AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Kofi,” Lyon said, “what do you have for me?”
Kofi looked up, his cloudy gaze slowly clearing. Lyon had gotten used to it in the weeks Kofi had been working for him. Approaching the man while he worked was like trying to pull someone from a compelling dream. It took a minute for him to come fully back to the here and now.
“We’re in,” he said.
“You’re… in?” Lyon asked. “To the traffic archive?”
Cracking the cameras had taken Kofi all of two hours, but they weren’t looking for the live feed. They needed access to the historical images, and those were locked behind the city’s firewall with the rest of its data.
“I’m in,” Kofi said, turning to his screen. His fingers flew over the keys on the keyboard until two images appeared. “What do you see?”
Lyon adjusted his position so he had a better angle. He recognized one of the pictures. In it, a group of men — including Sergei Ivanov — stood outside a brick building, cigarettes dangling from their fingers.
It was one of the pictures Damian had given him when Lyon had been trying to figure out where Vadim and his men were working. Lyon had passed it onto Kofi.
The other picture had been taken at a different time and place. The image quality was grainier, and this one showed a group of men in an SUV. Lyon couldn’t make out the guys in the back, but the two men in the front were pretty clear.
He looked closer. There was something familiar about the guy in the passenger seat, something in his narrow face and hawk-like nose.
He looked back at the first picture and the pieces clicked into place.
“It’s the same guy,” Lyon said. He touched the man in the first photo — head bent to a cigarette near the entrance to the tunnels that led to the water crib — then the second photo, where he was a passenger in a car driven by someone Lyon didn’t recognize.
“Yes,” Kofi said. He tapped at the keyboard and a single image filled the screen. It was a mug shot, and Lyon instantly recognized the man standing behind the numbered slate as the same man in both pictures.
“Meet Ira Lidin,” Kofi said. “He’s got a rap sheet a mile long. Petty shit — vandalism, auto theft, assault.”
“Not exactly the leadership qualities we’re looking for,” Alek said drily.
“He’s no leader,” Lyon agreed, staring at the man’s face on the screen. “Just a worker bee.”
“So one of Vadim’s men is now working for whoever is attacking us,” Alek said.
“Which means some — maybe even most — of the men attacking us might be stragglers from Vadim’s army,” Lyon said.
He wasn’t surprised Kofi remained silent. He’d done his job. These discussions were above his pay grade for the time being.
“Think one of them grew some balls?” Alek asked.
“Enough to motivate and inspire Vadim’s men to take on the entire Chicago bratva without him?” Lyon asked. “No, I don’t.”
Vadim’s high-level men had all been securing his position at the water crib. Lyon had known they hadn’t killed every man on the street, but it hadn’t mattered, because a man on the street needed someone to lead him to be dangerous, and at the water crib, Lyon had killed the only two candidates.
Which meant someone else had picked up where Vadim left off, leading his army, either because it had been pre-arranged or because he was an opportunist who saw his chance to commandeer an army that was already in place and prepared to do a job.
“Maybe Vadim had a partner?” Alek asked, on the same track as Lyon.
Lyon considered it further, then shook his head. “Something tells me Vadim Ivanov isn’t the sort of man to have a partner.”
His psychotic son didn’t count.
Alek exhaled. “Fuck. So this doesn’t help us at all.”
Lyon wasn’t so sure. There was something there, something they were missing. He could feel the missing piece lurking beyond the borders of puzzle, like the memory of a dream that had just slipped out of his grasp.
Now he just had to find it.
36
