“It’s not every day I get the chance to see the Lion up close and personal,” Damian said.
His eyes were so dark they looked almost black, and Lyon had the disconcerting feeling that every one of his secrets had already been catalogued and stored in the mind behind them.
“I’m sure it’s a disappointment,” Lyon said. “Just a man.”
Cavallo studied him. “Somehow I doubt that.”
“Shall I sit?” Lyon asked.
Cavallo shrugged. “Make yourself at home.”
His tailored button-down was open at the top, which meant he’d either taken off a tie or didn’t bother to wear one, and when he lifted his feet to rest them unceremoniously on the desk, Lyon clocked his pants as custom made.
Lyon sat. “I need information. Ronan Murphy said you could help.”
Cavallo was obviously a man after his own heart, one who didn’t like to waste time with small talk.
“That remains to be seen,” Cavallo said. “But our cyber lab has been around a long time, since before I joined the Syndicate actually.”
"You created a lab before you took over New York?” Lyon asked.
He knew the backstory — that Cavallo had played around in the criminal underworld during the power vacuum left by Raneiro Donati’s departure from the Syndicate, that Nico and the other leaders who’d rebuilt it had tapped Cavallo to be New York’s official leader after Donati’s execution.
But that would have been nearly a decade earlier. Cultivating cyber capability at the time, especially as it related to organized crime, would have been bleeding-edge.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Cavallo said.
Lyon nodded, impressed. “Clearly a prescient impulse.”
“What kind of information do you need?” Cavallo asked.
“Anything you can find,” Lyon said. “But specifically, financial information for the past five years related to deposits made to traditional and offshore accounts, plus anything relating to crypto.”
“Crypto is a challenge, but we can get it done,” Damian said.
“How does it work?” Lyon asked.
Damian removed his feet from the desk and positioned his hands over one of the keyboards. “Name and date and city of birth?”
Lyon hesitated before supplying his mother’s information. There was no love lost between them, not in the traditional sense of the word, but old habits died hard, and loyalty was one of the oldest when it came to the bratva.
But she’d left him no choice. He gave Cavallo the information.
Cavallo tapped away at the keyboard and stood. “Follow me.”
Lyon stood and followed him out of the room. They turned right, away from the lobby, and followed the hall in the other direction. After a couple more turns, they came to a steel door.
Damian keyed some numbers into the keypad mounted on the wall next to the door and it opened with a quiet buzz.
Damian stepped back and gestured for Lyon to enter ahead of him. “After you.”
Lyon wasn’t all the way through the doorway when he realized what he was seeing.
It was a big room, a few degrees cooler than the rest of the office. The room was eerily quiet even though four full rows of computers sat facing several large screens at one end of the room. About half the computers were in use by a variety of people, all of them tapping furiously at keyboards, most of them wearing headphones.
A subtle humming emanated from the room, either from the computers or the cooling unit that was keeping the temperature stabilized, but other than that and the quiet tapping of keys, it was silent.
“This is your lab,” Lyon said.
“This is it,” Damian said. “It doesn’t look like anything special, I know, but all of the equipment is state of the art, and we have access to several proprietary programs we shouldn’t have access to.”
Lyon’s gaze traveled to the giant screens at the front of the room. Some of them were black. Others featured rows of code that made no sense at all to Lyon.
One of them had his mother’s name, plus the date and city of her birth in red, a time stamp next to it counting down the minutes, presumably, since Damian had keyed in the information from his office.
“They’ll know what to do?” Lyon asked.
“They’ll find everything there is to find,” Damian said. “They’re very competitive.”