture of a woman in her twenties that could be Stazi’s twin. All the intensity that Hank had recognized in Dmitry now made sense. “Is the daughter still alive?”
“No, she was killed shortly after these pictures were taken. It happened in Russia and the details surrounding her death are murky. As far as I can tell, his daughter was the love of his life. He doted on her completely and when she died, some felt that a part of Dmitry died along with her.”
“Fuck me,” Hank said quietly. This was so much worse than he thought. “A lot of things are starting to make sense.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Lucky said as she added pictures of Dmitry and his daughter. “This makes his fascination with Stazi understandable.”
“And that much harder to stop,” Sam added. “This is the kind of thing someone doesn’t get over.”
Hank walked over to a chair and sat down heavily. This put a whole new spin on the situation because telling a man he had to get over the doppelgänger of his dead daughter was going to be close to impossible. All the darkness he’d seen in the man’s gaze was grief and longing and that wasn’t a thing that probably ever ended. He knew if something happened to Stazi he would never get over it and he imagined that he would be equally torn up if there was a child involved. Maybe worse. His father had always told him there was no greater love than one for a child, so Firtash’s behavior made a lot of sense.
Lucky came over and plopped down next to him. “This makes the whole thing a lot more complicated because we can’t predict his next move. It’s not the usual things that are motivating his behavior— sex, money, or power. It’s something so much more powerful and unpredictable.”
“Some of the most difficult missions that I’ve been on don’t compare to what we are about to face. All the times that I’ve gone out and hunted evil, I knew what the enemy wanted. Their goals and objectives were clear, so that made predicting their behavior relatively easy. This is none of those things. This is a man with a broken heart, and a Bratva pakhan who’s probably going to use Stazi as a pawn to get what he wants.”
“You never had an easy day,” Sam commented “You’re a fluid warrior. You don’t need a set plan to succeed. Hell, you’d probably hate it if it happened. This is no different, and we’re not going to let any of those assholes harm your girl.”
“That’s the thing that’s mind-fucking me. The woman I love is in danger and it’s messing with my mojo. On any given day, I would look at this situation and laugh at how easy it was going to be to take down the bad guys.” Running his hand over the back of his neck, he smirked. “Nothing about this feels easy.”
“Which is why we work as a team,” Lucky replied. “This is my best friend in the world and I, for one, want to cause them a lot of harm. It’s only because Sam is standing in the room that I’m not revealing the many ways in which I’m willing to destroy their lives.”
“I think I’d like to hear it, so I can prepare for the Armageddon that you have planned for me,” Sam said with a laugh.
“I don’t care about you enough to destroy you,” Lucky replied.
Hank glanced over at Lucky and saw how true her words were. She reserved her skills for people and situations that really mattered and right now Sam didn’t matter a bit. Looking over at his buddy, he noticed he wasn’t too happy about it. You’d think he would consider it good news, but the look on his face suggested he would like to be of consequence to Lucky.
Interesting.
But not important in the landscape of what he was currently dealing with. “I don’t think Firtash is going to do anything to harm Stazi, but I believe that Sergey Belikov would if it will further his aims. Let’s make him the focus of our investigation and start planning accordingly.”
“Agreed,” Sam and Lucky said simultaneously.
“Jinx, you owe each other a Coke,” Hank said.
“I’ll buy you dinner when this is all over. How does that sound, Lucky?”
“Like torture.”
Hank let out a bark of laughter. The crush that Lucky had seemed to have faded. Maybe the time the two had been spending together had cured her and what she saw up close wasn’t all that appealing. Proximity did that to a relationship. Either killed it stone dead or made it flourish.
Knowing that he and Stazi had landed well on the side of flourishing gave him a nice dose of smug satisfaction. They’d been almost exclusively in one another’s company for almost a month. Twenty-six days, to be exact, and all he wanted were thousands more. Even when they were out of sync, they were better than anything he could’ve imagined.
All the yelling she’d wanted to do last night ended up being a result of the orgasm he’d given her and not because she was mad. Or the mad she had disappeared when he’d taken control of her body and pleasure. Not that things could be solved by sex. Hell, even he knew that.
But taking her up against the wall the moment they walked through the door sure didn’t hurt any disagreement that had happened earlier. And truth was, he couldn’t remember what she had been mad about in the first place, which might not be a good thing because it was probably lodged in her brain and added to the list of things he’d done wrong. Not that she ever hinted that she had a list, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Maybe he should ask her about it when he picked her up and see if there was anything he could work on.
There were three things that he could name off the bat and he figured there were a hundred behind it. His domineering, autocratic ways probably didn’t make him the best boyfriend in the world, but they also didn’t make him the worst. If he could balance those qualities with others that she liked, then he hoped she would be willing to keep ahold of him. And hold him she did. Every night she twined herself up with him and held tightly from the moment her eyes closed to the moment they opened. He’d never made a comment about it and he wasn’t planning to because she would probably feel self-conscious.
Stazi was a strong, independent woman and the idea of needing him probably would send her into a tailspin. Which isn’t anything he needed to see. Looking up, he saw Lucky and Sam discussing some surveillance options for the warehouse, so he decided to step out for a minute and check on Stazi. She was going to be at the museum all day and he wanted to make sure she didn’t need anything. “Guys, I’m going to make a quick phone call and then see if Justin and Maddox are available so we can read them in on the intel.”
“Sounds good,” Lucky said without looking up.
Hank walked out of Lucky’s office, headed down the hall, and thought about Dmitry. He wasn’t a threat like Hank had initially imagined, but he was still in play. And how that would ultimately turn out was still a mystery.