No matter how serious he’d looked hours earlier, she wasn’t anticipating his readiness to help. She was surprised, therefore, when the door swung in to reveal him fully-dressed, Reese ready to go behind him, beanies already pulled down over their ears.
“Oh,” she said, and he arched a single brow, the same way she did.You doubted me?
Yes. Yes, she had.
She recovered, though, and said, “He’s just gone.”
“Yeah, I heard.” He and Reese stepped out into the hall. “Out the terrace.”
“Yes. Don’t let him see you.”
That got her another lifted brow, and a snort for good measure.
She went back to bed when they were gone, though sleep refused to return.
~*~
Toly didn’t ask Misha where he’d acquired two jumpsuits in their exact sizes; he’d always had a knack for running down props and disguises, whatever the occasion called for. Andrei had scoffed at him, shaken his head, insisted that they were powerful; that they shouldn’t need to pretend to be anyone else. Toly knew that discretion was what had kept them all out of prison. Hopefully it would hold true here as well, in America.
Caps pulled low to hide their faces, Toly’s hair stuffed up inside of his, they toted their toolkits down the sidewalk to the service entrance of the building they’d been watching, punched in the code at the door, and entered at five-fifteen, as the cleaning crews were loading up carts and getting organized on the lower floors.
They had to pass the guard stationed in the lobby, and Misha put on a believable American accent to say, “The lights up on fifteen are acting up, yeah?”
“Uh…” The guy checked his sheet, shrugged, and gave their name tags only a cursory glance. “I guess, sure.”
It was that easy, getting access to the upper floors, and office number 1208.
The twelfth floor wasn’t empty. A wide sea of gray-walled cubicles stretched all the way to the glass walls of the offices on the far side, and Toly spotted more than a few desk lamps on, though the big overhead tubes were all off. The blue glow of computers. Heard the murmur of voices, one-sided conversations as haggard men negotiated deals over the phone in languages not their own. One wall hosted an array of labeled clocks, keeping time across the world.
1208 was locked, but Misha had it open in a matter of seconds, and they let themselves in to find…
Nothing.
Well, not literally nothing, but…
There was a mail slot in the door, and Misha dodged the white envelope that lay on the floor just inside of it. The same envelope from yesterday, pushed through by the mailroom kids and not picked up yet by the office’s owner.
Deeper in, a desk and a file cabinet sat by the window, a desktop computer…all of it dusty. Unused. No photos, no coffee mug, no clutter of any kind. Not so much as a scrap of paper. The blinds were half-down, and when Toly crossed the room to touch a slat, his gloved fingertip came away brown with dust. Whoever used this office didn’t use it for anything office-related at all. It was a drop-off/pick-up spot for the drugs.
“What the fuck?” he muttered, turning a circle in the center of the room.
Misha had gone to the computer, leaning over the back of the pushed-in chair to work the keyboard. It booted up slow, a flicker of white and blue, mountain screensaver, a password prompt. He shook his head. “I can’t get in.”
Miles could have. That guy the Alpines used for all their tech shit. But Toly was just as helpless, here.
He picked up the package and turned it over in his hands, saw it was still sealed. “I’ve got an idea.”
They were gone less than a minute later, a post-it with a phone number written on it left in the parcel’s place.
“Now we wait some more,” Misha said with a sigh, when they were back in the car and moving.
“Hm.” Toly watched out the window, the still-dark hustle and bustle of the city coming awake: metal grills lifting up in the fronts of bodegas, lights clicking on in high windows, shifting tides of work-goers emerging from subway stops.
Toly wondered if Raven was up yet. Standing in the kitchen sipping coffee, checking her email on her phone…wondering where the hell he’d gone. The gym story wasn’t going to hold for long – maybe not even through the rest of the day. But he needed a little more time to find this guy, tofinish this, shake hands with Misha, and dust his hands of the bratva for good.
The car slowed, and turned, thumped up over a gutter and into a parking lot. A long, narrow diner, clad in shiny metal and neon, an all-nighter greasy spoon sort of place, wholly American, probably not a Russian in sight inside.
Toly sat up straighter as Misha parked and said, “Why are we stopping?”
