Desolation Road (Torpedo Ink 4)

“You’re absolutely right,” Absinthe agreed. “He had no way of knowing that. This group of assassins for hire, what do they call themselves, Code?”

“According to their offices in San Francisco—and they do have offices in a very upscale office building right in downtown San Francisco—they are called Sword Security. Nice little graphic. They don’t solicit business, nor do they take it from just anyone. You have to be recommended to them, and they don’t come cheap.”

“So, we have Sword Security set up in San Francisco and who knows where else. I’m guessing more than one place, am I correct?” Absinthe asked.

Code nodded. “Three cities, and they travel as well. I’m looking into them to try to find out how many they have on their payroll.”

“The Russian runs them. They’re his assassins. He took the reins when Sorbacov and his son died. These men wanted someone to tell them what to do and they needed the work and the money. They banded together, just the way the others did from Gavriil’s school, the ones that we patched over from Trinity County into Torpedo Ink,” Absinthe continued. “Sorbacov died, all of us were free and most of us had no idea what to do.”

“That still doesn’t mean the Russian would know enough to send one of his assassins undercover into a club just on the off chance that we had formed a club,” Czar said.

“He most likely didn’t,” Absinthe said. “He had his assassins working for the Ghosts, remember? They were pretending to be a club, getting in with other clubs, getting information, riding with them, trying to find the gamblers. The Russian would be smart enough to stick a couple of his men in with those clubs whose members they already knew. They could get the information so much easier. Go on runs with them, no one would suspect anything. If they had to kill, they were in a perfect position with plenty of cover.”

That much was true, and they all knew it.

“Once the Russian suspected he was dealing with us,” Absinthe continued, “if he had his men already in place, he could easily get word to his assassins to start pushing for their club to follow in the footsteps of the Trinity one to patch over to Torpedo Ink.”

“You put this all together when?” Czar asked.

“I’ve had this nagging feeling in my gut ever since the hit went out on Ice’s old lady. It didn’t make sense to me the way everything was so connected,” Absinthe admitted. “I couldn’t put things together, not until now. They just sort of clicked into place. That’s how it works with me.”

“It isn’t like we can ignore whenever something clicks into place for you as much as we’d like to,” Czar said. “You’ve never been wrong.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Damn it. The Russian knows we’re his enemy. He isn’t likely to try to recruit us. He’s very familiar with all of us. He had to be part of the school we were in, whether as one of the instructors—and he would have been one of the younger ones—or one of the students, and he would have been one of the older ones we thought had been killed.”

“I’m sorry, Czar.” Absinthe meant it. He didn’t like the pieces of a puzzle to snap into place late and put his club behind. “I should have figured this one out sooner.”

“I’m always amazed when you put things together, Absinthe. This was barely a thread to follow. I had my first hint of the Russian when I was ordered to take out Blythe’s stepfather. Her stepfather was a pedophile. At the time, all the information on him was correct and he deserved to die. What I didn’t know then, but since have learned, was her stepfather was part of a major pedophile ring and he’d crossed the Russian and the orders had come from him through Sorbacov. That was quite a few years ago and I’ve never even considered that he was behind these men.”

“Shit.” Ice shook his head. “He knows us. He knows every one of us.”

“That’s not true,” Steele, always the voice of reason, disagreed. “He may think he has the advantage because he thinks he knows us, but we survived by sticking together. By becoming one person, a machine. A killing machine, if you will. We wove ourselves together and he can’t know that’s how we function. He can’t know we took our psychic gifts, talents other people may have but ignore, and we practiced until we could do things no one would believe. He doesn’t know us as adults. Or that we still train every day to be faster and more skilled at the things we were taught and that we deliberately learned even more once we were outside the walls of that hellhole.”