16. Raven
Raven
Nobody comes to arrest me.
That's the whole of the next four days. No vehicles on Rennick, no second man, no knock, no warrant served at six in the morning by eleven people in windbreakers. The grey Impala is towed on the Friday by an ordinary tow company and the street goes back to being a street.
I spend those four days waiting for a door to come in and it doesn't, and by Sunday night I have stopped sleeping properly and started doing the thing I do, which is turning one question over until the edges come off it.
Why hasn't anybody come?
There are three answers and I've been through all of them.
One: they're building. Watching me to see who I lead them to, which is standard and would be reasonable except that I've led them to a hilltop property with the Pakhan of a Bratva family in it and they have not photographed him once.
Two: the surveillance isn't Bureau. Except the badge was real, the man was real, and he'd been in the field four years and knew how to sit a position.
Three.
Three is that somebody with a badge and a case code is having me watched and specifically does not want me picked up, and I have been staring at three for four days and I do not like where it goes.
I'm still turning it at half past nine on Sunday when I hear Ilya's voice from the study.
He's got Yeremey on speaker.
The door isn't shut. That's the first thing — the door is standing four inches open, and this is a man who changed a lock overnight, and there's a part of me that notes it and files it and does not want to examine what the filing means.
"—no, I have it now. Confirmed twice." Yeremey's voice, tinny, coming through a laptop.
"The five letters are Danes. D-A-N-E-S. And there is only one of those in a position to have generated that routing string, and I'm going to say his name and then I'm going to say the rest of it, and I would like you to sit down first."
"Say it."
"Claudio Danesi. Assistant Director, FBI."
There's silence.
"Say the rest," Ilya says.
"He took the post eight months ago. Ilya — eight months.
Three weeks after the Kowalczyk plant." Papers moving.
"He did not get promoted into the path of an investigation.
He built an investigation and then walked into the chair above it.
And I have now spent two days on his family and there is an old Italian name under the new one, and it is not a small name, and it goes back four generations in New York. "
I stand in a dark corridor with my hand flat against the wall.
Assistant Director.
Not a supervisor. Not a SAC. An Assistant Director sits above four field offices and can classify a file, reroute a case, seal a personnel action, and make a serving agent disappear into a wire with four sworn statements attached.
And nobody came to arrest me because he doesn't want me arrested. He wants to know where I am.
"Then he is the one who put the team into my house," Ilya says.
"He is the one who put the team into your house, took your Gulf routing, and burned the woman who was standing in the corridor when it happened.
" A pause. "And he is inside two organisations at once, which means he knows what you are and he knows what they are, and there is exactly one way that ends. "
"How much does he have?"
"Enough that I stopped sleeping. He has four of your brokers.
He has the Newark structure. If he has been reading that routing file for six weeks he has the shape of everything from Veracruz north, and the only reason we are still standing is that he can'tmove on it without exposing himself, and the day he finds a way to do that without exposing himself—"
"Then he does not get that day," Ilya says.
His voice doesn't change at all. That's the thing. It's the same voice he used on the terrace on Wednesday asking whether there was more bread.
"Ilya."
"Find him. Where he sleeps, where his children go to school, which of his men drives him and which of them he trusts, and how many minutes he is ever alone." A chair moves. "And then we will kill him, and I would like it to be quick, because a slow one is theatre and theatre is how you get caught."
"He's an Assistant Director of the FBI."
"He is a man who put a bullet through my son," Ilya says. "Find him."
And I stand in the corridor and wait for it.
I know what's supposed to happen here. I have nine years and three commendations and I have just heard a man order the murder of a federal official through a four-inch gap in a door, and there is a correct reaction, and it is supposed to arrive with a sound like a bell.
I wait for it.
It doesn't come.
What comes instead is a small, clear, entirely calm voice that says: yes.
Not he's right, but. Not I understand why he'd think that. Just — yes. Danesi shot a ten-year-old to steal four sheets of paper, buried a woman he'd never met to make it stick, and he's sitting in a building I used to badge into with the authority to do it again to somebody else next month.
So do it.
I stand in a dark corridor in a house on a hill with my hand flat on the wall and understand that I have crossed something and can'tsay when.
That's the moment. That's the actual moment, and it isn't the office floor and it isn't Kansas. It's a corridor, fully clothed, agreeing.
The call ends. Ilya doesn't come out.
I stand there for about a minute and then I push the door open.
He's got both hands flat on the desk, head down, and he is carrying something across the shoulders that he does not carry in front of anybody, and when the door moves he straightens up so fast it's almost violent.
"How much did you hear?"
"All of it."
He doesn't apologise and doesn't explain and doesn't ask me what I intend to do about it, which I appreciate more than I can say.
"Then you know."
"I know he's an AD. I know he's got a name under his name." I come in and shut the door. "And I know something you don't, so sit down."
He doesn't sit down. He never sits down.
"The man on Rennick," I say. "Four hundred frames on that card and not one of them is you.
Nineteen days, from Cedar City, and nobody has come for me.
" I put my hands on the back of the chair.
"Danesi's not hunting the Hellhound through me.
He's keeping me. I'm not a lead, I'm a piece he hasn't decided how to use yet, and he has known exactly where I'm for eleven days and hasn't touched me. "
Ilya is very still.
"Why?"
"Because a fugitive who dies in a Bratva house solves everything for him," I say.
"The file closes. The agent who could contradict him is dead in a criminal's basement, which is exactly where a traitor ought to end up.
He doesn't need to arrest me. He needs me here, and then he needs a reason to come and get me. "
The silence goes on for a while.
"You have thought about this a great deal," Ilya says.
"For four days."
"And you did not tell me."
"I'm telling you now."
"Why now?"
And that's the question, isn't it.
"Because you left the door open," I say.
He looks at me.
And whatever is behind his face, it isn't triumph and isn't strategy — it's a man who has just been handed something and is not sure he's allowed to hold it.
"I have had eleven years of people who tell me what I want," he says. "I have three men who will die for me and one who will argue with me, and not one person in that entire list has ever walked into this room and made my situation worse in order to make it true."
"Ilya—"
"I did not leave the door open by accident," he says.
Nobody says anything.
And then I cross the room and take his face in both hands and kiss him, and it is not like the office and it is not like Kansas, because both of those were things that happened to me and this is a decision I make standing up.
"Upstairs," I say.
His control breaks for one sharp second, hands locking around my waist as he kisses me with such passion I wonder if we’ll be able to make it upstairs. The kiss is enough to steal the air from my lungs, as he drags me against his hard body before catching himself once more.
"Raven—"
"I'm not asking."
He puts a hand around my wrist. Not stopping me. Just holding.
"There is something I want," Ilya says, "and you are going to say yes because you are in a particular mood tonight, and I do not want it on those terms. So you will hear what it is downstairs, with your clothes on, and then you will go upstairs and think about it, and if you still want it in an hour you will come and tell me. "
"That's the most infuriating sentence anybody has ever said to me."
"Yes."
"Say the thing."
He tells me.
It takes about ninety seconds. He is completely matter-of-fact about it — what it involves, what it does, what it feels like, the fact that it will not scar and will not burn and that he has done it before and knows precisely what he is doing.
He tells me the parts that are non-negotiable: that he will test every single one on his own forearm first, that nothing goes anywhere near my face or my hands, that there is a bowl of water within reach at all times and I will see him put it there.
And then he says the last part, which is the only part that isn't practical.
"You will not be able to see," he says. "That is the point of it.
Everything you do is watching — you count exits in a room you have been in forty times, you read the ink on a man in a hotel, you have looked at every single person in this house and worked out what they are for.
You do not stop. I have never once seen you stop.
" He lets my wrist go. "So I'm offering you an hour in which you are not able to. "
I stand in his study.
"An hour," I say.
"Go upstairs."
I go upstairs.
I sit on the edge of the bed for eleven minutes with my hands flat on my knees, and I do not think about it at all, because there's nothing to think about, because I knew the answer while he was still talking and the eleven minutes are a formality I'm observing out of respect for the fact that he made me take them.
Then I go and find him and say yes.