Chapter 31
Maeve
The Attempt
One week before the grand jury.
I am in my firm's twenty-second-floor conference room with the federal prosecutor's team.
Sarah Klein, the lead AUSA, has flown back from a deposition in Washington for this prep session.
Her two senior aides are at the table. Two paralegals.
The court reporter is not here yet because we are not under oath; we are running my testimony cold one more time before Thursday's grand jury appearance.
Lex is at the far end of the table. He’s in a charcoal suit.
He’s reading the same brief I have been reading, but he’s not reading.
He’s been watching the door of the conference room for the last forty minutes with the exact alertness of a man whose wife is going to be in this building for three more hours.
Cormac is in the lobby. Two Konstantinos soldiers are on this floor. Two Marshals are on this floor. Petrov is in the parking garage.
I have not been alone since November.
I am, by 11:47 AM, the woman I have been for sixty-three days — a witness with full security wrapping who has gotten so used to the wrapping that she’s stopped noticing it.
I have been rehearsing the parking garage testimony for three weeks.
I have rehearsed the dead informant's name.
I have rehearsed what I saw done to him.
I have rehearsed it so many times that the words come out clean.
Sarah Klein says, "Last pass on the Tremont Street sequence, Maeve. From the top."
I take a breath.
I begin.
? ? ?
The contractor enters at 11:53 AM.
He’s in a courier uniform. Real uniform.
Real clipboard. The receptionist has already buzzed him through because the courier has been on this building's approved list for nine months, which means the contractor has, somewhere downstairs three blocks away, intercepted the actual courier in the last forty minutes and traded clothes with him.
He gets to my floor.
He gets to the corridor outside the conference room.
He’s been on this floor for forty-three seconds when Lex stands up.
I do not see what Lex sees. The conference room glass is frosted at sitting height; only people who are standing can see through to the corridor.
Lex was reading the brief at sitting height.
Lex stood up. Lex's body went from the man who had been waiting to the man who was moving, and the change happened with no sound and no warning, and Sarah Klein, in the middle of her sentence, registered the change and stopped speaking before her brain had caught up to why.
Lex says one word.
"Down."
Sarah Klein is on the floor inside two seconds.
Her aides follow. The paralegals are slower, but they are also down.
I am down because Lex has crossed the conference room and put me on the floor with one hand at the back of my neck, the way a man puts his wife on the floor when the floor is the only surface she’s allowed to be on.
The conference room door opens. The contractor is in the doorway.
The clipboard is in his left hand. The knife is in his right.
The knife is a four-inch blade, fixed handle, the kind a man brings into a building when he’s been told the target is a federal prosecutor in a private firm with metal detectors at the lobby entrance, and he’s been told to use a thing the metal detectors will read as a clipboard's bracket.
The contractor has had the knife taped to the back of the clipboard.
He sees Lex.
He’s eight-tenths of a second to register that the man between him and the woman he came here to put a knife into is not a Konstantinos soldier.
The man is the Greek heir. The man is the husband.
The man is the architect between the contractor and his work, and the contractor's brief didn’t warn him that the husband would be in the room at this hour.
Lex disarms him in three seconds.
I do not see most of it. I am face-down on the conference room carpet with Lex's hand at the back of my neck, and what I hear is the sound of a wrist breaking and a body hitting the floor and the sharp clatter of a four-inch fixed-blade knife sliding across the conference room carpet.
Cormac comes through the door.
He’s been moving since the lobby. The lobby buzzed him about the courier ninety-one seconds ago.
Cormac came up the stairs. Cormac has the lobby alert in one ear and his own assessment in the other ear, and he arrives in the corridor outside the conference room exactly forty-six seconds after the contractor entered the floor, which is, as Cormac will tell me later in a kitchen with a bandage on his forearm, ‘the slowest he’s moved in fifteen years and not slow enough. ’
Cormac steps over the contractor. Cormac kicks the knife further down the corridor.
Cormac says, "Hi, Lex."
Lex says, "Hi, Cormac."
Marshals are in the corridor inside another forty seconds.
The contractor is unconscious on the floor.
The conference room is mostly under the conference table.
Lex's hand is still at the back of my neck. Sarah Klein, federally appointed prosecutor, is shaking against the leg of her own chair and is going to be fine because she’s Sarah Klein and she’s worked Bratva cases for nine years, and she’s not going to come undone in her own conference room with an unconscious contractor four feet from the door.
Lex says, low, into my ear, "You are okay."
"I am okay."
"I am going to lift you up."
"Okay."
He does.
The aftermath takes three hours.
Marshals secure the floor. The contractor is taken into custody alive but not awake.
Cormac takes a knife wound to the inside of his forearm during the disarming phase that I do not see; the wound is three inches long, requires three stitches at the firm's nurse station, and is the kind of cut that needed a bandage and didn’t slow him down for any minute of his life.
Cormac calls it the scratch.
"How's the scratch?" he asks himself, in the firm's break room, while a federal Marshal photographs the contractor's identification.
"The scratch is fine," Cormac answers himself.
"The scratch will hold."
"The scratch is going to dine out on this for years."
Lex, beside me at the conference room table, makes a sound that is not quite a laugh.
Cormac winks at me through the doorway.
I file ‘the scratch’ in the column of my brain titled ‘Things Cormac O'Brien Will Never Stop Saying.’
? ? ?
The intel chain takes the rest of the afternoon.
Marshals identify the contractor through prints.
Konstantinos surveillance independently confirms. The contractor is ‘‘Aleksei Karpov.’’ Bratva associate, late thirties, operational hand for a senior Reznikov lieutenant.
Petrov runs the financial side and surfaces the conduit within ninety minutes: Karpov's payment trail routes through a Brookline-based forensic accountant named Richard Foley.
South Boston Irish, federal connections, the same Foley who introduced Marcus Andreev to Mikhail Sokolov six months ago.
Same network. Different operational hand.
Foley is the bridge.
Foley confirms what we already suspected: Reznikov Sr. has been putting tacit approval on operational moves against the Konstantinos family for at least nine months, and Karpov is the third contractor he’s dispatched in the last sixty days.
The first was Volkov, whom Lex dispatched in the warehouse outside Worcester.
The second was the man who took our daughter and was killed in the rescue.
Karpov is the third. Reznikov Sr. is escalating because his son is dead and he’s decided to make us pay for it across as many calendar months as he’s left in him.
Federal arrest warrants are issued for Foley by 4:00 PM. Foley is picked up at his Brookline office at 4:18. He surrenders without resistance. He’s been expecting this for two weeks.
Reznikov Sr. is still out there.
He won’t be picked up today, tomorrow, or before the grand jury.
He’s in St. Petersburg. He’s beyond the reach of the federal system and beyond the operational reach of the Konstantinos family.
The book will close with him out there, hating us across an ocean, ending his life as the architect of every threat that has touched my daughter.
Book three's writer will inherit him.
I do not know that yet.
What I know, on the floor of my firm's conference room at 11:54 AM with Lex's hand still on the back of my neck, is that I am going to live through this. We are going to live through this. The thought arrives like ice water. ‘I am going to live through this.’ Sixty-three days of waiting for the next thing to happen, and the next thing has happened, and it didn’t get me, and I am going to walk out of this conference room and drive home to my daughter and live through this.
That is the thought.
That is the only thought I have for the next twenty minutes.
? ? ?
Lex drives me home at 5:47 PM.
Cormac is in the front seat with the bandage on his forearm. He’s refused to be looked at by anyone except the firm's nurse, whom he charmed into giving him a packet of Skittles in addition to the stitches. He’s eating the Skittles in the front seat while reading something on his phone.
Lex's hand is on my knee in the back seat.
Neither of us speaks.
When we get to the brownstone, Cormac peels off and goes to his apartment in Beacon Hill.
Petrov takes over the lobby detail. Lex carries my briefcase in for me.
I have not asked him to, and he hasn’t asked whether he should.
The carrying is the quiet architecture of a husband who has made up his mind that his wife will not carry her own briefcase tonight and has made nothing of the carrying.
Inside the brownstone, the kitchen is quiet.
Eleni picked up Nora at 3:00 PM and is keeping her overnight per the standing arrangement we made weeks earlier because attempted-attack days qualify for emergency-grandmother coverage.
Eleni doesn’t know about the attempt yet.
Nico knows. Eleni will be told tomorrow morning, in person, by Lex, the Greek way.
I sit at the kitchen island.
Lex pours me a glass of red wine and sets it in front of me. He pours one for himself. He sits across from me. He doesn’t ask if I am okay. He’s been with me for the last six hours. He knows what I am.
I take a long sip of the wine.
I say, "Are you okay?"
Lex says, "Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure."
"You broke a man's wrist in your wife's conference room today."
"Yes."
"In front of the federal prosecutor."
"Yes. Sarah will need a stiff drink."
"Sarah is going to write an after-action report that is going to make her boss very happy."
Lex's mouth twitches the way it does when I have made him almost laugh in a kitchen we are sitting in alone after a contractor came for me.
It is small. It is real. It is the man who has been allowed to exist, in this kitchen, for fifty-six days now, and who is reaching across a kitchen island to me on a January Tuesday at 6:13 PM after the worst day my federal prosecution has produced in nine months, and the man is real and steady and present.
I say, "I want this to be over."
Lex says, "Six days."
"Six days."
I walk around the kitchen island. He stands up.
He pulls me to him. He holds me. He doesn’t speak.
The brownstone is the brownstone. The contractor is in federal custody.
The Foley arrest is closing out. Reznikov Sr. is in St. Petersburg, hating us.
Cormac is in his apartment eating Skittles.
Eleni is two miles away with our daughter.
Six days.
I count them in my head while my Lex holds me in the kitchen.
Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday.
Tuesday is the grand jury.
Six days.