Nick didn't like this one bit.
The police scanner was correct: the mansion was still crawling.
Crime Scene people combed the yard and the house, though the only thing he and Sin could see clearly was the front door from this vantage point. The steady stream of people in and out—most of them in paper suits and carrying evidence in some form—told them local agencies were stripping the house.
The place was ablaze, both from the inside and from Klieg lights placed strategically. Occasionally a shadow passed in front of a window, letting them know that the place was full. It was going to be a bitch getting in.
"We need another entry. This sure as shit isn't the way in." She sounded about as excited as if she was in a dental office waiting room. Maybe less so.
Nick understood. He felt the fear, too, his nerves screaming that their timeline had a short downward spiral. They would crash soon and probably not really know when the end came—only that they had been too late.
She was already walking away and Nick followed, climbing into the car and driving the long way around. It was ten minutes later that they managed to park and enter the yard of a quiet home behind the Kurev mansion.
They hadn't been all that stealthy, but Nick was counting on Sin being able to fight their way out if necessary or him being able to talk them out. He had friends in there. But those friends might not be able to openly acknowledge him.
Sin popped up onto the fence, placing her hands carefully between shards of glass protruding from the top. There weren't trees here that would get them over. Only a ladder would do it.
After bracing herself up for a few moments on rigid arms, she cursed and dropped back down.
"What?"
"The back is lit up like the front. They've covered the whole grounds." She shook her head. "They almost spotted me. That would not be good."
Nick wasn't surprised the techs were all over the place. "Hey, who owns it now?"
Churkin was kin. He knew that.
While he'd found Kolya's bastards all over the US, most of them didn't know it. Even if they did know, they would only have a claim if Kaspar and Roman didn't have anything in writing. Nick didn't think that would be an issue. The Kurevs were a family—with a capital F—first and foremost.
"I don't know. I should have looked into it before we killed them."
Nick's eyeballs almost popped out of his head. It was probably the first time he'd ever heard Sin speak of something she'd done, something that would incriminate her. Either she was losing it or she'd simply ceased to care. Neither option was good. He changed the subject. "Did you see anything useful?"
"There are FBI agents hauling out everything—even some of the art."
"The art?" Nick thought about it. He'd seen huge canvases featuring both realistic and abstract works. The frames alone had been gilded and ornate, probably worth a fortune.
"I thought I saw a Vermeer in there. And a Godlevsky. Maybe they were stolen?"
"Doubt it." Nick shook his head. "Too much attention to have stolen work. But it is a sound investment. Few people know exactly what a painting is worth."
Sin nodded at him, her attention clearly not on the art. She was looking at the wall as though she could see through it. As though, if she could see the back of the house, she could figure out how to get into it.
Nick was wondering the same thing when one of his own phones buzzed. He reached into his pocket and plucked out the one that vibrated. Flipping it open, he looked at the incoming number.
He'd only given this number on Duffy's recommendation. There wasn't much else Duffy could do to prove his loyalty to Nick, and Duffy trusted this guy completely. So Nick had given his number to a man he'd never met—hindering the ability of anyone keeping tabs on him to track him, but making it much easier for this one man to do it.
"Yes?" He answered the call.
"It's moving." The voice was clear. Even though the words all came through cleanly, Nick didn't process them well.
He tried to sort it out. "Same number? Where is it?"
"Yes, same number. Same place. I'm on a precise map now. Ready for coordinates?" The voice stayed calm, clearly used to tracking people with GPS.
"Okay, give me a minute."
He fumbled the phone, turned to Sin and had her open a map she could plug coordinates into. Her fingers moved, but her eyes stayed on the house in the middle of the yard they'd trespassed.
They waited until the dot popped up, then she turned to Nick. "Give them to me again."
He would have put her on the phone. But he didn't want anything else incriminating. It was enough that this man—whoever he was—had several of Nick's numbers. Nick wouldn't hand over his sister, too, nor even implicate her in being here. So he played middleman, rattling off the numbers again, waiting for Sin to input them to the system again.
It took a minute, but she asked, "How accurate are these?"
Nick asked, and the answer came back almost immediately.
"Very. Very very. I'm pinging him off four towers, and the signal is faint, which is odd. But even though it drops out some, the readings are consistent."
Nick was holding the phone out so Sin could hear, but put his hand over the mic when she started to ask a question.
"Get him to give us the first place he located the phone . . ." She was still looking at the red dot on her map and frowning.
Five minutes later, Nick thanked the guy and hung up. Despite all their questions, the man had never faltered, never gotten frustrated with them. Which meant he was either used to this, or he was pinging Nick's phone and someone was going to show up for them any minute.
Nick pulled Sin aside. They'd been standing in the middle of the backyard, the tall fences obscuring this house from the others around it. No one seemed to be home despite the single light left on. Still, they were safer in the shadows.
She didn't pay attention to his movements, but as soon as they were more safely tucked away, she held up the phone to him. A series of dots showed on the map, some directly on top of the overhead picture of the Kurev mansion, some out in the backyard.
She was shaking her head, and Nick felt his own frown begin to form. His mouth started working through the problem that was worming around in his head. "If these are accurate, then he was inside the Kurev house and is now in the back yard."
"I know." She simply handed him the phone and headed for the wall again.
Hands feeling around for a spot with no glass shards, she muscled herself up and peered over the top again. Nick didn't speak. He didn't think this was her smartest move, but he wasn't going to make noise and draw attention to her. It was well known there was a criminal tendency to visit the scene of the crime. Not that it was common, but it was common enough that anyone popping their face over a wall at a recent gas release and double murder would get their asses questioned.
Finally, she let go and dropped to the ground. "He's not there. How recent was the data?"
"He couldn't be in the backyard anyway. You would have seen the Feds questioning him." Nick shook his head.
"Or he could have gotten himself a jacket and hat and no one looked twice. The place is crawling. I’ve seen three different agencies; they can't all recognize each other."
While that was certainly true, Nick added another piece. "That last set of numbers was supposedly getting recorded while we talked."
Sin sighed. "So according to this, he was in the backyard less than two minutes ago."
"Or his phone was."
"The Mechanic is not a man to lose his phone." She shook her head, then countered her own statement. "But he would plant it on someone else to keep us guessing."
"Or," Nick added, "to keep it on and let it ping so we'll come to him. He knows Nikki Holder didn't get Annika. And he knows she knows his number."
"True." She looked at the wall again, still thinking. "And this place is so big that your guy’s numbers would have to be way, way off to have the mechanic not be on the property."
There was no good answer. Nothing to really act on. And it wasn't like they could get into the house anyway.
Just then a noise came from the house behind them. Something subtle, but not the wind, not the night around them.
They stilled and as they did, they heard the front door open. With his hand flat and pushing toward the ground, Nick signaled his sister to stay low and quiet as they quickly paced the side yard to see the front.
A lone officer walked down the front walk, jacket on, flashlight swinging at his side. As they watched, he turned right at the sidewalk and headed down the street to a cruiser parked just around the corner.
Nick's own breathing became faster as Sin looked at him with wide eyes. Her voice was steady, but clearly surprised. "What's the street address here?"
"You're the one with the map!" He motioned to her as they stayed tucked in the shrubbery that helped baffle the sound from one house to another.
She pulled out the phone and checked what she could, her words rambling from one statement to another. "This is one of the properties, I think. There were so many, even in just Chicago. I didn't memorize them all, but . . . I think this is one of them."
Nick wasn't even watching his surroundings, his brain was working so fast. It explained so much. The times the feds had watched the house . . . And gotten nothing. The times Nick had looked for Kaspar and wondered why he stayed inside so long, or why he'd missed the man.
When he looked up, he saw Sin watching the house with wide eyes. "We have to go in."
"Wait." He put his hand to her arm, as though he could truly hold her back. "That was an officer. If they know about it, the place will be swamped."
She shook her head, but didn't shake him off. "They'd be watching this house to see who tried to enter this way. If they knew, we would’ve already been pulled aside and questioned."
"Unless they're waiting for us to go in." Nick didn't like it.
"That's a risk I have to take." He could see the clock running down in her eyes.
His hand still rested on her arm. "We."
She nodded and smiled. Really smiled.
He'd seen that before. But it wasn't common.
An image flashed through his head of all the time he'd spent hunting down Kolya's bastards. They were far and wide, varied and many in number. But only one had turned into the family he'd been looking for. Nick smiled back.
Without speaking, they agreed to enter through the back door, a lock pick making short work of a place that wasn't sealed all that tightly. Once inside, they stood in the kitchen as Sin absorbed her surroundings. It became apparent to Nick pretty quickly that a family lived here. There were kid cups and baby bottles in cabinets when he took a quick glance. Luckily the low stock in the pantry and sparse fridge led him to believe this was a planned absence.
When he looked up, Sin was checking other rooms. He found her in a closet, pushing on the back wall.
"Narnia?"
She snorted. "The exact opposite of Narnia." But the wall didn't budge.
Believing the house to be empty, and needing to make short work of time, they split up. Nick checked walls, looked for seams, anything. The door would have to be able to open from either side, or it wasn't useful as a real method of entering and leaving the Kurev house. It would have to be difficult to find—in both places. Police raids, Feds, even DEA visits had to be common occurrences for Kolya's sons.
But he was back in the main room, trying not to make shadows from the single light in the living room, when it popped off.
His heart stopped, his gun was out, safety off, in a two-hand grip before he heard his sister's voice. "Timer."
Shit. His heart slowed and he didn't even react as another light popped on in the other room with a click. He was glad he wasn't standing there. He would have been outlined perfectly in the window. But Sin no longer cared about the lights.
"We have to go down, not up. But I'm not finding it."
"Me either." He'd checked the floors in the closets, looked for signs, but found nothing.
Sin stood still. "We have to look again, but smarter. If you were going to design a way between the houses, where would you put the entry?"
"Back of the house." He answered without thinking. "In the house, so as not to be seen, but the back rooms are easier to get to. . . . Not the kids' bedrooms, or mine."
Nodding, Sin agreed with him. "I think all the bedrooms are upstairs. But back of the house means the kitchen, the office, or the guest room."
They split up again, not speaking. The best case scenario was that another person would come out and they'd see exactly where the door was. Nick didn't want to alert that person that someone was here.
It took ten minutes before he made it to the office and realized the rug wasn't tacked in the far corner. No furniture covered the space. Sure enough, under the padding was a wood flooring, and near the wall, one short board had a gouge missing, just big enough to get a man's fingers under.
He lifted the flooring and saw the soft low light emanating. When nothing changed, he had to believe it was always on. It impressed him how the door was square, but the flooring lifted in the pattern it had been laid, leaving one edge step-and-finger shaped, so that the boards didn't have a seam that gave it away. Only the gouge in the wood, under the padding, under the carpet, in a fully furnished room told of the door.
Letting it softly down he headed out to grab his sister from where she was once again in a closet. "I've got it."
She smiled and followed him into the other room, watching as he went through all the steps.
"Clever." She commented. "Actually pretty easy—fast maybe—once you know what you're doing, but certainly not obvious."
Nick smiled. She would know.
But now they lifted the door together, watched the light, and Sin nodded, heading down the neat staircase into the tunnel that had to lead under the Kurev mansion.
Nick followed in the glow from small overhead fixtures, the ceilings a good eight feet tall as they hit the bottom. The cinderblock hallway was cool but not cold, the blue color probably a sealant rather than a paint choice. His fingers drifted out and trailed along the plasticky coating that didn't completely conceal the rough block beneath.
Though comfortably wide—enough for several people to pass each other, it was otherwise eerily quiet. The flooring was a soft polymer, ironically printed to look like tile. As he walked, Nick noted that it absorbed their steps. Or at least his—he had no doubt his sister could walk quietly in a pit of bells.
The hallway looked as though it came to an abrupt end in front of them, but as they approached it became clear that it was just a jog. Ninety degrees to the left, probably followed by another ninety to the right that would aim them directly under the Kurev mansion. The shift kept anyone from seeing directly down the long hall, from firing bullets over long distances, and probably more.
Nick wondered if there were cameras down here, but he hadn't seen any. There probably weren't. These days the worst thing you could do was link something to a digital feed, then anyone could hack it, see where you were. Now, the oldest ways were the most secretive and Nick didn't worry that someone would see them coming. He also didn't care.
After they made the turns, slowly, the hallway changed. Though still empty, there were now doors on either side. Nick's heart stilled—Rooms. A whole cavern of them. Who knew what the Kurevs were keeping?
Sin was shaking her head as she took in everything around them.
Windows were set into the walls next to the doors. Blinds or various coverings kept the people in the hall from looking in. Numbers delineated each doorway. Nick's heart rate kicked into high gear.
If the Mechanic was here, then Lee might be too.
Sin's hand was on a doorknob even before his was.
His gun in his hand, ready for anything that jumped out or hit or shot at him, Nick calmed his breathing and opened the door too quickly for anyone on the other side to react.
But no one met him.
It took a moment for the contents of the room to sink in.
Paintings, covered in fabric, hid in the shadows, stacked against the walls. A few corners peeked out where drapes had slid away and Nick's breath caught. He wasn't knowledgeable about art, but it looked like the real deal. He was trying to imagine the worth of the room when Sin called to him, her voice low and carrying only over the short distance.
He closed the door, berating himself for getting sidetracked. Sin shouldn't have had to call out.
As he turned, she pointed to two rooms that she must have checked. She mouthed the word "Empty" and pointed to the door she had open.
This time when he looked in, he faced an armory.
His chest felt like it was caving in.
He had guns. His grandfather's home in Atlanta was armed to the hilt. Nick had inherited it. As the head of Vasilescu and as an officer, he'd fired most everything. But this made his stomach turn.
The thought of taking over the Kurev holding curdled in his gut. He was not on their level. They were armed for Armageddon. They could turn Chicago into a militarized zone with what they had. By his calculations, they weren’t under the home. They should still be under the long property behind the house. This was not their armory—this was just the spare.
Sin's expression told him her thoughts were the same. Slowly, she closed the door and they resumed checking rooms.
Nick moved a little faster this time, finding most of the rooms empty and waiting. His hand was on the knob to open yet another, ready to find the Mechanic, or Lee, or something of value, when he heard the man's voice.
"Stop."
It was slow, controlled and in charge.
Nick didn't open the door in front of him. He just turned in time to see Sin, held in front of the man.
He didn't put her in a choke hold, which she could have easily escaped. No, he had his arm snaked around her right arm, applying pressure at the back of her hand. Though she didn't drop the sai she held there, she could no longer control it. Her other arm was trapped in his as well.
But the most damning part was the .45 that he had jammed into her ribs.