‘What?’ Miguel said, looking confused.
‘Sit down,’ Ryker said. Miguel did so. Ryker indicated over to the computer terminals. Miguel got the idea. He reached out and pushed a button, and there was a clunk and whir then a whooshing sound as the system booted up.
‘You want me to show you?’ Miguel asked. ‘How I found her?’
‘No. I wouldn’t understand it anyway. I need you to do some digging for me. A company.’
‘What sort of digging?’
‘Anything you can. The company is called Empire Holdings.’
‘Which country?’
‘I don’t know. Spain. Russia. England. Try all three. Georgia too. I need names of people. Addresses. I don’t know where it’s located but it’s operating here. In Andalusia.’
‘Okay,’ Miguel said, looking and sounding confident all of a sudden. ‘Shouldn’t be hard.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘Minutes. Hours. Depends what I find.’
The system came online and Miguel’s fingers moved at a speed that Ryker had never seen before. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going through the boy’s head or how a teenager could learn such skills. But one thing was clear, even to Ryker’s uninitiated eye, this kid wasn’t just talented, he was a master of his trade.
‘You’ll keep your trail clean?’ Ryker asked.
‘Of course. As best I can. But then...’
‘Yeah. We found you. But it’s taken nine days of looking and the efforts of one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world.’
Ryker thought he saw the glimpse of a proud smile on Miguel’s young face but it was gone again.
After a few minutes, Miguel’s mother poked her head around the door and spoke to her son in Spanish. Ryker caught a few of the quickly spoken words. She was checking he was okay. He said he was, told her not to worry, asked her to bring some drinks.
Not long later, she brought in two cups of coffee. Ryker took them and thanked her. Miguel didn’t once take his eyes of his screens or his fingers off the keyboard.
After nearly half an hour, Miguel suddenly sat back in his chair and let out a long sigh. Ryker moved over to him.
‘You found something?’
‘Something?’ Miguel said. ‘I’ve found lots. This is a real minefield. It depends how far you want me to go. I’ll show you.’ Ryker fixed his eyes on the left hand screen. It was showing scans of corporate records of Empire Holdings from the company registry in the Cayman Islands. ‘The actual company seems to be empty, no real operations.’
‘A shell.’
‘Yes. The names of the people behind it aren’t available in open records, but through accessing the system of the Registry, I managed to find the name of the sole shareholder.’
‘Who?’
‘Andrei Kozlov.’
Ryker shook his head. ‘You said the company is empty, but it does operate. I’ve seen correspondence here in Spain.’
‘I don’t know much about companies. There’s not much there, though, just a name, no tax returns in Spain, no official financial records, no website or anything like that. But the name does appear in Spain, yes, in planning documents with various ayuntamientos–’
‘Town halls? Councils?’
‘Yes. And in construction contracts, things like that.’
‘Any other people associated with Empire, other than Kozlov?’
‘Lots. Mostly look like Russian names. Dzaria. Papava. Kazaishvili.’
‘Addresses?’
‘This one,’ Miguel said, pointing to the second screen. ‘Seems to be the main one for Empire.’
It was Kozlov’s home in Marbella, a good link, but Ryker wanted more. He already knew Kozlov was involved in Empire, but Ryker needed to find who was at the top of the food chain. Kozlov certainly wasn’t the ringleader of the Georgian mafia.
‘Others?’ Ryker asked.
‘Not for Empire. But I cross-referenced those other people’s names in the databases of the Government of Andalusia and I found lots of different company names associated with them, lots of addresses too. But these two come up a lot.’
Ryker looked. One of the addresses was labelled as Cadiz, which Ryker knew was the name of both a city and the province in which the city was located. The other was in Algeciras, a major port city in the Cadiz province that was just a few miles from the northern tip of Africa. A well-known crossing point connecting all manners of trade – both legal and illegal – between Europe and Africa.
Ryker made a mental note of the addresses. They had to be worth checking out. ‘Good work, kid.’
‘That’s it?’ Miguel asked, spinning around in his chair.
‘For now, yeah. That’s it. I’ve got work to do.’
‘What will happen to me?’ In an instant, the enthusiasm Miguel had been showing moments earlier as he hacked his way through cyberspace vanished. Back was the fear, the awkwardness, and uncertainty. The reality of the situation.
Ryker couldn’t help but think that this child simply wasn’t cut out for the real world. Everything happy and comfortable in his life was inside a computer terminal. Online he must have felt invincible. In the real world, he was puny and geeky, and insignificant and lost.
Ryker thought about the question, but he didn’t answer it. It wasn't his place to answer. Even if it had been, he simply didn’t get a chance, because before he could open his mouth to speak a noise caught his attention. A loud knock on the apartment’s front door.
Ryker stared over at Miguel. The boy looked panicked. Ryker turned and moved over to the bedroom door. He inched it open, much like Miguel had done minutes before, and peeked out.
Across the other side of the hallway, Miguel’s mother was tentatively opening the front door. She’d moved it only a few inches when it burst into her face, knocking her backwards against the wall. Blood poured from her nose and she clutched at it with her hand.
Stood on the other side of the door were two men. One was big, almost as tall and wide as the doorframe he was standing in. Ryker recognised him as one of the men who’d followed him from the bullring in Ronda.
The other man was smaller, more unassuming, but with a sinister look in his beady eyes.
Sergei. The Vor.
CHAPTER 50
Ryker’s eyes darted across the two men as he pulled his Colt from his jeans. Neither man had a weapon in his hands, though both were wearing jackets so could be concealing. With Miguel’s mother already dazed, the giant stepped forward and threw a punch into her face. Her eyes went wide in shock, then she slowly crumpled to the ground. Ryker shot his head back into the bedroom.
The boy wasn’t there.