At this point in her life, after what had happened outside The Ground Floor—after she had been raped and beaten and burned and thrown away, it was important to acknowledge it fully and not hide behind vague notions—only one man in the world knew everything about her. Only Nick Pagano.
Before he’d started to work with her, he’d demanded to know everything. He had read her entire medical file. Before the attack, he’d known as much as her father and her therapist. But now, her father didn’t know the details of that attack, or of her week in West Virginia. Dr. Rosen didn’t know details about the cabin. But she knew Nick knew it all. He demanded to know everything, and no one told him no. She had no doubt that the Bondaruks had told him everything before he’d rendered justice, and she had no doubt that Trey had told him everything as well.
Nick probably knew more about her attack than she knew herself. He’d given her justice, taken care of her, given her time, stood by her while she found her way. Even from a distance, he’d become a second father. Because he was a constant.
Three months after the attack, with her body fully healed and her mind on the mend, Lara stood in the middle of the living room of this apartment she’d bought with money earned on Nick Pagano’s payroll. She surveyed the dust and the desiccated plants, smelled the dry staleness in the air. Breathing six ticks in and six ticks out, she turned.
Nick stood near the front door. Not her father. Nick Pagano. The most powerful crime boss in New England. Arguably the most powerful person in New England. Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, the sleeves pushed to his elbows, he looked like any wealthy late-middle-aged man—this one perhaps more handsome than most—on a day off from business.
Since she’d been back from West Virginia, Nick had visited every week, alone, without his bodyguard—or, more likely, with his guard at enough distance that she didn’t see him. Nick had come simply to check in, at first. For the past month, though, he’d taken her out, for tea, or just a walk or a drive. Twice, he’d gone by this apartment and parked before The Ground Floor.
Today, they’d gone to the zoo. On the way back, he’d parked in front of the apartment. Saying nothing, he’d gotten out and walked to the porch. He’d sat on the steps for long minutes, his eyes on her, until she’d gotten out of his personal car, a Maserati Quattroporte GTS, and made her halting, terrified way to him. He’d stood and taken her hand, and they’d gone into her apartment for the first time since the day she’d been taken. The first of April. April Fool’s Day.
“How do you feel?” he asked now, studying her closely with those green eyes of his.
She set her hand on her chest and felt the banging of her heart. “Okay.” That was true. She was not not-okay, so she was okay. And she was glad, anxious as she was, to be here. So she told him that, too. “I’m glad to be here.”
He smiled. “It was time. Yes?”
“Yes. But …”
“But?”
“I don’t … I don’t think I can stay. Not alone.”
Still smiling, he came to her and brushed his hand over her hair, the same move her father made so often when she was stressed—comfort and touch without crowding. “I understand. You’re here, and that’s a big step. But we’ll stay for a few minutes. Fifteen. Can you do that?”
Lara nodded. She could do fifteen minutes.
~oOo~
Over the next two weeks, Lara worked her way steadily to the point that she could stay in her apartment alone for up to three hours. She couldn’t go outside alone, but by the middle of July, she was able to spend a few hours each day alone in her own home. At first, her father drove her. Then, he walked with her. When she was ready to leave, she called him, and he came to pick her up.
She spent those hours making her home her home again. First, she’d cleaned, removing the dust and staleness from the rooms, and, sadly, throwing away her little collection of houseplants. Even her succulents had expired after three months alone. She’d thrown out all the linens and towels, even the curtains. She’d made her bed with a new look, filled the bathroom and kitchen with new towels, and hung fresh curtains.
Then, the most important part: she’d taken every book and knickknack from the shelves, and every hanging from the walls. She’d resorted them and set them back in new arrangements, new patterns. She’d emptied her closets and reorganized them.
New systems, new constants, for a new home.
She couldn’t get to it alone, or stay the night alone, but she’d made strides. She was moving forward. One day, she’d have it back.
While she was in her office, reorganizing the bookcases filled with her puzzles, her phone rang. She went to the desk and picked it up: Nick was calling. She was expecting him the following day.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Lara. How are you today?”
“I’m okay. I’m at the apartment, organizing.”
“Very good. I’m calling because you’re needed. It’s time to do some work. Are you able?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to come to me for this. I’ll come for you myself, but I need you to do the work here.”
She hadn’t left Providence since Trey had brought her back. Nick wanted her to go to Quiet Cove, an hour away, and it was almost noon. “Is it something I can do in an afternoon?”
“I don’t know. If not, you’ll stay with Beverly and me.”
“Nick …”
She didn’t know what would have come after his name to finish the sentence, or question, or whatever it might have been, so she let his name hang there.
So did he, and it seemed to echo in the distance between them.
Nick had made the men pay. He’d made her safe. He’d taken care of her.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
“I’ll be there in an hour. I’ll pick you up at home.”
Home. He’d helped her come home. And she was almost ready to stay.
~oOo~
Lara called her father, who was shocked, and pleased, and worried, to hear that she was going to Quiet Cove to work and might not be home until the next day. She took a shower in her own bathroom and blew her hair dry, then dressed in a skirt, blouse, and pumps. She put a little makeup on—just mascara and lipstick, the most she ever wore—and put her hair up. She packed up her laptop for the first time in three and a half months—fourteen weeks and six days—and a backpack with a change of clothes, and waited for Nick to arrive.
Nick was, of course, on time. Today, he wore a perfectly tailored custom suit, and he’d come with Ray, his driver, in his black Lincoln Navigator. This was business, not a social call—which was why she’d dressed as she had, too.
He sat with her in the back seat of the Navigator while Ray drove them to the coast. Once they were out of the city, he handed her a slim, battered Moleskine notebook—classic black, eight-by-five. She slid the elastic band off and opened it.
Inside, the lined pages were filled with tiny boxes, most the same size, or meant to be, taking into account the inconsistencies of human handwriting, and each one had a symbol inside—different symbols in each box. Not in each box; in her first scan of the first page, she saw repeated symbols. Because it was a code.
Turning through the pages, doing a preliminary scan, Lara asked, “What can you tell me?”
“It’s Bondaruk. It came off a low-level bagman, so it’s probably a ledger, and I’m sure they know it’s missing, so they won’t use this code again.”
“But if I decrypt this, we’ll understand the grammar of their coding.” That was one of the most important facets of decryption. Like any language, codes always had a grammar, a logic, a consistency. And because coders were human—even coding software was human in its origin—their codes tended to have similar grammars. She’d learned two unrelated languages—Mandarin and Latin—so that her own encryptions would not always lean on English grammar.
“Exactly. And there might be some names I have use for.”
Lara focused on a page, letting the pa
ttern rise up from the paper. “It looks convoluted, but I don’t think it is. I already see repeated phrasing.” She smiled at Nick, relieved—and exhilarated. There was power and focus in making nonsense into sense. And to do something, to take action herself, that might weaken the Bondaruk bratva? That was personal power. Healing focus. “I might be able to work this out today.”
Nick rewarded her with a wide, affectionate grin and a squeeze of her knee. “I’m very glad to have you back.”
~oOo~
Pagano Brothers Shipping was a plain, low building, not unlike all the other businesses and warehouses that rimmed Quiet Cove Harbor. A narrow, long rectangle, it had windows across the front and along the sides of the first third, where reception and executive offices were located. Past that, the building was unbroken beige brick.
From the outside, it looked like nothing special. Inside, though, Nick’s legitimate business showed his taste and his success. The reception area, which spanned the full front of the building, was sleek and modern, and a beautiful woman sat behind an arced glass desk.
She stood when Nick walked in with Lara, and Ray behind them.
“Good afternoon, Don Pagano.”
“Meredith.” He nodded at the receptionist and headed to double doors and the offices beyond.
Just before he was in reach of the doors, they opened, and Trey came into the reception area. She’d never seen him dressed for work, not up close. He wore a grey three-piece suit and a blue shirt, with a silk tie of the same blue. It all fit him so well it had to have been custom made for him, or at least very well tailored.
She hadn’t seen him in three months, but she still thought of him every day. If she’d been told she’d forget how handsome he was, she would have argued the point, but she had. Memory couldn’t do reality justice.
He saw Nick first. “Uncle! Hi. Sorry.” He stepped to the side and held the door, but then let it go when he saw Lara. “Lara. Hello.”
“Hello,” she said. Her heart began to jig, and she breathed in six ticks.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
His smile was gentle and somehow private. “Okay is better than not-okay.”
“It is. How have you been?”
“Me? I’m good. You look … you look good. You look strong.”
The compliment pleased her far more than it deserved, and she felt her cheeks get hot. She rarely blushed, but it wasn’t the first time Trey Pagano had made it happen. “Thank you.”
Then their eyes seemed to get tangled up together, and they just stared at each other. The silence between them had almost physical weight. It pressed on Lara’s chest and made her jigging heart ache.
“Where are you off to, Trey?” Nick finally asked. There was a lilt of humor in his voice that Lara recognized but didn’t comprehend.
Trey blinked, and turned to the don. “PBS business. I’ve got a meeting with Towson. They sent an RFP for a new route.”
“Ah. Good. You’re back here after?”
“I can be. Do you need me for something?”
Strangely, Nick smiled at Lara when he answered. “I might.”
“Then I’ll be here.” He turned back to Lara. “It’s good to see you, Lara. Really.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
He left them then, and Lara watched him go to the door. He didn’t look back.
“Come, Lara. You can work in my office.” Nick set his hand on her back and led her through the double doors.
“What’s an RFP?” she asked.
“Request for proposal. You know we all have regular jobs here. Trey is an account manager. He’s off to meet with a shipping customer.”
“Account manager. Like a salesman?”
“Yes.”
“Request for proposal? That’s asking for a bid, right? Sent to competing companies, too?”
“Right.”
“Do you ever lose those?”
As he opened the doors to his office, he chuckled. “Only when I want to.”
~oOo~
Math and language were not so different from each other as most people thought, and the place where they intersected most obviously was in decryption. Whether a code was numerical or verbal, it was always symbolic.
The term in scholarship was semiotics. Sign + Signifier = Signified.
It was truly all about the grammar, and grammar was all about predictable patterns. Inherently and pragmatically a method of communication, a code was meant to be understood, wanted to be understood. Without comprehension, a code had no value at all. It was simply a different language, one meant for only a few to share.
One need not be fluent in a language to be able to translate it at least sufficiently for understanding; one needed only a key. Once it was unlocked, it could be transcribed. Once it was transcribed, it was revealed.
Sitting on the soft leather sofa at the side of Nick’s office, Lara studied the Moleskine notebook and made notes in a book of her own. Her laptop sat on the sofa beside her, closed. She wouldn’t need it until she was ready to create the framework for the decryption, and she needed to understand the patterns first.
She began with a few pieces of information and some strong hypotheses: the book had been taken from a Bondaruk ‘bagman,’ a low-level operative whose job was collection. The most likely use for this notebook, then, was a ledger, to keep track of who owed, who paid, when, and how much. The physical arrangement of the writing on the pages supported that premise, with discernible columns, but on some pages, the writing seemed to be in paragraph form.
Those were the pages Lara focused on. A ledger was among the harder documents to decrypt, because there was little grammar in a list. But a paragraph, someone’s notes—that was where the logic lay.
Since it was a Bondaruk notebook, she started with the assumption that the code’s grammar would be consistent with Slavic languages. The Bondaruks were a Ukrainian organization, with a membership even more culturally exclusive than the Paganos, so it was highly likely that the creator of this code had Ukrainian as a first, and possibly still primary, language. Lara didn’t speak Ukrainian, or any Slavic language, but she knew the Cyrillic alphabet phonetically, and she understood some key features of Slavic languages. She could, for instance, set aside a search for indefinite or definite articles; Slavic languages did not rely on them as other languages did.
From there, it was a game of Concentration. Delineate the repeating symbols, diagram the rhythms of sentences. Find the pattern. There was always a pattern.
“Lara.” Nick’s voice and the touch of his hand on her shoulder drew her up from deep inside the code. He sat beside her, smiling. The light of the room had changed; it was nearing dusk outside, and now the main light was artificial, coming from the lamps in his office, golden beams in overlapping circles. Hours had passed since she’d last noticed her surroundings.
He poured her a glass of water from a carafe on the table before the sofa. “It’s past seven. Should we order some food in, or call it a night and start again tomorrow?”
Finding herself parched, she took the glass of cold water and drank it down. “I’ve almost got it. Would another hour or two be too long?” She’d much rather go home tonight than stay at Nick’s house. His wife, like all women, made her nervous, and she didn’t know their house.
“Not at all. Will you eat?”
Nick knew her preferences, and she was a little hungry, so she nodded. With a pat to her thigh, he stood and went to his desk, and Lara let herself fall back into the beautiful quiet of the code.
~oOo~
“It is a ledger.” Lara stood at Nick’s desk, beside his chair, and showed him what she’d translated. “These pages are all names, amounts, and dates. It’s these pages that are most interesting.” She flipped to the notes, the paragraphs, that had provided the key, and then showed him her own notebook, where she’d translated several pages by hand. The notes were descriptions of the leverage the Bondaruks had on some of the key
names in the ledger.
Nick read the first page and then looked up at her. “You’re right. This is very interesting. Lara, this is excellent work.”
She smiled and set a flash drive on the desk. “I wrote a decryption program, so you can scan the rest in and translate it. Or I can, if you’d rather.”
“No, you’ve done more than enough. I know you’d like to go home.”
“I would.”
“So would I. I’ve been away from my family too much lately, and I’d like to be home to say good night to my children. I’m going to send you home with someone else. Will you be okay with that?”
Would she be okay? Well, her okay was a vast plain spanning all the long distance between ‘feeling great’ and ‘having a breakdown,’ so yes, she thought she’d be okay. Did she want to ride for an hour with a stranger? No. But she answered the question he’d asked. “Yes, I’ll be okay.”
~ 13 ~
Trey had spent the last part of the afternoon and the whole evening at PBS, with nothing much to do. Except for an hour spent with the second shift in the warehouse, where a lot of low-level Pagano Brothers associates and soldiers worked, buying them pizza for dinner and sharing it with them, he’d spent his time in his little, windowless interior office, waiting for Nick to possibly need him. It was almost nine o’clock, and he’d spent the last two hours playing games on his phone, trying to keep his mind occupied and out of trouble. But Nick hadn’t called yet, and he knew better than to make the call himself and interrupt the don.
He was beginning to wonder if he’d been forgotten.
Lara was here, or had been, dressed in business clothes and looking like a tiny, hot, teacher fairy, with her hair done up, her beautiful lips red, and tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose. She wore a brown skirt that skimmed just below her knees. Her legs were skinny—all of her was bird-thin—but shapely, with slim little ankles leading to small feet encased in very nice brown pumps. That was a sight he’d keep hold of.
Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1) Page 15