6. Raven
Raven
The gap in between the cameras is twelve minutes and it took me six days to find it. Not one gap. Two half-gaps that overlap for twelve minutes, twice a night — the seam where two systems meet and neither one quite covers the other.
That's half of it. The other half is Grigor.
Grigor walks to the generator shed at eight and again at two, he does it in the same order every time, and on the second walk he stops in the lee of the shed and smokes a cigarette he is clearly not supposed to be smoking.
That's four minutes with his back to the north face, plus a minute either side of him getting there and getting back.
Overlap the two and you get twelve minutes, twice a night, where the north tree line is not watched by a machine or man.
I've had it for two days and I've spent both of them checking it, because you don't bet your life on a pattern you've seen once. Now, I've seen it four times.
Six days to get here, and most of that wasn't watching. Most of it was making myself boring. That's the part they don't teach you and you only learn once — the work isn't finding the seam, the work is being a person nobody thinks to watch while you find it.
So for six days I have been exactly what they expected when they hauled me out of that shed. Difficult in small, harmless ways. Bad at cooking, worse at pretending otherwise. Loud about the small things. I complained to Andrei about the coffee three separate times.
I have gone to bed at ten every single night, and laid there fully dressed counting camera sweeps through the window. I made sure to be caught looking out of it on day two, so that by day four nobody thought anything further of it.
You want to be predictable. Predictable is a coat you put on so you can leave in it.
The rest of it I got sideways. The generator shed I got from a ten-year-old thief.
The wind and the dogs I got from the cabin.
Grigor's cigarette I got from a torn filter in the grass by the north face, still dry when the ground around it wasn't, which meant it hadn't been there long and meant somebody stands in that spot regularly enough to be careless in it.
Nobody handed me anything. I built this out of a cigarette end and a chewed lead and six days of being unremarkable, and I want that on the record, because in about forty minutes I'm going to throw all of it away.
I've got a coat off the boot room hook — Karina's, dark, too big, which is better.
I've got a lighter and forty-one dollars from a drawer in the utility corridor that nobody has opened in a at least year, judging by the dust on the runner.
I've got a bottle of water inside the coat and my boots laced tight.
I have been lying on top of my covers fully dressed since eleven. At 1:51 I go out the utility door.
It opens from the inside. Andrei told me that himself on day one, as a boast, and it never once seems to have occurred to him that a door which opens from the inside is still a door.
The cold comes up off the wet grass and takes the breath out of me. Forty feet of open lawn to the first hedge and it is the longest forty feet I have ever crossed — no cover, no story if anyone sees me, just a woman in a stolen coat walking away from a house at two in the morning.
Hedge. Down behind it. Count to ten.
Nothing.
Then the long ground.
There's two hundred metres of open lawn between the hedge and the tree line and it slopes up, which is a small cruelty, and I run it in a low crouch that turns my thighs to acid inside of sixty seconds.
The grass is soaked. My boots come down with a sound I hate every time.
Halfway across I go flat because a light comes on in the east wing, and I lie in the wet with my heart going like a bird for ninety seconds until it goes off again — somebody up for a glass of water, somebody's bad night, not mine.
Move.
I move.
The tree line is a relief so physical it's almost sexual. Cover. Trunks and dark and the ground going soft underfoot. I get thirty metres in before I let myself stop, one hand flat on the bark of a birch, breathing like a bellows and grinning like an idiot in the pitch black.
I’m out.
Four hundred metres of woodland, then the fence, and the fence is a fence — eight foot, no razor, sensor line at the base that I can get over if I go up a tree and out along a limb, which I have picked out in daylight from the window seat in Sergei's room while pretending to look at a model ship.
Then two miles of state land to the county road.
Then a truck stop, a phone, and somebody who isn't Bureau.
That last part is the part I hadn't solved.
Nine years of contacts and every one of them has now read three pages by Louis about a corridor.
There's my mother in Bethesda, who I can't go near — first place anyone looks, and putting a sixty-eight-year-old woman between me and a federal warrant is not something I'm prepared to do twice in one lifetime.
There's Foster, who arrested nobody and signed nothing, and whose apartment is probably being watched.
So the plan past the fence is thin. The plan past the fence is get past the fence and become a problem somewhere else, which is not a plan, it's a direction.
You take the door that's open and you solve the next problem from inside the next room.
I move through the woodland faster than I should. Roots and leaf litter the ground, and I’m met by the smell of wet earth. Somewhere off to the left a deer breaks and crashes away through the dark and my whole body goes liquid for a second before my brain catches up.
Two hundred metres. My hands are shaking and it isn't from the cold and it isn't fear. It’s from excitement. Six days of being cooped up in that house and every muscle in my body is ready for chaos.
I'm three hundred metres in and moving well when I hear it. At first it's nothing. A bird, maybe. The kind of noise the woods make. Then it comes again and I know instanlty it isn't a bird.
It's a child screaming.
I stop.
I stop so completely that I hear my own coat settle, and I stand in the dark with one hand on a tree and I listen to Sergei Yaroslav screaming my name across two hundred metres of open lawn.
Not crying. Not the nightmare, either — I know the nightmare, the nightmare doesn't have words in it.
This is the other thing. This is a kid out on the terrace in the dark yelling for somebody, over and over, and the sound is climbing at the end of every repetition, and I know exactly what that climb means because I have heard it twice this week.
Behind me: four hundred metres of woodland, a fence, two miles, a truck stop.
Go.
I don't move.
He's ten and he's in a house with six armed men and a doctor on the property. He is the single most protected child in the state of New York. Somebody will reach him in thirty seconds and they will do exactly what they have been doing for years.
Which is stand there and do nothing.
That's the thing. That's the thing that has me by the throat, standing in the wet dark three hundred metres from the fence.
They'll reach him. And they'll get it wrong. Andrei will fill the doorway and make it worse. Karina goes home at seven. His father stands in a corridor with his hand flat against the wall and waits for it to stop.
Nobody in that house knows how to help bring him down.
I do.
I look at the trees around me. Four hundred metres.
Twelve minutes, of which I have burned maybe five, and I will never have this again — they will find this seam within a week, they will move Grigor's cigarette or reseed the cameras, and I will spend eighty-four more days in a house I cannot leave while somewhere Louis writes another three pages about my false sins.
This is my life. That's what's on the other end of these trees. My name, my badge, my family. Everything I built out of a bad situation, a worse boyfriend, and a father who got shot for saying no.
And on this end of it there's a kid I have known for six days.
It's not even close, I tell myself. Professionally, it's not even close.
And it isn't. That's the thing. If you put this scenario in front of any instructor I ever had, any one of them, they'd tell you the same: the operational objective is exfiltration.
The asset is not your issue, the child is not in danger, and a bodyguard who blows a two-day window on a panic attack has confused her job with her feelings.
I could write the review myself. In fact, I have written that review, about other people.
He isn't dying. Nobody's going to let him get hurt. Somebody will reach him.
They'll do nothing.
I have been in that room multiple times now, and what I actually saw was not a boy having an attack. It was a boy having an attack in a house where years ago the person who came when he screamed stopped coming, and everyone else has never made it past the door.
He's out there in the dark yelling for me by name.
Six days, and he has a name to yell, and it's mine, and I know exactly what a kid like that has to go through to pick someone.
The screaming climbs again, thin and getting thinner. I stand there for about four seconds and I use every one of them to hate this situation. Then I turn around and I run back down the hill.
Downhill is faster and I don't crouch, because there's no point now — I take the open lawn flat out with the coat flapping and my lungs burning and I come around the corner of the east wing at a dead sprint.
He's on the terrace with bare feet.
Andrei's about six feet from him with both hands half-raised as if contemplating how to stop him, and it's the single most useless posture I have ever seen a competent man adopt. And there’s Sergei, backed against the stone balustrade with his eyes fixed on nothing.
"Turn the light off," I instruct. "Andrei, back up."
Andrei looks at me, his eyes narrowing.
"Back up."
He backs up.
I go down onto my knees on the freezing stone about three feet in front of the boy, which puts my head below his, but I don't touch him.
"Sergei. It's Raven. Two hands." I hold them up in front of him. "Count them."
Nothing. His breathing is a disaster — high, fast, all chest.
"Sergei. Two hands." I repeat.
"—two."
"Two. Good. Now five things you can see. Out loud."
It takes him a long time. The light, which is off. The stone. The door. My coat.
"That's four."
"...You."
"That's five." I sit back on my heels. "Four things you can hear."
He gets to four. He's shaking so hard his teeth are going and his feet must be blue on that stone but you don't move them until they're back, you never move them until they're back, and by the third round of it his shoulders have come down out of his ears and he's making noise on the intake instead of nothing at all.
"You're ok," I tell him.
"I couldn't find you." It comes out wrecked. "I went in your room and the bed was—"
"I know."
"—the bed wasn't slept in and I thought—"
"I know. I know, kid."
And then he steps forward and puts his forehead against my shoulder, which he has not done, which nobody in this house has done, and stands there shivering.
I put one hand on his back.
Over the top of his head I can see the lawn I just crossed twice, silver with wet, and the tree line above it going black against the sky. Somewhere in there is a birch I put my hand on.
"I'm not going to lie to you," I say, quietly, into his hair.
"So I'm not going to promise I'll be here forever, because I don't know that.
But I'm here tonight, and I'll be here tomorrow, and if that changes you'll hear it from me first and not from an empty bed. That's what I've got. Is that enough?"
He nods against my shoulder.
I get him inside. Andrei carries him the last of the way up the stairs, because the boy's feet are genuinely too cold to walk on and because Andrei asks — actually asks, one word, looking at me and not at Sergei.
At the top of the stairs he hands him over without a word.
I get his feet warm, then get him into bed. I do the counting twice more, and it's nearly half three before he goes under properly and I can straighten up with my knees screaming and my clothes soaked through to the skin.
Andrei's waiting for me in the corridor outside.
He looks at the coat. He looks at the mud up my legs to the knee, and the grass seed, and the state of my boots.
I wait for it. I've got about four sentences ready and none of them are any good.
"Utility door?" He asks.
"Yes."
"Two o'clock."
"1:52."
He nods slowly, like I've confirmed a figure in a report. Then he says: "The cigarettes. I have told him about those damn cigarettes."
"Not hard enough, apparently."
"No." A pause. "Apparently not."
And that's it. That's the whole conversation.
He doesn't ask why I came back and I don't offer, he turns and goes down the stairs, and it isn't until he's gone that I realise he never once looked toward Ilya's end of the corridor — which means he already knows, and has known since before he asked, and every question he just asked me was a courtesy.
Great. Wonderful. The mute one has manners.
And when I turn around, Ilya is at the end of the corridor. Coat on. Keys in his hand. The same six feet from the door as before, the same everything.
Except tonight he isn't looking at the door.
He's looking at me — at the stolen coat, at the mud up my legs to the knee, at the grass seed in my hair — and I understand with total clarity that he has been home longer than I thought.
That he watched me cross that lawn. That he stood at a window in an unlit house and watched a woman in a servant's coat go up his north slope at two in the morning, and did not send a single man after me.
That he watched me stop in the tree line. And that he stood there, for however long it took, waiting to see which way I came out.
Neither of us says anything for a long moment. My heart is still going and there's an entire conversation happening that neither of us is audibly having.
Say it, I think. Ask me. Ask me where I was going and let's have it out right here. Right now.
He doesn't.
"Tomorrow," Ilya says, "you will teach me how to do that for him. The counting thing."
Then he turns and walks away, leaving me alone in the hallway with nothing more than my thoughts, and the silence around me.