Page 75 of Lethal Alliance

I sit for a moment, mulling this all over. “So tell me why you have Pavel and Mickey looking up Fedorovs, if they’re supposedly all dead?”

“Ah.” Mak’s twisted smile makes another brief appearance. “Well, it seems Vilnus wasn’t quite the outcast he claimed. For several years before he turned up on Petrovsky’s doorstep as a poor lonely orphan, he had in fact attended an elite boarding school in New York. Under an assumed name, of course.” He takes a photograph out of the manila folder on the table in front of him and slides it across to me. An adolescent Vilnus Orlov stares back at me from a school photo taken in the late sixties.

Red-hot rage seizes every cell of my body. I don’t trust myself to pick the photograph up; I’m certain I’d tear it to pieces.

“His school fees were paid by one Andras Peretz, supposedly a Jewish refugee from Poland.” Mak takes another photograph out of the folder. The face on it sends shivers down my spine, though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it before. It’s the man’s eyes. I’ve seen eyes like that before, on men who have killed too much. Dead, entirely devoid of any kind of emotion. The man staring back at me is no refugee. He’s a stone-cold killer.

“Andras Peretz disappeared about six years ago. Nothing dramatic, he just faded from sight. Around the same time, Vilnus Orlov registered a business name: Fedorov Industries.” Mak looks at his watch. “And any moment now, we’re about to find out what Andras Peretz is calling himself these days.”

He just finishes speaking when Mickey bursts back in the door, waving his laptop excitedly. Mak sits back in his chair, lacing his hands behind his head with an air of quiet satisfaction.

Smug bastard.

“Surely you could have done this yourself,” I mutter. “Since you’re fucking encyclopedic about the rest of it.”

“Why should I do all the work?” He arches a lazy eyebrow. “It’s your shit show.”

Dimitry explodes again, sending éclair across the table. I glare at them both, but neither look in the least repentant.

I suppress the urge to smile. Despite the shit storm circumstances, it’s good to work with Mak again.

“Fedorov Industries.” Mickey is stammering in his haste to get his words out. “The registered CEO is a man named Ilyan Fedorov. I had to trawl the dark web to get a picture, but this is his company ID.” The same dead eyes of the man who recently called himself Andras Peretz stare back at me from the plastic card on the screen. “And Ilyan doesn’t just own a house in the Everglades. He owns an entire fucking compound—or rather, his company does.” He clicks, and another image appears, an enormous house with a long driveway set just back from the swamp.

“Ah. Ilyan.” Mak reaches into the manila folder and withdraws an old newspaper cutting, yellow and faded. “I did suspect as much.”

The cutting he hands me is a French article about two cases of suspected arson: fires in a Paris jewelry shop and at an adjoining art dealership, which claimed the lives of two Russian men and their entire families, women and children included.

Ilyan Fedorov is named as the prime suspect.

The photo of him is grainy and indistinct, but even though it’s a much younger man, there’s no mistaking the brutal, dead eyes are the same as those of Andras Peretz, and of the man on the Fedorov ID card.

I stare at the photograph for a long time.

This man is the reason my father and Sergei parted ways when they reached America. He’s the reason for the secrets my father kept his whole life. Ilyan Fedorov is why Darya’s parents and mine didn’t have Sunday lunch together, tell stories about Russia like my friends’ parents used to do.

Ilyan Fedorov is the reason Sergei and my father wouldn’t risk anyone knowing they were connected.

They wouldn’t risk losing their families a second time. They knew that Fedorov would take revenge the first chance he got.

I hear my father’s voice, that long-ago night when I sat on the landing:“We both know what happens to those who wait to long to act, Sergei. I will not make that mistake again.”

It was Ilyan Fedorov who told the Colombians where to find my mother.I’m as sure of it as I am that he was responsible for my father’s death—even if it was Orlov who wielded the knife. My father’s house, too, had been burned to the ground after they killed him. It’s too macabrely similar to what happened in France to be a fucking coincidence.

When I look back up, the entire table is watching me expectantly. I stab the Everglades compound on Mickey’s screen with one finger.

“Fedorov is pulling Orlov’s strings. Get rid of him, and we weaken Orlov. We take that house first. We take Fedorov. Then we come for the rest of the fuckers.”

Mak inclines his head. His smile is almost as cold as Fedorov’s. “That, my friend, will be a pleasure.”

23

ROMAN

Ihead back to the penthouse for siesta. Plans are in place now, or at least in the process of being made, and I need to see Darya.

The penthouse is dark and quiet. Dimitry picked Abby up earlier, so I know she’s gone, but I thought Darya would still be here. I pick up my phone to text her, wondering if I’ll ever stop feeling a lurch of fear when I find her gone.

“She’s asleep.” I look up to find Maria, the maid, watching me from the corridor. “She is very tired.”

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