10. Ilya
Ilya
Yeremey is in my office before the building is properly awake, which means he has not been to bed.
"Nineteen minutes," he says, dropping into the chair. "You want to know how Andrei was at that window nineteen minutes early."
"I know how. I want to know from where."
"A man I keep at a diner on Route 9 called it in.
Black Suburban, two occupants, stopped for coffee, neither of them drank and then turned north onto a road that goes to four houses, three of which are shut for the winter.
" He rubs his eyes. "That is the entire warning system, Ilya.
One tired man in a diner. It worked this time. "
"And the vehicle?"
"Plates come back to a leasing company in Newark that has eleven vehicles and no employees." He shrugs. "A shell company owns the company. I can walk it, but I already know what I'll find at the end of it, because I've walked four of these in the last year. It's Italian money."
I turn that over.
"Then why announce themselves? They sat on a private road with their lamps on for six minutes and then backed out two hundred meters nose-first. That is not surveillance. Surveillance does not want to be seen."
"No," Yeremey agrees. "Surveillance doesn't. But a survey does."
"Explain."
"They weren't watching the house. They were making the house watch them.
" He leans forward. "You sit outside a place at three in the morning with your lights on, and you learn everything.
How fast a man gets to a window. Whether there's a rifle behind it.
Whether anybody comes down the drive to have a conversation about it.
In six minutes they mapped your response posture without firing a shot, and by backing out they made sure the only plate angle you have is one you can't run past a company with no employees. "
The city is coming up grey outside the glass. Somewhere below us, 1,100 people are arriving to move 9,000 containers.
"They know it's a defended property," I say.
"They know it's a defended property with a heavy man on a long gun and a nineteen-minute warning cycle. They don't know whose. Which is the part that should worry you, because a man who doesn't know whose it is comes back with more people to find out."
"How long?"
"If they were Bureau, weeks. Courts and paperwork." He spreads his hands. "They're not Bureau. So — days."
I stand and go to the window.
Here is the arithmetic and it takes about four seconds.
The house upstate is the most defensible property I own.
Every camera, every loop, I placed every man on that ground over three years with one purpose.
It's also, since eleven nights ago, a property that a federal team walked into in under five minutes, and now a property that Italian money has sat outside of and measured.
It's compromised. Not breached — compromised, which is worse, because breached is an event and compromised is a condition.
"We move him," I say.
"Ah." Yeremey sits back. "There it is."
"Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles." He says it the way you'd repeat a diagnosis.
"Which is glass. A hillside with four approaches and a public road below it, and which you bought in 2018 because you liked the view and it is, and I'm choosing my words with great care here, the single least defensible asset in your portfolio. "
"It's also not on any list. It's held four companies deep, nobody has slept in it in two years, and there is no version of tonight's dinner in Los Angeles because nobody is looking there.
" I turn around. "The house upstate is a fortress that four people now know about.
The house in Los Angeles is a bad fortress that nobody knows about. I will take the second one."
Yeremey doesn't argue with that, because it's correct.
He argues with the next part.
"Fine. Move Sergei. Move him tonight, I'll have a team on the road in three hours." He taps a finger on the arm of the chair. "Leave the woman."
I say nothing.
"You have a serving federal agent," Yeremey says, "with an active warrant, whose face is on a wire in every field office between here and Sacramento, and you are proposing to put her in a vehicle with your son and drive her across four state lines.
Do you know what that is, legally? That's not harboring.
That's transport. That is the charge they give you when they can't be bothered to prove the interesting ones. "
"She is his bodyguard."
"She is a hostage you have started calling a bodyguard, and I'm the only person in your life who will say that sentence out loud, which is precisely why you keep me.
" He is not smiling now. "There are four women on my list who could do that job.
Vetted, armed, and unencumbered by a federal manhunt. I can have one in the house by Friday."
"He would not go near them."
"He'd manage."
"He would not go near them." My voice comes out harder than I intend, and I hear it happen.
"He has spoken more in the last eleven days than in the four years previous.
He has been outside. He cooked a meal. On Tuesday, he told me — unprompted, in a corridor — about a documentary, and I stood there unable to think of a single thing to say back to him, and that is my failure, not hers.
You want me to remove the only variable that has changed and replace it with a vetted stranger and see whether he holds. "
Yeremey looks at me for a long moment.
"That," he says, "is the best argument I have ever heard you make for a thing you are doing for a completely different reason."
"Yeremey—"
"No, it's a good argument. It's actually a good argument, that's what makes it dangerous.
" He stands and collects his folder. "So let me ask the other one, and then I'll stop.
If it were only about the boy — if she were sixty, if she were a man, if she were anything other than what she is — would you be putting her in your own car?
Or would she be in the chase vehicle with Andrei? "
I don't answer.
"Right," he says. "I'll arrange the route."
He is at the door when I stop him.
"The list."
"Eleven down to three." He half-turns. "Two are yours, and I'm not naming them until I'm certain, because you'd do something and then we'd have a funeral and no information.
The third came out of a routing header on the file they pulled from your safe — five letters of a surname, buried in a distribution string that shouldn't have existed. "
"Five letters."
"D-A-N-E-S. Or D-A-N-E-Z, the character's degraded." He shrugs. "It's a name that goes somewhere. Give me a week, and I'll tell you where."
He goes.
I stay at the glass for a while after that with my hands in my pockets.
There is a thing I have not said to him, and it has been sitting behind my teeth since he said, "leave the woman." It is not romantic or sentimental, and it is the actual reason.
If she stays in that house without me, and the Italians come back with more people to find out whose property it is, then the woman on the ground is a federal fugitive with no badge, no radio, no backup, and a name on a wire.
Nobody would come for her. Nobody would even look.
I know that with total precision, because I'm the one who made sure of it.
I call the estate at ten.
Andrei answers on the second ring and reports in the flat voice: the property is quiet, the boy is at his lessons, and the woman ran the fence line yesterday afternoon.
"How far?"
"All of it. Both flanks, the kennel end, the service gate." A pause. "She found the two gaps at the south corner."
"And?"
"And she did nothing. Said nothing. Walked back to the house."
I stand in a glass office and feel that land somewhere under the ribs.
She found them and left them.
"Is she armed yet?"
Andrei is quiet for slightly too long.
"No."
"She has been in that house eleven days, she has run at my son's screaming twice, and she came back down a hill she did not have to come back down." I watch the traffic forty-one floors below. "Give her a sidearm."
"Pakhan—"
"You will clear it, you will log it, and you will be the one who hands it to her, because if it comes from me it is a gift and if it comes from you it is a decision by the man responsible for security on that property." A beat. "Which is what it is."
"...Understood."
"How is she otherwise?"
The pause this time is a different shape.
"She tried a tablet in the kitchen yesterday," Andrei says. "Karina's. Four characters into a message before I stopped her."
I close my eyes.
"To whom?"
"Foster. The one from the file who did not sign a statement."
"What did it say?"
"'R-W a-l-i.'" He says the letters individually, flatly. "R. W. Alive, I would assume."
And there it is.
Not get me out. Not a location, not a plea, not a description of a house or a man or a boy. Eleven days in my custody and four characters of bandwidth and she spent all of it telling one person on earth that she was not dead.
"You did not report this yesterday," I say.
"No."
"Why?"
Andrei takes a long time.
"Because I did not know what you would do," he says, "and I did not wish to find out."
We are both quiet for a moment on a phone line, two men who have known each other nine years and are now standing on the edge of a conversation neither of us is going to have.
"Thank you for telling me," I say.
"There will be a next time."
"I know."
"Ilya." He rarely uses it. "When she does it again — and she will, because she is exactly what you hired her to be — what happens?"
I look at the map on my wall. Eleven years of it. Four cities, and a napkin, and a line drawn through eleven circles by a man who was too decent to walk it.
"Prepare the vehicles," I say. "We leave Thursday."
The call to Chicago takes four minutes.
Victor Rozovsky picks up himself, which he does for perhaps six people, and there is the ritual first — his wife, his children, whether the winter has been as bad there as they say.
I ask after Alex. He asks after nobody, because he knows there is nobody to ask after, and has known it for eleven years and has never once made it a question.
Then:
"Italian money is moving," I say. "Newark, through a leasing shell. They are looking for a man who has been inconveniencing them, and they have started to look properly."
A pause on the line.
"Which family?"
"I do not know yet. My man will have it in a week."
"And when he does, will I be receiving a call in which you ask me for something?"
"You will be receiving a call in which I tell you what I found. Whether you do anything with it is entirely your business."
Victor laughs — a short, dry sound. "You know, your father used to say it exactly like that. 'Entirely your business.' It always meant the same thing."
"What did it mean?"
"It meant: I'm telling you before it becomes your problem, so that when it becomes your problem you remember who told you.
" A rustle, a chair. "Fine. Consider it remembered.
And Ilya — the debt from Milwaukee is settled.
I have considered it settled for two years. You may stop declining to mention it."
"I have never mentioned it."
"That is what I said."
He rings off.
Yeremey comes back at four with a route, a schedule, and three suites reserved under a name that has never been used.
"Two vehicles, twenty-nine hours, one stop." He drops it on the desk. "Kansas. There's a hotel where I keep a standing suite and a manager who has been very well paid for six years to have a bad memory."
"How many bedrooms?"
"Two," says Yeremey, and does not look up from his folder, and does not need to.
I let that pass, because the alternative is a conversation.
"There is one more thing," he says, "and I want you to hear it in this room rather than in a car in Nebraska."
"Go on."
"Whoever those men were, they sat outside a house at three in the morning to measure a response.
" He finally looks up. "So somebody now has a stopwatch on your security.
Somebody has your posture. And on Thursday you are going to take everything you actually care about in this world and put it on an interstate for twenty-nine hours. "
He lets that sit.
"You will have made it very easy," Yeremey says, "for the second measurement."