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Then, all at once, a shrill ringing jolted her out of the ether in which she’d been floating.
She sat up with a start. “What…?”
“It’s the phone,” Lyon said. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”
It wasn’t unheard of for Lyon’s phone to ring in the middle of the night — it hadn’t been for hers either when he’d been gone — but it wasn’t common either.
She wasn’t going back to sleep.
She caught Alek’s name on the phone before Lyon answered the call.
“What is it?”
Kira couldn’t hear what was being said, but Alek sounded agitated, and Alek was rarely agitated.
“I’ll be down in fifteen minutes,” Lyon said.
“What is it?” Adrenaline had flooded Kira’s body. She was in full fight-or-flight mode, a deep feeling of unease seeping through her body.
“Someone hijacked one of the drivers making the delivery to Cicero. He’s been beaten pretty badly. He’s at Trinity, by the Port.”
She blinked as he jumped out of bed and tried to make sense of it all. “But… Vadim and Sergei are dead. Musa is dead. Who…?”
She trailed off, almost afraid to ask the question in its entirety, as if doing so would conjure a new enemy when that couldn’t be possible.
“I don’t know,” Lyon said, hurrying to the closet. “But I have to go.”
She got out of bed, albeit a bit slower than her husband. “I’m going with you.”
29
Lyon rushed through Trinity hospital with Kira and Alek at his side, his mind racing. It didn’t make sense. It had to be a fluke, a coincidence. Lyon would reach Oleg, the driver’s brigadier, and the other man would tell him this was the work of a bunch of street punks or a personal vendetta against the driver.
They emerged on the fifth floor and started down the hall toward a group of men clustered at the end of it.
“I’ll join you in a bit,” Kira said, peeling off to sit with a woman huddled in a chair in the small waiting room.
The driver’s wife, Lyon assumed.
The nurses gave them a curious glance as they passed the nurses’ station but didn’t bother asking questions. Lyon assumed Markus had greased the wheels to keep everybody out of their business. That lubrication would extend to the local police, who wouldn’t make a fuss when the driver opted not to fill out a police report.
“Tell me,” Lyon said as he reached the men.
“Bud picked up the shipment, as usual,” Oleg said. The old man looked tired, his face sagging, shadows under his eyes. He was old for a brigadier, and they’d all been through a lot in thepast few weeks. “He was stopped at a red light on his way to Cicero when two men opened the cab of the truck. They dragged him out, beat him, and left with the oil.”
Lyon raked a hand through his hair. “Did he recognize the men? Has anyone given him trouble before this?”
Oleg shook his head. “Not since Vadim was…” He looked around to make sure no one was listening, then left the rest unsaid anyway.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Alek said next to Lyon.
“Could some of Vadim’s men — the ones who were left — have mobilized on their own?” Markus asked.
“I don’t know,” Lyon said. But that didn’t feel right. Vadim’s loyalists were with him in the crib, and Lyon’s men had left no one alive. After dumping their bodies in the deepest part of the lake, it was as if they’d never existed.
Vadim certainly had men on his side who weren’t at the crib on the night Lyon had killed him and Sergei, but they wouldn’t have been high-level enough to mobilize on their own after Vadim’s death, and that’s if they even had the motivation to bother without someone leading the charge.
“So… a coincidence then?” Markus asked, echoing one of the possibilities that had run through Lyon’s head a few minutes before.
