After we killed the snitch and made an example out of him, the rest of the crew gathered in a bleak, wood-paneled breakfast room in the hotel. We were all jittery and not a single one of us could look at another. The only person who seemed completely at ease was myself, who had taken the whole execution as a sort of cosmic inevitability, a hiccup in the relentless forward progress of our scheme. He cracked through the shell of a hard-boiled egg as if he were preparing to dissect it in a freshman biology class, then mashed the yolk between his fingers and smeared it in a spiral on his plate, looking vaguely delighted. My own appetite was dead, but I forced down a third cup of coffee and kept my eyes locked on the blurred landscape outside, where pre-dawn snow polished the windshields of the parked cars to a mirror finish.
The logistics were horrifying, but that was always the allure: the scale of the ambition, the intricacy of the moving parts, the sheer obscenity of what we planned. The next step was to establish a production facility big enough to supply not just us, but the entire pipeline of clubs and dealers and celebrities that orbited the new Zurich. We needed a lab so clean it could sit next to a hospital, and so remote nobody would ever stumble on it by accident. Switzerland was the obvious choice. Neutral, well-off, overflowing with bored chemists and high-altitude chateaus with good security. We could move enough product through the back rooms of Zurich and Basel to fund an entire revolution, or at least the next season of our debauchery, and nobody would blink.
First, though, I needed to call Denise—my stepmother, though I still referred to her as "Monica" even in my own head, because "mom" was too ridiculous to contemplate. She was the only person on earth who could get me in touch with her cousin Omar , who had not only the technical know-how to set up a bombproof clandestine lab, but also the connections to source the precursor chemicals without triggering some kind of Interpol panic. Monica. I phoned Monica's phone, and just to annoy her, I said Hello, mother. She gets a little annoyed by that development, but she is deeply in love with my father and currently pregnant with my future newborn sibling. I have loads out there because my father is a notorious womaniser. its where i got the trait from. I told her my requirements and asked if she is able to fulfil the favour and request. I know she will be able to sort it and any funding will come through my father as this would be business expenses.
It was almost Christmas. You could feel it in the way the mornings went from bone-scraping cold to something more brittle, more expectant. The shops fronted with synthetic garlands, the cafes blaring pop carols while the actual customers scowled into their mulled wine. I'd always hated holidays, even as a child, but this year there was a sense of possibility about it—a sense that we were about to burst through the tinsel and the cheap sentiment and pull off something so audacious nobody would ever forget it. The old world was dying, and we were the new kings, even if we still trembled when the phone rang in the dead of night.
"We're not just setting up a lab," he said. "We're going to supply half the continent. You get that?"
The first chords of "The Fairytale of New York," tinny and discordant, leak through the window, and I recognize the opening instantly because it's everywhere—car radios, department store speakers, the shitty AM station the hotel staff leave on at all hours. It's supposed to be a festive anthem, but here it sounds like a dirge played for lost causes. On the street below, strung lights blink with algorithmic indifference, illuminating drifts of snow and the occasional staggering drunk in Santa hat regalia. Even the air seems to taste of tinsel and spent fireworks. The city's festive inertia sweeps up everything, indifferent to blood on the snow or the bodies left behind in the canal. I used to think I was immune to the sentimental pull of the holidays, but the closer we got to our endgame, the more I felt the world swelling with some grotesque parody of hope.
I watch the snow build up on the balcony rail outside my window and catch my own reflection in the glass: a face too young and soft to be in charge of a criminal conspiracy, eyes too old and sharp to belong to anyone in my grade at school. I've always been the youngest in every room that mattered, even when that room was a biology classroom, or a university library, or a dim-lit bar in Istanbul. My primary school teachers used to call me "gifted," a euphemism for the kind of intelligence that makes normal kids hate you and adults squirm. At twelve, I'd finished half the university's undergrad reading list; by fourteen, I was ghost-writing essays for doctoral candidates who never bothered to ask how some random kid in Zurich could parse Heidegger better than they could. My memory works like a tape recorder—every fact, every equation, every offhand insult or whispered threat, stored in perfect fidelity, waiting to be weaponized at the right moment.
The irony is that the smarter I got, the less I cared about the assignments themselves. I'd breeze through the calculus or chemistry with half my mind elsewhere—usually on the next phase of our operation, or on the text messages from Monica, who had trained me to see loopholes and liabilities in the syllabus of life. The school's headmaster once called me into his wood-paneled office and asked if I was bored, if I ever felt unchallenged by the curriculum. I told him, very politely, that everything in life was a curriculum, and most of it was designed by idiots. He laughed the nervous laugh of a man who had never been outsmarted by a teenager before and sent me back to class with a warning to "apply myself." I wanted to tell him that I'd been applying myself in ways he couldn't possibly imagine, that my real homework involved supply chains and secure lines and watching for police tails in the pre-dawn dark.
I rarely spoke to anyone at school except when absolutely necessary. My grades were immaculate, my attendance was perfect, and my disciplinary record—thanks to some judicious hacking of the admin system—was cleaner than the Pope's. The other students shunned me, partly because I was an obvious outlier, and partly because the rumors about my family had started to circulate. Most assumed my father was some hedge fund brute or Balkan oligarch, which wasn't too far off the mark, but the truth was less respectable: he was a middleman, a fixer, a man who could get you anything from a false passport to a Swedish organ donor, depending on your price point. Monica had married him for the challenge, or the cash, or possibly just the thrill of being around someone so pathologically dangerous. I loved her for it.
On the day after the snitch incident, Monica texted me during algebra: Need you to meet me at the usual. She always used the same phrase, "the usual," as if our clandestine meetings were just another part of some shared domestic routine, like dentist appointments or school pick-up. Nobody ever questioned my absences. I'd built up enough fake extracurriculars that I could vanish for hours without anyone raising an eyebrow. That afternoon, as the rest of the class slogged through a worksheet on quadratic equations, I slipped out the back doors, blending into the cold like a ghost.
I made my way to the meeting spot—a greasy spoon cafe overlooking the Limmat. She was already there, in sunglasses and a white wool coat, swirling a cup of tea like she was waiting for the Queen. She handed me an encrypted burner phone with a SIM already installed and said, "You'll need this for Switzerland. Don't use it unless it's life or death." I asked if she'd managed to get a line on Omar. She smirked, then nodded, and told me to memorize the code on the slip of paper she slid across the table, then burn it. I took the paper, scanned the series of numbers, and committed them to memory with a single glance. I knew better than to ask what would happen if I lost the phone or forgot the code. I never forgot anything.
It was almost Christmas. You could feel it in the way the mornings went from bone-scraping cold to something more brittle, more expectant. The shops fronted with synthetic garlands, the cafes blaring pop carols while the actual customers scowled into their mulled wine. I'd always hated holidays, even as a child, but this year there was a sense of possibility about it—a sense that we were about to burst through the tinsel and the cheap sentiment and pull off something so audacious nobody would ever forget it. The old world was dying, and we were the new kings, even if we still trembled when the phone rang in the dead of night.
"We're not just setting up a lab," he said. "We're going to supply half the continent. You get that?"
I should have questioned why she gave me the burner when I already had the satellite phone—untraceable, secure, a black market marvel that could ping a signal from anywhere on earth. But I took it without comment, another tool for the arsenal, another failsafe in a plan that couldn't afford failure. Monica never did anything without reason, and I'd learn hers soon enough.