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NINE
The ARU files described Mark Fitz as “sheepish” and “compliant.”He knew he should have informed his superiors about his gambling problem, but he’d carried on hiding it in the hope that the next big win would pay off his debts.Now that he’d been found out, he seemed more relieved than anything else, and he’d begun attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings.
That was where he’d gone this evening.
His rented bachelor pad was a strange mix of minimalism and sentimentality.Light wood floors, a neutral colour scheme, big windows with gauzy drapes.Framed pictures covered the walls, photos mainly, but the living room lacked a couch.A desk in the bedroom held a laptop, but there was no TV.A shelving unit was home to an ornate glass chess set, several tennis trophies, and a bunch of books, mostly memoirs with the occasional reference text.I flipped through the pages of each, but there were no hidden notes and no hollowed-out centres.
“Think he sold his furniture?”Ana asked as she unscrewed the cover plate of the electrical outlet beside the bed.
I unearthed a pile of receipts in the desk drawer.“Pawned it.”
Did that mean he was still hoping to hit the jackpot and get it back?Tsk-tsk-tsk.
“Doesn’t he realise the house always wins?”
“Not always.Anatoli the Bear didn’t win.”
The former Bratva boss had fallen to his death from the seventeenth floor of his casino in Atlantic City during a late-night tryst with a hooker.Someone had filmed the landing, and the video of his insides dripping off the roof of a Lexus had racked up over half a million views online before it finally got taken down.
“That was you?”
In my early twenties, I hadn’t been burdened with so many scars, which made that type of undercover work much easier.Especially with a man like the Bear, who, in his later years, had developed a tendency to drink too much vodka and think with his dick.
“He didn’t see eye to eye with the general.You think the light fitting in the living room belongs to the landlord?”It was fancy, designed more for decoration than illumination.“I don’t want Fitz to accidentally pawn a bug.”
“It was pictured in the rental listing.”
I glanced at my watch.Fitz’s GA meeting was scheduled to go on for another fifty minutes, and then he had a twenty-minute drive back home.Quinn was keeping an eye on him—the group met in a community centre, and he’d taken Tabby for burgers at the fast-food joint opposite.
“Then I’ll work with it.”
Installing the bug took less than five minutes—I’d had plenty of experience, and the hardware supplied by Blackwood was designed for ease of use—and then I checked on Fitz’s laptop.The data was halfway to being copied.Cracking the encryption would be somebody else’s problem—I broke people, not codes.
A young Fitz looked down on me from the walls as I worked.The photos were arranged in chronological order from birth to the present day or close to it.What kind of person documented their life like that for all to see?The idea made me shudder.Baby Fitz in a crib, toddler Fitz playing under a lawn sprinkler, junior Fitz playing chess with an older man who might have been his grandfather.There was a facial resemblance.
Hmm.
Chess.The chess set…
I scanned the other pictures, now with a goal in mind.There he was again—teenage Fitz, playing in a chess tournament, his face tense with concentration.And then near the end of the timeline…
“Ana?”
“Da?”
“Look at this.”A second later, she was at my side.“Fitz plays chess, quite seriously, it seems.Timonenko, Novikova, and Angelou also play chess.”
“You think they met at some chess tournament?That Fitz is our guy?”
“Blackwood has people who can research this?”
“I’ll contact them.”
“While you’re putting in the request, ask about this boat too.”I tapped the picture of grown-up Fitz posing on the swim platform of a yacht.“TheBalestra M.”
“Why?Isn’t the balestra a fencing move?”