Page 10 of The Mad Don
“How could this happen?” he asks himself.
He looks up at me. “You called in fast enough that I had time. The men with us were compromised. You gave us a head start.”
I ask the question in my chest. “The shipment, we lost it?—”
“There was no shipment.”
I sit up.
“What?”
“There was nokoshka. There was a truck, crates, and a great deal of paperwork that would convince anyone watching the dock that the shipment was real. But the actual product was moved through our family in Moscow three days ago. They will route it through the northern corridor next week.”
Kirill planned to catch the Italians in their plot.
“It was never about the shipment. It was about finding the leak. Mondi could not resist a target that size. I knew he would move on it.”
He turns the laptop on the desk toward me.
The screen is showing the inbox of one of his secure home accounts. It does not exist on any public network, and fewer than ten people in the world have it. There is a single new message at the top from an anonymous sender, time-stamped at six this morning.
The subject line is a warehouse address.
The body of the message is two sentences.
A meeting. Two days. 3 p.m.
There is an address underneath.
I look up at Kirill, then I sit back in the chair.
“Pakhan. We know where he will be. We know the time. We have two days to plan. Let me take him.” I lean forward.
Kirill is shaking his head before I have finished.
“It is too risky.”
“Pakhan —”
“He is not Esposito. He is not Vitale. He is Mondi, and the Mondi name still carries weight in five countries, and the old families inSicily will treat the assassination of their Don as an act of war, regardless of what he was doing in New York. There are alliances I cannot afford to lose. There are favors I am still calling in.”
“Then we let him keep coming?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
He stands and walks to the window. He looks out for a moment.
“I need to know what he wants.”
“He wants a war.”
“No. He wants something. Men like Mondi do not burn this much oxygen on a feud they cannot name. He wants something I have. I need to know what.”
“And once you know?”
“Once I know, I decide. If we stay defensive, strike, or make peace.” He turns from the window. “But we do not commit to one of those three things without knowing the answer because the wrong choice on any of the three loses me the family.”
