Page 70 of Tamed Enemy
“I’ll kill him.” He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t sound angry or vindictive. He’s simply stating a fact, as if he were giving a stranger his address or telling an interviewer his net worth.
“Killing’s too good for him.” I say. “I want him to suffer. I want him to lose every single thing he holds dear. His house. His men. His reputation. I want him to wake up with nothing, and to know you and I are the ones who took it all.”
“Nothing…” Cole echoes, and he gets very still.
“What?” I finally ask.
“Shannon.”
“What about her?”
“There’s one con she always wanted to run but never got the chance. It takes money to stage, a lot of it. And people. And time. She could never pull everything together in one place.”
“What is it?”
“The Big Store. You build out a space and put in people like they’re running a real business. A gambling parlor. A bank. An investment firm. It all looks legit. And after a month or a year or whenever, you shut things down and walk off with everything you took in from the marks.”
“What sort of business would Tarasov fall for?”
He’s quiet for so long I think I’ll have to repeat my question. But finally he says, “The Mid-Atlantic Joint Task Force for the Interception and Interdiction of Organized Crime. MAJAT.”
I grew up in the Canton Crew. I can name every law enforcement agency in the country, from beat cops to the director of the FBI, all the yokes with their hands out. “There isn’t any MAJAT.”
“Not yet. But there will be—a joint effort from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. We just have to build it.
My head hurts. “Let’s say we find a way to pick him up. Even find a way to keep him for a while. Eventually we’ll have to let him go.”
“Exactly.”
“You aren’t making sense.”
“MAJAT will record every second Tarasov is in custody. And they’ll accidentally-on-purpose post it to the internet. When he slips—and he will—the entire bratva will see him betray the brotherhood. Not just Baltimore—every Russian mobster in the country. Once MAJAT lets Tarasov go, he’ll have a deep red target on his back. His own people will take care of him.”
“What makes you so sure Tarasov will slip?”
“His son did.”
Pyotr Tarasov broke when the FBI dragged him in for questioning about diddling kids. We know that because of Cole’s computer program, Viktor, because of searches Pyotr ran before I killed him.
“And you’re sure you can makeNikolaisqueal?”
“I don’t have to,” Cole says. “Youwill. You’ll be guiding the interrogation the entire time. Everything that motherfucker has ever done to you, to the Canton Crew, to the entire city of Baltimore—you’ll use it. And you will make him pay.”
Turning Tarasov’s own men against him… It’s terrible. It’s cruel. And I can’t imagine a more fitting fate for a shitehawk like Nikolai Pavlovich Tarasov.
Lying here in the dark, talking about murder as if we’ll invite the pakhan in for Sunday Roast, I can’t imagine how I’ll break him down.
But the thought of doing so heals me more than anything else Cole has done for me in this luxury hotel room.
“Tell me more,” I finally say. “How do we set up MAJAT?”
26
COLE
Kate and I go straight from the airfield to the garage that is serving as Sawgrass’ command center. I’m not sure how many uniformed men crowd the four-car space. A blue tarp stretches across the concrete floor. In the center of the tarp, Jeremy Collins is secured to an armchair I’ve never seen before.
A shop light is clipped to a rafter, pouring harsh white light over the scene. Duct tape binds Collins’ ankles and wrists to the chair. His feet are bare. His chest too. Someone has worked him over multiple times; his bruises range from yellow-green to deep purple-black. His eyes are swollen nearly shut, and his mouth is a rotting piece of fruit.
