Chapter 22 #2
My hands are not steady. My jaw muscles work---the grinding motion of someone clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing.
I can feel it happening, the fracture in the mask, the place where control is slipping from my grasp like water through fingers.
But there is no time for control. There is only the drive forward, the primal understanding that the boy is gone and I am still breathing and the world will burn before
I accept the permanence of that fact.
I take their phones. I check the corridor---empty. I move.
* * *
The car park is below the auction house. Two levels. Concrete pillars.
Strip lighting that turns everything the colour of old bone.
Bay three is at the far end of the lower level. A black van---Mercedes Sprinter, tinted windows, no plates. The rear doors are closed. The engine is not running. The bay is empty.
Yuri is on the ground beside our car.
Face down on the concrete. His right arm extended, reaching for the driver's door he never opened.
Blood pools beneath his head---a dark, spreading circle that catches the strip light with the flat sheen of liquid on a non-absorbent surface.
His breath is shallow. His eyes are closed.
The back of his skull shows the indentation of a blunt-force impact---a baton or a pipe, the attack of a man who knew Yuri's position and waited for the moment his attention was on the auction house doors rather than the stairwell approach.
I kneel. Pulse present, thready. He is alive. He will survive if he receives medical attention within the hour.
The car is empty. The back seat where Rory sat on the drive from the hotel---where his knee touched mine, where his hand rested on the leather between us---is empty.
The black van is gone. Bay three is a rectangle of oil-stained concrete and the fading echo of an engine that left while I was driving a pen through Zhuk's hand.
Rory is gone.
The words arrive as a physical event. The chest tightens. The vision narrows. The hands---my hands, the hands that held him and washed him and took him apart and put him back together---close into fists, and the fists are steady, and the steadiness is the most frightening thing about this moment.
I take Yuri's phone. I open the car. The keys are in the ignition---Yuri was preparing the exit when they hit him, the engine warm, the route to the airport programmed. The airport is no longer the destination.
I sit in the car in the concrete silence of a sub-level car park beneath a building where my forgery just sold for millions and my forger was just stolen from me, and I hold the phone, and the phone is a bridge to a man I have never met and who is, as of this moment, the only person on this continent whose interests align with mine.
I dial the number. I found the Nokia three weeks ago, tucked inside the lining of his pillow while he slept.
I did not confiscate it. I copied the single contact stored in its memory and put it back, because the phone was a lifeline and taking it would have broken something I was not yet willing to break.
The line rings. On the third ring, a voice answers. Low, controlled, taut with a violence held in check by discipline rather than desire. The voice of a man who has been waiting for this call the way a rifle waits for the trigger.
"Who is this."
"My name is Kazimir Volkov. I am the man your brother has been living with. I am the man you came to London to find and followed to Zurich.
And I am calling because I have failed to protect the one thing you and
I have in common."
Silence. The silence of a predator recalibrating. The Zurich night behind him---the same cold air, the same dark river.
"They took him." The three words are the hardest I have spoken in twenty years.
Harder than the confession to the Bratva council.
Harder than the silence after the warehouse.
The three words are a failure compressed into language, and the man on the other end is the man whose brother I promised to protect and whose brother is now in a black van heading to Vienna with men who will use his hands until the hands stop being useful.
The silence holds. Then Killian Kavanagh speaks, and his voice is the Reaper, and the Reaper says five words that change the direction of everything.
"Where do I find them."
I close my eyes. I open them. The car park is concrete and strip light and the blood of my most loyal man pooling on the floor.
On the other end of the phone is a man who should be my enemy and who is, as of this sentence, my ally, and the alliance is forged in the only metal that holds: the shared, uncompromising need to recover the boy who belongs to both of us.
"I will send you an address," I say. "Bring your husband. Bring whatever resources the Falcone network can mobilise in six hours. And bring the thing you are famous for, Killian Kavanagh, because where we are going, the Reaper will be required."
I end the call. I start the engine. The navigation recalculates.
The destination is no longer the airport.
The destination is the place where the Consortium keeps the things it owns, and the Ghost is driving toward it, and the Reaper is converging on it, and the boy between them---the boy with the artist's hands and the green gaze that is the colour of the only future I have left---is waiting.
I drive.