17. Ilya
Ilya
I'm awake at five and out of bed by ten past, because there's something I have to say out loud today, and I would rather not say it first to the woman it concerns.
She sleeps like something that has been switched off. That is new — for six weeks she has slept the way people in this business sleep, which is to say, four inches under the surface with one ear working, and last night she went completely under and has not moved since.
I stand in the dark and look at her for a while, which is not a thing I have time for.
Then I go and find Andrei.
He is on the terrace at half past six with coffee, watching the road below, which is what he does now instead of sleeping.
"Anything?"
"Nothing on Rennick since Friday. Nothing on the service road.
The tow was a real tow — I called the company, they were paid by card, the card belongs to a leasing shell.
" He hands me the second cup. "Which tells us the man was extracted properly and professionals cleaned up his vehicle, and that whoever runs him has an administrative department. "
"That is not comforting."
"It's not meant to be. Amateurs improvise. Departments have policies." He drinks. "Whoever is watching her is a bureaucracy, Ilya, and bureaucracies do not lose interest."
We stand there for a while. Long enough that further down the hill somebody's sprinkler comes on.
"I'm going to say something," I tell him, "and I would like you not to look at me while I say it."
Andrei turns very deliberately to face the ocean.
"I'm in love with her."
The sprinkler goes round twice.
"Yes," Andrei says.
"That is your response."
"You asked me not to look at you. You did not ask me to be surprised." He drinks his coffee. "I have known for eleven days. Yeremey has known for longer and has been unbearable about it on the telephone, and I would advise you to prepare for that conversation, because he has been saving it."
"How?"
"Kansas."
"That is not an answer."
"It's a complete answer." He sets the cup on the rail.
"In Kansas, you overruled me in front of her about a room.
Not about a route, or a schedule, or a weapon — about a room, and you did it badly, and then you explained yourself afterward, which you have never done in nine years to anyone, including your own father.
" A pause. "I did not need Kansas. Kansas was simply the loudest of it. "
I let that sit, because there is nothing in it I can argue with.
"Then you understand the problem," I say.
"You have two of them."
"Name them."
"The first is that a woman who is in this house because you threatened to kill her can't leave it, which means you will never know what she would have chosen," Andrei says without any inflection at all.
"The second is that a man who is in love has a second thing that can be taken from him.
You have spent eleven years arranging your entire life so that there is only one, and it sleeps upstairs, and now there are two. "
"Yes."
"So."
"So we fix the first one," I say, "and we do it now."
He turns around then.
"Explain."
"She stays because the alternative is a wire with her face on it and four sworn statements.
She works because the alternative is a cell.
" I put my cup down. "I want it gone. All of it.
The warrant, the file, the four statements, the classification — I want Raven West to be able to walk out of that door on Thursday and get on an airplane like a citizen. "
Andrei is quiet.
"You want to take her off the list," he says.
"I want to take her off the list."
"That list is held by an Assistant Director of the FBI who built it specifically to bury her."
"Yes."
"And who is, as of Sunday, a man you have ordered killed."
"Also yes." I look at the water. "Those two things are not in competition, Andrei.
They are the same operation. Danesi is the only person who can unwrite what he wrote.
He is not going to do it, so we take what he has — the file, the routing, whatever he keeps and wherever he keeps it — and then we remove him, and then the four agents who signed those statements discover that there is nobody above them who requires the statements to stand. "
"That is a great deal of work for one woman's paperwork."
"It's a great deal of work for a man who put a bullet through my son," I say. "The paperwork is what I get to keep afterward."
Andrei looks at me for a long moment and does not believe me, and does not say so, which is its own kind of loyalty.
"There is a version of this," he says slowly, "where it works. Where you take his files, and you remove him, and every charge against her evaporates in a fortnight."
"Yes."
"And in that version, Ilya, she is a free woman with a clean record standing in a house in Los Angeles that belongs to the Pakhan of a Bratva family." He picks his cup back up. "What happens then?"
I don't answer.
"You have thought about it."
"I have thought about very little else since Kansas."
"And?"
"And it does not matter what I have thought about," I say.
"That is the entire point. It's not a decision I get to be in the room for, and if I arrange this so that she is grateful, or so that she is cornered, or so that she owes me something — then I have built a better cage, and I will have to live in it with her and know that I built it.
" I finish the coffee. "So we clear her.
And then she chooses. And if she gets on an airplane, she gets on an airplane. "
"You would let her."
"Don't ask me that today."
Andrei accepts this because he has known me for nine years and understands the difference between a man who says yes and a man who says, "Don't ask me that today."
"Then there is one more thing," he says, "and you will not like it, and I'm going to say it anyway because you pay me to be the last man in the building who will."
"Go on."
"She told you about the photographs."
"She did."
"She told you Danesi is not hunting you through her; that he is keeping her. That he requires her to be in a Bratva house when something happens to her." He sets the cup down again. "Ilya — she is right, and you and I both know she is right, and neither of us has said the next part out loud."
I wait.
"If Danesi needs Raven West to die in your house," Andrei says, "then the safest place on this earth for that woman is away from you. Every day she stays here, she is standing exactly where he needs her to stand. You are not protecting her. You are holding her in position."
The ocean goes on doing what it does.
"I know," I say.
"You know."
"I have known since Sunday night."
"And?"
"And I'm going to keep her here anyway," I say, "because the alternative is putting her on a road alone with no badge and no radio and no one at all, and I will take the risk I can put men around over the one I can't." I look at him.
"And because I want her here. Both of those are true.
I'm not going to pretend the second one out of the room to make the first one sound better. "
Andrei nods slowly.
"That," he says, "is the most honest thing you have said in four years, and it is going to get somebody killed."
"Very possibly."
"Which somebody?"
"That," I say, "is what today is for."
I take the call in the study at eight.
Yeremey has been awake all night again — I can hear it; he gets precise when he's exhausted rather than sloppy, which is one of the several ways he is not a normal man.
"Danesi's residence is in Georgetown, and before you get excited, it is not a house; it is a position.
Federal protective detail on the street because of the office.
Cameras that belong to the government. Two men who are not detail and are not on any payroll I can find.
" Paper moving. "There is no version where you approach that building. "
"Then not the building."
"Then not the building. He moves four times a week — the office, a club on H Street, a restaurant in Bethesda he has used every second Thursday for nine years, and a casino in Maryland where he plays badly and loses on purpose to a man he owes something to.
" A pause. "The casino is the softest of the four by a considerable margin. "
"How soft?"
"Private gaming floor, six tables, members only. His detail waits outside because the room does not permit them and he enjoys that it does not." Yeremey exhales. "It's the only place in his week where an Assistant Director of the FBI is a man alone in a room with a drink."
"When?"
"Thursdays. Third Thursday of the month, without exception, for two years."
"That is nine days."
"That is nine days," Yeremey agrees. "And Ilya — I want to note, on the record, that a pattern this clean in a man this careful is either a genuine weakness or it is a door with a sign on it."
"Noted."
"That is not the same as heard."
"It's what you are getting." I turn a pen over.
"Get me the room. Every entrance, every camera, every man on that floor and who pays them.
And find out what he keeps and where he keeps it, because the man himself is only half of this — I want what he has taken out of my house, and I want the file he built on Raven West."
There's a pause on the line.
"Say that last part again."
"You heard it."
"I did hear it. That is why I'm asking you to say it again." Yeremey's voice has changed. "Because I have spent six weeks watching this and I have not once asked you a direct question about it, and I'm going to ask one now. Is this operation about the man who shot Sergei, or is it about the woman?"
"Yes," I say.
"That is not—"
"It's both, Yeremey, and I will not be separating them, and if you require me to rank them before you will work then we have a different problem.
" I hear my own voice go flat. "Take Raven off the list. That is an instruction.
Whatever else happens in Maryland, whatever we take out of that room — the file on her goes into a fire, and every trace of it goes with him.
I want her to be clean. I want her clean if I'm alive at the end of it and I want her clean if I'm not. "
The silence on the line goes on for a while.
"All right," Yeremey says quietly. "All right. I'll have the room by Wednesday."
"Thank you."
"Ilya."
"What?"
"When this is finished," he says, "and she is clean, and there is nothing on this earth keeping her in that house — you understand that you will have to ask her.
Out loud. With words. Like a man." A breath.
"And I have known you for eleven years, and I have never once seen you ask anybody for anything. "
He rings off.
I sit in the study with the pen in my hand and the ocean going grey-blue through the glass.
He is right, and Andrei is right, and both of them have been right for six weeks, and neither has said it until this morning, which means they were waiting to see whether I would arrive on my own.
You will have to ask her.
I put the pen down.
And that is when I hear it — out in the corridor, perhaps eight feet beyond the study door, a floorboard I have walked over ten thousand times and know the exact sound of.
It goes once.
Then nothing.
I sit very still with my hand flat on the desk and listen to a house in which nobody is moving, and I count four seconds, and at the end of them I hear it go again — softer, further away, going back down the hall toward the stairs.