2. Ilya
Ilya
The phone goes off at half past one and I know before I answer that something is incredibly wrong. Partially because of the time, and partially because there are only four people alive who have this number and only one of them would use it at this hour.
"Speak." I command a half second after I swipe the screen to answer.
"The north house was breached." Andrei's voice is the same voice he uses to report a shipping delay. "Six intruders. They were inside for four minutes."
I am already off the couch and reaching for my coat. "Sergei?"
"Alive."
Alive. The answer makes my heart tighten. Not with relief, not quiet yet.
"You're not telling me all of it, Andrei."
A pause. Choosing his next words carefully, Andrei has never in nine years had to choose his words with me. Which makes my heart drop to the pit of my stomach.
"He was shot." He finally admits, rushing to continue, “But he is fine. It was just a graze.”
My coat is in my hand and I’m headed for the door. I don't remember picking it up, moving instead on autopilot while continuing to analyze the situation as it’s presented to me.
"Where?"
"The left arm. It went through the meat. Bogdan has cleaned and closed it and the boy is awake and talking. It will heal, Pakhan. Another four inches though–"
"Another four inches and what?" I demand.
"It would have pierced ... his heart."
That causes me to stop, standing still in both shock, and something more primal – anger – in the middle of my living room in a building I own with the city burning white below me.
I don’t say anything at all for four seconds.
I know it is four seconds because I count them, I count the breaths, forcing myself to calm.
That’s how I deal, how I handle things under pressure. I count the seconds. Since I was nineteen years old, it is the only reason I am still standing here today. The discipline to fight my gut instinct to burn the world down around me out of pure volatile response.
"You will tell me the rest, leave nothing out," I say. "In order from the beginning of what you know, and you will not be mindful of any part of it. Now speak."
He tells me everything. The security envelope went down as a power event and came back on its own after five minutes and eleven seconds, which is a thing that has never happened in the three years since its installation.
By best count four or five men had entered the house.
Federal, by the movement — he says this the way a man identifies a rifle by its report.
They went for the office and the east wing and they were gone through the tree line before the extra security reached the gate.
Except one.
"We have one of them. Alive. I’m having him held at the cabin.”
"And the office?" I ask instead.
"A file is missing."
I close my eyes.
"Which file?"
"The Gulf routing. Ports and brokers." He lets that sit for a moment. "They left no prints behind. Nothing, the cameras were down and didn’t catch their faces either, and a five-minute hole in the recording where they were down. What I have been able to gather is minimal, but something."
"Send it to the car."
The car is alread ready downstairs, Grigor had been alerted of the incident and was there waiting.
He’d been driving for me for eleven years now and knows what the phone at a half past one means.
Nothing good. We are on the Palisades in under a quarter hour and I watch the footage on the tablet in the back seat.
There isn’t much. The loops come back on and the corridor camera catches perhaps nine seconds before the feed cuts again, and it is nine seconds of a masked figure in black going down onto the carpet shielding my son.
I watch it four times.
Medium height. Slight build. Moves like he’s had extensive training — or experience. Not military, the footwork is wrong for military, it's tighter than that, it's the movement of a person taught to control a situation without over-filling it.
Going to one knee in front of the boy. Hands off their weapon. It is left to hang, which is either the most reckless thing I have ever seen a professional do. Or it’s deliberate. Because nothing else in those nine seconds is quite as reckless.
Then someone else comes through the door at the end of the hall, also dressed in all black, the figure moves faster than the frame rate can follow, and my son is on the floor under their body in a microsecond, and then the feed dies.
I watch it a fifth time. You put your own body over his to protect him.
I set the tablet face down on the seat and look out the window at nothing for the rest of the drive. By the time we turn off onto the county road I have decided the order of what I am going to do to the person in that cabin, and it’s a long list.
The house is lit up like a holiday party when we arrive. Six of Andrei's men on the premeter and two more on the roof. Every window blazing with light, which is exactly the opposite of what I want right now.
Let’s just announce to the world that I’ve been robbed. I chastize internally, making a note to remind Andrei that appearances matter later. Pushing the irritation aside it only takes me half a dozen strides to breach the front door, there is only one thing in this house I want and it is upstairs.
Bogdan meets me in the hall. He is sixty-one and has taken more bullets out of my people than any surgeon in the state. Thankfully, he doesn’t bother with the greeting.
"Four centimetres wide, no muscle involvement. It will scar. He impressed me, was calm when I closed it up." He hesitates, which is unlike him. "He was calmer than you usually are even."
"Is he awake?" I ask.
"He is awake." He confirms.
I go up the stairs two at a time. When I reach his door it’s open and the lamp is on and my Sergei suddenly seems so very small in a bed that is too large for him.
He sit’s there propped up on three pillows with his left arm wrapped from shoulder to elbow.
Dark hair flat against his forehead where the sweat has dried.
He sees me and a look of silent relief crosses his face. I stop three feet from the bed.
This is the part I don’t do well.
I can take a room from four armed men. I can sit across a table from a Sicilian who wanted me dead. But I cannot cross three feet of carpet to give my own ten-year-old flesh and blood reassurance that a child surely deserves.
"Does it hurt?" I ask, breaking the awkward silence.
It comes out flat. Worse than flat — it comes out like the first question in a job interview.
"Not much." He says with a small shrug, his voice thin. "Bogdan gave me something for the pain and in case of fever."
I nod. Crossing my arms, trying to feign indifference. "Did you see any of their faces?"
"No."
"How many were there?"
"I don't know."
"Did they come in the front stair or the back?"
"I don't—" He stops. His hands have gone tight on the blanket and his voice rises in frustration. "I don't know. I don't know."
Stop, I yell at myself. He is not a witness. He is my son and I am standing over his bed at three in the morning demanding a statement.
This is what I do — this is what I have always done — I come into a room and the temperature drops and everything in it becomes something to be managed.
His mother used to say that.
"You should sleep," I say. Pivoting from interrogator to empathizer as best I can.
I stand there a moment longer, and then I turn for the door, leaving is the only thing I have ever been able to give him that he actually wants.
"Papa."
That stops me just shy of the doorway. He has not called me that in at least a year. I look back at him over my shoulder and wait for him to continue.
"Don't punish the woman."
The woman.
I assume he means the housekeeper I’d hired eight months ago on the strength of a childcare certification and four years of competitive judo.
The woman I paid a great deal of money to stand between this boy and precisely what happened tonight.
She was in this house, in the east wing while a federal team walked my son's corridor.
I’d already decided she would no longer be employed by me past dawn.
Something must move in my face, because Sergei's grip tightens on the blanket again.
"Please."
He rarely asks me for anything, the small tone in his voice pulls at my chest strings.
"If that is what you want," I hear myself say, "then she stays."
He lets go of the blanket.
I get out of the room before I can say anything else to him, and stand in the corridor with my hand flat against the wall for a moment. Steadying myself. Then I go down the stairs and head out across the wet grass to the cabin, and by the time I reach the door I feel myself again.
The cabin has one room and a generator and a tiny window. Andrei is inside with two others. And seated in the chair in the middle of the floor, wrists zip-tied behind the back rail, head down, is a figure in black tactical gear and a face cover.
Small. Slighter than I expected, even after reviewing the video footage.
“Is he awake?"
"If he isn’t he will be now," Andrei says, wringing his hands together. "Nothing on him. No ID. No phone, no wallet, no dog tags. Side arms a Glock 19, Colt LE6920."
“Hmmm,” I grumble. “FBI then.”
Andrei nods in agreement.
I pull a chair across and sit down in front of our prisoner, close enough that our knees would touch if either of us leaned forward.
"You are awake," I say. "Your breathing grew rapid the second I said FBI."
The prisoner doesn’t respond, instead, there’s an obvious effort to slow his breathing again.
"Good. Let me explain our little situation here, and you listen carefully.
" I keep my voice conversational, which is a choice, and one that has historically worked better than the alternative.
"You entered my property. You put a bullet through my son.
And there is a file missing from my house.
I want it back and I want the name of the man who told you where to find me. "
I’m met with silence. They give away nothing. Nothing.
I try again. "You will give me the file.
You will give me the name. Then, because I am not a sentimental man and you are not a stupid one hopefully, you will give me the rest of it — the office you report to, the case number you're working on, the names of those who came here with you.
" I let a silence fill the space between us for a moment, before adding, "Then we will discuss what your future looks like. "
Again I’m met with nothing. Not a shift of weight. Not a murmur under their breath. Just nothing.
And that — that — is what starts to get to me. Because I have sat in this chair a number of times before tonight and there is always something. A swallow. A tightening in the shoulders. The body tells on people long before the mouth does, and yet his body is telling me nothing at all.
"Andrei.” I turn to look at him. “What did the shot look like on the recording?"
"There's no frame on the shot.” He says with a shrug. “There's only the nine seconds after."
"And in the nine seconds after?" I ask it even though I already know the answer. I want him to know what the cameras caught.
Andrei is quiet, eyebrows raised in slight confusion. Then: "This one covered Sergei."
I look back at the figure in the chair.
"Why?" I ask, voice still conversational. “Why protect a child you don’t know from one of your own? After breaking into his home?”
Nothing.
"You had a window. You had ninety seconds to get out, perhaps two minutes, and every man you came in with used it.
They left you. Hell, they are probably off drinking coffee somewhere south of here right about now.
" I lean in then, our knees touching ever so slightly and a strange unfamiliar warmth runs up my legs.
"Yet you stayed. There is no version of your training that recommends that. Unless you're intended to be a plant. So I am asking you why, and I am asking politely. Mark my words, this is the last time I’ll ask from this chair."
Silence. Utter, flat, professional silence.
My patience is not infinite and it has been a long night, so finally something in me comes loose.
I stand up, grabbing a hold of the front of the figure's vest, and I want to see exactly who I’m about to destroy before I lose my temper completely, I take a fistful of the balaclava face covering and pull it off.
Long dark hair comes down out of it in a cascading mess.
Shit. A woman. I stare in utter disbelief.
Thirty, perhaps. She is looking straight up at me without an ounce of fear in her face anywhere, none, not a milligram of it.
A sudden spark goes through me that has absolutely no busines in this room.
She is beautiful, not in a conventional way, no – in a dangerous way.
Those wide green eyes, combined with the dusting of freckles across her cheeks, the bridge of her nose.
The absences of fear in their beautiful depths, the way her hair has slipped from its tie and fights to fall down along the side of her neck.
The mess of it makes me want to reach out and touch it on some odd impulse that I have to fight to resist.
This isn’t a woman afraid of consequences. No, this is a woman who is daring me to give them to her.
The floor goes sideways under me. Not because she is a woman — I have known a great many dangerous women and buried two. But because Sergei’s voice comes back to me then.
Don't punish the woman.
Not the housekeeper. He didn’t mean the housekeeper.
"You will stay here as my prisoner until I decide how to kill you." I say through clenched teeth.
She works her jaw side to side, then spits blood onto the floor between my feet. And then she looks up at me through the hair in her face — and smiles.