Chapter 2 #3
They drove him to a garage in Newark. He didn’t know the address. He had been blindfolded for part of the drive, but he had counted turns and estimated distance. Fifteen to twenty minutes from wherever they started, which he believed was near the port.
At the garage, they had beaten him. Not quickly, not in anger. With patience. They had asked him questions between the blows, always the same questions.
“They wanted Father’s schedule,” I said.
“Mikhail Mikhailovich’s movements. When he was at the warehouse. When he was home. Which car. Which routes. They asked about the security rotation on the upper floors. They asked about the Tuesday meetings.”
Tuesday meetings. The weekly council sessions where Mikhail and his senior men discussed bratva business. If the Voronins knew about Tuesday meetings, they had someone inside the organization. Not just a dock worker. Someone with access to the schedule.
“What else did they say?” I asked.
Sergei’s swollen eyes shifted. He looked down at his hands, then back at me.
“They said Lev Sokolov authorized the interrogation. The kidnapping. They said it over and over. Three times, four times. ‘Lev Sokolov knows. Lev Sokolov authorized this. We have to do what Lev asked us to.’ They wanted me to believe it. They wanted me to — to say it. To anyone who found me.”
“Did you believe them?”
“No.” The word came out hard. “Of course not. I’ve worked for Mikhail Mikhailovich for six years. I’ve been in the same room as Lev Sokolov twice. He doesn’t need to kidnap dock supervisors to learn when Father walks the floor. He could pick up the phone and ask.”
Good. Sergei was thinking clearly, despite everything.
“They put something in your jacket?” I asked.
He reached for the jacket lying on the bed beside him.
The breast pocket was torn where someone had forced the card in.
He pulled it out — a laminated union card.
Sokolov Freight & Cartage. The name on it was not Sergei’s.
It belonged to a man named Dmitri Volkov, a Sokolov dispatcher who, as far as I knew, had never met Sergei Petrov.
“They put it there before they left,” Sergei said. “Right before. They gagged me, tied my ankles, and put the card in my pocket. Then they set the — the device. The timer. And they left.”
I looked at the card. Someone had put a Sokolov name in Sergei’s pocket and another in his mouth. Neither was an accident.
“Who found you?” I asked.
Sergei looked at me. Through the swelling, through the bruising, something moved in his expression that was not fear. It was something closer to bewilderment.
“The Sokolovs,” he said. “They raided the garage. I heard shooting — one man, upstairs, shooting at them. Then silence. Then footsteps.”
“Who came to you?”
A pause.
“Daniil Sokolov.”
I did not move. I kept my hands in my lap, my posture open, my expression the same as it had been for the previous ten minutes. I did not let anything change in my face or my hands or the set of my shoulders.
“He came into the room,” Sergei continued. “The storage room, in the back. He cut my hands free. He cut my ankles. He asked my name. He asked if I could stand. I couldn’t. He picked me up and carried me out of the building.”
“Carried you.”
“Over his shoulder. Like — ” Sergei made a rough lifting motion with his hands. “There was a timer beside me. Counting down. He put me in a vehicle and told the driver to take me to a clinic.”
“And the explosion?”
“We were at the gate. I heard it behind us.”
Daniil Sokolov had seen the timer. He had stayed long enough to cut Sergei free and carry him out.
I had told Zoe that Daniil saw people as assets, liabilities, or obstacles. Sergei Petrov was not an asset to the Sokolovs. He was an Orlov man, useful only as a corpse in the Voronins‘ plan. Daniil had carried him out anyway.
I filed that away. I would think about it later, when no one was watching.
I turned to my father. “They wanted us to find Sergei in a building the Sokolovs own and hear that Lev had ordered it. The card was there to support the story.”
Mikhail looked at me. The room was quiet. Anton had not spoken since I arrived. Roman stood by the door with his arms folded.
“We would have retaliated,” I continued. “The Sokolovs would have answered. The Voronins wouldn’t need to defeat either family. We would do it for them.”
My father studied me for a long moment. His dark eyes moved across my face, reading the analysis, testing it. Then he nodded.
“Anton,” he said. “She’s right.”
Anton pushed off the wall. “I know she’s right. I knew it before she walked in. I wanted to hear her say it.”
“Because?”
“Because she says it better than I do.” He looked at me. There was no resentment in it. Anton had grown up watching me translate our father’s instincts into words he could act on. He had made peace with it years ago.
Mikhail turned back to Sergei. “You will stay at the secure clinic until we’re certain the Voronins aren’t watching. Your wife is there right now, waiting.”
Sergei’s face changed. The toughness, the lucidity, the careful recitation of facts — all of it gave way. His mouth trembled. He pressed his lips together hard enough to turn them white.
“I tried to — when they showed me the photograph — I couldn’t call her. I couldn’t — “
“I know,” I said. I stood, moved my chair beside the bed.
I took his phone from the table beside the bed and put it in his hand.
“Call her,” I said. “Tell her you’re alive. Tell her you’re safe. You don’t have to tell her anything else.”
He dialed. The phone rang once. Half of a second ring.
“Sasha.” His voice broke on the first syllable. He pressed the phone against his ear and bent forward over his knees and the sound he made was not a word. It was the sound of a man who had been holding himself together for three days finally allowing someone else to hold the weight.
I sat beside him and said nothing. I listened to him tell his wife he was alive, he was safe, he loved her, he was sorry, he was sorry, he was sorry. I listened to the sound of her crying on the other end of the line — loud, uncontrolled, the crying of a woman who had spent three days not knowing.
I stayed until his voice steadied. Until the shaking in his hands slowed enough that he could hold the phone without it slipping. Until he said “I love you” one more time and hung up and sat back and wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“Thank you,” he said. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the phone in his hand.
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“Thank you,” he said again.
I stood. I squeezed his shoulder once — briefly, firmly — and left the room. Anton followed, and my father after.
“Ksenia, Anton, my office. Let’s talk.”
My father’s office faced the river.
It occupied the northeast corner of the second floor, and from his desk he could see the East River, the span of the Manhattan Bridge, and the stretch of Brooklyn waterfront that had been Orlov territory for longer than I had been alive.
He had chosen that view deliberately. Mikhail Orlov did not decorate by accident.
Every object in the room — the nautical chart framed behind his desk, the photograph of his own father standing on the Red Hook docks in 1974, the model of a container ship on the bookshelf — said something about who he was and what he intended to remain.
The desk was mahogany. Old, heavy, scarred at the corners where decades of use had worn through the polish.
He settled behind it with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of tea cooling at his elbow.
He had been here since before Sergei arrived.
I could see it in the lines around his eyes, the particular stillness of a man who had been angry for hours and had converted that anger into the kind of patience that was more dangerous than the anger itself.
Anton stood at the window, looking out at the water.
I sat in the chair across from his desk. The room smelled of tea and tobacco.
“Tomorrow evening,” Mikhail said. “Seven o’clock. Volna. Lev and I will have dinner together, publicly, with both families present. After dinner, Lev and I will meet privately to discuss compromised personnel and the Voronin operation.”
He paused. His fingers rested on the desk, flat, still.
“I need you there. Both of you.”
“The alliance needs to appear intact,” I said.
“The alliance needs to be intact.”
He looked at me. My father had dark eyes — the same eyes Anton and I had inherited, though in Anton they had hardened earlier and in me they had learned to soften on command.
In Mikhail they were simply watchful. He missed nothing, and he allowed people to believe he missed less than he did, which was its own form of strategy.
“If I don’t attend,” I said, “it looks like the Orlovs are hiding.”
“If you don’t attend, it looks like the Orlovs are fractured.
A father who has just been targeted by an enemy organization, whose employee was abducted and nearly killed, who cannot produce his daughter at a public dinner with his closest ally — that is a family in crisis.
That is a family the Voronins can pressure. ”
“And if I attend — “
“If you attend, the Orlovs are strong. Composed. The Pakhan’s son and daughter stand beside the Pakhan. The alliance is visible. The Voronins see two families operating as one.”
I understood. I had understood before he said it. The request was not a request. It was a deployment, and I was being deployed, and I would go because that was what I did.
“Will the Sokolovs bring their full family?” I asked.
I asked it the way I asked about the menu at a business lunch. Lightly. As though the answer were a logistical detail rather than the only thing I actually wanted to know.
Anton turned from the window. He looked at me with an expression I recognized — the slight narrowing of his eyes, the fractional tilt of his head. He had spent his entire life watching me the way I watched rooms, and he had learned to read the distance between what I asked and what I meant.