Chapter 17
I sat in a chair in the hospital waiting room, studying my phone. Alex was in getting his shoulder x-rayed, to ensure the bones were healing properly. My own check-up had been quick and simple, and I’d been pronounced in fine heath.
Laryssa had sent me hundreds of pages of reading material.
The connections were convoluted and faint. Mikhaylo and his crew rarely spoke in open, clear terms. There were pseudonyms and coded references. Abbreviations and shorthand. But Laryssa and her team were experts at what they did. They had lived in this world their entire lives. They knew what they were looking for.
And the ghost of a thread was there.
Mikhaylo had originally been making plans for exploring new options in Abu Dhabi. Something involving a luxury hotel and high-end clients. But he had been turned. Redirected. For some reason he had backed off on the whirlpool tubs and the Carrera marble and he had taken his private plane to the gritty streets of New Haven. To our waterfronts and warehouses.
Why?
It almost seemed random. It was almost as if a whim had come to him and he’d simply turned his head.
But Mikhaylo wasn’t like that. He didn’t just move left rather than right. He was methodical, careful, and alert. He had flown west for a reason.
I just couldn’t see it.
I scrolled … scrolled …
A text message. From someone named V. The IP address had him in Honduras.
Enjoy NH. Try P’s clam abeetz.
And the response.
Works out, you get a marker.
My finger tapped.
A man like Mikhaylo didn’t throw markers around. The offers to help were given when he felt he achieved something substantial, something of worth. And setting up an entire new operation in New Haven would certainly qualify.
This V person, despite being in Central America, seemed to know the New Haven pizza scene well. And Laryssa could not find any connections at all between V and Ukraine. Between V and Mikhaylo, before this set of exchanges. If anything, V seemed to be more involved in the Central American drug trade. I couldn’t see any points of intersection between his world and ours.
There was a motion above me, and I clicked off my phone.
Alex stood there, rotating his shoulder. “Doc says it’s healing up fine. Should be good as new in no time.”
I stood and smiled. “That’s good to hear.”
His gaze held mine. “Anything interesting, in what you’re reading?”
I tucked my phone in my purse. “Just some minor cleanup from Mikhaylo’s files. Now, c’mon. I hear Sasha has been working all day on a German meal which will make your heart melt.”
He smiled, but I saw it in his eyes. The awareness that I was not sharing everything. That he was willing to wait. To let me tell him in my own time.
I drew him into a hug. “Thank you, Alex.”
He ran a hand down my hair. There was no need for words.
* * *
We were at the precinct. Alex and the others were working on paperwork. It seemed as if the paperwork faerie had set loose the most widespread flood of forms and documents that I had ever seen. True, the Mikhaylo network was layered with almost Biblical intricacy. There were calls coming in from the FBI, the CIA, and foreign governments. Still, there only seemed so many different ways in which a single operation could be recorded.
I had not been spared.
They had treated me respectfully, and Alex had been by my side through most of the interviews. They had not pressed me on details of what I had endured during my years with him. But still, it was a challenge even speaking his name to strangers, to investigators who now saw him as merely an entry for a clinical document.
At last they let me go.
Alex looked with a sigh at his computer. “I have at least another four hours of work, just to keep up with the current forms. But I think you should get out of here. Is Laryssa free? Or Sasha? I don’t want you to be alone. But I don’t think it’s good for you to be here, surrounded by all of this.”
I held up my phone. “Laryssa’s been offering to keep me company until you’re done. She can meet me out front.”
He smiled in relief. “Great. I’ll walk you down.”
Another few minutes, and her car pulled up by the steps. She gave a wave to Alex. “I’ll take good care of her.”
He kissed me. “I’ll call you the moment I can get free. You two go do something fun. Relax. Talk.”
I nodded and climbed into the car.
We were off.
Evening was tracing purples and violets into the sky, and she headed up, up, up the gentle hills into East Rock Park. It was impressive to find such a retreat of trees and hiking trails immediately above the sprawling city.
She smiled at me. “I thought you could do with some quiet and nature, after a full day of grilling.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I assured her. “They were respectful of my experiences, and Alex being in there with me helped as well. In a way, I’m glad to go through it. Because it means that Mikhaylo really is gone. It’s proof of it. A cleansing process. The way we seal and bury him.”
She parked, and we climbed out. Dusk was falling now, and as we walked, stars began twinkling high overhead. It was chilly, but I relished the fresh air. The sense that our world was cleansed and new.
She looked over. “We’ve been poring through Mikhaylo’s files. It could take us years to examine every line. But I still don’t see it. We can’t find any reason for a connection between Mikhaylo and New Haven. We can’t find any sign that Mikhaylo knew you were here, or even who you were.”
She shrugged. “Remember that documentary we watched, about the triplets who were separated at birth? How two of them ended up going to the exact same college and realized they were related? Funky stuff happens in life. And it’s not as if you’re in different lines of work. You were taking down a prostitution ring. Mikhaylo was setting up a prostitution ring. Maybe it was inevitable your paths would cross again.”
“I suppose.”
Laryssa was right. Bizarre coincidences were all around us. People ran into long-forgotten friends at vacation resorts. A favorite song played at just the right time.
We came up to the edge of the hill. New Haven was spread out beneath us, glistening like a jewel-scattered cloth in the night air. It really did look gorgeous. And in that city of students and fishermen, of taxi drivers and police officers and shopkeepers, each one was going about their daily routine, barely knowing the lives of the many other threads which crossed their paths.
How many other coincidences happened every single day, and we just weren’t aware enough to see them?
I asked, “Did you ever get a name for the V guy? The one in Honduras?”
She pulled out her phone. “Nothing we could trace. But I do seem to recall … let me look … yes, here. In this one transaction, on the dark web. He was looking for contacts for what might have been a drug transaction, down in Honduras. Yeah. He used a first name there.”
She held it up to me. “He went by Vengar.”
I blinked.
I said, “In Spanish, that means to avenge. To achieve vengeance.”
She looked doubtful. “Lots of people on the dark web use strange names. It’s almost a rule.”
I stared down at the city, with the cars zipping along the highways, all racing, racing, racing off to who knew where. “What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong? We were thinking that Mikhaylo was lured here to interact with me. Maybe by someone who had been hurt by Mikhaylo, either directly or indirectly, and who wanted him brought to an end. We assumed they figured I’d be the one to make it happen.”
I turned to her. “But what if it was never about me bringing an end to Mikhaylo? What happened, when Mikhaylo arrived at Tweed? When we realized he was here?”
Her brow creased. “Well, you of course decided you wanted to take him on. To go in and face him.”
I nodded. “Anyone who had done even the slightest research into me would have made that guess. And they would also have known of Mikhaylo’s power. His near-Biblical reputation. Most people would have assumed I’d lose. That I’d be caught up in Mikhaylo’s web and lost forever into that world. That I’d be brutalized and raped for years.”
Her gaze was serious. “Sasha and I would never have let that happen. None of us would.”
“You and I know that, and we know we have the skills to follow through on that. But an outside observer? They would see me as an ex-whore with a pipe dream of taking down her boss. They wouldn’t give me the remotest odds of success.”
Laryssa was slowly nodding. “I imagine you’re right. A lone woman up against Mikhaylo? It would seem doomed to failure. But why would someone want to throw you into the lion’s den? To subject you to years of torture? Could it be related to one of the Johns you’ve exposed over the years? Maybe a brother to Boris? That sort of thing?”
I shook my head. “We’ve been pursuing that line already. We couldn’t find anyone from our own circles. And someone who knew me that well? From our own world? They’d know I had a solid chance against Mikhaylo.”
My gaze drifted out over the landscape. “I’m beginning to think this situation was caused by someone who thought I didn’t have a chance. Who thought this encounter would lead to years of punishment for me. Years of torture.”
Awareness came to her face, and she stared at me.
I nodded my head. “Not just torture for me. But for Alex. Someone wanted to torture Alex, for years and years, and they were going to do it by having me captured. By having me stolen away into a brutal world from which he could never wrench me free.”