club. Code uncovered a single pipeline both clubs are using that seems to originate from Mexico, but it isn’t coming from there. He’s been tracing that pipeline back to the source and, surprisingly, the drugs are coming in from Canada, not Mexico like it first appears.”
“What does that mean?” Steele asked.
“Someone has deliberately made it seem as if the drugs have come in from Mexico,” Code said. “But when I continued with the trace, the trail stopped dead. I had to go back and found a single thread, picked it up there and found the origins are in Canada.”
Czar drummed his fingers on the table. “There’s a possibility that the Ghosts are involved in this. There’s one name that continues to come up. Louis Levasseur seems to be bringing in everything. Fentanyl, meth, heroin, cocaine. Code is looking into him. His name is new on our list so we don’t have much on him.”
“This is a huge job. I’ve asked my friend Cat to help out,” Code said.
“We don’t want to put an innocent in danger,” Czar cautioned, frowning. “These people are extremely dangerous. They play for keeps and they’re aware someone is looking for them.”
“She’s careful,” Code said. “I told her not to take any chances, not to use her own equipment and to make absolutely certain her location can’t be traced. She has orders to break off if they even start to trace her. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Any chance this man has anything to do with the Ghosts we’ve run into before? Didn’t they have some origins in Canada?” Keys asked.
“They seem to be spreading their poison everywhere,” Reaper said. His woman, Anya, had been targeted by the Ghosts.
“I have a bad feeling about the assassins the Ghosts are mixed up with,” Absinthe said. He was reluctant to bring it up because his “feelings” hit on the mark every time now and Czar was aware of it. He didn’t want another “gift” revealed. To him, those talents he’d developed as a child had become curses he couldn’t shake, no matter how hard he tried. Still, they were in dangerous territory and his club needed all the advantages they could get.
Czar turned those piercing, assessing, all-seeing eyes of his on him. It felt a little as if the president of his club could get right through flesh and bone and see into one’s soul. Absinthe didn’t want anyone doing that, especially not the man he admired most in the world.
“What kind of ‘feeling,’ Absinthe?”
In spite of the fact that Czar probably knew whatever Absinthe was going to couch in terms of speculation, his voice was mild, simply an inquiry.
“We’ve talked about it before, but the assassins the Ghost club hire to intimidate the rival clubs by killing their women, the way the assassins work, is too reminiscent of the way we were trained. We’ve seen their work. We briefly considered that they might have been trained in the same schools as we were and then we dismissed it. I think we should consider it a very real possibility. We patched in twenty-five members of a club made up of members from a school Gavriil attended. He vouched for those men because he knew them. We got to know them, but just briefly. Now we’ve got another club, members of two schools made up of men who were trained just as we were. They want to be patched over like the others, to be part of our club.”
Steele leaned in close, his eyes shrewd. “What are you saying?”
“We have to get to know those wanting to join. We’re not just going to take them on faith. We have to invite them here, to our clubhouse. We’ve got to let them near our women. These men are trained assassins, just like us. They were trained in the schools in Russia, and like us, they have banded together. I believe that the assassins the Ghosts hire also are from these same schools, displaced children set free when Sorbacov was killed. I think the man running the largest pedophile ring we know of, the one we know only as the Russian, set them up here in the United States to do his work for him.”
Once Absinthe had stated the possibility aloud, it made even more sense. There wasn’t a lot any of those trained in Sorbacov’s schools could do other than continue to kill. They didn’t know any other way of life. Where could they go? There was so much blood on