Chapter 17 #2
“I know.”
“He’ll take the resignation, take the freight operation, and keep her. Or he’ll take you both. You know that.”
“I know.”
“Then what are you doing?”
I looked at my brother. His hands on the wheel.
The scar on his forearm. The jaw set like concrete.
Arkady, who had spent his entire life being the violent solution, the weapon, the man who broke things when they needed breaking.
He was looking at me with something I rarely saw on his face — not anger, not calculation, but fear.
The particular fear of a man watching his brother walk toward something he could not protect him from.
“Just help me make sure she gets out, Arkady,” I said.
My brother looked at the road. His jaw worked. His hands tightened on the wheel.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
“I need Nikita outside that garage. I need him in the car. I need him to be the one who takes her when she walks out. I need you close enough to get her clear if something goes wrong. And I need you to promise me something.”
“What.”
“If she gets out and I don’t—if Oleg takes me, if it goes sideways, if the deal breaks—you take her and you go. You put her on that plane to Chicago. You don’t come back for me.”
Arkady’s hands tightened further. The knuckles went white.
“Daniil—”
“Promise me.”
“I can’t—”
“Arkady. Promise me. If she is out and I am not, you take her and you go. That is not a request.”
The truck was silent. The engine. The road. The gray sky through the windshield. My brother’s face, working through something he did not want to accept.
“I promise,” he said.
“Now, let’s go to that tile showroom. We have work to do.”
I picked up the phone. I opened the camera. I looked at the screen—my own face, pale, the ice-blue eyes flat and hard, the face of a man about to record the end of everything his father had built.
I pressed record.
The tile showroom sat on a flat stretch of industrial road between two warehouses, its glass front reflecting the grey November sky and the red and blue lights of three emergency vehicles still parked at the curb.
Police tape crossed the entrance in a loose X.
The wrecked SUV was fifty yards east, lodged against a concrete barrier at an angle that made the vehicle look like it had been dropped from a height.
The driver’s door was open. The rear window was gone—not shattered, simply absent, the frame holding nothing but cold air.
Arkady pulled the truck to the curb. I was out before he stopped.
A police officer tried to intercept me at the tape. Nikita handled him—credentials, rapid Russian-accented English. I did not hear the exchange. I was already through the door.
The showroom was small. Carpeted. Sample boards on the walls.
A reception counter at the center, behind which a woman sat in a chair with a blanket around her shoulders and a paper cup of water in her hands.
She was middle-aged. Brown hair. Her face was pale and her hands shook when she lifted the cup.
I looked at the carpet.
The blood was there. Four feet from the counter—a smear, dark against the gray industrial fiber.
I could see the path of it: a drop near the door where she must have entered, a streak along the display rack where she had run between the tile samples, and the larger stain where she had sheltered behind the counter and waited.
I knelt beside the stain. I put my hand on the carpet, next to where hers had been. The fiber was stiff. Drying.
“Sir?”
I stood. The woman was looking at me. Her eyes were red. The blanket slipped from one shoulder and she pulled it back.
“You’re her husband,” she said.
“Yes. Tell me what happened.”
She told me.
Ksenia had come in bare-armed. No coat. Her blouse torn at the collar.
Her hand bleeding. She had said: they’re trying to take me.
Please. The woman had called the police.
She had guided Ksenia behind the counter.
She had thought—for a moment, for two minutes—that it would be enough.
That the police would come and the glass door would hold and the woman crouching behind her counter would be safe.
Then Oleg had come through the door.
“He was enormous,” she said. “I’ve never seen a man that big in a suit. And he was—he was polite. He introduced himself. She hit him.”
The woman’s mouth moved — not a smile, something closer to disbelief.
“She came up from behind the counter and she went for the side door and he caught her and she turned around and she punched him in the mouth. With her fist. With the hand that was bleeding. She hit him so hard his head went sideways.”
I looked at the counter. At the carpet. At the space between them where my wife had stood and fought a man who outweighed her by a hundred pounds.
“He had a pistol,” the woman said. “He pointed it at me. He said she had to come with him, or I would die. Right here. In my showroom.” She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “She stopped. She just—stopped. She looked at me and she stopped fighting. She went with him.”
“Thank you.”
I opened my mouth to say something else—to say what, I did not know, something that would be adequate to what this woman had done, something that would convey the fact that she had called the police and guided my wife behind a counter and been threatened with death for it—and nothing came.
My throat closed. I stood in a tile showroom and I could not speak.
The woman looked at me. She reached across the counter. She touched my hand—a brief, light pressure, the gesture of a person who understood that the man standing in front of her was holding himself together with something thinner than thread.
“She’s strong,” the woman said. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“She’ll be okay.”
I nodded. I did not trust my voice. I turned and I walked out of the showroom and the cold air hit my face and I stood on the sidewalk beside the police tape and I breathed.
I took out my phone. I called Sal.
He answered on the first ring.
“Daniil, cugino.”
“She’s been taken. Oleg Voronin. Near Teterboro. I need everything you can spare. The plane—keep it available. A doctor. Men. Whatever you have in New York or can get here within the hour.”
Sal was quiet for two seconds. I heard the silence of a man who had fought his own war and understood what the words meant.
“The plane is yours,” he said. “I have four men in the city—Scordato security, armed, licensed. I’ll have them at your location in twenty minutes. A doctor—I’ll find one. Give me the address of where you need them.”
I gave him the address of Sokolov House. “We’re heading there now.”
“Yelena knows,” Sal said. “She’s ready.”
“Thank you.”
“Daniil.”
“Yes.”
“Bring her home.”
I hung up.
She was a fighter. She had done everything in her power to escape. For herself, but for me, too. I couldn’t just give up everything my father had built, Ksenia wouldn’t want that. I had to be a fighter, like her.
Arkady stood beside me. Nikita stood beside him. My brothers. The road. The grey sky. The wrecked SUV against the concrete barrier and the police tape across the glass door and the blood on the carpet inside.
I looked at Arkady.
“How do we get her out alive?”
307 Brighton Beach Avenue. The building rose from the street in dark stone and smoked glass, discreet and immovable.
I had walked through these doors ten thousand times.
I had sat in my father’s office and listened to him give orders.
I had stood in this hallway as a boy and watched men kiss his ring.
Now I walked through the doors as a man whose wife was in a garage in Hackensack with a man who had helped murder her father.
Men stood in clusters—Sokolov soldiers, captains, people who had heard something was wrong and come to headquarters because headquarters was where you went when things were wrong. They parted for me. They watched my face. Whatever they saw there, they did not ask questions.
Arkady followed. Nikita followed. We went upstairs to the office. Lev’s office. My office.
I stood at the window and I looked at the street below and I waited for my brothers.
Arkady entered first. He closed the door. He stood with his back against it, arms crossed, his face set in the hard blank mask that meant he was ready to do violence and waiting for the word.
Nikita entered last. He pocketed his phone. He leaned against the bookshelf, his posture casual, his green eyes sharp.
“We’re getting her back,” I said.
The words came out flat. No emphasis. No heat. The cold had stripped everything from my voice except the information itself.
“The plan is this.” I turned from the window.
“I give Oleg what he asked for. The recording. The orders. I go to the garage. I walk in alone and unarmed. Nikita waits outside in a car. Ksenia walks out before I enter—she gets in the car with Nikita and she leaves. The moment she is clear, you move.”
“Move how?” Arkady said.
“You, Anton, and Sal’s men. Out of sight until Nikita confirms she’s clear. Then you hit the garage. Recover me. Take Kostya alive.”
The room was quiet. The harbor light came through the windows—gray, thin, November light that fell across the desk and the chair and the photographs on the wall.
“Kostya,” Nikita said.
“Kostya can expose the conspiracy behind our fathers’ murders.
He has the information—names, contacts, the chain of communication between himself and Viktor.
He is worth more alive than dead. Oleg without Kostya is a son without his father’s network.
He loses the men, the infrastructure, the protection Kostya has been building from inside the Orlov organization.
We take Kostya and we take the evidence and we dismantle the Voronin operation from the inside. ”
“And Oleg?” Arkady asked.
“Whatever it takes.”