Page 5 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)
Xander
Tuesday
Bratislava , Slovakia
Xander clasped his hands, then leaned his weight onto his forearms, bringing his face closer to Anna’s. “Spit it out.”
“You’re heading home to Washington?” she asked.
“In the morning.” Xander eased back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Why?”
“Two things.” She swiveled in her seat and reached into her coat pocket. “First, I have a message for Nutsbe Crushed in Panther Force.” She held out a greeting card envelope with a quirk of her brow. “Do you think you can pass it to him without losing it in a mugging?”
“Not at all funny.” Xander accepted the communication, looking down at the pink envelope. The Slovak accent marks that decorated the curly, old-fashioned script written with a purple glitter pen looked like confetti at a birthday party. “What does this say?”
“On the front? ‘For my precious granddaughter.’” Anna tapped it. “I brought it just in case you had time to do me a favor and take this by Iniquus. It sounds like you’re heading there, right? You said you’re picking up Radar at their Cerberus campus?”
“That’s right.” Xander turned the card over to find a sparkly cupcake sealing the seam.
Anna turned her phone over to check the time readout, then twisted toward the bartender, calling out to him.
The bartender focused hard on Xander, nodded, and then walked away.
Xander tipped his head toward the door the guy disappeared through.
“I told him that a homeless guy with a knife jumped you on the way here and took your coat. That was what all the shouting was about when I rushed out. Then I asked if some drunk left a jacket in the lost and found that you could use to get home. You can’t go out on a night like this without something warmer on. ”
“Thanks, cuz.” Xander reached under his sweater, unbuttoned his shirt, and tucked the envelope away.
“If someone does get hold of it,” Anna reached back into her coat pocket and pulled out a lip balm, “I wrote the card as if for a child and then included a letter written in English. It embeds the information that needs to go to Nutsbe and only Nutsbe; it reads like it’s news for the granddaughter’s mom.
More importantly,” she glanced over her shoulder, ensuring they were still alone.
“I need you to meet up with Bill York.” She mouthed, “C.I.A.” silently.
“York can give you the particulars of his assignment so we can coordinate with your D.I.A. team. There’s no room for overlaps right now.
York’s been tracking a man named Orest Kalinsky. ”
“Orest Kalinsky,” Xander repeated to memorize it.
“They fly to D.C. tomorrow.”
“York and I were buds in Afghanistan. I have his contact information. This Orest Kalinsky guy, what’s he doing in Washington?” Xander asked.
“Walking around without having a Zoric last name, mostly.” She uncapped the tube and slicked the balm over her lips. “But he certainly is a Zoric. He’s Medved’s favorite cousin.”
“Orest is new to me,” Xander said.
Anna snapped the cap back in place and turned to slide the balm into her pocket.
“He would be. His role is both intrinsic and somewhat peripheral. I’ll tell you about it in a second.
First, York believes Orest is going to visit the Zorics in their various prison cells to bring them up to date on the family happenings. ”
“Happenings plural?” Xander asked.
“We’re not entirely sure what messages he means to pass because things are fluid right now, which I’ll also touch on in a minute—So much to tell.
So little time—But importantly, Orest planned this trip months ago.
We speculated that Orest was adding a day to his itinerary to do the prison visits and perhaps explain how The Family has been working the back channels to see if they can’t obtain pardons and releases since there’s a rash of millionaires being pardoned for no apparent reason right now. ”
“Why not take advantage?” Xander deadpanned.
“Exactly.” Anna wrinkled her nose as if the whole thing stank.
Which it did.
“Their releases are improbable, right?” Xander asked quietly. “They’re going to stay out of the public sphere, tucked under a shoddy blanket on a prison shelf, right?”
“The Family has dangled carrots of possible rewards and raised their sticks for inflicting pain. That’s not in my wheelhouse, so I’m not the best person to ask. I wouldn’t say improbable, though. The D.A. only charged the East Coast Zoric family with trafficking minors.”
“Only?” Xander’s face clouded.
“The worst crimes weren’t charged because who wants pundits on the evening news telling the world about the method the Zorics developed to kill people with neurotoxins that are legal to obtain, easily accessible, imperceptible, and without any known medical interventions?”
Xander released a breath. Yeah, there was that.
“At any rate, we speculated that Orest was taking an extra day in D.C. to update the imprisoned family members on the potential for their release. But now?” Anna paused to draw in a deep breath. “Now, something new is rumbling under the surface.”
The same sensations that flooded Xander’s system in the street before the thugs jumped him raced along his nerves. “Okay.”
“The Zoric dinner table discussions have become extra bitter. The Family has put decades of effort, blood, and treasure into their project.”
“Project is such a laughably innocent-sounding word,” Xander said. “They’re trying to upend world order so they can reestablish their beloved USSR.”
“And,” she leaned forward to whisper, “they’re afraid that AI is advancing to the point that if they wait, they’ll lose their chance because their systems will be obsolete. The sense I get is that it’s now or never.”
“F’ing hell.” Xander threw his hands into the air. “That’s what you brought me here to tell me? Doomsday is fast approaching?” He stalled and caught her gaze. “Wait. Why were you asking if Radar was mine?”
“The thing your team was looking for in Kyrgyzstan has moved, so you won’t need Radar for that mountain trek. We don’t know where the thing moved. Westward toward Europe is all I have right now.”
“I—"
Anna held up her hand with a little smile and a shake of her head. “I’m going to take this conversation back a step and tell you that Russia’s space agency sent up a rocket last week.”
“With satellites, yes.” Xander sat up straighter, stretching his arms out the width of the table and wrapping his fingers around the edge. “Two space weather monitors and then about fifty smaller satellites.”
“Not just Russian satellites. It had two Iranian satellites that it put into orbit. Of the two Iranian satellites we identified, one is a communications satellite—that’s the one we’re going to focus on. The other is for high-resolution imaging.”
“This isn’t a first,” Xander said. “Russia worked with Iran in the past on a satellite project. A couple of years ago, they put up an Iranian satellite that was legitimately there to help research Iranian topography. So, there’s precedent.
As I remember it, they got Russia to do it because the Iranians had had a bunch of failed launches.
” He let his focus shift away as he contemplated the regional fallout.
“Israel isn’t going to love that much, given the present circumstances,” he muttered under his breath.
When Xander focused on Anna, he asked, “Are the Iranian satellites driving more instability? The Zorics have taken advantage of unrest in the area in the past.”
Anna turned to the window, conducting a practiced sweep of the street. “The Iranians are saying they need the images to monitor their natural disasters.”
“Which is true.” Xander’s voice drifted off.
Anna brought her gaze back to Xander, offering him a weak smile. “Yes, while true, and therefore a plausible reason to have the satellite, the Iranians can also use it to gather other information.”
“Also true. Realistically, though, how good are the images?” Xander asked. “What kind of pixels can they see?”
“Now you know as much as I do about the Iranian imaging satellite,” Anna said. “Our concern isn’t about the images. We’ll leave that to others. My team is worried because the Zoric Family paid for the Iranian communications satellite.”
“Shit,” Xander whispered.
“Yup. Whatever The Family has going on down here on planet Earth, they needed a satellite where they had a door—not a back door—but a door they could legitimately walk in and out of whenever they wanted. Why? To do something .”
“Right to do something with some machine that’s bigger than a breadbox and is functioning in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan—”
“ Was functioning there but no longer is ,” Anna reminded him.
“Right. Bigger than a breadbox and on the move toward Europe. But please, AWG alum, go find it and figure out what the Zorics are doing with it that puts humanity at risk.” Xander bit down, making his jaw bulge as he looked at the shot glasses that represented the death of one team member and the lifelong injury of another.
When he returned his focus to Anna, he said, “You’ve stopped blinking. There’s more to it.”
“Do you remember last year when Niko Popyrin’s yacht was taken over by Somali pirates?”
“Vaguely,” Xander squirmed in his seat as a new shot of pain traveled up his spine from his bounce off the cobblestones. “I read in the paper how the passengers were saved by one of the cruising bajillionaire’s security forces that showed up out of the blue.”
“McKayla Pickard’s security. And it was Iniquus’ Strike Force that saved them.
It’s a very small world, after all. Also, it wasn’t East African pirates; it was a group of very selfish, very wealthy friends who bankrolled a rogue mercenary band in the hopes of becoming the Kings of the Earth.
The friends group included one Karl Davidson. ”
“Karl Davidson, the oil guy that lost his leg in a big game hunting accident in Tanzania?”