11. Raven
Raven
Andrei hands me a gun on Thursday morning in the boot room, and neither of us makes a thing of it.
It's a Sig, compact, and he clears it in front of me and hands it over grip-first with two spare magazines and a holster that's been broken in by somebody else's body.
"Logged," he says. "Yours while you are employed. Not yours after."
"Understood."
"Don't carry it in front of the boy where he can see the shape of it under a coat. He notices."
"I know he notices."
He looks at me for a second longer than the transaction requires.
"You did not ask me for this," he says.
"No."
"I know." He turns for the door. "That is why you have it."
Well, I think, standing in a boot room with a loaded weapon on my hip for the first time in twelve days. That's about as close to an apology for the throat thing as I'm ever going to get.
The car is Ilya's and Ilya drives it, which apparently nobody is happy about.
I get that argument in fragments across the gravel at seven in the morning — Andrei wanting a driver, Ilya declining, Andrei pointing out with real force that the principal behind the wheel is the principal with his hands occupied, and Ilya saying something short in Russian that ends it.
So: Ilya driving, me in the passenger seat, Sergei in the back with a tablet, headphones, and a blanket he pretended not to want—Andrei behind us in the chase vehicle with two others and every bag we own.
Twenty-nine hours to Los Angeles. One stop.
For the first ninety minutes nobody says anything at all.
He's a good driver, which irritates me. Smooth on the brake, sits three seconds back, doesn't fidget with the wheel.
He checks his mirrors on a rhythm I clock at about eleven seconds and never varies, and twice in the first hour he changes lanes for no reason I can see and then changes back, and both times a vehicle drops away behind us that I hadn't registered.
"You're running a route."
"I am."
"Since when?"
"Since the gate." He doesn't look over. "Nobody is behind us. I would prefer to know that four times an hour rather than once."
Somewhere past Clearfield, he says, without any preamble:
"What did you want to be? At nine."
I turn my head. "Sorry?"
"At nine years old. Every person wants to be something at nine, and almost nobody becomes it, and the gap is usually interesting." He indicates, passes a truck, settles back. "You were not planning on federal law enforcement at nine. Nobody is."
Here we go.
Because I know this technique, I have used it — you don't open with the thing you want; you open three rooms away from it and let them walk you back. Get somebody talking about being nine and forty minutes later, they've told you where their mother lives.
Except he already knows where my mother lives.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Because we have twenty-eight hours and I have read everything the Bureau has written about you," Ilya says, "and none of it tells me one single thing worth knowing."
"That's the pitch?"
"That is not a pitch. That is a complaint about the quality of the file."
I look out the window for a while at Pennsylvania going past.
"A vet," I say eventually.
"A veterinarian."
"For about two years. Then somebody explained the part where animals die in front of you, and I revised the plan.
" I shrug. "Then I wanted to be a lawyer, because my father was, and then he was killed by people in your business, and I wanted to be the person who put them in prison.
So I suppose I did become one. It just went sideways somewhere in the middle. "
He drives for a while.
"That is the first thing you have told me about yourself," he says, "that you were not compelled to."
"Don't get comfortable."
But I do.
That's the problem. He asks about six things over four hours — the last time I took a holiday, whether I can swim, what I do on the four days a year I'm not working — and I answer about half of them, badly, sideways, with the important parts filed off.
I keep waiting for the moment when it becomes an interrogation, but it doesn't come.
He doesn't ask about the Bureau. He doesn't ask about the file, or Louis, or what I'd do with ninety days' worth of what I've seen in his house. Not once.
And around Ohio I work out that he isn't building a profile at all. He genuinely wants to know, and he has no idea how to want that out loud, so it comes out sounding like an interview because interview is the only register he has.
He's bad at this, I think, with something in my chest going sideways. He's actually bad at this. He's doing it anyway.
We stop for fuel outside Toledo, and he comes around the back of the car while the pump runs, standing next to me, close, both of us watching the numbers climb, and neither of us says anything for two full minutes.
His shoulder is about four inches from mine.
I do not move away, and neither does he, and by the time the pump clicks off, my heart rate is doing something unrelated to the drive.
The diner is in Indiana, and it happens by accident.
Sergei is hungry, and there is nowhere for two hundred miles that isn't a service plaza, and there's a place off the ramp with eleven cars in the lot and a hand-painted sign, and Ilya looks at it for about three seconds and pulls in.
"Andrei will not like this," I say.
"Andrei does not like anything."
Here is the thing about Sergei Yaroslav in a public building.
He has not been in one in over a year. I know this because he told me, matter-of-factly, the way he tells me everything.
And for the first ninety seconds inside that door he is a small, rigid child holding onto the hem of his own sleeve with both hands, taking in eleven strangers and a jukebox and a woman calling an order through a hatch, and I can see it building behind his eyes.
I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades.
"Booth," I say. "Corner one. Go on."
He goes. He sits. He counts things without being told — I watch his lips move — and by the time the menus come down he's got both hands flat on the table, and he's breathing.
Then he sees the jukebox.
Fifteen minutes later my professionally paranoid principal's son is standing in front of a Wurlitzer feeding it quarters that Ilya keeps producing from his coat, playing songs recorded forty years before he was born, and narrating — telling us both, at length and with total confidence, how the mechanism selects the record.
"He read about it," Ilya says quietly.
"Obviously he read about it."
"Two years ago. In a book. And has been waiting since then for a machine to say it at." He's watching his son. "This is the longest he has been in a room with strangers since he was six."
I take the seat with my back to the wall. Pure habit — you take the wall, you take the door, you count the exits, and there are three plus the kitchen.
And I look up, and Ilya has taken the other wall seat on the far side of the booth, facing the opposite way, so that between the two of us the whole room is covered and the boy at the jukebox is in both our sightlines.
Neither of us planned that. Neither of us says a word about it.
He catches me noticing, and something happens at the corner of his mouth, and I look at the menu very hard for a while.
We eat badly, and it takes an hour. Sergei gets pancakes at two in the afternoon and considers this the greatest legal loophole ever discovered. The waitress calls Ilya "hon," and he takes it with the gravity of a man receiving a title.
At one point Sergei asks him whether he ever came to places like this as a boy, and Ilya says yes, with his father, on Brighton Beach. There was a restaurant with a green awning that isn't there anymore — and then he stops, visibly, like a man who has walked into a room he didn't mean to open.
Sergei asks what his grandfather was like.
And Ilya says: "Clever. Kind. Both of those were true, and only one of them helped him."
Then, after a beat: "You would have liked him. He would have been unbearable about you."
Sergei goes pink, looks at his pancakes, and doesn't say anything, and under the table his heel starts knocking against the bench in a rhythm I have learned means he is happy and doesn't have anywhere to put it.
At the pumps afterward, Andrei says six words to me.
"You were right about the diner."
"I didn't say anything about the diner."
"You did not disagree." He screws the cap on. "That is the same, from you."
Which is, I'm fairly sure, Andrei Dudin making a joke.
The hotel is outside Salina, Kansas, at nine at night, and it is not a hotel — it's a low, expensive, anonymous building with eleven cars in a lot and a man at the desk who greets Ilya by a name that isn't his and doesn't look at any of the rest of us.
Standing suite on the top floor. Two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchenette.
Four people.
I do the arithmetic in the elevator, and it comes out the same three times, and I decide not to be the one who says it.
Sergei is asleep on his feet by the time we're through the door — twenty-nine hours minus a day of it, and a jukebox, and more human beings than he's seen since he was six.
Ilya carries him the last twenty feet, which he does without appearing to think about it, and something about that is worse for me than anything else that has happened today.
He comes back out, stands in the middle of the sitting room, and allocates.
"Sergei takes the far room. Andrei with him."
Andrei nods.
"West is in with me."
There's about a half-second of nothing.
Then Andrei says, "No."
I have been in this man's company for twelve days, and I have watched him take orders about weapons, routes, timings, and a federal agent living in his principal's house, and he has never once said a word about any of it.
"Say that again," Ilya says. Very pleasantly.
"The boy takes the far room. I take the sitting room floor by the door, because that is where I sleep and you know it.
" Andrei's face is completely flat. "She takes the second bed in the boy's room.
That is the correct posture, and it is the posture we have used in every house for four years, and I'm telling you it is correct because that is what you pay me to tell you. "
"And if I decline?"
"Then you decline." A pause. "But you will have declined the advice of your head of security in front of the person the advice concerns, and I would like that noted."
Nobody moves.
I stand there with my bag in my hand and my ears going hot and the very strong sense of being an item on an agenda, and the truth is that Andrei is right — it is the correct posture, it's what I'd recommend, and if anybody had asked me I'd have said the same thing.
Nobody asks me.
Ilya doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't move. He looks at Andrei for a long moment, and then he says, "Noted," and that's all, and the word does something to the temperature of the room.
Andrei holds it for two seconds. Then he picks up his bag, walks into the far bedroom, and closes the door.
And Ilya turns and looks at me, and he doesn't say a single thing, and he doesn't have to, because the entire allocation is standing in the room with us.
"That was ugly," I say.
"Yes."
"He's right, you know. Tactically. He's completely right."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because there is one door to that suite and it opens onto a corridor," Ilya says, "and if somebody comes through it at four in the morning, I would like the two people in this building who can actually fight to be at opposite ends of it, and not stacked in the same room with my son between them."
It's a good answer.
It's such a good answer that it takes me until I'm standing in the second bedroom, alone, with my bag on the bed and the door shut, to notice the shape of what's missing from it.
He gave me a tactical justification.
He gave it to me unprompted, in a lowered voice, after Andrei left the room — and a man who is only making a security decision does not stand in a hotel suite explaining himself to a woman who did not ask.
I sit down on the edge of the bed.
Through the wall, I can hear the shower start.