Chapter 19 - The Voice on the Nokia
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With fingers that felt numb, Jade connected the external battery lead to the old 2008 Nokia brick phone and held down the power button.
The tiny monochrome green screen flickered to life on the mahogany desk.
One saved voice memo sat in the device’s internal memory, recorded at 11:14 PM on October 12th—the night retired Trooper Frank Miller had died in his farmhouse outside Augusta, Maine.
Jade pressed PLAY and held the speaker between herself and Enzo.
At first, there was only the sound of a grandfather clock ticking in a quiet country kitchen and the rattle of rain against a windowpane. Then came the crash of a back porch door being kicked in cleanly with a single strike, followed by Frank Miller’s voice—calm, grizzled, and defiant:
"I figured you’d come yourself once you tracked down the sealed foster docket, Number Twelve. Or do they call you Agent Vance now?"
Jade froze.
From the tiny speaker of the Nokia phone came a woman’s voice—young, twenty-three years old, speaking in crisp, unaccented American English with a faint undertone of the exact cold cadence Grigori Volkov had drilled into them in the dark:
"Where is Anya’s current placement file, Trooper Miller? Give me the key to the bank box and walk away."
"Little girl, Anya carried you through a wall of fire on her own back when you were five years old and couldn't walk," Frank Miller rasped on the recording. "She took a paring knife to her own ear on the side of Route 17 so the Russians wouldn't track the two of you together! Why are you hunting your own sister for Grigori Volkov?!"
"I don't work for Grigori Volkov, old man," the young woman’s voice replied coldly on the tape. "I’m the one who leaked Anya’s file to Grigori’s hackers in Brooklyn so she and Enzo Moretti would do the dirty work of killing Grigori and Salvatore Bellini for us. Once the old dinosaurs in Boston and Brighton Beach are dead, Number Four and I take the eastern ports without firing a single shot."
There was the muffled thwip of a suppressed dart gun on the recording, the heavy thud of Frank Miller hitting his kitchen floor as a stroke-inducing toxin hit his bloodstream—and then the recording clicked off.
Dead silence hung over the Beacon Hill library.
Jade stared down at the tiny green screen of the Nokia phone, her mind reeling as the entire board flipped upside down in front of her eyes.
Masha.
Little five-year-old Masha—Number Twelve—the terrified little girl with blonde braids whom eight-year-old Anya had dragged out of the burning basement barracks on her back eighteen years ago, collapsing from smoke inhalation by the highway rail just as police cruisers arrived in the rain!
When Jade had woken up three days later in an Albany hospital handcuffed to a bed before Frank Millerspirited her away, the FBI agents had told her that the little five-year-old girl had died of smoke inhalation in the ambulance!
It had been a lie.
Whoever had pulled the strings inside the FBI raid that night in 2008 had taken five-year-old Number Twelve—and ten-year-old Number Four, the oldest boy in the camp, Viktor’s own illegitimate nephew, Aleksei—and raised them inside the federal intelligence apparatus or a rival shadow syndicate!
And they hadn't leaked Jade’s foster file in October to help Grigori Volkov kill her.
They had leaked her file to use her and Enzo Moretti as a battering ram to wipe out Grigori Volkov’s remnant crew and Don Salvatore Bellini’s traitorous faction—clearing the entire board so Number Four and Number Twelve could walk in and seize the East Coast!
"Enzo," Jade whispered, her hand dropping instinctively to her stomach where their unborn child rested beneath the midnight-blue velvet. "Look at Frank’s letter again—he said the woman who came to his house in Maine had a scarred left wrist."
Enzo’s eyes narrowed to slits. "Why did she have a scarred left wrist?"
"Because when I pulled five-year-old Masha through the broken basement window of the Catskills house in 2008, the jagged glass sliced a three-inch crescent across the inside of her left wrist!" Jade’s eyes widened in sudden, blinding terror as a memory from three hours ago flashed into her mind. "Enzo—at the diner this afternoon, when I went to check on nineteen-year-old Jenny..."
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"What about Jenny?"
"Jenny told me she quit her shift today because her new boyfriend got her a high-paying administrative job right here in Beacon Hill—and when the new catering waitress she recommended for tonight’s dinner served Don Castellano his wine twenty minutes ago... she was wearing a wide silver cuff bracelet over her left wrist!"
