Page 78 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

“Lead car,” I say. “Separate him.”

The lead sedan misses the next turn on purpose and slows behind a bus. Dima takes the turn late. The blue sedan has to choose between staying with the lead car or following us.

It follows.

Roman gives a humorless smile. “There he is.”

Dima takes the next left late, hard enough for the tires to spit slush against the curb. The rear car blocks the lane behind us, and the lead car cuts across the blue sedan’s nose at the next intersection. Three cars close the street like a fist.

The blue sedan stops. One of our men gets out with his hands empty and his coat buttoned. Another opens the passenger door from the outside. The man inside raises both palms, then lowers one slowly when he sees who has him.

I leave them to question him.

“Report after,” I say.

Dima drives on.

The tire depot sits behind a chain-link fence and a sign faded almost blank. Snow is piled in dirty ridges near the gate. Past it, the yard holds stacked tires, dead trucks, oil drums, and a low brick building with grimy windows.

Ilya stands near the old service door at the back corner of the building with two of his men. He has a tablet in one hand and a pistol under his coat.

He points toward the door. “This is how they came in.”

We enter through the service door and step into stale heat, rubber dust, and old oil. The concrete floor is marked with snowmelt and tire mud. Someone swept near the entrance, but the corners were left dirty.

Inside the rear bay, the van sits with its doors open, white paint dirty, plates gone, and burn marks around the brackets. The rear latch matches the still from Riga, dent and all. The interior has been stripped of loose trash, floor wiped, handles wiped, dash wiped.

Ilya walks beside me. “No prints on the front surfaces. We bagged fibers from the driver’s seat. Nothing useful yet.”

“Show me the route.”

Ilya lifts the tablet. “After the Riga hit, they split. One van went west toward the port roads as the obvious trail.”

He drags two fingers across the map and enlarges the east side of the route.

“The support van left through the contractor exit under a refrigeration service plate. We caught it twice on traffic cameras, lost it near the border, then found it again outside Pskov after the plates changed.”

He taps a point outside Moscow.

“The last confirmed camera puts it near this maintenance cut before it reaches Moscow.”

The line passes behind the old brickworks road near my family’s house. It’s a bad route unless someone already knows why it matters.

I crouch near the back step and lift the rubber mat with two fingers. Gray grit clings beneath it.

The grit beneath the mat doesn’t match Riga, the warehouse, or a salted winter road. It comes from the old brickworks route near my family’s house. I know it because my men found the same dull gray flecks in the wheel well of a car photographed after the fire.

Ilya watches my face. “Same source?”

“Same method.”

Roman comes in from the front of the van holding an evidence bag. Inside lies a metal contractor token stamped with half a company mark. The edge is scorched and the center is scraped, but the remaining letters are enough.

“Vostok Meridian,” he says.

Patrick’s archive had Vostok Meridian hidden under hotel fronts, renovation invoices, and fake contractor companies. The same contractor mark also appeared in my family-house file, under fire repairs and payments that disappeared into cash.

Now the same name is here again, on a van tied to the Riga attack.