Page 56 of Call Sign: King
“Hey,” he answered, waiting for Wrath to say why he’d called back. When no explanation came, Ryder pressed. “I hope you guys have a clue, because I’m not recognizing the asshole.”
The men started a stare down with Ryder’s pulse bumping up with each second that ticked by.
“What? You have news.” He groused. “Just spit it out.”
“The blood splatter. We got a hit.”
“Thank God. Is it one of the Bratvas in Russia or Belarus? I may not have recognized the man, but I sold a shit ton of those semi-auto AR-15 handguns to the biggest families in those countries back in the day.”
“You were right. It’s Russian.”
Ryder’s mind raced, narrowing his long list of enemies down to those in Russia. When he was active, the Volkovs had been the biggest family he’d been charged with surveilling, but since wiping out all three of the powerful brothers, he ruled out the current family leader, Alexi. Alexi could no more pull off kidnapping Khloe than Ryder’s Aunt Ginny.
“It must be the Lovernos family.”
“No.”
“The Popovs?”
Axel remained silent giving Ryder time to explode. “Just fucking tell me! We don’t have time for a damn guessing game.”
“It’s a Volkov.”
“The tests have to be wrong,” Ryder argued. “There is no fucking way the man in these photos is Alexi Ivanov, err… Volkov. I spent hundreds of hours with him over the years. The only other Volkov blood relatives are kids under the age of twelve and Viktor’s widow. Clearly, the tests have to be wrong.”
“I don’t know how he did it either, but Bing is positive.”
“What? That there is some other distant relative I never fucking met?”
“It isn’t a distant relative, Ryder. It’s Vladimir.”
Impossible. Vlad was dead. Killed in the same bomb blast as his two brutal brothers.
“Say this is true, where has he been hiding for four years?” Doc asked what Ryder was thinking.
Ryder’s heart was pounding. It was hard to get his brain to work under the strain.
“That man didn’t look anything like Vlad,” he finally reasoned out loud.
“Hold on. Bing is calling. Let me link him into this call,” Axel said, putting them on hold and giving Ryder’s mind even longer to spin into a tornado.
Bing’s voice forced him to focus on the problem at hand. “I think I’ve found something. Do you know who the hell a Yurdin Malcovic is?”
The name was familiar, but under his current level of stress the answer didn’t come to Ryder quickly.
Yurdin. Not a common name, even in Russia. Still, he’d heard it. Where? It finally hit him.
“He’s the long-time butler for the Volkov’s estate out in Barvikha, the compound an hour outside of Moscow.”
“Crack has been sifting through the files we worked up on your old enemies years ago, looking for something to jump out. Once we knew we were dealing with a Volkov, she tapped into the old bank accounts they’ve used for years, looking for a money trail to stand out. She ran the data through one of her programs and there are dozens of huge payments and reimbursements to and from this Yurdin person that started just over four years ago.
“Only after she tracked down his personal accounts did she find it.”
“Find what?” Doc asked.
“Hundreds of smaller payments to doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel in Russia dating back years. Then just over a year ago there were three major payments to an account in Switzerland. She was able to track that account to the largest plastic surgery clinic in Zurich. It’s just a guess here, but things are adding up that Vlad somehow made it through the bomb blast and has been getting nursed back to health over the last four years. That might explain why you don’t recognize him. He’s been under the knife for reconstruction.”
Vladimir Volkov was alive.
