20
What Jade Knows
Alex
Jade emanated heat and fire. Her energy wrapped around me, and I simply marveled at how composed she was.
She asked Olga for a pen and a piece of paper, then drew a pyramid right in the middle, beginning her story about how much her father knew about us. A fucking lot. He knew way more than we had thought.
"Your crew—your guys; there are informants at every level." She divided the pyramid into three. "I have a whole list on our shared drive, but I can't access it.” She doodled on the page, but then I realized it wasn’t a doodle, it was a number. “But to be honest, even if you know them all and start to slowly take them out, that will set off all the alarm bells."
I reminisced about a few days ago—maybe we should have listened to Vasily for a bit longer.
"How many approximately?" Andrei was now incredibly cooperative, listening intently.
Jade pursed her sweet lips and pointed to the doodle. “Nine."
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
"Nine?!" we both shouted in disbelief. "That's a huge fucking number!" Andrei added while I descended into hell.
Nine guys among our ranks were snitching to the cops about our every move. Fucking hell.
"Yes. A few have been with you for a very long time. One of them came to us voluntarily last year. I think his last name is...Voronov or Vontov or something?" Jade asked, and Andrei and I both knewexactlywho that was.
"Ilya Vorontsov," I confirmed, and Jade nodded. Andrei and I exchanged glances, knowing how much of a stab in the back this was. Vorontsov was a little younger than us, but he'd been with us since the beginning. We personally trained him when we brought him in.
"Yes, yes, his first name started with an I!" Jade spoke enthusiastically, but then continued on. “He’s provided a lot of information. He explained how he works, your process, and what’s behind your massive success,but…never gave us yournames.” Jade pointed to Andrei and then turned to me. “No one has. None of the informants have been able to tell us who runs it all.”
I noticed Jade’s little mysterious smile, but she quickly turned back to her notes. “Anyway. All this has made it much easier for the detectives to predict your next moves. Not always of course, but I'm sure you've noticed that there have been a good number of botched attempts this year, way more than at any other time?"
Damn. We’d been stupidandblind.
"Yes. We noticed," I admitted.
There really wasn't much to say—she knew so much already. Poor Olga sat there quietly and listened to this nightmare just like us.
"I can look through some old emails to find more names for you of who else is working for u—" Jade was about to sayusbut then stopped herself. "Working for my dad.”
My girl.
"How did you know about the early shipment?" Andrei asked, his arms crossed and eyebrows furrowed, all of him now business-oriented.
"Great question." Jade’s eyes sparkled. "Whose idea was it to send the shipment earlier? And how many cars did you have in this one?"
"Alex's idea,” Andrei responded immediately, but that wasn't entirely true. "We had about six hundred. More than usual."
"It wasn'tthisAlex's idea." Jade pointed to me and confirmed my thoughts. "It was Alex Slater's idea—to send the shipment earlierandto send six hundred cars."
"Holy shit, Jade, do you guys have ears in the walls? What the fuck?!" I was astounded. She knewsomany details.
Andrei stared at her, eyes wide and thinking the same thing I was: we werefucked.
"I need a sedative," Olga spoke weakly and stood up to get herself a glass of water. At this point, we all needed something to help us through the nightmare.
"You guys should've just asked me this shit right away!" Jade accused us. "You kidnap me to make my dad drop the case, but you made a huge mistake! You don't even know him! This case is incredibly important to him. I bet he's willing to leave me missing and kidnapped forever, as long as he gets to solve this."
Olga froze mid gulp, all of us taken aback by that sentiment.
