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Roman shrugged. “The hard way just seems to find me.”
“Can you do that?” Ruby asked Damian. “Find someone? Someone who’s missing?”
Damian stood. “Follow me.”
They followed him out of the office and down another hall. They stopped at a set of double doors with a keypad and Damian took out a card and inserted it into a slot at the bottom.
The keypad’s red background turned green and a mechanism inside the door buzzed.
A low hum emanated from the dimly lit room, and when Roman stopped in after Damian, he saw why: the massive room was lined with worktables groaning under the weight of computer monitors and CPUs.
Almost every chair was occupied by someone wearing earbuds or headphones, the room silent except for the tapping of fingers on keys and the collective hum of all the equipment.
Some of the people manning the workstations bobbed to music only they could hear. Others sat as still as stone while they stared intently at their screens.
“What is all this?” Ruby asked.
“Cyber lab,” Damian said.
Ruby peered up at him like she was trying to find a missing clue to a very confusing puzzle. “You have a cyber lab?”
Damian nodded. “Have for years, although our capabilities are far beyond what I had when I started.”
Roman had heard something about Damian and his love for data — that Damian had a lab even before he joined the Syndicate, back when he was just a lone wolf playing with digital crime.
Apparently the Syndicate had a second lab in Paris.
“And you can find people with all this?” Ruby asked.
“Sometimes.” Damian grinned, like he was happy to give up being modest. “Usually.”
“I need to know who’s come into the city from Russia in the past three months,” Roman said. Three months was probably a bigger window than he needed, but he wanted to cover all his bases.
“Assuming you’re not looking for the tourists,” Damian said.
“Correct,” Roman said.
Damian nodded. It was his business to know what was going on within rival organizations in the city.
He knew what was up.
“We can get into the TSA without too much trouble,” Damian said. “The CBP system is a bit trickier.”
“Are you saying you can’t do it?” Roman asked.
Damian grinned. “What do you think?”
“I’ll owe you big,” Roman said.
“Yes, you will.” Damian said it good-naturedly and Roman was surprised all over again to find that he liked the guy. “What about the cop?”
“Works for the city,” Roman said. “He’s taken a leave of absence. We don’t even have a lead on where he might be.”
“He took my daughter,” Ruby said a little frantically.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Damian sounded like he meant it, and Roman remembered something else — Damian had two boys and his wife was the sister of a former boss, one who’d taken control when the Syndicate had been between leaders. Roman had been young when it happened, but he remembered it as a bloody time for the rival organization, and his father had said contemptuously it was all over a woman.
“I need to find her,” Ruby said.
