For what was coming, Evan couldn’t have any tactical gear on him.
No cargo pants with discreet pockets for hiding spare magazines. No Woolrich shirts with magnetic buttons. No Original S.W.A.T. boots. No ARES 1911 or Strider folding knife.
He had to look like your average lowlife.
He grabbed a pair of dark 501s from the bureau drawer and stepped into them.
The door to the bathroom was open, the shower door slid back, the hidden door ajar. And Joey was inside the Vault at the commands, a pilot driving a spaceship, shouting her findings out to him. “Unshockingly, Twin Towers Jail hasn’t updated their security systems in ages! Budget shortfalls, blah-blah-blah. I mean, a noob with a Compaq and a USRobotics dial-up modem writing their hack in Visual Basic could get in here in, like, thirty seconds.” She gave a self-satisfied snort.
Evan went toward the walk-in closet, buttoning his jeans. “I don’t know what any of that means.”
Joey’s voice boomed out at him. “Jail surveillance bad. Joey good.”
At the foot of the bed, a scattering of dog hairs rested on the concrete floor, pronounced beneath the overhead lights. He blinked his eyes hard, opened them, but they remained. He’d have to deep-clean the penthouse when this was over with.
He tore himself from the sight and entered the closet. Past the neatly stacked cartons of boots was a bin holding several pairs of sneakers he’d dragged behind his truck, scuffing them up for undercover work.
This would certainly qualify as undercover work.
“So get this!” Joey shouted. “Like, half of the surveillance cameras are still using the factory default passwords.” She laughed heartily.
It never ceased to amaze him what the girl found amusing.
He stomped into his sneakers and swept the hanging shirts aside to reach a cubbyhole cut into the drywall. A dozen metal cases, each the size of a deck of playing cards, were stacked inside. He slid the top one free and cracked it open. Slotted neatly into the black foam lining were twenty glass microscope slides. An oval of silicone composite film half as wide as a strand of dental floss resided inside each, suspended in a ghostly float.
Fingerprint adhesives.
As he slid the case into his pocket, Joey rattled on. “They have everything hooked up to the Internet. Typical. Like, let’s get everything online and vulnerable and then not update it, ’cuz we’re stupid city bureaucrats. So I banged in there with Shodan.”
“Shodan?”
“Dude, c’mon, X. The search engine for Internet-connected devices? Every device that sends data out has a string that IDs what it is. Shodan searches all those strings, feeds you the geolocations based on the IP addresses. I bust into the cameras, and I’m looking at a bunch of ugly-ass felons sitting in jail. Oh—and a deputy in the control room picking his nose. Aaaand he’s eating it.”
Pulling on a T-shirt, Evan ducked into the bathroom and fingertipped in another specialized contact lens to cover his dilated right eye. Then he yanked open the other drawers, searching their contents.
“I’m gonna drop in a zero-day exploit now,” Joey said. “Make that two, so I have one for insurance. Hang on, and…”
Evan heard the pounding on his keyboard and wondered if she’d actually break it. It struck him how odd it was to hear another voice within the walls of his penthouse. He was used to drifting through the rooms accompanied only by the sound of his own breathing.
“The more secret digital doors into the system software we have, the better,” Joey was saying. “Then, to cover your ass, I can always slew a lens to face a wall or spoof a frame to show an empty room or just burn down the whole house with a distributed denial of service attack and be all, ‘How ya like me now, bizatches!’”
Beneath the sink he found the bottle he was looking for. Charcoal pills. He pocketed eight of them and stepped through the shower into the Vault.
Joey had shoved Vera II to the side and yanked the keyboard into her lap so she could type while cocked back in his chair at a breaking-point angle. Her dirty bare feet were up on the sheet-metal desk. A glass of orange juice rested on his foam mouse pad.
As he entered, the projection light hit him in the face, streaming glare and shadow across his eyes. He lifted the sweating glass off his mouse pad, swiping at the condensation ring with his wrist. “Don’t they teach the use of coasters in evil-hacker school?”
“Shockingly not on the curriculum,” Joey said.
Dog the dog lifted his leg and urinated in the corner. Joey swiveled her head from the dog to Evan, trying unsuccessfully to bite down a smile.
He watched the trickle leaking out from the wall. “This isn’t funny.”
“Actually, it’s really funny.”
“You’re gonna clean that. Paper towel in the kitchen and Clorox spray beneath the—”
“Whatevs. Once you see what I just did, you’re gonna drop the whole OCD routine.”
Evan came around the L-shaped desk, nearly tripping on her kicked-off shoes, and stood behind her to take in the OLED screens horseshoeing the walls.
One photograph was front and center.
A bland-looking man in his late forties. Side part, affable features, totally ordinary.
“Who’s that?”
“That’s your shot caller.” Joey flicked a hand over the mouse, bringing up a rap sheet for Benjamin Bedrosov. “Weird last name. I mean, I thought this was an Armenian operation.”
“Quite a few Russian Armenians had their surnames changed to end in ‘-ov’ somewhere along the way,” Evan said. “Like Garry Kasparov.”
“He that actor in all those westerns? High Noon and shit?”
Evan knew that a withering look would be wasted on her, so instead he studied the rap sheet more closely. A host of dismissed charges. Two failed convictions. A deep bench of defense attorneys with Century City and Beverly Hills addresses—a clear upgrade from Alexan Petro’s array of legal firepower. Under Aliases a single nickname was listed: Bedrock.
“He’s a full-on businessman,” Joey said. “Bernie Madoff motherf—” She caught herself. “Homey’s got a I-banking firm downtown, slick crib up Beachwood Canyon, on the board of a half dozen companies. Check out the fancy website. If you didn’t pull his rap sheet, you’d think he was legit.”
Evan couldn’t help marvel at the photo again. Bedrosov wore a suit jacket and a button-up shirt loose at the collar. He wasn’t smiling exactly, but his face was set in a pleasingly mild expression. It was the kind of portrait you’d see on bus benches and billboards, a Coldwell Banker Realtor conveying can-do competence.
Evan leaned over Joey and thumbed up Bedrock’s booking photo. The suit jacket was gone, but the same inoffensive expression remained, a businessman you could rely on to be steady at the helm through rocky waters.
It called to mind that well-trodden line about the banality of evil.
Dog the dog tapped his way over, circled a few times at Joey’s feet, and lay down with an old-man groan.
“How’d you find this guy?” Evan asked.
“The payments to the dirty cops didn’t come from Petro,” she said. “They came from this other account. Which is funded with incoming wires directly from a shell corp that happens to also have the controlling interest in—you guessed it—Petro’s Singapore bank. The shell corp lists Benjamin Bedrosov as the principal. I’m guessing this guy has a few Petros under him scattered around the city, all of whom feed his bank for a small piece of the ownership.”
“And he’s currently in Twin Towers.”
“Awaiting trial for wire fraud,” Joey said. “Looks like he’ll be tried under Penal Code 186.10 as a felony. Been there about a month and a half.”
Evan checked the date. “Right around when payments began to Brust and Nuñez.”
“Like you said, he put the detectives in place to cover his ass and squelch the investigation. I’m not big on reading legal mumbo jumbo, but from the prosecutor’s internal memos here”—she swiveled to an investigative document projected onto the south wall—“it looks like they know they don’t have a solid case. The bureau director himself called it ‘thin’ twice in the case-review memo.” Click, highlight. “Like, youch, right? Bedrosov’ll probably walk, same as he did every time before. The guy does an exceptional job insulating himself from Petro and everyone else beneath him.”
“Which makes Grant’s files that much more damning,” Evan said. “Wires, accounts, transactions, code names—all linking back to Bedrosov. And the cash thresholds are probably high enough to take the case federal. Then you’re not talking a few years in prison for a conviction. You’re talking twenty per. That doesn’t just put him away. It sinks him for good.”
He thought back to Grant Merriweather’s final moments, confused and depleted. He’d given his life uncovering the evidence to take down Bedrosov’s operation. He’d been hired by dirty cops with a hidden agenda. By doing his job well, he’d turned it into a death sentence. For himself and for Max.
If Evan didn’t shut Bedrosov down, he’d send the next wave of hit men after Max. And another wave after that.
Evan stared at Grant’s thumb drive, currently slotted into a USB port. The attached Swiss Army knife key chain protruded, a mundane hiding place for a data dump that had cost twenty lives and counting. Bedrosov had presided over the whole bloody mess with calm upper-management demeanor, a pleasing façade, and a psychopath’s willingness to dispatch anyone in his way.
Evan had faced evil before in various guises—dark and dirty, passionate and zealous, powerful and cruel. But he’d never gone up against someone so … ordinary. This mission moved against the grain of all those that had come before. Rather than winding into increasing perversion and turpitude, it seemed to arc upward toward a kind of warped legitimacy. He kept looking for a clear enemy, but the faces he continued to encounter were seemingly interchangeable. Terzian and Petro and Brust and Nuñez and Bedrosov were variations on the same theme, a progression of men seeking profit at any cost.
As if reading his thoughts, Joey said, “I thought we’d finally get to some master villain, you know? Someone who looks the part. But he’s not a villain any more than those dirty cops were. It’s like they’re all pieces of a villain that have to be put together for us to see. And that makes them worse, almost. ’Cuz they can pretend none of them are to blame.” Her dark eyes were shiny, her hair twisted down to cover one eye. She’d withdrawn into herself, but Evan could hear in her voice how keenly she felt the outrage. “The guy does whatever he wants to whoever he wants and gets away with it.”
“Not anymore,” Evan said.
Joey’s eyes were glassy, drinking in the evidence writ large on the walls.
Evan thought about the epiphany that had hit him after he’d taken out Petro: That he wasn’t fighting a snake but a hydra. That the fanged mouths would keep multiplying until he reached the commanding head and severed it. He hoped that was Bedrock. But this time he had to make sure of it.
“While I’m doing this,” he said, “you dig into Bedrock’s connections, bank records, comms, e-mails, everything. I’ve been caught on the back foot three times now. I need to know that if I walk out of this alive, I’m done.”
Joey’s eyes flared at the “if,” but he gestured her aside, not wanting to get bogged down. After she vacated the chair, he rattled around in Google, coming up with a slew of articles from April about Armenian pride rallies. A San Diego feature contained several photographs depicting some of the marchers and naming them in the captions.
Evan started highlighting names and running them through the databases.
“What are you doing?” Joey said.
He waved her off. From her dish of cobalt pebbles, Vera II looked on in support.
The fourth name, Paytsar Hovsepian, threw back a useful report from NCIC. A stoned outing in his senior year of high school had ended with a conviction for vandalism. He’d made threatening remarks to the arresting officer, earning him a position on the Violent Person file.
Even more helpful was his profile information. Mid-thirties. Lean build. Average height. Just an ordinary guy, not too handsome.
Evan went back to the online article depicting Paytsar holding a sign that read NO PLACE FOR DENIAL. With his other hand, he flashed the peace sign.
Evan double-clicked on the high-res photo. Great focus, strong lighting.
Precisely what he needed.
He zoomed in on the two fingers held aloft. Tighter, tighter.
“X,” Joey said, “why are you dicking around with this right now?”
From his other side, Vera II cheered him on silently. Another reason to prefer the company of plants.
The photo resolution held. He captured the image, sent it to his RoamZone.
“Wait,” Joey said. “Is that…? Are you…?” She shook her head. “No way. No fucking way.”
“Language,” he said.
He grabbed his phone from the charger, scratched Dog the dog on the head, headed out of the Vault.
Paused halfway across the threshold, one foot in the shower.
“You coming or not?”
Joey scrambled off her chair.