Chapter 66 – Watch Your Back
"Ekaterina?" Sergei's heavily accented voice came across the line, made even more disembodied by the static on the cellular line Kat was using.
"Yes." Kat answered curtly. She reminded herself she was supposed to be a scared, weak little girl and altered her tone. "What plans have you made?"
"Two days from now I will meet you at my office building in downtown L.A. It is called 'The Dragon's Gate' and is located on the corner of Beaudry and 3rd street, right beside the Pacific Stock Exchange. You will meet me there at 12pm. Come into the lobby and take the middle elevator to the top floor. I'll be waiting for you there. Come alone."
"How will I know you kept your word and let my friends go?"
"When I have you I will no longer have need of them. I will let them go."
"I want to hear you give the order. I want you to do it in front of me." Kat bargained, knowing it was unnecessary since if all went well she'd have everyone freed by then anyway. "You'll tell the people holding them to let them go where I can hear you do it."
Danny Williams was giving her looks like what she was doing was foolish. Kat knew that drawing attention to letting her friends go wasn't the smartest thing she could have done, but she also knew if she didn't ask about them at all Sergei would figure something was up.
"Yes, yes, it matters little to me. When you are here in my office I will let them go."
"Fine. I'll be at 'The Dragon's Gate' at 9pm in two days."
"Yes, you will do that if you want your friends to live. Tell no one where you are going or why or I will kill them anyway. Do you understand?"
"Yeah, I hear ya." Kat hung up her phone and turned to the group. "Ok, it's done. I'm supposed to meet him in two days at the office building."
"I still don't know how this is going to work." Danny held his head in his hands.
"Well, we're gonna get Sean and Jesse and then when I'm supposed to turn myself over instead we'll invade the office building and get my mom back. I mean, Sergei has no idea what you're up to does he?" Kat asked Danny.
"No. Point being?"
"You can go back to him and be inside when he plans to make the exchange for me can't you?"
"Yes, but there would be no guarantee that he would allow me to be there when it goes down. He doesn't let me in on everything he does."
"Well then cop boy it's your job to make sure he lets you be there for this." With that Kat spun on her heel and turned on the TV to MTV. Danny Williams looked after her in shock. He leaned over to Brian.
"Is she always this..." Danny clearly didn't even have a word for what he was trying to call Kat.
"Not always." Brian paused, clearly understanding what the other man was getting at even if Danny didn't have words for it. "She was a totally different person till this all happened. She was really sweet and spunky and almost too young for her age. She's changed into someone hard and I don't like it at all."
"Classic disassociation issues due to the shock?" Danny speculated.
"I'm not sure. Either that or she's projecting another personality so that the real Kat doesn't have to deal with these issues. I'm no shrink so I don't know what's really going on. But she seems like she has a lot of practice doing whatever it is she's doing."
"Yeah, it does. But she needs to calm the hell down if we're going to pull this off. It's not going to be easy."
"I don't think its calming down she needs to do. Chilling out maybe but I'd say she's pretty calm as it is."
Kat was busy trying to do just as Danny had suggested she do. She was about to explode with all the negative talk going on. She didn't want to hear it and it was making her mad. She was doing ok in her opinion because if she had fully reverted to her old self she would have simply mauled the man for annoying her. She'd come a long way from those days. And that was why she was so scared to return to them.
She sat down and waited for them to figure out what to do first. After ten minutes went by and no one seemed any closer to any sort of action she stood up with a sigh and looked at Brian and Danny, who were still talking together in a corner.
"Well?" Kat asked impatiently.
"Well what?" Brian asked, figuring he'd do his best to prevent Danny and Kat from as much direct contact as he could.
"What are we waiting for? What are we gonna do about all this?"
"We're trying to figure that out now." Danny answered, taking a short tone of voice.
"What's to figure? We got two days, let's get to it."
"It's not that easy. It's not like we can just walk into one of Sergei's businesses and just walk out with your friends. Someone would be bound to tell Sergei his house is under attack."
"So we talk them quietly and no one knows." Kat answered slowly, as though she were talking to a small child.
"Then when someone notices them missing, and someone would, and reports that to Sergei, anyone we haven't gotten to yet gets moved and ends up under ten times as much guard as they are now."
"Ok, fine. So at least we now have some sort of plan. We know we have to time all three rescues on the same day and likely within a few hours of each other. We can leave Ivan in the first house and Josef in the next. They can maintain radio contact since they can speak Russian."
"Don't you think their father will know their voices over the radio?" Danny asked Kat, feeling challenged that the girl was coming up with decent plans when he was supposed to be the FBI agent here, not her. He'd thought he'd be running the op, he'd never had a clue that some group of thugs lead by a girl smaller and younger then his kid sister would be telling him what to do.
"Not if they disguise their voices and even then the radio will change the sound of their voices somewhat. Not to mention how many times to you honestly think Sergei deals with this shit over the radio himself? He'd have to get clued in there was an issue before he'd alarm himself over it. He's likely busy wining and dining the associates who've flown in from god knows where."
"She's right." Ivan broke in. "Sergei is out of town till the day that he is to meet Kat at 'Dragon's Gate'. I heard him telling Boris this before Josef and I left. He's meeting the Russian delegation in San Bernardino."
"We still can't go after anyone till the day of the exchange." Danny insisted. "He'll still radio back and have them moved if he gets wind of anything funny. He's got about 5 other properties in California alone. Not to mention he's got ties in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Detroit, maybe even more that he doesn't feel are worth mentioning."
"Texas and Arizona." Josef tossed out. "Those are the only two big ones you missed. He has small amounts of his army in most states but large amounts of his men in the others that were mentioned. If he gets wind of this whole plan he can move your friends and our mother so many times and so far away they may never surface. Or he might just kill them all. He is, after all, a sadistic bastard."
"I can see why we have to do the whole thing in one big strike in one day but we can't go in blind. We need to go do some scout work in the two days we have to make plans of action. We can't just storm the houses. We need to know how to get in and what way to approach." Kat looked around at the assembled group. Her band of brothers and the scared racing family she had been all set to adopt as her own.
She knew it would kill the Tigers and the Toretto's to sit around and wait on disaster to strike. They had to keep busy and one good way would be to go out and scout the neighbourhoods in question and make plans for where to stash cars, people, ways to approach buildings and ways to hide from security cameras and also try to find out what other kinds of security they'd be dealing with.
"The weakness of the Long Beach house is the private beach. There's no way to patrol the whole thing so it is, for the most part, unsecured. We can easily come up the beach, into the tree line on the right hand side and pretty much just stroll up to the house. We might have to take out the odd guard but there's lots of places to tie them up and hide them." Danny told the group, not sure if he wanted to do any in person scout work. He figured he knew enough about the properties in question to set up plans from the relative security of Connor's house.
"If you think we are taking the time to knock out and tie up Russian thugs you got another thought comin." Connor broke in. "We're shooting to kill as many of the fuckers as we can."
"As long as they go down clean and silent." Josef said. "If they can reach their radios, or if anyone hears the shots it will bring all kinds of hell down on our heads."
"That's what silencers are for." Connor smirked, than looked at Danny sheepishly, since most of the kinds of weaponry he was talking about were illegal. Danny shot a pointed look at Connor's own handgun.
"What do you have that kind of weapon for."
"Hunting." Connor tossed out.
"Hunting what?" Danny asking incredulously.
"Dogs and rats mostly." Connor answered, deadpan.
"Never mind." Danny let the subject go. He bit into the next one to enter his head. "There is every chance that Sergei has his men outfitted in bullet proof armour."
"That is what hollow point rounds are for." Kat held Danny's gaze.
"If you have them." Danny trailed off. "But of course you all do. Ok. So shoot to kill. If not you better knock the target out of commission. I don't care how you do that but make it quiet and make sure he can't get up, away or call for help on his radio."
"Ok, so that's an idea about the beach house. What about the Bel Air house?" Dom asked, worried about Jesse.
"That's going to be harder. However, the back corner is dark, and there are trees we can climb to get over the wall that encloses the estate. Once we're over the fence we'll be in a dark corner that the cameras don't see. But we will have to leave this corner to get to the house. We're likely to be seen by someone in this case. It's hardly likely we'll make it to the house without getting caught."
"Then how are we gonna get Jesse out?" Leon asked, his worry making him far less easy going then was his norm.
"We're going to have to subdue every one of Sergei's men. This is where we will have to let Ivan or Josef pretend to be one of the soldiers on the estate and keep up radio contact with Sergei's base. It can't get back to Sergei that he has a problem till after we are all in position at 'Dragon's Gate' downtown."
"I still don't see how we're going to win that one." Connor bit out. "It's an office building. How are we going to get anywhere in there without him seeing us, knowing exactly where we are?"
"We are going to let Kat head to the elevator like planned. Once she is past the security booth then we are going to take out the security guard manning the camera station. Sergei still has control over the cameras from his penthouse suite. But we can hope that since he still won't know everything is not statis quo he will only be watching Kat's progress up to him, not the rest of the building. We'll need to pick a few other smaller people to use the air system to get up to the top floor of the building to support the recue of Kat and her mom."
"I will not need anyone to rescue me, thank you." Kat growled. "I can take lots of care of myself."
"But you'll need to look like the scared little girl he's expecting, not like Gangster Thug Barbie." Danny growled back, sick of being undermined by female criminal.
Kat curled her hands into claws and started to run at Danny Williams. Danny moved toward her, as ready for the clash as she was. Just before Kat would have sunk her claws into Danny's face and Danny would have had his hands around Kat's throat, Connor got a hold of Kat and Brian held Danny back.
"This is not helping." Brian shouted at both the people being restrained from throttling each other in Connor's living room.
"You betta check yo boy before I check him for you!" Kat pointed a finger at Brian.
"I'm the one who knows what's going on here, not you!" Danny yelled back at Kat before Brian could say a thing.
"Yeah, you got lotsa know. You didn't know where your own sister was till today. You sure as hell don't know me. When you're in our house you betta watch your step." Kat snarled at Danny.
"You better watch that bitchy mouth when you talk to me girlie. You need me more then I need you. My relationship with my family is none of your damn business." Danny spun on his heel to walk away and walked smack into Vince's fist.
"Damn that felt good." Vince laughed down at Danny who was slowly getting back up off the floor shaking his head and testing his now throbbing jaw. He pointed down at Danny. "That was for how you treated Nys and for calling our Kitten a bitch. You better watch that back." The last sentence was delivered in a snarl of warning.
"Ok, let's put this on the back burner for now and go check out these neighbourhoods people. Tigers, mount up." Connor called.
They broke up into groups and went to drive out to check out what was in store for them in a mere 48 hours, slightly less.