Page 9 of Tin God

“Unless you can fly like some vampires.” Lee glanced up again. “Any sign of her?”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t. By the way, the next time you go to New York to meet with a vampire assassin, turn off your location services, okay?”

“Noted.” Brigid retrieved a compact 9mm handgun from her backpack and started taking it apart.

So soothing.

“Is that your emotional-support firearm?” Lee asked. “Adorable.”

“Shut up, Lee.” Brigid looked at the shuttered window. “She’ll be here. Lev is taking me tomorrow to see the raid.”

“You’re sure it’s Zasha?”

Brigid looked back at the screen. “I’m sure.”

He frowned down at his keyboard. “But others aren’t?”

“Opinions are mixed. Accordin’ to Mika, Zasha is the only one who would have dared inflict this kind of damage under Oleg’s nose.Butthere’s some debate if Zasha is working solo and just wants to piss off their brother or…”

Lee looked up. “Or?”

“Some folks in Oleg’s organization think Zasha is working with Katya.”

Lee’s eyebrows went up. “Katya Grigorieva? Our Katya? The vampire whorunsAlaska?”

“‘Runs Alaska’ is a very fluid idea.” She thought about the wild country she’d passed on the dogsled. “I have a feelin’ that Alaska mostly runs itself.”

“What about the Ankers?”

The Ankers were a shadowy vampire clan that dealt in information, illegal data harvesting, and identity fraud. They also had some shipping interests that Oleg used to his advantage.

“Zasha’s worked with the Ankers before,” Lee continued. “They worked together in Las Vegas and in Louisiana. Oleg’s people don’t suspect that the Ankers are funding Zasha this time?”

“According to Mika, it’s not likely. Oleg has some kinda deal with them about moving fuel out of Russia with their unregistered fleet, and they make a lot of money by not pissin’ him off.”

“Could they be right?” Lee asked. “Would Katya work with Zasha Sokholov?”

“I doubt it.” Brigid shrugged. “I get the feelin’ that Oleg’s crew up here knee-jerk blame Katya for most stuff if it’s aggressive. I’m gonna try to talk some sense into Mika when I see him. I’m with you—I think Zasha is probably working with the Ankers again, but I’m a nobody up here.” She frowned. “Actually, I’m a barsuk. Any idea what that is?”

“No.” Lee pursed his lips. “But I can try to find out. Don’t rock the boat in the Wild Vampire West, boss.”

“I’ll try not to.” She hunched forward and started lining up the pieces of her compact Hellcat from magazine on the left to frame on the right. “Any luck tracking the Ankers’ money lately?”

“No. I’m pretty sure they’re using cryptocurrency, because there was a gold exchange in Antwerp that received a sizable deposit a week ago—roughly two million dollars—and another one that popped a two million outlay to a client two days later in Vancouver. If Zasha is in Alaska and someone wanted to send them money, Vancouver is the closest gold exchange they could use.”

“Vancouver?”

“Yep.”

That was close. “Vancouver is Katya’s territory.”

Lee’s voice dropped. “So you think there might be some truth to what Mika was saying?”

“No.” Please, God, don’t let Katya be working with Zasha. That would be a huge mess. “Even if it’s in her territory, Katya can’t interfere with the gold exchanges.”

“She’d make a lot of people angry if she did.” All vampires relied on the gold exchanges to move money around in the human-dominated modern age, and lately more and more of them were discovering cryptocurrency, which was even harder to trace than gold. “But that confirms that whatever Zasha is up to, the Ankers are probably involved.”

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