Chapter 3
The two men who came into the diner that night were not random. They were Vulov's men, sent to verify a piece of information about me that Vulov had requested, which was whether I was who I appeared to be. They were not supposed to escalate. They were supposed to observe. The one who grabbed my wrist had improvised, which was not part of anyone's plan, and I had responded to the improvisation in the most efficient way available, which was also not part of the plan, and the result was that Falco had watched me handle a physical confrontation in a way that did not match his working model of who I was.
This was useful. I had decided it was useful before the wrist was released.
The alley meeting had been arranged through a dead-drop channel that Vulov's men used to communicate with intermediaries, and I had accessed that channel through Gerald's team six weeks earlier after we identified the specific protocol they were using. The meeting was supposed to be a handoff, me providing documentation that Falco believed I had obtained through a contact inside the Customs and Border Protection office, documentation that would allow Vulov's people to verify which manifest review windows were currently under surveillance and which were clean. The documentation was real in the sense that it had been fabricated by Gerald's team with the specific forensic signatures of genuine CBP internal documents, and it was the kind of thing Vulov's organization would pay a great deal for, and it was also the kind of thing that, once accepted by Vulov's men, would constitute a federal crime on their part that would be captured on the recording equipment I was wearing under the waitress dress.
The two men in the alley were Vulov's operational contacts. The scarred one was named Petrov and he had been with Vulov's organization for eight years and had three outstanding warrants in two countries. The one with the revolver was newer and more nervous and the nervousness was the thing that made him more dangerous than the scarred one.
Carmine Falco was not supposed to be there.
May you like
He had followed me.
I had known he would follow me, because men like Falco follow things that have become interesting to them, and I had been interesting to him for four months, and the diner altercation had made me more interesting, and I had made sure to take the route I always took when I did not want to be followed, which was the route that was most difficult to follow on, which meant it was the route that confirmed to anyone capable of following it successfully that following me had been worth the effort.
