OUTSIDE MATARÓ
Four a.m. Every curtain in the mansion is shut tight to block anyone outside from seeing inside. All the lights are on throughout the ground floor. The house is quiet.
Carson, sitting at the end of the dining table farthest from the windows, grinds the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. She’d picked this shift, figuring the others would bitch about it more than the eleven-to-three shift. With good reason.
She forces her skittish attention back to her laptop’s screen. She’s halfway through the latest EU Drug Markets Report, a joint effort by Europol and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Not exactly the kind of thing she should be trying to read at this hour, but she needs to get smart about the narco scene here.
Carson spent yesterday morning’s shift thinking about who might be behind the hit team on Ibiza. Dareh gave her a list of the thirty-nine companies he and Karl had hacked. It held a few familiar names, including the big pharma company Alivian Healthways. She had to smile at that one; its CEO—a prize asshole—had been the client for a DeWitt project she’d done in Portsmouth last Christmas. If anybody deserves to have his “executive discretionary accounts” looted and sent to help orphans in India, it’s him. The two most obvious revenge candidates (a pair of private security contractors with especially bad reputations) are the least likely to be behind the hit; they would’ve sent a full team and done it right.
That led her back to drugs.
Sandals on tile make her look over her shoulder. Sebastian’s carrying two steaming mugs of what she hopes is nuclear coffee. He slides one next to her laptop, then bends to kiss the lips she offers him. “Is this lot your schoolwork?”
“Yeah.” The coffee’s both heart-stopping and scorching. She’s glad Sebastian volunteered to share the shift with her, even though they haven’t seen much of each other since they came on duty. “Drug market down here’s a fucking circus. Everybody’s here.”
“What do you mean by ‘everybody’?” He thumps into the dining chair next to her.
“Everybody. Dutch and Vietnamese control the cannabis trade. Turks, Pakistanis, and Albanians own heroin and opioids. Colombians and Brits do cocaine. Dutch and Belgians cover a lot of the amphetamine market. Gangs from Liverpool and Manchester compete in MDMA. There’s somewhere from fifty to a hundred drug gangs on the Costa del Sol alone.”
Sebastian’s eyebrows climb his forehead. “I’d no idea.”
She’d left one player off the list: the Tambovskaya Group, another splinter off the Russian mafiya tree that supposedly does money laundering down here. She wants to ask Rodievsky about the state of relations between the Tambov and Solntsevo gangs before she looks too much farther into the Tambovs. “Looks like Cadiz, Algeciras, Valencia, and Barcelona are the main entry points for bulk drugs into Spain. Then the gangs move it onto the market here and into Western Europe and the Nordic countries.” What was Vicki doing in Algeciras two Saturdays ago? “Ever see any outlaw biker gangs around here?”
Sebastian frowns. “How would I know they’re outlaws?”
“They look like they hope you’ll walk in front of them so they can run you over. They’re not like the old dudes in custom leathers with bikes that cost sixty grand.”
“Now that you mention it, I may have done. Why?”
“They apparently move a lot of product for other markets. There’s even Swedish and Danish ones that take the drugs to Scandinavia.”
“Swedish biker gangs?”
“Hey, Swedes are badass. Ever hear of Swedish death metal?”
“I’ve heard of it.” Sebastian chuckles. “Never heard it.”
“Well, thank God for that. You still have ears.” Talking about what she’s read helps Carson’s brain organize the information and store it someplace she can find it again. She hopes she doesn’t need it.
Sebastian takes a long draw from his coffee, then leans back in his chair. “Now that you know this, does it help? Do you know who sent those men after us?”
Do I? Carson stands and stretches, enjoying that Sebastian watches her closely. She does a couple Warrior I poses to give him something more to look at, then sits. “Maybe. I read a news article about the local cops busting Dutch and Swedish hit teams. Gangs hire them from out of town to settle scores. They come here, do their thing, then leave. They’re young—between twenty and thirty.” She lets herself picture the scene from that last night in Ibiza. “Guy I shot in the kitchen was real young. Could’ve been Dutch or Swedish. He had an accent, but didn’t say enough for me to figure it out.”
“So you think it’s a drug gang that hired them?”
“Could be. I haven’t seen anything that looks like ‘Grup Sabadey.’ Can’t look it up if I don’t know how to spell it. But…” She sighs. “If these guys are around, then any of your ‘donors’ can hire them, too.”
“What’s your gut tell you?”
Carson takes a lot of time to answer that. Her gut’s signals are highly mixed. If someone in Vicki’s posse is dealing, she (or he) needs to launder the money to make it usable. She flicks a glance at Sebastian. Any of Vicki’s friends could sell drugs; only Sebastian has the skill set to clean and hide the money. And as he proved to her at Anubis, he knows how the retail end of the drug business works here.
That line of thought makes Carson vaguely ill. If I don’t trust him…why am I sleeping with him?
Finally, she says, “Drugs. Like you said, they’re everywhere. We got the whole United Nations jockeying to sell them here. Ties in the stabbed dealers. And Ibiza wasn’t the slickest op ever, so I’m thinking whoever’s behind the team doesn’t do hits for a living.” Carson watches Sebastian for a meaningful reaction but doesn’t get one. “Beyond that…haven’t got a clue.”