CHAPTER 14
Nikolai
◆
Six o’clock in the morning at Teterboro had a particular sound: the low hum of a Gulfstream idling on the apron, the whine of a fuel truck retreating, the click of a ground crewman’s radio inside a cold hangar.
Nikolai watched the temperature by the way his breath went white and thinned.
Forty-one degrees, near enough. He stood at the bottom of the airstair in his charcoal suit and felt the weight of his father’s cufflinks at his wrists—small, cold, silver, and heavier than they had any right to be.
The executive terminal behind him was empty in the way only very early hours emptied a building.
Two attendants at the desk, a corridor of leather club chairs, a coffee bar with a machine warming and no one ordering.
Outside the glass, the sky above the Palisades was the color of unwashed pewter and turning by minutes toward pale.
He weighed the light against the departure window on his phone and stopped.
Elena came up the steps ahead of him in the wool coat Marina had bought her a week ago, the collar turned up around a soft gray sweater.
Her hair was pulled back the way she wore it for early shifts.
She carried the smell of the espresso she had refused to finish in the terminal, and beneath it, a trace of the soap from the penthouse (plain, no perfume).
She paused at the doorway of the cabin, looked once at the interior of walnut and pale leather and the crown moulding of a jet meant to be a residence, and stepped in without any comment about it.
He had watched wealthier people flinch at less. She read and moved on.
Marina came up behind him and gave the tarmac a last professional sweep.
She wore a dark suit, her blonde bob tucked behind one ear, and the Sig sat under her left arm without argument.
Sasha was staying in New York; the penthouse door was his tonight.
Nikolai had counted the men and the routes twice before dawn and stopped there.
Inside, the cabin was warm. Elena took the forward-facing seat and buckled in. Nikolai sat across from her at the walnut table. Marina took the aft-facing seat opposite, belted with the practiced speed of a woman who preferred to face any interior door.
The captain called the numbers back over the intercom. The plane rolled off the apron and swung onto the taxiway. Elena watched the wingtip clear a fuel truck, then looked down at the safety card slotted into the seat pocket by her knee. The tail number was printed on the top corner.
“N eight-six-zero Romeo Mike,” she said. The words came out under her breath, the way she caught a chart line at a bedside without knowing she was reading it.
Marina glanced up from her tablet. “His net worth. It is a joke. He hates the joke.”
Elena’s head lifted a fraction. Nikolai kept his eyes off Marina. He held his own breath in the cabin’s warm air and let a beat pass.
“It is a joke,” he said.
Elena’s mouth moved at one corner. “It is a large joke.”
Marina went back to her tablet without smiling, which was as close to laughter as she came in a working hour.
Eight hundred and sixty million dollars was the running number Marina had used to needle him since the first year he owned a plane, and she would use it until one of them retired.
Denial was the joke’s fuel; he let it stand.
The truth of the figure sat somewhere north of Marina’s number and south of what the Council in Zurich had estimated at the last audit; he preferred the joke.
The Gulfstream lifted off cleanly at six twenty-two.
Nikolai took a folder from the inside of his briefcase and opened it flat on the walnut table.
Elena reached into her tote and produced a pediatric-cardiology journal, plain paper, a marker clipped inside the front cover. The quiet sat between them.
Elena glanced at his folder, then at her journal, then back at him. “Whose homework is worse.”
“Mine.”
“I accept.” She uncapped the pen.
He almost smiled. One corner of his mouth nearly lifted, then settled.
The flight to Hanscom Field was fifty-two minutes on the plan and it ran to schedule.
Nikolai read for forty of them. The folder was Kanter’s, and the trip had been Kanter’s suggestion; the names inside were the ones he already carried.
He was reading them again to be sure of what he was walking toward.
Elena read the journal for the remaining twelve minutes with the pen uncapped and a small line at the bridge of her nose that appeared when the authors were being loose with their statistics.
Their hands stayed on their own sides of the table. They sat, however, inclined at exactly the angle of two people who had shared a bed and expected to share another one. He considered his breath and let it out.
Hanscom Field was cold at the black car. A driver Nikolai had used twice before opened the rear door without a word. Marina moved to the front. Elena, in the second row, watched the terminal windows slip past.
The hotel in Cambridge was one of the small brick ones by the river.
The lobby smelled of good wood polish and yesterday’s rain on wool coats.
A bellman offered a bag; Nikolai declined without looking at him.
The lift ran in a shaft narrow enough that he could hear the cables working.
The suite was on a corner, two windows, a walnut writing desk, a dish of pale-shelled almonds no one would eat.
He put Elena’s laptop bag on the desk himself.
He opened the laptop, entered the credential he had been given at three o’clock in the morning, and pulled up the forensic tabs Renée’s team had prepared: three tabs, color-coded, a shared cursor at the corner of the second one where Renée had left a note for her in plain English.
Elena stood at his shoulder, close enough that her breath warmed the back of his hand as she looked at the file tree.
“Stay in the suite. Do not open the door for anyone but Marina,” he said.
She took the weight of him with her clinical eye, the same eye she used on a monitor when she was deciding whether an alarm was noise or news, and answered him with the word she used at bedsides.
“Okay.”
The second man on the door was one of Marina’s, fair-haired, a coat that hid the outline of a weapon well. Nikolai gave him one look and had his answer without the man speaking. He touched Elena’s elbow through the wool of her sleeve once, briefly, and left.
The meeting was three streets away, in an office suite whose lease had been rewritten twice for this ninety-seven minutes.
Nikolai walked with Marina at his left shoulder and the Charles River visible between two brick buildings.
Cambridge in October held thin sun over old brick and trees turning without drama.
He let the block count end at three and kept the meeting out of his thoughts until he arrived.
Marina stood at the door of the suite. Nikolai sat at the small table across from a man whose face he would not describe later even to himself, took the folder that was handed to him (paper only, no drive, no phone), and read the top page in the man’s presence.
He asked two questions. He received two answers.
The man had a way of tapping the pad of his index finger once against the tabletop after each answer, the tick of a person who preferred that no one else time him.
Nikolai put the folder in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
He stood, offered the man his hand, and left.
In the car back to the hotel, he took the folder out and read it once, slowly.
Twenty-two names. He knew four already. Two of the other eighteen belonged to men who worked for him.
One had been his friend at twenty-six, a man Nikolai had defended in Marina’s presence six months earlier.
He read the name twice. The letters did not change.
Predatel’. Traitor. Marina watched a Boston-plated sedan pass on their right and asked nothing.
She would change the burner rotation before they reached Cambridge.
He counted to three, silently, and set his hand flat on his thigh.
In the Cambridge suite, Elena finished the third forensic tab before Nikolai returned. The rain had stopped against the corner windows, leaving the brick across the street dark and clean.
He entered with the folder inside his jacket and tension set high in his shoulders.
“Bad?” she asked.
“Useful.”
“That was not the question.”
He removed the folder and placed it on the writing desk. “Twenty-two names. Two work for me. One was a friend.”
Elena closed the laptop. “Do you want to tell me his name?”
“Not until Kanter confirms the context.”
“Fair.”
He loosened his tie and sat on the edge of the bed without seeming to notice he had done it. The hotel room gave him nowhere to pace without turning the movement into performance.
Elena stood between his knees. “May I?”
He looked at her hands. “Yes.”
She removed the cufflinks one at a time and set them on the desk. His father’s silver bars, worn smooth at the corners. Beneath the left cuff, a faint crescent marked where he had clenched his wrist against the fabric.
“Your sister,” Elena said. “Irina. Does she know any of this?”
“Enough to stay in Zurich. Not enough to be useful to Vasiliev.”
“Are you protecting her or avoiding her?”
“Both.”
The answer came too quickly to be rehearsed.
“She restored a chapel outside Lucerne last year,” he continued. “Sent me photographs through Marina. We have not spoken directly in fifteen years.”
“Why?”
“She blamed me for choosing the syndicate after our father died. I blamed her for leaving me to choose alone.”
Elena rested her hands on his shoulders. “You were twenty-seven, not the last man alive.”
“I behaved as if I were.”
“Call her when this is over.”
He looked up. “That is an instruction?”
“A recommendation from a nurse with excellent judgment.”
His hands settled at her waist, light and asking. “Noted.”