by David Pepper
“Jack!”
Eyes narrowed, Tori was again staring at me across the table.
“What?” I wiped my brow, and a few beads of sweat moistened the back of my hand. “I guess I’m getting excited.”
“Whatever. I wish you trusted me.”
“Of course I do.” And I did, with everything but this.
Early in its first year, the plane hadn’t flown often, but when it did, it traveled precisely where Oleg Kazarov would’ve gone. Summer flights to and from St. Petersburg, landing at a small airport near the dacha where he’d hosted me. Flights to and from western Siberia, where he ran a major oil and gas operation. And a flight to a small airport in northwest Pennsylvania, down the road from the Titusville headquarters of Marcellus Enterprises, Kazarov’s well-disguised American fracking operation.
But the history revealed a lot more than who owned the plane.
Late the year before, the plane had flown to Aspen twice in three months. Both flights went from Blackbushe to Aspen, with a quick customs stop in Denver. It took two minutes of searching online to discover that these trips coincided with weekends when the president had escaped to her ranch.
Then came the first flight to Cleveland, six months ago. The airplane stayed at Burke for two days, then flew home. Three weeks later the Gulfstream returned but departed back to England an hour after landing. Four weeks later came another flight, but like this past weekend, the plane went on to Aspen, flying back to Burke three hours after landing.
At first, Cleveland made no sense. Even if Kazarov was visiting his Titusville headquarters, landing in Cleveland added hours of driving.
So why Cleveland?
Then I remembered the reason I’d dismissed Kazarov’s involvement in the first place. He was battling cancer, facing a bleak prognosis. I did a quick search, digging up that energy journal article from months back—the one detailing Kazarov’s failing health. Unsurprising, it had been published weeks after the first flight to Cleveland.
That was it.
The world-renowned Cleveland Clinic had a separate unit that provided care to the world’s most elite leaders—royals, dictators, and run-of-the-mill billionaires—when they battled illnesses. Oleg Kazarov must have joined their ranks, undergoing tests on the first trip, then returning for an extended stay weeks later.
I stared at the screen, eyeing the small blue line tracing across the ocean, from the letters BBS to the letters BKL.
I let out a deep breath, my neck and scalp prickling at the realization that Oleg Kazarov was in Cleveland right now.
Tori was still irritated, her mouth tightly pursed.
But the flight history didn’t end with Cleveland. Around the time of the first Aspen meeting, and then following Kazarov’s first Cleveland trip, the Gulfstream became even more active. It traveled to more far-flung destinations: Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Syria, and several long, multi-stop trips to China. There was a trip combining stops in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan. The longest trip took the plane to remote Siberia, then on to a small airport sixty miles from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, then straight over the Arctic back to London.
Two of the shortest trips were a one-day visit to Romania and a more recent flight to Portofino, Italy. A flurry of multi-stop flights followed Portofino, circling back to the same destinations as before.
I glanced up at the whiteboard with Cassie’s handwriting on it, reviewing the countries listed across the top.
Ukraine.
China.
Kazakhstan.
And Romania.
The words on the whiteboard and the Gulfstream’s flights matched almost perfectly.
“What, Jack?” Tori asked as I scanned her chart.
I had to tell her something.
“Mary was wrong,” I said quietly.
“How’s that?”
“She said, ‘Someone’s leading it.’”
What a wise woman. She had been so close to the truth.
“And that’s not true?”
“It’s close. But it’s not someone. It’s two people.”
“Who?”
“Katrina Rivers and her very sick Russian uncle. And they’ve been flying all over the world to get it done.”
CHAPTER 113
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Cassie stared at the ceiling for hours. Even with Rachel asleep next to her and three melatonin gummies buried deep in her stomach, sleep eluded her.
She still couldn’t decide if Detective Foley’s purpose had been to help her or spook her. And the double murder he’d described had been horrific. But that was not what was keeping her up.
She couldn’t get Katrina Rivers off her mind.
She trudged into the kitchen of their modest apartment, where she had charged her laptop overnight. She flipped it on and reviewed the folder of photos she’d compiled.
The old Katrina. The new Katrina. Blond or brunette. Glasses or contacts. Stretching tall or stooping low. Cassie would recognize her anywhere.
But for all her weeks of tracking her down, Cassie hadn’t come close to understanding what made Katrina tick. As a young woman, she’d been as shy as could be. Then she’d grown into a confident, liberated beauty. Smart from the get-go, her idealism evolved into cunning, and worse. Technically skilled, she also demonstrated a sky-high emotional IQ that allowed her to size up her foes before running over them. And she traded in her dreary rags for showy riches.
Katrina Rivers was a contradiction. An enigma. A sphinx.
Until now.
Now Cassie understood her in a way that few could.
They shared something—as deep and searing a wound as a person could experience. They’d both been through the hell of losing their families.
A drunk-driving millionaire had plowed into Cassie’s parents’ station wagon when she was fourteen, killing them both. The accident and the ensuing trial sabotaged her middle-class childhood, upended her worldview, and shaped every aspect of her life since.
The soul-crushing loneliness, until she married Rachel.
The decades of financial stress.
And her lifelong zeal to take down big shots. The acquittal of her parents’ well-connected killer had awakened her to the unjust advantages of America’s elite and made countering that rigged system the cause of her life. Whenever she doubted her mission, the tattoo on her arm, emblazoned with the time and date of the crash, reminded her to keep fighting.
Katrina’s family, too, had been wiped away in minutes. Not even the dignity of a funeral. The fact that she was thousands of miles away at a fancy school must’ve made it all the more wrenching.
Cassie’s first days living with her uncle had been awkward. But his quiet house in South Boston became her home, too, where she remained under his watch and wing until college. On his mailman’s salary, he toiled to be the father figure she’d lost. He was her rock until she struck out on her own.
As shy as Katrina was, Cassie guessed that only one person had remained for her as well. Her yearbook made clear she already felt indebted to her dyadya. So he would’ve played a central role after the murders, when the trappings of wealth had surfaced, along with Katrina’s darker traits.
Every day of the trial, Cassie had sat in the front row, scribbling notes, recording every detail of the accident. She’d never speak to her parents again, but she could at least relive their final moments, feel what they had felt, understand every action leading up to the crash. In the fog of grief, her fact-gathering obsession diluted the darkness that consumed her each night in the cold new bedroom.
But it also meant every twist of the trial, every moment of the crash, was chiseled in Cassie’s memory. The fancy, bow-tied defense lawyer with the polished shoes and plaid suspenders making small talk with the judge. The fat bank CEO with the jowls
and the pin-striped suit and the pudgy fingers clutching his wife’s hand, even when his mistress had been injured in the crash. The photos of both cars, shredded like ripped tinfoil. As time passed, those details anchored whatever smidgeon of closure she ultimately found.
Now she imagined Katrina’s plight.
Perhaps she, too, had coveted every detail of her family’s deaths. The motivation for her father’s visit, the cause of the escalation, the precise sequence of events. In Cassie’s experience, at least, knowing everything was better than knowing nothing.
How would Katrina Rivers react if, eleven years later, she learned the truth? That her own brother had committed the crimes and was still alive. And that she’d never been told.
Cassie knew that it would unsettle her if even one detail of her own parents’ death were to change: the street they were on, the make of the car that hit them. She’d have to piece it all back together. And if some crucial element was not as she’d believed—say, that the mistress had been driving and not the CEO—it would rattle her to her core.
Katrina learning the truth about her mother’s murder would be more devastating than that.
Which presented an opportunity.
Cassie logged off Facebook, then back on. But not to her own page. Instead, she created a new profile. She filled in the most bare-bones profile information, choosing a random birthday making her twenty-four years old. It would all appear fake, but that was fine.
She didn’t add a photo initially but then changed her mind. She uploaded Katrina’s high school yearbook photo as the page’s profile photo and changed the account name to “Katrina Rivers.” And she altered the birthday, selecting the day eleven years earlier that Katrina’s brother had killed her parents.
She opened the Facebook page of Kat Simmons. There she was, brimming with joy in front of that fountain near Seattle. So many posts, “likes,” and comments dotted her page, including in recent days.
Surely, to keep that front going, she would be monitoring any messages sent to the fake account.
Cassie opened up Facebook’s direct message function and typed a few words.
Katrina, your brother killed your parents. And he is still alive today.
She hit “send.”
Then one other jarring message occurred to her.
And they’ve taken Razi Dallas to keep it secret.
CHAPTER 114
YOUNGSTOWN
Your friend stopped by. She was as nice as can be.”
As they did every morning since her dad had come to, Tori and he had their morning check-in call. They’d been on the phone for a few minutes Tuesday morning when he mentioned the visit in passing. It sounded odd from the outset.
“What friend?”
“Tammy. You know, your old roommate. You’d mentioned her a bunch over the years.”
Dad was right. Tammy Logan had been a roommate for her final two undergraduate years at Lawrence. She now lived near Green Bay, but they still kept up actively on social media to this day.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“We’re talking now.”
“I mean when she visited.”
“It was just a short visit—”
As he answered, Tori opened her laptop and went to her direct messages. She scrolled through old messages, finding her last one to Tammy Logan. It was three months ago, wishing her a happy birthday.
“—and she said you asked her to check in on me, so there was no need to call. She brought me a whole care package and everything.”
Tori typed below the birthday greeting: Hey there, Tammy.
“That’s nice. And the cops let her in?” she asked her dad.
“Of course they did. An old family friend visiting? Why wouldn’t they?”
Tori didn’t want to alarm him, so she slowed the conversation.
“Dad, what did you guys talk about?”
“How my recovery was going. Her boys.” Tammy had two sons. “The fun you guys used to have at school.”
Her laptop sounded a quick beep as words appeared next to the pleasant face and dark brown hair of Tammy Logan. Tori! How are you?
“Anything else?” Tori asked her dad. “Did you talk about me?”
Good, she typed back to her friend. Where are you?
“Of course. She obviously wanted to know how you were and if we knew who had done this to me.”
? Green Bay. Where else would I be?
“And what did you say?”
“Tori, slow down. I feel like I’m being cross-examined here. It was actually nice to have a visitor. Pretty one, too.”
Pretty? Not something she’d expect her dad to say about Tammy.
Did you visit my dad today?
“Sorry, Dad, I just don’t want to burden anyone else with our drama. What did you tell her?”
“That you and a reporter friend were in Youngstown trying to figure it all out.”
Nausea gripped her stomach. She knew even before Tammy’s message came back what her dad had done.
Your dad? No. Is something wrong?
CHAPTER 115
YOUNGSTOWN
I’m really sorry, Jack.”
We were at a diner down the street from the Vindicator when she told me the bad news.
“It’s not your fault, Tori. Did your dad know what the woman looked like? Your friend, that is.”
“Tammy? Yeah, he met her a few times at school. But that was a while ago.”
“Can we look at her real quick?”
“Sure.”
Tori hit a few keys on her computer, then turned it so we both saw the screen.
“There she is,” she said, pointing to a picture of a mom and two young sons sitting in a park.
Tammy had brown hair that dropped past her shoulders and wore oversized glasses that took up much of the top half of her face.
“Whoever did this clearly went through your Facebook page. And to be safe, they would’ve assumed your dad had met her in person. So they must’ve chosen someone who Tammy bore some resemblance to.”
“Right.”
“Maybe Katrina Rivers herself. Or some new hired gun.”
“True. So how do we figure it out?”
“I’ve got a way.”
I logged back on to the website from the day before and typed the plane’s tail number back in. My gut told me there’d be a new flight listed.
There were two.
I pushed the link to the first flight and a map opened up on my screen, a thin line tracing the Gulfstream’s first journey. It had taken off from England early in the morning, crossed over the Atlantic and Canada, reentered the United States over Lake Michigan, and landed at an airport with the three-letter code MSN.
Dane County Regional Airport. Madison.
I looked up from my computer, rocking back and forth in my chair. “It’s Katrina.”
She’d landed so recently, I was surprised that another flight was even listed; maybe the pilots had dropped her off and flown home. So I clicked on the second link.
I was wrong.
The Gulfstream was at twenty-two thousand feet and climbing. Traveling east at 530 knots, it was back over Lake Michigan, about to cross Michigan’s western shore.
And its path was clear.
Katrina Rivers was heading our way.
CHAPTER 116
OVER MICHIGAN
Even as the plane leveled out smoothly at thirty-nine thousand feet, Katrina’s jaw stiffened.
The cabin monitor showed that they were east and north of Grand Rapids. Enough time to accomplish the worst task of her day.
In order to keep her alternative persona alive, Katrina spent fifteen minutes a day freshening up Kat Simmons’s social media activity, spewing the type of facile drivel and insincerity she had spent her life avoiding. A
dding a new post on Facebook and an occasional photo. Liking friends’ photos or posts. Sharing an article. Sending or receiving direct messages. All mindless nonsense, but necessary.
There wasn’t much activity from the day before. Her most recent photo of Mount Rainier had generated dozens of likes along with comments praising the picture. She responded: Not hard to make Mt. Rainier look good!!
A Senate staffer who surfed Facebook day and night had written a long response to her post about the upcoming elections. She wrote a two-sentence retort to keep him occupied. The more back-and-forth, the more real Kat appeared.
And she added a fresh post cheering on Speaker Paxton’s recent tirade about the president’s excessive spending. That would light things up for a few days, especially with any liberals left from her early Facebook years.
Three new messages appeared. Two came from Facebook friends whom she communicated with regularly. One was a lonely older women who lived vicariously through Kat’s more exciting life. The other was a flirtatious twenty-something who still worked at the RNC. She replied to each.
Then there was a new “message request,” sent from someone who was not currently a Facebook friend. Such requests appeared on a separate page and overwhelmingly contained spam, bots, and flirts from men trolling for women. Knowing that, Katrina rarely went to that page to accept new messages.
But the general message page helpfully included the first names of those who’d made requests. And the latest request came from someone named Katrina.
Curious, she clicked on the “message request” list to learn more.
CHAPTER 117
I-80, NEAR YOUNGSTOWN
Burke Lakefront?”
Billy Luna’s voice blared through the car’s speaker system. The longtime sports columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer was one of my better friends in journalism. We’d bonded through the decades over Cleveland sports, and he wielded an especially poisonous pen capturing all that misery. But now he was the only person I knew who could help quickly and who was street smart enough not to get himself killed.