Page 100 of Lethal Obsession

“Whoever is running the team of John Owenses isn’t content with just running you out of town. They’re coming after our turf, Lex, and they’re coming hard. Fifty percent of our games have been shut down in the last couple of weeks: all of the floating casinos and half our private back rooms. Three of our nightclubs are temporarily closed, held up on fire safety technicalities or some other bullshit. But the real kicker is how they’re coming at the Cardeñases’ business. The cartel has lost two narco-subs in the past two weeks, each carrying five thousand kilos of product. We’re talking over three hundred million in lost revenue. The Cardeñases are rightly accusing us of failing to protect them and their pipeline. That favor you gave Mak is hitting our bottom line. Hard.”

Christ.

I slump back in my chair, reeling. I can almost feel the swamp creeping inexorably across the ocean, determined to reclaim me.

“Is it the Novikovs?”

“No.” Dima answers immediately. “It was definitely Kiril who took down the Luccheses, but not without some serious help smuggling him into the city. Since then, though, he’s stayed out of sight. I’ve got a girl inside Kiril Novikov’s Atlanta strip club, and he’s been there every night. He hasn’t put a foot this side of the border again.” He gives me a cold smile. “The fucker would be dead by now if he had.”

I don’t doubt it for a minute.

“You said that whoever is trying to take us down is the same person behind the Owens aliases.” I look between Dima and Lars. “What makes you so sure there’s a connection?”

“It’s not a person, exactly.” Lars starts tapping, and social media images from a range of platforms appear on the second screen. “Checked out social media lately?”

“Of course not.” I glare at him. “You know I hate that shit.”

Dima lights a cigarette. “This won’t make you like it any better.”

It takes me a moment to realize the social media posts all feature me—and that none of them are positive.

“The Pakhan’s Plan,” screams one headline, beneath a clear image of my face. “Is Petrovsky’s Playbook a Plot to Conquer the Keys?”

There are a hundred variations on the same theme.

“Ballot Box Boss.”

“Polls, Politics, and the Pakhan Poisoning the Process.”

And it doesn’t stop at the political conspiracy shit. The posts dredge up old scandals along with the new.

“The Biscayne Butcher,” beneath a gruesome carousel of homicide images of corpses. “Blood, Bodies, and the Brutal Bratva Boss.”

“Sunny Isles Slaughter,” with a picture of Ron Watkins’s face.

“I like that last one,” I say lightly, ignoring the cold creep of revulsion spreading through my body. “But this has to be my personal favorite.” I click on another headline, highlighting it. “Draining the Dade County Swamp: Can Florida Finally Free Itself from Petrovsky’s Payouts?”

“It’s got a ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yeah.” Lars gives me a loopy grin. “That’s the thing about AI. Endless fucking creative possibilities.” He clicks into a diagram. “I’ve reverse engineered a stack of the social media accounts and so-called news outlets behind the headlines. All of them lead nowhere, off into the ether. Bot accounts spreading AI bullshit news sources, but the fuckers are smart, Lex. I can tell they’re fake, but I can’t track them. Whoever is running the campaign against you has one hell of a disinformation machine. We’re talking content farms and high-level media manipulation.”

“This shit is all over every screen in Miami, Lex.” Dima isn’t smiling. “And when I tell you it’s fucking us, I mean like a reverse pineapple up the ass, without lube to smooth the passage.”

“Interesting visual,” Lars murmurs, earning a dark glance from Dima. “But true, unfortunately. I ran the numbers after Dima asked me to check. Earnings are down, deeper than that fucking swamp you love so much.” He clicks, and the revolting headlines disappear.

Unfortunately, the sick churning in my gut doesn’t.

“The reason I’m so sure there’s a connection,” Lars says, “is because the same social media accounts that are painting you black are busy whitewashing Marty Hunter Jr. and his family to American dream perfection.”

“Owens did say that was his plan.” I scroll through the links Lars sent through, all showing Marty’s white-toothed smile dazzling the camera, his arms around his perfectly groomed blonde wife and daughter. “They must be doing photo shoots before eleven in the morning, if the wife looks that sober. The facade will crack sooner or later,” I say dismissively. “Hunter’s so deep in the swamp he’s barely breathing, and the public knows it.”

“The public,” says Lars dryly, “know what they’re told to know. And the people behind Hunter have used this thing with you and Ron Watkins to recast you as Miami’s villain and him as a modern American crime-fighting hero. They don’t mention who is actually doing the crime fighting, mind you. And that’s where this shit gets interesting.”

He clicks on an aerial shot of the crew of a Cardeñas narco-sub surrendering to a force of armed men in black military fatigues. “Have a look at the uniforms worn by the military guys who boarded the sub and tell me what you see.”

I zoom in, frowning at the gun-toting figures on the deck. “Unidentifiable,” I say. “Except for that horizontal arrow. Mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing,” Lars says. “Doesn’t belong to any law enforcement agency, nor any private security firm we can identify.”