Page 19 of Sexting the Pakhan

Then I leave the basement and head upstairs.

The main floor of Veles is quieter now, the dinner crowd not yet thick enough to fill the room. Low lights, velvet booths, dark liquor on polished tables, women in black silk, men pretending they’re more important than they are. The kind of place where nobody asks the wrong questions if they’d like to keep coming back.

I move through it with two men behind me and eyes turning away as soon as they meet mine. The phone stays in my hand.

I step into the back office at Veles and close the door behind me. The noise of the club dulls at once, reduced to a low pulse through wood and concrete. I continue the texting conversation until Stepan comes in, shuts the door, and hands me a clean glass. I don’t take it.

“Well?” I ask.

He watches me wipe the last of the blood from my hand with a fresh towel. “Well, the idiot you just dismantled is exactly what he looks like. Greedy. Scared. Useful only when cornered.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he says, “it isn’t.”

I toss the towel onto the desk and sit. The leather groans under my weight. “Then give me one.”

Stepan doesn’t move right away. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, expression flat in that way of his that usually means the news is disappointing.

“We’re no closer,” he says at last. “Not really.”

I lean back in the chair and look at him.

He goes on before I can tell him to.

“We know money is moving where it shouldn’t. We know routes are being mentioned outside the circle they’re supposed to stay in. We know someone keeps feeding scraps of information to the wrong people just enough to test what they can sell without getting caught.” His mouth tightens. “But we still don’t know who.”

I say nothing. That’s when men around me usually become uncomfortable. Silence forces them to listen to themselves.

Stepan, unfortunately, is used to me.

He keeps talking. “I feel like the best lead we still have is the library.”

I look up.

That, at least, is something.

A month ago one of our runners got stupid and picked up the wrong hardback from a dead-drop shelf we use for low-level paper exchanges. Old system. Quiet. Rarely touched. The library made sense years ago because nobody notices men handling books, and nobody remembers who stood in the history aisle for twenty minutes if they leave with one under their arm. Since then we’ve found two more signs that someone inside the organization knows the pattern.

Someone is using my drop system. Or watching it.

Either way, it narrows the leak to a smaller circle than I like.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” I say.

Stepan nods once. He expected that.

My phone vibrates against the desk.

Once. Then again.

I look down.

Unknown number.

My attention catches.

The first messages are still on the screen from earlier.