Will closed his eyes for a moment and waited for the small black phone to explode.
It didn’t.
He leaned forward to sniff it—as though he might smell C4 or other explosives like a trained dog—when he felt Diana’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. “What if it’s . . . viral? Anthrax?”
“Anthrax is a white powder.” He shook his head. Hers wasn’t a bad idea. He leaned back. Besides, he couldn’t sniff explosives anyway.
“Did you touch it?” She looked at him.
“Yeah. Just a bit.” So if there was something deadly on it he’d already been exposed.
Diana looked at it more closely, tilting her head for better light. “There are prints on it. More than you could have done. Someone handled this and left us all kinds of evidence. Don’t know if that was the person who sent it, or if it’s an older phone with a previous user. Most of them aren’t smeared.” She frowned.
Will didn’t comment, just sat, looking at the small black burner. Neither of them touched it.
Giving it another few minutes to act on its own, Will contemplated his chances of death by cell phone. He was beginning to think the odds were actually pretty high.
He and Diana had perpetrated some serious damage to some seriously dangerous people. While the people they’d hit hadn’t had the wherewithal to survive, toward the end, they’d started to wise up. If someone was coming after him and Diana, that person would be making a poor decision if he opted for blunt force and rash bravado—that had been shown to be no match for them in the past. The better choice would be a tactical strike.
Will had to admit, if he were ordering a hit on the two of them, that’s what he’d do. Will and Diana had fought with strength, technique, and brains. Bullets and brawn had little effect on them. If someone wanted the two of them dead, that person would have to come in with something new.
Something like say, a cell phone in the mail. Chemical weapons. Diseases. Explosives. Anything but bullets. . . .
Still the phone didn’t blow up. Before he could think of the next step, Diana said, “It’s a good day to die” and, wearing dish gloves she must have fetched, pried the black clamshell open.
He froze. Waited. Nothing happened.
Just a regular black phone. After a beat, Diana used a finger to hit the power button.
“Goddammit, Diana!” Will popped up. “Don’t you think you should consult me just a little before you decide it’s a good day to die?”
She shrugged. “I’m sorry. You just always said we had a short shelf life. And there’s not much other way to figure it out.”
His eyes blinked. “You have bomb-sniffing dogs at your job! You could have taken the phone to them!”
She counted off on dish-gloved fingers. “One—the dogs are always with their handlers. So if the phone were loaded with explosives, the dog would alert when I came near, and how would I explain that? Two—I can’t come up with a way to borrow a bomb dog! And three—you want me to carry a potential bomb around just to check it with a dog?” She pointed. “Look, it’s on.”
She was right. But so was he. Dammit.
The readout startled him. “There’s a text message waiting.”
She looked at him. “I’m curious.”
“Well, son of a bitch.” Sighing, Will motioned to her to hit whatever buttons were necessary. She was wearing the dish gloves after all. And he’d already left what was probably a clean full print on the shiny black casing.
It wasn’t her phone, so she leaned in—got within what Will was now thinking of as “Anthrax range”—and read the buttons, pressing one here, one there, until she saw the message.
She saw it before he did and yelped, “Holy shit!” Peeled the gloves and picked up the phone.
“What the fuck, Diana?” He looked at her, forced to glance over her shoulder to read the text.
Text when you get this–The Agent On The Case.
Diana was already pushing buttons. Repeatedly clicking through to letters she needed. Not the best phone for text correspondence.
She hit send, and only as it posted did he see her response. Just a simple,
Here–The CKs
While they waited to see if a response was coming soon, Will checked the phone out. It seemed to be just as he thought: a simple burner, black clamshell, old school. It had a limited number of minutes, though the amount this phone sported would allow for ample communication. The print at the bottom of the small display showed an end date for the minutes. Will figured that was fine; they should trash it long before it expired.
She had opened the phone, turned it on, and texted back, all without his input. He felt his teeth pressing together. He wanted to be angry, but the fact was, each of them had worked alone for so long that even when they’d worked together, they each made their own decisions. It wasn’t so much that they worked as a single unit—they’d always clearly been two, functioning separately, making decisions based on entirely different sets of standards—but they’d always had each other’s backs.
Though he didn’t completely trust ex–Special Agent Owen Dunham, Diana did. Will only met the man once, briefly. It had been at their home in Los Angeles, when Diana had inadvertently admitted who she was, and consequently who he was. He and Dunham had exchanged only a few words. But Diana had been the agent’s student for several years in college.
Though the relationship went back further than her college time, they’d only ever interacted face-to-face as professor and student. She was convinced that Dunham was never going to turn in evidence on the Christmas Killers, that he would never turn on them.
Will was operating on Diana’s ironclad belief in Dunham. It was all he had to go on. For a man used to keeping his fate firmly clenched in his own hands, it had always felt disconcerting to rest it in Diana’s. It felt downright uncomfortable to tie it to the FBI agent who had chased the two of them across the US.
He was contemplating his options, wondering why Dunham had contacted them, when the phone beeped.
Kolya’s son in Atlanta area. You OK?
Will heard Diana take a deep breath. That was just great. They got to update Dunham. While Diana pushed buttons, Will took another moment to contemplate that Dunham must have been following the Kurevs . . . and the Kincaids. His voice came out sharper than he intended but less sharp than he felt. “Did you tell him where we lived?”
She didn’t look up. “No. But Will and Diana Kincaid aren’t hard to find. I was clearly heading into law enforcement. That really narrows the pool.”
“Was it a mistake for me to go back into accounting?”
She shrugged, but her fingers didn’t stop tapping the keys. “I don’t think so. That whole hide-in-plain-sight thing. Here.” She held the phone up to him.
Oh, he got a say this time? He tamped the thought down, knowing it wasn’t worth thinking.
Ivan’s breathing greatly diminished.
He almost laughed. She was using his overheard conversation, avoiding key words, though he didn’t think texts were monitored. She also seemed to be deleting anything older than the previous message. Good girl.
This time the phone beeped quickly.
Zero? You?
Realizing the second question was not about whether she was breathing but whether she was responsible for Kurev’s lack thereof, she quickly replied.
Yes & Yes.
After a few minutes, Will looked at Diana while she watched the phone. It wasn’t going to tell her whether Dunham was writing back or if he’d thrown the phone away, effectively washing his hands of them.
Will figured he could rather easily find the good professor. Criminology and investigation experts weren’t a dime a dozen. Those who had been associate professors at UCLA were even fewer between.
The phone didn’t beep.
Pushing his palms flat against the table, Will leveraged himself to standing. The good news was the phone was from Dunham and conceivably had his fingerprints all over it. The envelope was postmarked from a city in the Northwest but probably not purchased or mailed from his home area. Aside from a serial number that might lead to point of sale, it was an untraceable phone. Will wanted to check it to see if Dunham had disabled tracking in some way or if the burner phone completely lacked that function. The number alone could be triangulated from cell towers . . . but it appeared the ex-agent had done everything he could to keep the link between them as tenuous as possible. And, on the surface, it appeared the man had contacted them to warn them. Too little, too late, but an assumedly kind gesture nonetheless.
With nothing to do but wait, Will made them pace the house again, creating motor patterns for grabbing weapons, practicing pulling them out, ready to use. They went back to the stash and added guns and blades to the garage and the backyard. Then carefully to the front porch. Even with all of this accomplished, Will didn’t feel much safer. He was pretty convinced he wouldn’t have much chance to defend himself when the time came. A nice sniper bullet would do the job faster and with less collateral to the Kurev family.
When they went back in from pretending to take a drink on the porch and fix a rickety railing, the phone had another message waiting.
Sorry. Visitor in office. Will monitor Roman and Kaspar. Also check for Shvernik and Churkin. Top guys. Most likely headed your way. Stay in touch.
Diana responded.
Thank you. Will do.
And she turned the phone off.
The less it pinged the cell towers the safer they all were. Dunham had probably done the same thing on the other end.
In a mere ten days, their orderly world had devolved to nearly complete chaos. He’d been here before—he’d been hunted, wanted, and almost dead too many times to count—but this time it was different. This time he had to keep up the appearances of his orderly world. And this time he cared.
He let Diana keep watch while he napped, then that night he headed north, through Chattanooga and into Sewanee, where the good families on Carolina Circle fed him free Wi-Fi under the cover of their old-growth trees. He did as the ex-agent had instructed and checked out Shvernik and Churkin.
He decided right there that he was developing a severe flu and would be calling in sick the whole next week.
To say Kaspar Kurev was upset would be an understatement.
Nick counted his odds at surviving the meeting much lower than he originally calculated. Then again, he’d counted his odds at surviving his meeting with Bun higher than he should have. He’d banked on Bun not wanting to take out his only remaining grandson, but the slide of the gun as he walked away told him he hadn’t calculated those odds quite the right way either.
Nick had walked out that door not certain if he would feel the sting of a bullet between his shoulder blades or if his world would just end before he could even register that Bun had shot him in the head. Bun had done neither, but Nick had sweated it. He was trying not to sweat the current meeting. Things were accelerating, and he was getting pushed far faster than his plan had room for.
To say the meeting was going as he intended would have been a gross misrepresentation. But he’d been well aware going into this that his wishes were highly likely to go unmet. He expected there to be no love lost between him and Kaspar Kurev, and he found that prediction borne out.
“Ivan is my brother!” There was no hint of accent when he spoke. Kaspar had shed the Old World in ways his father had not. In that, Nick found him to be a kindred spirit, but he didn’t bother pointing out that the Kurevs had many brothers. More than they knew. Besides, there was a woman here. She seemed to be catering to Kaspar, though Nick had to wonder at her abilities to even fetch drinks with her left wrist in a brace and clearly being favored.
Nick held a lot back; there were simply too many gaps between them to bridge. He quit trying. “Was. Ivan was your brother.”
The dull shade of red was creeping up Kurev’s neck, but he otherwise held the emotion in check. “You killed him.”
Nick sighed, knowing power was found in many places but rarely in rash reaction. “No. Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t kill your brother and then come to tell you.”
“He died in your town.”
This time he did get mad. Kurev was an idiot. He had no idea who he was speaking to. “Yes. My town, where he came without permission to encroach on our territory. He’s lucky one of my people didn’t kill him.”
Eyebrows gave the slightest quirk, again showing Kurev’s ignorance. “Your people had nothing to hold him on. There was no evidence.”
Kaspar opened his hands, palms up, as though he was in an interrogation room and Nick was the police. But here, while Nick would gladly use his badge as a deterrent for Kurev putting bullets into him, he wasn’t acting as an officer. He was fishing. And it was very interesting what he was reeling in. “No, no evidence. Kurevs have always been known to be slippery, so that’s not surprising.” He leaned forward, doing his best to invade the other’s personal space. The woman didn’t react, just sat nearby, while Nick watched for tics and tells while they talked. “Was Ivan there at your behest?”
Kurev’s finger tapped on the arm of his chair. His muscle twitched ever so slightly at his right temple. “Of course he was. He’s my brother.”
A lie. Nick nodded. So there was no love lost between Ivan and Kaspar. Ivan had probably been moving of his own accord, possibly amassing his own area and income in an attempt to take over from his older brother one of these days. Nick threw out a tester comment. “Silly system, isn’t it? The oldest male gets everything, whether he’s qualified or not.”
Kaspar, having been the recipient of so much through this ridiculous system, clearly disagreed. “Are you suggesting Ivan was better qualified than me?”
“Ivan just got himself killed running an errand that you knew nothing about. I’m not sure either of you are qualified.”
It happened as fast as he thought it might.
Kurev was on his feet, gun materializing in his hand, barrel pressed to Nick’s forehead before Nick could formulate a thought.
Luckily, Nick didn’t have to think. Luckily, Nick had grown up the hard way, and he was as fast as Kaspar. He’d come by it much the same way the eldest Kurev had. So his gun—his personal, stolen-from-evidence, no-traceable-serial-number gun—wasn’t pointed at the other’s head. No, it was aimed at his balls.
Kurev gave away only the slightest intake of breath. In the background, the woman shifted, indicating she wasn’t as indifferent as she appeared and that she was more likely to throw herself into a fight than run from it. Interesting.
Nick started talking. “You can shoot me, but at point-blank range, the head is not your best bet. The likelihood of the bullet glancing off my skull is relatively high. But whether it kills me or not, it is going to jerk my hand and you’re going to live the rest of your life as a dickless wonder.”
His temple twitched again, but Kurev slowly tilted the gun up and stepped back so that the barrel of Nick’s old Bryco 9mm was no longer flush against his cock. And Nick couldn’t keep the corner of his mouth from creeping up. Threaten a bullet to a man’s brains or his heart and he’d stand tall and dare you to pull the trigger, but hold a gun to his dick? Nick hadn’t seen one challenge that yet.
Nick issued another warning. “Ivan was stupid and it got him killed. I don’t want to see any of your people in my town again.” He didn’t mention that Chicago was slowly but surely becoming his town. There were several officers in the CPD with morals that understood Nick’s clean-up practices. All he needed were a few. There were also several people within the Kurev administration who would smoothly transition when the time was right. Nick was slowly making inroads, just as he had planned.
Kaspar glared. “What are you doing about Vasilescu?”
“Leave Vasilescu to me.”
Again, the red crept up Kaspar’s neck. In spite of being almost thirty, he acted young—green. Clearly he hadn’t yet learned to control his emotions or rein in his tells. Given his tendency toward brash reaction, he wasn’t going to live to see the day it happened either.
Nick left it at that. He’d been hoping to see Roman . . . separately from Kaspar. He held out no illusions about the oldest, but he’d had real hopes for the two younger brothers. The Kurev boys had ties and Nick could take advantage of that, but only if the brothers were amenable. Kaspar was not. Ivan was dead. Roman, the youngest, was the only egg left in that basket. And he was not here.
Nick left Chicago then, navigating O’Hare Airport and finding a message from Diana Kincaid when he landed back at ATL. He was standing in the stiflingly hot air, in the bargain parking lot, car doors standing open to cool the interior. Phone to his ear, he waited while the call connected and Diana’s voice came over the line.
“Hey, how was your lecture? Did you catch any new recruits?”
He laughed. “It went great and I don’t know yet. We’ll see who’s stupid enough to email me after.”
“Thank you so much.” Sarcasm dripped at the personal dig, but then her tone changed. “Were you at U Chicago? I know some of the folks there in the Criminal Justice Department.”
Damn. “No. I was at Loyola.” He hated lying to her. He needed her on his side. And he was going to need her sooner than he thought. Between Bun and Ivan Kurev, his timetable was no longer leisurely, no longer his own.
“Bummer. Oh well, I called because we got Lotto Lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. We got a hit in AFIS and you are never gonna believe who our John Doe is.”
Oh try me . . . “Who?”
“None other than Ivan Kurev himself.” She paused, and when he failed to answer, she must have decided he needed enlightening. “He’s the second of Kolya Kurev’s three sons. You know who Kurev is, right? The former, well late, head of the largest crime syndicate in the US.”
“No shit?” He put as much inflection into the words as possible. Diana didn’t seem to have a clue who she was talking about. She must have—at some point in her life—become aware that it was the Kurev family that had ordered the hit on the Bellers. There was a short space in her life between Cynthia Beller turning eighteen and disappearing from the foster system, to Diana Kincaid surfacing and working in some retail store until it went belly up and she went into criminal justice school and police work. Surely, something in there, where she buried her old name and life, must have had something to do with the Kurevs. She had to know the basics.
But her voice didn’t give him that. “No shit. We have big trouble in little city, boss.”
He laughed at that. “We really aren’t that little. This Kurev guy was almost over the line into Atlanta.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t. And Vasilescu is certainly in our area. It doesn’t look good.”
Nick agreed and disconnected the line.
Diana seemed awfully naïve for the sole surviving victim of a mafia hit. And police work made sense for someone who knew about the Kurevs. On the other hand, he had to admit that it could also be the clear course for someone who watched her parents get executed and then saw her sister waste away from unchecked cruelty in the foster system. That would have been enough for him to change his name and get away from it.
He didn’t know what drove Diana’s decisions. But he needed to.
He needed to know how she would react before he broke the news to her.
Will pulled into the driveway around ten a.m. He’d taken Diana’s car, thinking his own would seem out of place coming home at a time when he was normally at work. He came in ready to be the bearer of bad news and found out he was instead the recipient.
He called his office from the road—no one had questioned that he was ill. He and Diana had lived here three years and he’d held the same job that whole time. Not once had he called in sick. Not once had he actually been sick. For a chunk of time he’d lived in a cabin with rats and spiders and a generator that got the water temperature up to lukewarm on its good days.
Calling in sick wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t thought there was a reasonable chance of taking a sniper bullet on the way in the front door.
While he drove the first leg of the trip home—when it had been too early to call in—he’d contemplated just letting it happen, let the bullet get him. Death would be fast. He would be with Sam and Bethy again. At least he wanted to believe that. But he couldn’t leave Diana. She’d be furious at him. And what would he leave her to? The same fate? He simply didn’t have the guts to do it.
He’d been left questioning his own morals for about half an hour. Why did he even have them? He’d lived a life that hadn’t lent itself to halos or even simple moral compasses. So why was he so certain that simply checking out was a bad idea?
But he was. At a bare minimum, his coworkers would live on with the trauma of having someone they knew gunned down. Moreover, they might witness it. For all that he’d suffered with Sam and Bethy, he hadn’t had to bear witness to their deaths, only the aftermath. At worst, a sniper might think it was necessary to cover Will’s death in a mass murder scenario . . . meaning a handful of other, unconnected, innocent people would die just to help the Kurevs get Will out of the way. That was simply unacceptable.
So he’d made the call, thinking about how much he meant it when he told the assistant, “Really, you are all much healthier without me there.”
He’d sniffled twice and hadn’t been questioned. Just told to feel better. He translated that for himself to “don’t get dead.”
He didn’t bother to call Diana and tell her. He wasn’t sure the phones weren’t tapped or traced or at least combed through later. So he walked in the door prepared to tell what he’d found and instead found her with her phone in her hand shaking her head at him.
She didn’t greet him with a hug and a kiss. Not his love. She said, “We are in deep shit.”
He already knew that, but he asked, “What shit is that?” Had she found out about Churkin?
“I just got off the phone with Loyola University.” She looked as though he should understand why she was calling a school in . . . oh, shit.
His face must have shown his thoughts, because she continued. “I wrangled it into the conversation with Stelian. He said he was at Loyola, but their Criminal Justice program has never heard of him. They said they never let guest lecturers on campus without central approval given the state of school security these days.”
Will waited a beat, putting together all the things he’d found out the previous night. Diana filled the space with a twisted sigh, “We have way too many connections to be a coincidence.”
Will nodded. They did. He sat down at the table and encouraged her to do the same. There was some math to do; things still didn’t add up. “Remember what Dunham told us?”
“Look out for Shvernik and Churkin? I assumed ‘top guys’ means ‘hit men.’”
“Almost. Shvernik is Stanislav Shvernik, and yes, his records indicate exactly that. Churkin’s a different story.” Will tipped his head. “Churkin is Yulia Churkin. And there’s not much on her. I wouldn’t have even thought that Yulia was the Churkin Dunham was talking about—she’s squeaky in a very greasy family—but she’s the woman from the alley behind Re-Bar the other night.”
Diana’s head dropped. “You fought Churkin?”
“Apparently. And apparently she’s very high up in the Kurev organization.”
A shake of the head didn’t seem to clear Diana’s thoughts. She rambled. “They let women in? When? Of course they do. They were taken out in part by a woman. These are the sons; they’re more forward thinking . . . she’s trained.”
“Yeah. All of the above. I was thinking the same thing.”
Will looked at Diana, but she looked somewhere off into space. “She’s like me. No one suspects a woman. Not for a long time. That’s how she’s so clean.”
He could tell she itched to start looking up what she could, but she couldn’t. There would be no Internet searches leading back to their accounts or this house. Diana was stuck.
She rambled again, even as the tumblers in Will’s brain clicked along to her words. He still hadn’t told her everything, but he knew better than to interrupt. “So she and Ivan are—were—here. And Nick went there. I told him the body was Ivan Kurev.” She looked at Will this time. “The CSIs ran the prints through AFIS and got a hit. So now everyone knows the body is Kurev, but Nick said he was back in town, here, calling from the airport, when I told him that. So he went to Chicago before the fingerprints matched the body as Ivan Kurev.”
Will filled in the gap she was connecting, but she kept going.
“Which means he identified the face. So he knew—or at least knew of—Kurev in some other capacity.” Her eyes landed on his face again. “We are so fucked. He’s onto us. We have to leave, now.”
She started to stand and her purpose gave her force. She didn’t seem afraid—more angry than anything, if Will had to name it. She’d always considered Stelian a friend, but now she was operating on betrayal.
Will had been jealous of her ability to make real friends. He’d only made one since he’d lost his daughter and first wife, and she was here at his table, trying to bolt, held back only by his firm grasp and the shred of hope he was going to give her. But that shred of hope came at a high price, one he didn’t want her to have to pay.
There was no way around it.
“I found something else, Diana. And if I’m right about how this is going down, we may have more work to do before we leave. This got a lot uglier tonight, and we can’t bolt until we know where to and how.”
She quit tugging and looked at him, ready for his worst. He gave it.
“What are the chances that Stelian is dirty?”