Page 72 of The Pakhan's Bride
I select the "Maraschino" folder—Ekaterina's code for political bribery, a joke so dry only she ever laughed. The documents are a mix—wire transfers, party invitations, a photograph of a German trade minister with a line of white powder on his desk. I attach the lot to a draft email. The recipient list is already built—five journalists, three regulators, and the personal assistant of a Dutch MP who owes us a favor.
I glance at the clock. The second hand ticks to the top. I hitSend. "First wave is live," I say.
The old Baranov archive is a monster, but Ekaterina left it to me with a note in her voice—Use only as needed. There's enough in here to burn a city. I queue up the second wave, this one uglier—laundering diagrams, shell corporations, names of diplomats in three countries who are on the take. The files were meant to be insurance. I use them as a weapon.
Vera's hand trembles as she types. "It's live on Twitter," she says.
I nod. "Let it run."
For a breath, I let myself think about Ekaterina. The way she annotated each file, how she'd assign nicknames to the targets.The way she built the archive as a living weapon, knowing someday it would be aimed at her own allies. She never intended to survive the final act. She made herself the villain so I wouldn't have to.
The conference room hums with static. The patriarch sits stiffly, one son tapping his heel under the table, the other lost in emails. The Albani reps have multiplied, six now, including the so-called legal team, whose only function is to nod and never blink. There is bottled water everywhere, untouched.
A phone vibrates. Then another. Then the whole room trembles as if a drone passed overhead. The patriarch's phone is first. He reads the alert, lips compressed to a single wrinkle. His left hand trembles, just once, then steadies.
Across the table, the Albani man's phone goes off. He glances, then turns chalk-white. His hand covers the screen. He tries to keep talking—something about mid-market rates, or a price break on insurance—but the words are background noise now. The sons look up, sensing a shift. One reaches for his own device, finds it already lit with unread messages.
The patriarch stares at the Albani team, then at the Swiss moderator. "We need a break," he says.
But the Albani man is already speaking into his sleeve, voice too low for the microphones.
The moderator, flustered, tries to impose order. "Perhaps we could?—"
"No," says the patriarch. "We're finished here."
He stands and signals his sons. They rise, chairs scraping the floor. The Albani man calls out, "This is a misunderstanding, we will clarify," but no one listens. The legal team consults in rapid Albanian, faces going from pink to gray.
As the Bratva trio heads for the exit, every screen in the conference suite goes red, then blinks to a new headline—EXCLUSIVE—Albani Syndicate Compromised Eurozone Banks.
The newsfeed cycles through bullet points—laundered billions, bribed officials, secret deals with half the major banks from Riga to Rotterdam. There are faces on the screen. The Albani man's is first. He hisses something, not in English, and slaps the table so hard the glassware jumps.
The patriarch and his sons keep walking. The camera crews outside the door swarm, bulbs popping like gunfire. The patriarch walks through it all, jaw set, eyes only on the elevator at the end of the hall. The sons flank him like bodyguards.
Inside the conference room, the Albani reps confer, hands frantic. One tries to call a number. It doesn't pick up. Another swears, then yells at the Swiss moderator, who shrugs, already backing out of the fray.
Down in the lobby, every television in the hotel shows the same story. The patriarch steps onto the marble, takes a deep breath, and in that moment, he looks less like a traitor and more like a survivor.
His phone buzzes again. He ignores it. The sons keep pace. They don't speak, but the younger one glances back, just once, at the top floor where the deal had died. The patriarch pulls his coat tight as he steps outside, hails a waiting car, and is gone before the next wave of reporters can find him.
The Albani men watch from the glass, helpless as their perfect plan drowns in the flood of bad press.
Back in the blue-lit command center, the room is quieter than before. The news tickers scroll across the bottom of every screen—"Albani Laundering Network Exposed," "Eurozone Rocked by Syndicate Scandal," "Unconfirmed Reports Link Berlin Negotiators to Organized Crime."
I let the data stream wash over me. The first wave did its job. The world is watching, but so are the enemies. I open the secondfile set, this one heavier, dirtier. Names of shell companies, trusts in Malta and Panama, the real owners of three major logistics firms in Hamburg. Ekaterina labeled itBitter End. She always had a flair for the dramatic.
I verify the leak package—no Vetrov fingerprints, no cross-contamination with assets we still use. The work is clean, almost elegant. "Ready?" asks Vera, her voice a whisper in the hum of the electronics.
I nod. "Push it."
She enters the command. It takes less than a minute for the files to propagate. The first journalist to open the link will have a field day. The second will call a prosecutor. The third will get a bullet, if the Albani have any sense left. The Berlin feed shows the patriarch and his sons exiting the tower, flanked by a different set of faces this time, security, lawyers, no more smiles. The Albani team is gone.
The lieutenant enters, tie now straight, hair still damp but face set in a new mask. He reads his phone, then looks up at me. "Confirmation from Berlin. Meeting is over. Albani team is in retreat."
I nod, just once. "And the patriarch?"
He checks his screen again. "On a secure line, wants to talk to Konstantin. Direct."
"Give him the number. Tell Sokolov to clear the line."
