Chapter 4 - The Russian’s Ledger
The penthouse suite of the Grand Regency Hotel smelled of imported Cuban tobacco, expensive leather, and the heavy, metallic tang of gun oil. Dimitri Volkov sat behind a massive mahogany desk, his thick, scarred fingers tracing the edge of an old silver coin as he listened to the voice coming through the speakerphone.
Volkov was fifty-two, a man built like a concrete pillar, with a completely hairless head and pale blue eyes that looked like frozen water. He was the undisputed head of the syndicate that controlled the northern ports of New York—a man who viewed business not as a series of financial transactions, but as a slow, methodical territorial war.
"A girl?" Volkov said, his voice a deep, gravelly rasp that barely rose above a whisper. "Moretti has a child?"
"A daughter, boss," the voice on the speaker replied. "Three years old, maybe four. Living under the name Sarah Miller in Astoria. Moretti’s security detail is thick—at least eight men on the perimeter—but he’s inside the house right now. He’s been there for over an hour."
Volkov slowly set the silver coin down on the desk. A thin, terrifying smile spread across his broad face, exposing a gold-capped tooth on his left jaw.
"For three years," Volkov murmured, leaning back in his leather chair, "I believed Adrian Moretti was a ghost. A machine made of ice and corporate law. I wondered why he never took vacations, why he lived in a penthouse that looked like a hotel room, why he fought for every square inch of the Brooklyn docks like a man with nothing to lose."
He leaned forward, slamming his heavy fist onto the mahogany table with sudden, terrifying force.
"And all this time, he was hiding his weak spot in a row house in Queens!"
Sitting across from Volkov was Nikolai, his chief lieutenant—a tall, lean man with a jagged scar running from his ear down to his collarbone.
"Do we take the house tonight, boss?" Nikolai asked, his hand drifting toward the silenced pistol beneath his armpit. "If we hit them now, before he reinforces the perimeter, we can wipe out Moretti and the girl in one strike."
Volkov raised a hand, stopping Nikolai instantly. "No. You think like a street soldier, Nikolai. You shoot Adrian Moretti in a suburban living room, and his men turn this city into a bloodbath. His syndicate doesn't disappear just because he dies—it fragments. His captains will tear Queens apart looking for us, and the federal authorities will shut down every port from here to Norfolk."
Volkov stood up, walking toward the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the glittering lights of Manhattan.
"Moretti survived the bullet on Mulberry Street," Volkov continued, his eyes reflecting the red lights of the city traffic below. "My sources inside the hospital tell me his heart is failing. He is weak. He is desperate. A desperate man with a child he loves is not a predator anymore, Nikolai. He is a target that moves exactly where you tell him to move."
"What are your orders, boss?"
"We don't attack the house," Volkov said, turning around, his pale eyes gleaming with a cold, predatory intelligence. "We let him think he’s safe. We let him spend time with his little princess. Let him build his little dream of being a father."
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Volkov stepped back to his desk, picked up a thick manila folder containing the shipping manifests for the upcoming fifty-million-dollar arms shipment arriving at Pier 42 next Tuesday, and threw it onto the desk.
"When the shipment arrives next week," Volkov said softly, "we won't need to fight his men for the pier. We will simply hand him a photograph of his daughter's playground, and Adrian Moretti will hand us the keys to the city himself."
