Page 2 of Vow Of Fire

Alberto coughed, then bent over and spat blood onto the concrete floor. I waited until he was upright again, then demanded, “Who did you tell about the shipment?”

He blinked at me. “Only the courier company that was supposed to pick up the paintings.”

The Agora Gallery represented a contemporary artist from Bogotá called Mateo Reyes, whose work was currently the gallery’s hottest acquisition. Art critics and collectors alike were salivating over his latest work, which meant Agora was shipping several of his pieces to New York.

“Not that shipment, dumbass.” I dragged a hand through my hair. Jesus Christ. Did he think we were doing all this for a couple of swirls of paint? “The drugs. Who did you tell about the drugs?”

He frowned. “What drugs?”

Vincent, our fixer, had arranged for the Colombian shipment to be hidden inside the temperature-controlled containers transporting the high-end art. Because the containers couldn’t be opened for fear of ruining the paintings with all that salty sea air, they were the perfect hiding place for our product.

I sighed. So it was going to go down this way, was it?

“The container was ambushed, my men were shot. Their blood is still staining the fucking dockside. You were the only person who knew about that shipment.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, man. I work at the Agora Gallery. In logistics. I don’t know anything about drugs.”

He was convincing, I’d give him that much. Only problem was we had proof.

“We looked at the phone records, Alberto. Your desk line. You made several calls to an unregistered number in the weeks leading up to the delivery. Always after hours. Always on the days you worked late.”

He shook his head, confused. “I did? What number?”

“You tell me. It was a burner phone, Alberto. Whose number was it?”

His face crumbled. “I swear, I don’t know anything about any calls to a burner phone. Anybody could have used my desk phone.”

That was true, except we knew it wasn’t anybody. We’d been watching Alberto for some time, ever since he’d been seduced by a hot Russian model a month ago, a woman who was way out of this geek’s league. It was exactly the kind of play the Bratva would make. That’s why we’d looked into it.

Then, a few weeks later, our shipment gets ambushed in a style that closely resembled the Bratva’s MO. Coincidence? Not a fucking chance.

We’d taken precautions, obviously, but it hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t expected the scale of the ambush. That level of firepower was rare, even in my world. Again, the Russian crime syndicate was one of the few organizations that had the ability to pull off something like that.

“Not everyone had access to your system.” According to our fixer, who also happened to do the gallery accounts, along with a handful of the other small businesses we laundered money through, Alberto was the only one who had a login to the logistics database.

“Anyone could have hacked in.”

He was grasping. Trying to divert the blame.

I fixed him with a steely glare. “Then there’s the matter of the fifty thousand dollars you received from an offshore trust.”

He stared at me, then gasped. “That was from my uncle. He died and left me some money. It’s totally legit. You can check it out.”

“We did,” I answered through gritted teeth. “It came from the Caymans.” No name, no address, just a hefty sum under the radar. Definitely shady.

“That’s where he lived,” Alberto insisted. “He wanted to avoid inheritance tax.”

For fuck’s sake. How stupid did this guy think we were?

Whoever had paid this fucker knew how to hit us where it hurt—in our product line. In this case, it was a rather large cocaine shipment that had come in last week from our Colombian associates.

Except it had never reached us. Armed mercenaries had stormed the container after it had been offloaded, stealing our merchandise and neutralizing my guys waiting to take delivery. It had been a goddamn massacre.

With no survivors, there was nobody to report back. CCTV in the container yard was sketchy. Precisely why we’d chosen it.

“Who got to you, Alberto?” I said quietly. “Who did you tell?”

He was sobbing now, tears mixing with the sweat and blood smeared on his face. “Nobody. It wasn’t me.”