23. Ilya
Ilya
Ifly back on the Friday against medical advice, against Andrei's advice, and against my own, and I do it because there is a conversation I am not going to have on the telephone.
Sergei is on the terrace when I come through the house. He has been out there most mornings since she left, according to Karina — not doing anything, not reading, just sitting on the step with his arms around his knees looking at the water, and coming in when somebody tells him to.
He hears me and turns around, and I watch him decide not to run at me.
That is a new thing, and I hate it. Six weeks ago he would not have considered it in the first place; two weeks ago he would have done it. Now there is a visible moment in which a ten-year-old boy calculates whether he is allowed, and decides he isn't, and stands up politely instead.
"You're back."
"I am back."
"Karina said—" He stops. He is looking at how I am standing. "You're hurt."
There is a version of this conversation where I say it isn't anything.
"Yes," I say. "Somebody shot me on Thursday night. It went through the side and out again, and a doctor has closed it, and I am going to be slow and bad-tempered for three weeks and then entirely fine."
He goes white.
"Sit down," I tell him, "because there is more, and you are going to want to be sitting."
We sit on the step. It takes me longer to get down than it should, and he notices that too.
"I need to tell you some true things," I say, "and I am not going to make them smaller. You are ten, and you've been lied to by adults your whole life for your own good, and I have been one of them, and I am finished with it."
He nods. Both hands flat on his knees.
"There is a man," I say. "He is a senior officer in the FBI, and he is also something else, and he is the man who sent the people who came into our house in New York in March."
Sergei's hand goes to his arm. To the place. He does it without any idea that he is doing it.
"The man who shot me."
"The man who sent the man who shot you. Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I have spent eleven years taking things away from people like him, and he wants them back, and he cannot find me.
" I look at the water. "So he has been looking for anybody who can lead him to me.
And that is why the people came to the house, and that is why he wants Raven, and that is why I have to go and finish it. "
"Is that why she left?"
And here is where I could take it. Here is the open door — yes, she left because of the danger, she left to protect us — and it would be free, and it would make a boy feel better this morning.
"No," I say.
He looks up.
"She left because of something I did," I say.
"Not something you did, and not the man in the FBI.
Me. She found something in my office that I had built, and it was a bad thing, and I built it before I knew her and I didn't undo it afterward, and when she found it she made a decision about who I am. "
"What was it?"
"When you are older."
"That's not fair."
"No," I agree. "It isn't fair, and it is the one thing today you are not getting, and the reason is that it is about her and not about me, and it isn't my thing to hand over." I turn my head. "You may ask me again when you are eighteen, and I will answer it then, and I will not have forgotten."
He thinks about that for a long time.
"Was it something to do with her mum?"
I look at my son.
"Why do you ask that?"
"Because she talked about her once." He picks at the seam of his sleeve. "In the pool house. She said her mum lives in a house in Maryland with a green door, and she hasn't seen her in a long time, and she said it in a way that meant don't ask me anything else." A small shrug. "So I didn't."
I sit on a step above the Pacific Ocean with a hole in my side and reflect that my son is more perceptive than eleven men who work for me.
"It was to do with her mother," I say.
"Is her mum okay?"
"Her mother is completely safe," I say, "and I have made very sure of that, and that is the truest sentence I will say to you today."
He accepts it. He accepts it the way children do, entirely, and something in my chest goes sideways.
"You're going to go and find him," Sergei says. "The FBI man."
"Yes."
"And Raven?"
"And Raven."
"What if she doesn't want to come back?"
"Then she doesn't come back," I say, "and I will make sure she is safe anyway, and that will be the end of it.
She is allowed. That is what being a person is.
" I put my hand on the step between us. "But I am going to go and find her either way, because a man is looking for her who wishes her harm, and I am not going to sit in this house while that is true. "
"Because you love her."
I do not answer for a moment.
"Yes," I say.
Sergei nods slowly, like a man confirming a figure.
"Okay," he says. "Good."
The rest of it is the hard part.
"You are going to England," I tell him. "Tonight. There is a house in Suffolk that nobody knows about with four men and Bogdan, and you will be there for a few weeks, and then we will see."
"With you?"
"No."
His face does something, and he gets it back under control in about a second, which is the worst thing I have seen this year.
"Why can't I stay with you?"
"Because the man I am going to find has already shot at you once in your own house," I say, "and because I would rather you were bored in Suffolk than reachable in California.
And because if you are somewhere he cannot get to, then I only have to think about one thing, and I need only to have to think about one thing. "
"Are you coming back?"
And there it is.
I am ten years too late for most things with this boy, and I have exactly one asset left: I have never lied to him about anything important, and I am not going to start today to make a plane journey easier.
"I don't know," I say.
He looks at me.
"I intend to," I say. "I have very good men and a very good plan, and I intend to come and collect you in three weeks and be extremely irritating about English food.
But you asked me a real question, and I am not going to answer it with a promise I cannot keep, because you would know, and then you would not be able to believe anything else I told you. "
Sergei's chin does something.
And then he leans over and puts both arms around me.
He does it hard. He does it hard enough that it goes directly through the dressing on my left side and the pain is genuinely astonishing. I sit absolutely still on that step with my son's face against my shoulder and my arms out to either side like a man who has never had a pair of arms before.
Two seconds.
Then I put them down. Both of them, flat, the whole weight, no delicacy anywhere.
We sit like that for a while.
"You're bleeding," he says, into my shirt.
"Probably."
"Sorry."
"Do not apologize," I say. "Do not ever apologize for that."
Andrei takes him at nine that evening.
At the steps of the aircraft, Sergei stops and turns around, and it isn't me he looks for.
He looks at Andrei.
And Andrei stands there — six foot four, armed, entirely still, a man who has spent four years arranging never to be alone in a room with this child — and looks back at him.
"Andrei," Sergei says.
"Da."
"You were at the gate."
Everything on that tarmac stops.
Andrei doesn't move a muscle. I do not move. I have no idea what is happening, and I have the very strong sense that I am watching something I have no right to see.
"That day," Sergei says. His voice is perfectly steady. "You were at the gate, because a man came about a delivery. And you told me to stay at the table, and I didn't."
"...Yes."
"I know you think about it." My son looks up at a man twice his size. "I think about it too. But you were at the gate, and I went up the stairs on my own, and that's what happened. That's just what happened."
Andrei says nothing at all.
"You can be my bodyguard on the plane," Sergei says. "If you want."
And then he turns around, goes up the steps, and doesn't look back, because he is ten years old and he has just done the single bravest thing anybody in my organization has done this year, and he doesn't know it.
Andrei stands on the tarmac.
He doesn't look at me. I do not look at him. We stand four feet apart in the dark next to an aircraft for perhaps fifteen seconds while a very large man does something with his breathing.
"Pakhan," he says eventually.
"Go."
"I will call from Suffolk."
"Andrei."
He stops.
"How long has he known?" I ask.
"I do not know," Andrei says. "Four years, I think. I think he has known for four years and has been being polite about it."
Yeremey lands at Van Nuys at two in the morning and comes straight to the house, and it is the first time in eleven years he has been in a room with me on the same day as bad news, which tells me what kind of news it is before he opens his mouth.
He looks at me for a while.
"You look terrible."
"I have been shot."
"I know. I paid the woman." He puts a laptop on the table and doesn't open it. "Sit down, Ilya."
"I will stand."
"Sit down."
I sit down.
"I have found her," Yeremey says.
Everything in the room goes very quiet and very sharp.
"Where?"
"She walked into the Washington Field Office six days ago at eight in the morning, with her hands above her head, and surrendered.
" He lets that sit. "She was processed and put in an interview room on the fourth floor, and forty minutes later she left through a stairwell with a dead camera, which means somebody in that building gave her a key. The arresting agent was Logan Foster."
"She is in custody."
"She was in custody for forty minutes, and then she was not. Then later she surfaced at an apartment on Q street belonging to Foster–”
"Yeremey."
"Two nights ago there was an entry at an apartment on Q Street belonging to Foster.
Not a raid. There is no warrant on any system, no arrest logged, no booking, no charge, and no report filed by any office.
" He opens the laptop now. "Foster was taken to a hospital in Georgetown with a fractured orbital bone and admitted under his own name, and has been interviewed by nobody, and is refusing to speak to his own supervisor. "
"And her?"
"She was removed from that building at two forty in the morning in a vehicle with government plates," Yeremey says, "and she hasn't been booked into any facility in this country.
There is no custody record. There is no arrest. As far as every system that exists is concerned, Raven West is still a fugitive at large, and nobody has laid eyes on her. "
I sit very still.
"Where is she?"
"I have a man in the county liaison office who has cost me a great deal of money and who has now given me one single thing that I believe.
" He turns the laptop around. "There is a residence in Georgetown.
It is Danesi's. And two nights ago, at approximately three in the morning, a vehicle entered the rear of that property and a woman was taken into the house through a service door, and she was on her feet, and she was restrained, and there were four men. "
I look at the screen for a long moment.
"He hasn't charged her," I say.
"He hasn't charged her."
"He hasn't booked her, or moved her to a facility, or put her in front of a magistrate, or generated one single piece of paper."
"No."
"Then he isn't arresting her," I say. "He is finding out what she knows."
"Yes."
"And when he has it?"
Yeremey doesn't answer, which is his answer.
I stand up, which hurts a great deal.
"How many men can you have in Washington by midnight tomorrow?"
"Ilya—"
"How many?"
"Nineteen," Yeremey says. "And I want it noted that I have spent four hours on the approach to that house and my professional assessment is that there is no version of it.
It is a federal street. There is a protective detail, there are government cameras, there are two men inside who are not detail, and there is no angle, no vehicle route, and no way out afterward.
" He closes the laptop. "This isn't the casino, where you were warned and went anyway.
This is worse. If you go into that house you won't come out of it, and neither will she, and Sergei will have lost both of you inside a fortnight. "
"Understood."
"That isn't the same as heard."
"No," I agree. "It isn't."
I go to the window.
Nineteen men, a federal street, and a woman in a basement being asked questions by a man who has already killed two of mine on a Thursday.
"Then we will not go in through the street," I say.
"Get me the plans of that house. Every renovation, every permit, every contractor who has invoiced that address in twenty years — and Yeremey, get me the utilities.
Water, gas, and whatever they did to it in the eighties, because a building in Georgetown that old has been opened up four times and somebody has drawings of all of it in a filing cabinet. "
Yeremey looks at me.
Then, for the first time in six days, something moves in his face that isn't exhaustion.
"Now that," he says, "is the man I have worked for for eleven years."