Chapter 40
COLE
Forty-eight hours down.
The second day is a repeat of the first, minus Fiona Moran’s cameo appearance and the bombshell of Pyotr’s confession.
The cubicle workers arrive. Megan takes her place at the receptionist desk.
The Sawgrass guards free Tarasov from his hood, give him water and a bare minimum of calories, then take him to the john.
Once he’s chained back to the table, Richardson and Bennett start hammering away.
At first, Tarasov stares into the middle distance.
But after a break mid-morning for another bottle of water, Tarasov finds a new wave of energy. He begins speaking in Russian, responding to every question with a sing-song answer none of us can understand.
Kate finally captures some of it on her phone and runs it through a translator. “Feckin’ gombeen,” she says. “It’s a love poem. Aleksandr Pushkin.” She reads from the app. “He dedicated it to the woman he loved, Anna Kern.”
Snorting with disgust, Kate transmits the information to Richardson and Bennett. She feeds them some of the translation she finds online, lines about phantoms and sorrow, about tears and love and life.
Unfortunately for Tarasov, Corey Bennett is not a fan of poetry. The interrogator slams his fist onto the table, knocking over Tarasov’s half-empty bottle of water. “Enough of this crap! Nobody gives a fuck what woman you lost.”
Tarasov gets a crafty gleam in his eye. “The poem is not about a woman I have lost. It is about a woman I will win. It is about my wife.”
He’s talking about Kate. My wife. I consider shutting down this game right now. All it would take is a single well-timed eye strike or an elbow strike to the temple, a hammer fist to the side of his head.
Tarasov destroyed Lone Wolf by releasing my indictment for fraud.
He turned Mr. and Mrs. A against me—a loss that hurts a thousand times more than losing Shannon ever did.
Tarasov still holds that video from Kynk—one post of it anywhere, and what’s left of my reputation will be shredded forever, not to mention Kate’s illusion of privacy.
If I kill him, this can all be over. We can all go home.
But I want revenge. Tarasov has to suffer more than Kate and I have ever done. All I need is patience. All I need is control.
And I am a master of control.
At Kate’s suggestion, the interrogators leave the boardroom door open for the afternoon. Megan sends a quick message to every team member on the floor: Ignore all boardroom activity.
Not one person breaks character. They type. They answer phone calls. They gossip over the tops of their cubicles.
And not one of them acknowledges in any way the man who is being hounded in the boardroom.
Tarasov shouts, trying to get someone’s attention. “I am being held against my will! This is a violation of my constitutional rights!” And then, when no one responds, “I will sue every one of you! You will regret the day you penned me like a dog. My bratva will—”
He catches himself before he completes the threat, an explicit description of criminal activity that would get the attention of any genuine task force with any legitimate powers of law enforcement.
But his tirade proves our game is finally working.
The pakhan’s frozen facade has shown a hairline crack.
He retreats into silence for the rest of the afternoon. Bennett works through his entire list of questions for the third time, leaning hard on crimes against women.
At 5:00 everyone goes home.
The door is still open. “Do not leave me here!” Tarasov shouts. “I am guarded by animals! You are good people! Do not go! Do not leave—”
Megan turns off the lights before she heads for the elevator.
Tarasov sits at his table, holding his head in his chained hands. His shoulders heave, and it’s difficult to tell from the observation room whether he’s sobbing or just fighting for breath.
The guards come in. The routine is the same as last night—a bottle of water, a sandwich as dry as the Sahara, a frog-march to the john, and back to the table.
As one guy produces the hood, Tarasov starts to babble.
“You do not need to do that. You have chained me here. I cannot escape. Just give me one hour of peace. All right, all right. You put on the hood. Just do not—”
He wails when they clap on the headphones.
The men stop by on their way to the break room. “He’s starting to soften up,” the senior guy says. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” I echo, but I can’t look at Kate as I say it.
Tomorrow, our divorce decree becomes final.