12. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I get back to the estate at half past midnight.
Rico debriefs me in the car on the way in. Nothing unusual on the grounds. Staff rotations ran clean. Nina’s light was on until eleven, off after.
I nod and get out and go inside and pour a drink in my study and sit down and go through the night’s business until two in the morning, and then I go to bed.
I sleep fine.
In the morning, she comes down at her usual time, seven forty, hair up, laptop under her arm. She pours her coffee, sits across from me, opens the laptop, and starts working. I read the paper, and we don’t speak for twenty minutes.
She gets up for a second coffee, comes back, sits down, and keeps working. I finish the paper and move to my emails.
Everything is normal.
At noon, I go to the kitchen.
She’s already at the table, phone in her hand, something on the screen holding her attention. She looks up when I sit down. I pour water. She puts the phone face down.
“Cold front coming in,” she says.
“So they say.”
She picks up her fork. We eat. The lunch is the same as every other lunch for three weeks.
Except it is not.
I can’t place it at lunch, so I let it go and go back to work, and at dinner, I watch her more carefully.
She sits across from me and she eats and she talks and she’s sharp the way she’s always sharp. She pushes back on something I say about a piece she filed this morning, and I push back on that, and we go two rounds on it the way we go two rounds on most things and none of that is different.
It’s the way she looks at me.
Not what she does with her face. Not her expression.
It’s the quality of attention behind it.
I have watched Nina Morozov look at a lot of things over the past three weeks, and I know what her attention looks like when she’s assessing something, when she’s managing something, when she’s deciding whether something is worth her time.
I’ve seen her give that look to people in the rooms we’ve been in together, and I’ve watched what she does with whatever she finds.
She’s giving it to me now.
Not occasionally. Consistently. Every time I speak, every time I move, every time I reach for my glass or set it down.
She’s watching me the way she watches a story she has decided to run, with the patience of someone who already has the first piece and is waiting to see where the rest of it comes from.
I ask her something about the piece she filed, a question I already know the answer to, and her response comes a half beat slower than her responses usually come. She covers it. Most people would not catch it.
After dinner, she goes upstairs, and I go to my study.
I pour a drink, and I sit, and I go back through the last twenty-four hours looking for what I missed.
There was nothing on the estate last night, Rico was clear on that.
No calls she should not have made, no communications outside the channels I know about.
Her routine was the same today as it has been for three weeks.
Nothing I can point to and say, there, that’s what changed.
But something changed.
I know the difference between Nina watching me because I’m in the room and Nina watching me because she has found something.
I’ve been in enough rooms with enough people to know when I’m being studied versus when I’m simply being observed, and what was across the dinner table tonight was not observation.
I finish the drink.
I think about her sitting across from me with patience behind her eyes, and I think about what she could have found and how she could have found it, and I come up empty on the how, which is the part that bothers me. Not that she found something. I cannot identify the gap she found.
I pour another drink.
She’s not going to tell me. Whatever she has, she’s going to sit on it and build on it and use it in whatever way she has already decided to use it, because that’s who she is, and I knew who she was before I put her in this house, and I made the calculation and stood by it.
The calculation still holds.
What is new is being on the receiving end of it.
I’ve been watching her for three weeks. I’ve tracked her attempts, her patterns, her adjustments. I’ve read her work and sat across from her at dinner and been in the back of a car with her in the dark, and I’ve been the one doing the watching this entire time.
She’s watching me back now.
I sit with that and finish my drink. The house is quiet around me and I think about her upstairs, probably at her laptop, probably writing, and I think about the half beat at dinner and the quality of her attention.
I think that I have been in this game for eleven years and I have sat across from prosecutors and federal agents and men who wanted me dead and none of them have made me feel quite as watched as Nina Morozov does when she looks at me over a dinner table.
I go to bed.
I don’t sleep as well as the night before.