Page 33 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
Kostya enters and closes the door behind him.
“We have a problem,” he says.
I sit down. “Tell me.”
“The second leak. We identified him on Friday night.” He opens his folder and slides a photograph across the desk. “Stone Renko. Mid-level, eastern corridor, has been with us for eight years. The financial trail goes back four months.”
I look at the photograph. “Marchetti.”
“Worse.” Kostya’s jaw tightens slightly, which for Kostya is the equivalent of anyone else turning white. “The payments don’t come from Marchetti directly. They come through a shell company we traced back to a holding group in Cyprus.” He pauses. “The holding group is registered to a subsidiary of Volkov Capital.”
The room goes very quiet.
“Grigori has been running two operations simultaneously,” I say.
“The Marchetti push into our territory and the internal leak are the same operation. He is funding both. The Marchetti syndicate is his instrument, Roman. They are not an external threat. They are Grigori’s hand moving pieces on our board while he sits in council meetings, confirms session dates, and sends his assistant to call your office twice.”
I lean back in my chair.
Weeks ago, Grigori Volkov sat across from me at a lunch table and talked about his niece’s ambitions with the patient warmth of a man who believed he had already won. He was running two intelligence operations against my organization while he cut his bread and told me Mila was not difficult to be around.
I look at the photograph of Stone Renko.
“Find out everything he has given them,” I say. “Everything. I want the full scope before we move on Grigori. I want it airtight.” I look up at Kostya. “And I want it fast.”
Kostya closes his folder. “How fast?”
“Before the end-of-the-month council session,” I say. “I am not walking into that room without everything I need to take him apart in front of his own people.”
Kostya nods once and stands.
“One more thing,” I say.
He stops.
“Elena.” I look at the window. “Increase her security detail. Quietly. She doesn’t need to know.”
Kostya looks at me for a moment with a carefully neutral expression. His mouth opens to speak, but he decides not to.
“Understood,” he says, and leaves.
I look out at the city.
Grigori Volkov has been moving against me from inside my own house for months, there is a council session in three weeks, and somewhere in all of it a woman I cannot stop thinking about issitting at a desk twenty feet away pretending this morning was just another Monday.
It was not just another Monday.
None of this is just another Monday anymore.
13
ELENA
Mara is waitingup when I get home.
She’s sitting at the kitchen table with two mugs of tea already made, which means she has been tracking my commute and timed it, which means she has been thinking about this conversation since I texted her this morning to say the resignation did not go the way I planned.
She pushes one mug toward me when I sit down, wraps both hands around hers, and looks at me with the patience of someone who has already decided to let me get there on my own.
