8. Raven
Raven
His office is the one room in this house that tells the truth about him.
Everywhere else is cedar and stone and a decorator's idea of a family.
This is dark wood with no photographs and a desk the size of a dining table.
One wall of is lined with books that have all actually been read judging by the spine wear, and theres a single chair on the visitor's side positioned about a foot further back than it needs to be.
I pull it forward, sit in it, and put my feet up on the corner of his desk, making myself at home. It's been a night, he can deal.
He notices. But he doesn't say anything about it.
"What’s your preference? Whiskey? Gin?"
"Whatever's open."
He pours two tumblers of dark liquor and hands me one before sitting down on the edge of the desk rather than behind it. Which puts him about four feet away and above me, I move my feet and sit up properly. Hating that I move on instinct alone.
"Tell me how it is going." He instructs. “You’ve been here a week.”
"You want the version I'd give a supervisor or the honest one?"
"I have a policy against lies and fluff. Give me the honest version."
I turn the glass around in my hand, fidgeting with it. "I'm bad at this. Not the security piece — that’s all fine, your perimeter's better than most federal buildings and your indoor coverage has four gaps I'd have informed you of on day one if anyone had asked my opinion on it.”
I glance up at him over the brim of the tumbler as I take a sip before finishing.
“It’s the rest of it. He's ten but yet, he isn’t.
He’s too smart for his own good, he challenges me at every turn, and yet, I enjoy his company.
But I have no instincts for this. Hell, I gave him tradecraft advice when he came to see me in the cabin. "
"I’d argue that you have better instincts than you give yourself credit for.” He pauses for a moment, sipping on his own glass. “Anyway, I didn’t hire your instincts?”
"Then why did you hire me?"
"Because, for reasons unknown you risked your own life for my boy. And I’m willing to bet you’d do it again. You did actually, when you came back across that lawn. You didn’t know what the repurcussions of your attempt to leave would be, and yet here you are.”
This time the whiskey stops halfway to my mouth. That confirms it, he was watching.
"I want to ask you about the staff," I say after another sip, because I'm not going near that other topic tonight.
"There's six men on this property and none of them are for him.
Karina goes home at seven. He's alone in his own wing with one adult, whoever you've hired that month.
That's not a security posture, that's a gapping hole, and I've been trying for a week to work out whether you know that or not. "
"I know it."
"Then—"
"Every person in this house is a person he has to survive.
" He says it flatly. "Six men in a corridor is not protection to him, it is six men in a corridor.
The last time this house was full of staff he was six years old, and he stopped speaking for months, the doctors used a great deal of language to tell me what I already knew, which is that people frighten him and the number of people that were in this house is what frightens him. "
He drinks, then continues. "So I have chosen the smaller risk. One person. The right person. Everyone else outside his side of the house."
"That's a hell of a bet."
"I suppose."
"And when the right person turns out to be the wrong one?"
"Then it was the wrong person," Ilya says, "and I am aware of the risk, Miss West, I have run it more often than you have."
"Okay. Then tell me the rest of it. Because I see a kid who has panic attacks two or three times a week, who's had them for years, who doesn't like to go outside, and who has a shrine in his room that nobody's allowed to touch — and I'm supposed to keep him alive, and I'm doing it blind."
He's quiet for long enough that I think he's going to refuse to answer. Surprising me when he does.
"His mother took her own life," he says after drinking the rest of his tumbler and moving to refill it. "Four years ago, in the bathroom at the end of that corridor. She was thirty-one."
I don't say anything. Dumbfounded.
"Sergei found her."
Oh my God.
"He was six," Ilya keeps going. The dam that had been intact until now broken between us. "He went to find her because he had been calling for her, and she hadn’t answered, the door was locked. Andrei broke it the rest of the way open about ninety seconds later, and carried her out past him."
And a piece of this house drops into place with a sound I can almost hear.
"That's why Andrei won't guard him."
"Andrei has never once said that to me." He turns his glass. "But yes. I suppose it is."
"Does Sergei know he was the one who—"
"Sergei was standing in the corridor. He knows precisely what he saw." Ilya looks at the wall. "They have not been able to be in a room comfortably since. Neither of them has ever mentioned it. It is, I think, the single greatest act of politeness I have witnessed between two people."
I put my glass down because my hand isn't entirely steady now.
"So he's more comfortable around women."
"His mother was the only person he was close to for the first six years of his life. That was — " and here something goes across his face that I file for later " — that was arranged. Not by him."
"Arranged how?"
"She didn’t want me near him." He says it without any judgement. "Ours was a marriage of alliance. She was given to me at twenty-four by a father who had already done a great deal of damage, and she wanted nothing from me besides a child.”
He pauses then, looking deep into the amber liquid in his glass as he leans back against the desk.
“I decided the kindest thing I could do was be absent.
So I was absent. My presence upset her, so I removed my presence, including from the nursery, I told myself for six years that was a form of respect. "
He drinks. "It was not respect. It was convenience wearing respect's coat. She was drowning in this house while I was in the city being considerate, and by the time I understood that, she’d already been dead a year."
"And now you can't go into his room."
"No. I cannot."
"Because?"
"Because I don’t know what to do when I get there," Ilya says earnestly, "and he knows it."
I have no idea what to do with that. It's the most naked thing anyone has said to me in about nine years, delivered by a man in a thousand-dollar shirt who kills people who get in his way.
So I steer hard for the exit, which is what I always do. "Right. Well. Speaking of things I don't understand you said a file was taken."
"Which file?"
"The one that walked out of your safe the night you caught me." I sit forward. "Andrei said one was gone. You've never once asked me about it."
"I assumed you would lie."
"Try me." I say with a shrug.
He looks at me for a long moment. “Did you take that file?”
“No,” I tell him honestly. “I did not.”
I hold my glass out to him, a silent request for another. He watches me careful for a moment, then sets his own glass down on the desk beside him before taking mine and moving to refill it.
Then as he does so he says: "That file contained the Gulf routing information. Ports, brokers, it was four sheets of information that only a handful of people knew about."
"I never had it."
"Are you sure about that?" He presses as he moves back to the desk and hands me the glass back.
"I mean it. I photographed forty pages off your desk but I took nothing.
Taking things is how you alert someone to your presence, its how you fold a case.
But photographs are how you get evidence, I'd have had that and been out of this house clean if one of my own men hadn't fired on Sergei.
" I hold his eyes. "I didn't take your file, Ilya. Somebody standing next to me did."
He goes very still, and I can see him running it — the same run I've been doing for a week and getting nowhere with, because I've been asking why did they shoot a child and the answer only works if you ask a different question first. Why did they need a distraction?
"You believe that," he says.
"I've had days to think about it. Louis had to be the one who fired in that corridor with no order and no threat, and then he wrote three pages about it that put the gun in my hand." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to.
"That's not panic. Panic doesn't write three pages.
Somebody sent my team into your house to take one specific thing and to make sure the only person who could contradict the story about it never made it out.
I walked them in the door. But I was never intended to make it out.
To this day I wonder if that bullet was intended for Sergei," I pause, sipping. “Or for me.”
"What was in the safe was not evidence," Ilya says slowly. "It was a supply chain. Ports, brokers, the men who sign for a container without reading it."
"For what? What are you actually moving?"
He doesn't blink.
"Weapons. Small arms, mostly, in legitimate freight, on paperwork that is genuinely correct up until the last two hundred miles. Yaroslav Freight moves about nine thousand containers a month and eleven of them are mine."
"Only eleven?"
"It isn’t necessary to be greedy when you are the only road in and out."
Well. There it is. No hedging, no euphemism, no import-export. He's just handed me the thing I came into this house to find, freely, with a drink in my hand — and the awful part is I know exactly why he can afford to. Nobody's coming for a fugitive's testimony.
"You just told a federal agent what you do for a living."
"I told a woman in my employment," he contradicts. "The federal agent is a legal fiction currently maintained by four sworn statements and a man with a broken nose."
I stand up, because sitting has stopped being an option, and cross to the window and look out at nothing.
"Why did you stay?" he says behind me.
"You've asked me that."