Chapter 10
PAVEL
The guns are not the problem, in and of themselves.
I have moved weapons through difficult territory before.
It’s a logistics problem, fundamentally, and I’m good at logistics problems. The issue is the territory, which has shifted in the way that territory shifts when the people who control it change their minds, their allegiances, or their governments, often in that order.
Igor lays it out for me on a Tuesday morning with the methodical calm of a man who has already done the worrying and arrived at the part where he simply presents the facts.
“Astrakhan was manageable,” he says, settling into the chair across my desk with a folder he doesn’t open, because Igor has never needed notes.
“We greased the right palms. The Caspian crossing went smoothly—we avoided Baku entirely, which added time but removed the headache.” He pauses, and I know from the pause that the headache is coming.
“Baku used to be reliable. It isn’t anymore.
Too much legitimate investment in the last few years.
Too many people with too much to lose by looking the other way. ”
“Turkmenistan?”
“Friendly, but we have a seasonal problem. The flooding in the south pushes the viable routes northeast.” He finally opens the folder, not to consult it but to slide a map across the desk.
His finger traces a line I follow without pleasure.
“To meet the Pakistani clients on schedule, we need to come through the northeast end of Afghanistan.”
I look at the map for a moment. “Then we need Kamila.”
Igor’s expression does something it rarely does, which is approach warmth.
“Tell her hello for me,” he says, standing, and there’s something in his voice that belongs to a history I have never fully inquired about and do not intend to start now.
He takes his folder and leaves, closing the door behind him with the quiet precision he brings to everything.
I lean back in my chair. This is a call I look forward to.
Kamila Mahendru has been running guns through every viable corridor in Afghanistan for the better part of fifteen years, and she does it with an efficiency and discretion that I have encountered in very few people in this business.
She knows the terrain, the players, the seasonal variables, and the precise calibration of loyalty required at each checkpoint along every route she operates.
We have had many nights spent over cards, laughing and telling tall tales of our greatness to one another.
I have worked with her for seven of her fifteen years and have never once had cause to question her judgment.
Kamila also drinks and curses like a sailor, often answering with her guns instead of her words.
It’s no wonder Igor’s crush on her has only grown over the years.
She answers on the third ring. “Allo?”
“Kamila, it’s good to hear your voice.”
There’s a pause that lasts slightly too long. “Pavel.” Her voice is flat in a way it has never been with me, stripped of the businesslike warmth that usually characterizes her end of these calls.
Something tightens at the base of my neck. “I have a shipment that needs a northeast passage. Same parameters as last time, adjusted for the seasonal routes. I need to discuss—”
“I can’t.” Two words, delivered with a finality that cuts across my sentence cleanly.
“Can’t, or won’t?”
Another pause. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, and beneath it I identify, after a moment, urgency. Not fear exactly, but its more controlled cousin. “Our professional relationship is over, Pavel. I won’t be taking your calls after this one. I’m sorry.”
I’m quiet for a moment. “Kamila. What is the meaning of this?”
“There’s no time to explain it properly.” She pauses, either in hesitation or consideration. I’m not sure which. “Ask Fedor. He can explain it better than I can.” Then the line goes dead.
I hold the phone for three seconds. Then I dial her back.
“The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
I set the phone down on the desk with considerable care and look out the window at the gray November city and think about what it means that Kamila Mahendru, who has operated in some of the most hostile environments on earth without flinching, has disconnected her number within thirty seconds of ending a call with me.
Fedor got there first. He got there far enough in advance to apply whatever pressure was required to turn our association into a disconnected line in under a month. His reach is longer than I calculated, and his timeline is shorter, and I have underestimated the speed at which he is moving.
I will not make this mistake twice.
I pull up my contacts and work through the backup list. The backups are less reliable than Kamila by varying degrees—one is competent but has a drinking problem that surfaces unpredictably, one is reliable in good conditions and creative in bad ones in ways that are not always useful, and the third I have not worked with in four years and have no current read on.
None of them knows the northeast routes the way Kamila knows them.
None of them has her relationships with the checkpoint operators, her understanding of the seasonal variables, or her ability to move a shipment through difficult territory without generating the kind of attention that compounds problems downstream.
This could get very ugly.
I call Igor back in and lay it out for him. He listens without interrupting, which is his way, and when I finish, he’s quiet for a moment with the stillness that means he’s working through implications rather than reactions. “Fedor’s been busy.”
“He has.” I look at the map still spread across my desk. “He’s closing routes. He wants us exposed before he moves. It’s a smart strategy.”
“Smart isn’t his usual play.”
Igor’s right. The man I knew wouldn’t have thought to do this.
No. This is the calculated Fedor, which is the more dangerous version.
“It’s not, which means the man who left prison is dead, and the new Fedor is worse.
Get me current intelligence on all of our active associates.
Anyone Fedor might approach, I want to know before he does. ”
Igor nods and stands. At the door, he pauses, which is unusual enough to have my attention.
“There is one other thing,” he says, in the tone that means he has been deciding whether to raise it and has decided he must. “Vet checked in this morning. Nothing to report.” He meets my eyes with the level, careful gaze of a man who has served me for eleven years and earned the right to say the thing he is about to say.
“She can’t be everywhere at once, Pavel. ”
“She doesn’t have to be. Molly’s side is the only place she needs to be.”
He nods once, then leaves.
Fedor is doing what he can to dismantle my operation. He spent seven years behind bars, considering what he can do to ruin me as I ruined him.
Kamila’s dry voice creeps into the back of my mind. “Ask Fedor.”
She knows I won’t ask him a damn thing. I’d sooner put a bullet in his brain than listen to what he has to say. Perhaps that was her true message. Whatever he did to spook her, she wants him dead for it. That sounds more like the Kamila Mahendru I know.
No amount of thermal cameras on Molly’s apartment will stop a bullet. Or a hit man. She’s in danger, the kind of danger that scared a gun runner from Afghanistan.
I should send Molly away.
The thought slices clean into my chest, then rips its way out.
But it is the rational position. Remove her from my proximity, construct a clean professional distance, make her unremarkable to anyone watching my life for leverage.
A generous severance, an exceptional reference, an exit from a situation that is becoming dangerous in ways she doesn’t fully understand, and I cannot fully explain.
She would land well. She is exceptional at her work and she knows it, and whatever she felt about leaving, she would be safe, and safe is the only variable that matters.
I know this.
And then I think about her at my window last week, looking out at the city with those steady brown eyes, working through something complicated with the quiet thoroughness she brings to everything.
There’s the way she says my name when she forgets to be careful about it, when the professional register slips.
How cold my office would be without her in it. How lifeless.
I cannot imagine my world without her in it.
This is, I recognize immediately, all the more reason to send her away.
A man in my position who cannot imagine his world without a specific person in it has handed that person to his enemies on a silver platter, and Fedor is the kind of man who will pick it up without hesitation.
The rational calculation has not changed. If anything, this makes it more urgent.
I turn away from the window and sit back down at my desk.
I pull up the contact list for the backup associates and begin making calls, because the shipment is still a problem that requires solving, and I’m a man who solves problems by working through them rather than around them.
The first call goes adequately. The second goes less well.
I leave a message for the third and expect nothing from it.
I make notes, draw contingencies, work the logistics of a route that will be slower, more expensive, and considerably less clean than what Kamila would have arranged, and I do all of this with the focused efficiency that has kept me functional and alive in this business for going on two decades.
The truth is, I turn to logistics because they are easier than my real problem.
At half past six, I hear her knock.
She opens my door and has a folder in one hand and her coat over her arm, which means she’s leaving soon. She stopped in on her way out.
Out to where?
Her voice is tired from a long day, but still bright. “Revised supplier contacts for the Vasiliev account. I flagged three who haven’t responded in the last cycle. You may want Igor to look into whether they’re still operational.”
She’s wearing the dark green dress, the one that does things to my concentration that I have long since stopped pretending to manage.
Her hair is slightly loose from wherever it started the day, and she looks tired in the way she looks at the end of long days, which is to say competent and tired simultaneously, which is a combination I find unreasonably compelling.
“Thank you.”
She reads my face, and something in her expression shifts. “Everything alright?”
“Operational issue. Nothing that requires your attention.”
She holds my gaze for a beat longer than she strictly needs to, and I can see her deciding whether to push. She decides not to, which is either trust or the end of a long day, and she says she’ll see me tomorrow, picks up her coat, and turns to go.
“Molly.”
She turns back, one hand on the doorframe.
I look at her across the office. I think about how I said I would send her away if I had to, and I’m no longer certain that is true. My gut twists, and an oily ribbon slithers through me.
Guilt. I’ve never been particularly good at guilt. Guilt is a professional hazard, one might say of my work. I do a number of illegal things, many of which get people killed. I learned to live with that a long time ago.
But this? This is something new.
I have never willingly put someone I care about into the crosshairs, and even though I know it’s not exactly that, it’s near enough that guilt swims in my veins now.
“Go straight home tonight. Not the long way. Straight there. Close your curtains too. No one needs to look at what’s mine.”
She stares at me for a moment with those steady eyes. Then she almost smirks. “Yes, sir.”
Fuck, she thinks this is a part of our game.
Fine. Let her.
“Good, pet. I’ll know if you don’t.”
That gets me a full smirk. She nods once, then leaves, taking all the air in the room with her.
I turn back to the window. The city offers nothing, as usual. I stand there until the building has mostly emptied and the lights of Manhattan have gone dark and cold against the glass.
Fedor Vinogradov must make a choice. There can be peace in Manhattan. Or he will die.