22. Raven
Raven
Logan's apartment is on Q Street, and it is exactly as bad as I expected.
Third floor, one bedroom, a couch that has been in four apartments, and a window that looks onto a street with parking on both sides and eleven vantage points I can see without moving my head.
I don't say any of that, because he's already risked his career and I'm not going to critique the accommodation.
"Bathroom's through there. There's a towel on the rail that's clean; everything else on the floor isn't." He drops a bag on the counter. "There's clothes in the bedroom — my sister left a bag here at Christmas and never came back for it; she's about your size and considerably better dressed."
"Logan—"
"Don't."
"I'm going to say it anyway. What you did in that building—"
"Was the minimum," he says, "and if you're about to tell me it was brave, I'd like you to consider how it feels to be told that after five weeks of doing nothing."
That shuts me up.
He's changed since the field office. In the interview room, he was shaking. Here he is, very calm and very fast, putting food on a counter and talking about logistics like a man who has decided to be useful because the alternative is thinking.
"Forty-eight hours," he says. "That's what I need.
I've got a friend at OPR who owes me, and I'm going to walk her through the signature block on that classification and let her draw her own conclusion, because the second I say his name out loud to anybody in that building it's over.
Forty-eight hours and I can have somebody above him looking at the paper. "
"And in the meantime I sit in your apartment."
"In the meantime you sit in my apartment." He looks up. "Raven. Say it back to me."
"I sit in your apartment."
"You are the worst liar I have ever met in my life," Logan says, "which is genuinely remarkable in a woman who does undercover work."
He goes out to get food at seven.
The second the door closes, I am standing at his window with my back against the wall, working the street.
He's wrong about forty-eight hours. That's the thing. He's wrong, and he can't be told, because his arithmetic is Bureau arithmetic — paper, process, somebody above him, an OPR friend who owes him. It's the correct approach for a corrupt Assistant Director.
I know Danesi signed my classification, I know he ran a man on Bureau credentials without a case number, and I know somebody put a welfare check on my mother's house two days ago and closed it inside the hour.
That's enough.
I need to get to Ilya.
And that's the sentence, isn't it? That's the thing I've been walking around for four days and two and a half thousand miles.
Because whatever is in that drawer in California — and it is exactly what it is, and I have not talked myself out of one inch of it — the man who is currently hunting Claudio Danesi has no idea that Danesi is hunting him back with eleven people and a federal budget.
He thinks he's chasing a bent AD. He's walking toward something with a wall in it.
He had your mother photographed on day two.
Yes. And he doesn't know what's about to happen to him.
I stand at a window, hold both of those, and cannot put either one down.
Logan comes back at half seven with Thai food and eats most of it, and I get through about four mouthfuls before I have to stop.
"You okay?"
"Long week."
"You've eaten about eleven grams of rice."
"I'm fine, Logan."
At half past nine I am on my knees on his bathroom floor being extremely comprehensively sick.
He's immediately outside the door, which is the worst thing he could do.
"Raven?"
"I'm fine."
"You are demonstrably not fine—"
"Was the food bad? The chicken thing."
"I ate the chicken thing. I ate your chicken thing." A pause through the door. "You've been sleeping in a stairwell for four days, and you've eaten out of a church and a truck stop, so at a guess it's everything, and I'm going to get you water, and then you're going to go to bed."
And that's a reasonable explanation, and I take it, and I go to bed. I lie in the dark in his sister's t-shirt and hear my own voice say the reasonable explanation back to myself, and somewhere around one in the morning my brain quietly puts a different one on the table.
No.
Count.
I lie in the dark on Q Street, and I count.
I have never in my life been regular. That's the first thing I tell myself, and it's true — after the miscarriage things went strange and stayed strange.
I have gone weeks before and thought nothing of it, and I have been sleeping in a shipping container and living on adrenaline and church lunches for forty-one hours.
Count anyway.
The last one was before the corridor. Before all of it, in New York, in a life that had a badge in it.
Which is — I have to do it twice, because the first time my brain refuses the arithmetic —
Fifty-one days.
I lie completely still in a stranger's bed with my hand flat on my own stomach.
Doctors told you twice. Two of them, four years apart, in two different offices, both using the word "unlikely" and one of them using "very." Scarring, they said. Damage, they said, in the sort of voice people use.
So it's stress. It's forty-one hours in a container and five weeks of the worst year of your life.
I can’t sleep so I get up, get dressed in the dark, and go out.
There's a twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Connecticut, four blocks away. I take the long way, both sides of the street, and I check twice, and I am clean.
I buy the test and a bottle of water and a packet of gum I don't want so it isn't the only thing on the counter, which is a habit I acquired for entirely different reasons and which is now the stupidest thing I have ever done, because the boy behind the register doesn't care about any of it.
And I cannot do it in Logan's flat.
That's the part I can't explain. There is a perfectly good bathroom on Q Street with a lock on the door and a man asleep four meters away who has known me nine years.
I cannot make myself do it in there, so I walk two blocks to a gas station on Florida Avenue and use the bathroom around the side that requires a key.
Three minutes.
I sit on the floor with my back against the door because there is nowhere else to sit, the floor is filthy, and I do not care.
Two lines.
I look at it for a long time.
And here's what happens, and I want to set it down properly because it is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me: it arrives in two pieces, and they arrive at the same moment, and they do not cancel each other out. They just both sit there.
The first one is joy.
Pure, appalling, uncomplicated. I am thirty-one years old, and I have carried around the word "unlikely" since I was twenty-three like a stone in a coat pocket.
I am sitting on the floor of a gas station bathroom on Florida Avenue with two blue lines in my hand, and the noise that comes out of me isn't one I have ever made.
I have a hand over my mouth for about a minute.
And underneath it, arriving at the same time, in the same breath:
His.
The man with the folder. Day two. Would cross for, in his handwriting, eleven names, and my mother on her own front step in a green coat she's had since I was in high school.
The man who watched me come back down a hill and never once said a word about it. The man who got down on the floor of his son's room because I told him to several days earlier, did it badly, and did it anyway.
Both of them. The same man. And I am sitting on a bathroom floor holding a piece of plastic that says I am carrying his child, and I cannot get the two of them into the same room in my head no matter how I turn it.
And he doesn't know where I am.
And there is a man with eleven agents, a case code who is looking for me, who wants me found in a Bratva house, and who has now put a welfare check on my mother's front door.
I sit on that floor for eleven minutes.
Then I put the test in the pocket of my coat, and I get up, and something in me goes very quiet and very organized.
Right. Well. That's the arithmetic changed.
I get back to Q Street at ten past two, and Logan hasn't moved.
I don't sleep. I sit at the end of the couch in the dark and start building the version of the next four days that has three people in it instead of one.
It goes badly, because every single route I can construct starts with getting a message to a man whose telephone number I do not have, in a house I could not find on a map, two and a half thousand miles away.
Yeremey. I don't have him either.
The freight company. Yaroslav Freight has a switchboard, eleven hundred employees, and a compliance record; I could stand in a phone box on Connecticut Avenue tomorrow morning and ask to be put through to the chief executive, and I would be the four hundredth crank of the week.
Unless you say a thing only three people know.
I sit up.
Because there is a sentence, there is a single phrase I could give to a switchboard operator that would be on his desk in less than ten minutes: ‘the onions were too big’.
Okay. Okay, that's a plan. That's a stupid plan, and it's a plan.
And I get up to get a glass of water before I lie down and try for two hours' sleep, and I go into the kitchen and turn the tap on, and while it runs I crouch to get the glass out of the cupboard under the sink because there's nothing in the drainer.
And I stop.
Because there's a shape behind the trap that isn't plumbing.
It isn't large. It is about the size of a matchbox, and it is grey, and it is cable-tied to the underside of the pipe, and the tie is white and clean and new, and the pipe is thirty years old with a skin of dust on it, and there is a wipe-clear ring where somebody's fingers held it steady.
I do not touch it.
I crouch on the kitchen floor of Logan Foster's apartment with the tap running four inches above my head and look at a device that isn't Bureau issue, because Bureau issue has a serial number, a case tag, and a chain of custody, and this has a bare housing and a hand-soldered tail.
How long.
The cable tie is clean. Not new-clean — a week, maybe two, and there's the beginning of dust on the top face of it.
Two weeks.
Which is before I got here. Which means it was never about me at all; it was put in this apartment because Logan Foster is the man who wouldn't stop asking questions in week one, and it has been sitting under his sink listening to him make telephone calls about a signature block.
And I have been in this apartment for eleven hours.
I have said Danesi's name out loud in this apartment. Twice.
I straighten up very slowly and turn the tap off, and the quiet afterward is enormous.
"Logan," I say.
Nothing.
"Logan."
He comes out of the bedroom with his hair everywhere. "What—"
And the door comes in.
Not a knock. Not a warning. The frame goes at the strike plate with a crack like a tree breaking, and there are men in the room before the door has finished swinging, and there is light — hard, white, moving light in my eyes from three directions.
I get a hand into the drainer.
There's a knife in there, a bread knife, and it is the single most inadequate object in the history of this country, and I get two fingers on it, and I am moving toward the window near the fire escape side because that is the only exit that exists, and I make it four feet.
And then somebody takes me off my feet from behind, and the floor is coming, and I have about a half-second of clarity in which I make one single decision.
I turn.
I get my shoulder underneath and my arms in, and I take the entire impact on the point of the shoulder and the side of my torso.
It is a bad landing and something in the arm goes, and I do it anyway, and I lie on Logan Foster's floor with a knee in my back and my cheek on the boards and my free hand flat and splayed low across my own stomach.
Somebody is shouting Logan's name.
Somebody else says, very close to my ear, in a voice with absolutely nothing in it:
"That's her. Don't mark her face."