The Witness

visited.
    People like him thought they were careful, but they weren’t. She knew his business nearly as well, she imagined, as he did. She knew his life, his fiancée’s, his girlfriends’, how he spent his money, where he bought his clothes, his shoes.
    Everything.
    And she knew the Volkovs still looked for her.
    She wasn’t a priority, but from what she could extrapolate, she was more than a loose end. Elizabeth Fitch was a principle.
    She was to be found and eliminated. As long as Sergei Volkov served as head of the
bratva,
she would remain a target. And she believed, absolutely, she would remain one when Ilya officially took his place.
    She knew Yakov Korotkii continued as enforcer. She’d compiled a list, one she added to on these visits, of people she believed he’d terminated. She knew—as she’d hacked those agencies as well—that the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and Interpol, among others, had similar lists.
    But nothing stuck to Korotkii. He was, perhaps because of her, a highly favored and well-protected tool.
    She also knew the FBI and the marshals continued to look for her. Or for Elizabeth Fitch.
    She remained a witness in the murders of Julie Masters and Alexi Gurevich, and also a person of interest in the deaths of John Barrow and Theresa Norton.
    John had spoken the truth, protected her to the end. She could trust no one. To the Volkovs she was a target to be terminated out of prideand principle as much as any potential testimony she might give. To the authorities she was witness to the murder of two federal marshals, or, depending on the analysis, a fugitive who may have, out of desperation, boredom, madness, incapacitated one federal marshal, killed another, wounded one more, as Cosgrove had been shot in the hip during the melée.
    Some theorized she’d initiated the gas explosion to cover up her crimes while she fled.
    The plan to eliminate her had been in place, she imagined, for days, even weeks, before her seventeenth birthday. Keegan and Cosgrove had initiated it.
    She had been meant to die along with John and Terry in the explosion.
    She rarely thought of those first few months on the run, that first year in hiding, all the terror and grief. But she’d found her way.
    She had a life now, and she meant to keep it.
    With the dog at her feet, she tiptoed into Ilya’s accounts. He changed his passwords routinely, updated his security, his firewalls.
    But she’d spent a decade studying, developing, programming systems—their ins, their outs. Whatever he built, she could break. It gave her a great deal of satisfaction to invade him, to peer into his private world, shatter his privacy.
    Her only regret was he’d never know.
    He’d never fear as she had feared.
    But she cost him.
    Every now and again, when she had enough, when she was sure of the data and her own safety, she found a way to leak bits of information to an agent with the FBI—one she’d thoroughly researched, one she felt she knew as well as she knew herself.
    Whoever she happened to be at the moment.
    She signed the brief, data-heavy memos
tvoi drug.
Russian for “yourfriend.” There were files, profiles, searches, queries, on
tvoi drug.
Most believed the informant male, and connected within the Volkov
bratva.
    Tvoi drug
had cost lives. Abigail hoped she’d saved some. Her greatest achievement, on her gauge, had been compiling enough information to generate a raid on a warehouse in South Chicago, and dismantle and destroy the forced prostitution ring operating out of it.
    Now she studied recent activity. Codes, cryptic phrases, false names. She passed over information on basic computer scams. If the federals couldn’t handle those on their own, they didn’t deserve any help.
    But the money laundering, she considered.
    Scraping away at the Volkovs’ bottom line offered satisfaction. Maybe not the deep and visceral satisfaction of knowing she’d played some small part in freeing more than twenty girls from sexual slavery, but diminished funds made their business more difficult to operate.
    Yes, the money laundering would be her new personal project. She’d consider it a kind of wedding gift to Ilya.
    She set about compiling snatches of information from e-mails—Ilya’s, the accountant’s, a handful of other contacts. It amazed her, always, what people revealed with keystrokes, how careless they were. While she worked, she thought in Russian, entrenched herself in it. So much so that when her phone rang, she