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“You don’t know what he’s been up to?”
Pavel shoots me a quick look of irritation that he wipes off almost immediately. “You’re pretty good at covering your own tracks. How easy did you expect your old man to be?”
I grunt. “Fine. Continue.”
“We’re still digging, still handing out bribes, and I did find a weak spot in Salt Lake City with a group of Mormons he pissed off.”
I hate that it makes me snort a laugh. “Fucking figures. What did they have to say?”
“That he needs Jesus.”
I roll my eyes and climb into the passenger side of the Rezvani; it’s best to let Pavel take the wheel since he’s got a calmer head.
I’m going to need the road trip to clear my mind as much as possible. I haven’t felt this tense in a long time, and I can’t afford to be off-kilter when facing down the leading star of my childhood nightmares.
My father is up to something. He always is, always has been, but Tolya and I usually had a pulse on his dealings until everything went to shit with Michael Little. Once Oleg abandoned ship for Russia, nothing he did had any effect on me, Tolya, or anyone in the Bratva.
So it’s been “out of sight, out of mind” for a blessed fifteen years or so.
“I’m guessing he didn’t run into them at a bar,” I grumble as Pavel pulls us out of the garage and peels down the long driveway.
“Stumbling out of one, actually. They said he ‘reeked of booze, sweat, and bad decisions.’ They tried to pray for him and ask him about his faith, but he told them where to shove their religion and swung a few punches. Only reason why he wasn’t arrested was because they didn’t feel like pressing charges.”
“They should have. Would’ve saved us all the trouble.”
“Yeah, well, here we are.”
Here we fucking are, indeed, driving toward the last person I ever want to see. “What else did you manage to find? Bank records?”
Pavel nods. “Only a few, but we’re still digging. You and I both know he’s funneling money through various channels, but I managed to get a guy on the inside of a few offshore accounts.” He pauses. “There’s been a lot of activity in The Cayman Islands. Recently pulled a shit ton of money in a single transaction for cash.”
I frown. “How much?”
“Millions. Tens of millions. Best as we can tell, between forty and sixty million dollars, American. And this was only a few weeks ago.”
“Before the auction?”
Pavel discreetly sucks in a breath, but I still hear it. The auction is a sore subject for him because, regardless of my status over him, he still blames me for taking Clara there and losing her to the world that she, as he put it, “didn’t deserve to be thrown into.”
He nods only once and adjusts his hands on the steering wheel. “Shortly before.”
Raizo did say Oleg was in attendance. “Are we thinking a single purchase? Or…”
“That’s another anomaly we found with his accounts in Hong Kong.”
I whip my gaze to stare at him in disbelief. “You hacked Hong Kong?”
Pavel scoffs. “I fucking wish. Nah, I got a guy on the inside who knows a guy who owes someone else a favor, so I just… helped a brother out. And then he helped me out.”
I wave a hand for him to go on.
He smirks. “So our guy in Hong Kong says Oleg’s been conducting some pretty lucrative business for the better part of the last decade. Withdrawals and deposits all evenly balanced and consistent with purchase and sales transactions. In the hundreds of thousands, though, so we’re confident it’s bigger than antiquities. Whatever Oleg is doing in the Motherland, it’s pulling in an average of ten million profit weekly, give or take.”
There’s only one black market industry I can think of that pushes that much product, at that price,thateasily. “Do we know if he supplied any women to Raizo recently?”
Pavel shakes his head. “From what little we’ve been able to glean Stateside, Oleg is here for something else.” Again, he hesitates. “But from what we’re hearing over in Russia, Ukraine, even Bosnia…”
The way he drops off and just stares out the window sets me on edge. “What?”
