24. Raven
Raven
Georgetown, Day Three
Ihave been in this room for something like sixty hours, and I have counted every one of them.
No window. One bulb in a cage. Two zip ties, wrists, front, which is sloppy of them, and I have not done a single thing about it because the moment I do they'll know and they'll put them behind me, and I would rather have my hands in front of me when it matters than free now.
Sixty hours, and they have asked me eleven questions.
That's the wrong part. Eleven questions in sixty hours, all of them from a man who comes down twice a day and sits on a crate, all of them about the same four things: where is the house, how many men, what is the name of the man at the top, and what is the boy's name.
I have given him nothing, which isn't brave; it's arithmetic. The moment I answer the last one, there is no reason for me to be alive.
But nobody has hurt me.
Sixty hours, and not one person has laid a hand on me since the apartment. I have been fed twice a day, there is a blanket, and somebody brought a second bottle of water without being asked.
Don't mark her face.
I have been turning that sentence over for three days, and it only goes one way.
You don't preserve the face of somebody you're going to bury in a landfill.
You preserve the face of somebody who is going to be found — in a house, in a basement, in a photograph, by people with cameras, and identified quickly and without ambiguity.
He's not keeping me. He's storing me.
I am a body he hasn't placed yet.
On the third morning the door opens, and it isn't the man with the crate.
I know before I see his face, because I know the walk. Nine years, four field offices, a hundred stairwells — I know the specific arrogant unhurried way Louis Mendez comes down a set of stairs.
He stops six feet away with a bottle of water in one hand and stands there so I can look at him.
So I look at him.
The bridge of his nose is a mess. It's been reset by somebody who either didn't care or didn't know how, and it sits about four millimeters to the left of where it used to, and there's a flattening across the right cheekbone under the eye that has healed with a dip.
I did that.
I did that in a corridor in March with one punch, and I didn't know whose face I was hitting, and I have carried that not-knowing for eleven weeks, and here it is standing in front of me holding a bottle of water.
"There it is," Louis says. "There's the look. I've been waiting three days for the look."
"Hello, Louis."
"You broke my face, Raven."
"I broke a masked man's face who had just fired on a child," I say. "The rest of it's an administrative detail."
He laughs. He actually laughs, and comes over and puts the water down where I can reach it, which is the first genuinely frightening thing he does, because a man who is careful about your hydration on day three has been told how long you're going to be here.
He sits on the crate.
"Six years," he says. "That's what you're doing the arithmetic on, right? I can see you doing it. Six years."
"Since Newark."
"Since Newark." He looks delighted. "God, you're good. Yeah. Since Newark, since the thing with the storage facility that went nowhere, which went nowhere because I made it go nowhere, and there's a man who noticed that I could make things go nowhere and asked me to dinner."
"Danesi."
"I'm not going to say his name, and you can't make me." He grins. "But yeah."
"Why the house?"
"You know why the house."
"I know he wanted the routing file. I know your job was to take it and mine was to be in the building when it happened." I keep my voice flat. "What I don't know is why a ten-year-old boy."
And here it comes. Here is the thing I have been waiting three days for, and weeks before that, and I do not move a muscle.
Louis shrugs.
"He wasn't supposed to be there."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the whole answer. There was no kid on any intel we had.
There was no kid anywhere — nobody knew that man had a son; that's the entire point of him, and I come round a corner, and there's a witness who can describe six federal agents in a house we're not supposed to be in.
" He spreads his hands. "So yeah. I fired.
That's the job. Anybody in the building is in the building. "
"He was ten."
"He was a witness who was ten."
I sit against a brick wall with my hands zip-tied in front of me, and I have never in my life wanted to do something as much as I want to do something right now.
"And me," I say.
Louis's face changes slightly.
"What about you?"
"Two rounds, Louis." I hold his eyes. "There were two rounds fired in that corridor.
Everybody's statement says one, including yours, and I've read yours three times because he showed it to me — three pages, very specific, and you put one round in the report.
" I let that sit. "But I was under him on that carpet, and I heard two. "
The silence goes on for a while.
"You always were the smart one," Louis says.
"Say it out loud."
"You were never coming out of that house.
" He says it easily. Almost kindly. "That's the whole op.
That's what it was always for. Six agents go in without a warrant, the team leader loses her head and shoots a kid, and then the team leader dies in the house — and that's a closed file, Raven, that's a beautiful closed file.
Nobody investigates a dead traitor. Nobody looks at a routing document that walked out in the same hour.
You were the reason the whole thing works, and you were never, at any point, supposed to be alive at the end of it. "
"And you missed."
"I missed because you moved, and then the alarms went, and then you stayed.
" He shakes his head, genuinely bewildered, and it's the most honest expression I've seen on him.
"That's the part I still can't get over.
For weeks I've been chewing on it. You had two minutes.
Every single one of us was gone. And you sat down on the floor with somebody else's kid and let them take you. "
"Yes."
"Why?"
And I look at Louis Mendez, and I think about a boy on a terrace at two in the morning yelling my name into the dark.
"You wouldn't understand the answer," I say, "and I'm not going to waste it on you."
His face closes.
"Fine," he says, and stands up. "Doesn't matter anyway. He's decided."
Everything in me goes cold.
"Decided what?"
"You're going to be found." Louis picks up the empty bottle.
"About two weeks from now, in a house upstate that belongs to a Russian, with a Russian bullet in you and enough evidence in the room to close nine files at once.
Which means somebody has to go and put you there, and that's a drive, so it happens tomorrow night. "
He goes up the stairs.
At the top, with his hand on the door, he stops.
"For what it's worth," Louis says, "I'm going to be the one that does it. Asked for it specially."
Then the noise starts upstairs.
I don't know what it is at first. It's four floors of house between me and it, and what comes down is a thud, twice, and then a sound like furniture going over.
Then, unmistakably, gunfire.
Oh, thank God.
That's my actual first thought, and I want to be honest about it. Not what's happening. Not who it is. I am sitting in a basement with sixty hours in it and a man who has just told me the date of my own death, and something starts shooting upstairs, and my entire body says: good.
I am on my feet with my back against the wall and my hands out in front of me when the door comes open, and Louis comes down the stairs fast.
And he isn't the man who was on the crate four minutes ago.
That man was enjoying himself. This one has a weapon out, and his face has gone completely white, and I have seen this exact transformation on about eleven men in nine years, and it means the same thing every time.
He's not in control of what's happening, and he wasn't told about it.
"Get up. Get up—"
"I am up."
"We're going out the—"
I hit him with both hands.
Two zip ties, wrists together, in front — and a pair of joined hands swung from the shoulder with the whole body behind them is a mace, and I've had sixty hours to think about the exact angle. It takes him across the side of the jaw, and he goes into the brick wall.
The weapon goes somewhere.
Then it's ugly.
He is bigger than me, and he isn't restrained, and he is frightened, and frightened is fast. He gets a hand in my hair and puts me onto the floor, and I take it on the shoulder again — the same shoulder, which lights up like something electrical — and then his weight is on my back, and his forearm is coming across my throat from behind, and this is how people die.
I get my chin down.
That's all you get, and I get it — chin tucked, so his arm is on my jaw and not my windpipe, and I have about eleven seconds before the arm slides, and it doesn't matter what my chin is doing.
I stop trying to pull the arm.
I go for his hand instead, both of mine, the little finger, and I take it back to the wrist, and I feel it break.
He screams, and the arm comes off, and I am out from under him and moving.
And I go for the weapon, and I am two feet from it when he gets my ankle, and I go down hard on the concrete on my hip, and I twist as I land — I twist without deciding to, my whole body turning to take it on the side rather than the front, and I hear myself make a sound that isn't about the pain.
Louis comes up on his knees with a bleeding hand and gets to the gun first.
And then the door at the top of the stairs comes apart.
Not open. Somebody puts something into it at the lock, and it comes off the frame in one piece, and there is a shape in the doorway with a rifle up, and the room goes very loud, twice.
Louis Mendez is dead before he finishes turning around.
I am on the floor of a basement in Georgetown with my hands tied and my hip screaming, and somebody is coming down the stairs three at a time.
He goes down on one knee beside me.
Ilya's face is grey. There's blood on his left side that has come through his shirt and his coat, old blood, and dust in his hair, and there is an expression on him I have never seen on any human being.
"Raven—"
"Don't touch me."
He stops.
His hands are eight inches from me, and he stops them dead in the air, and I watch every single thing in that man's face go through a door and close it, and he sits back on his heel and puts both hands out flat where I can see them.
"All right," he says.
I get myself up the wall. It takes a while. My hip has gone, and my shoulder isn't right, and I stand there with my back against 1911 brickwork, and my wrists still tied, and I look at him.
"The folder," I say.
And to his eternal credit — I will think about this for the rest of my life — he doesn't say now? He doesn't say later. He doesn't tell me there is a firefight happening two floors above us.
He answers.
"I had your mother watched from the second day," Ilya says.
"The second day, when you were in the cabin, and I hadn't decided whether to kill you.
I asked Yeremey for everyone in the world you would cross a state line for, and he told me what it was, and I told him it was because you knew my son existed.
That was true, and it was not the reason.
It was leverage. That is the word for it, and I am not going to find a better one. "
"Say the rest."
"Six weeks ago I changed the order," he says.
"It stopped being about where she was and started being about who was near her.
And two nights ago I put four men on Ellsworth Drive with instructions that nobody speaks to her, and they are there now, and they have been there since the night I was shot, and that is the only reason I can tell you your mother is safe. "
I stand against a wall with my hands tied.
"Both of those are true," Ilya says. "The second one doesn't undo the first. I built a rope for you in March, and it is the same rope that is around your mother's house tonight, and there is no version of this where I get to have only the good half of that.
You will decide what it means. You have every right to decide it means the worst thing. "
"You had her photographed at my father's grave."
"Yes."
"On the anniversary."
"Yes." He doesn't look away. "And when this is finished, I will give you every copy and every negative and the name of the man who took them, and you may do whatever you want with all of it, including with me."
Upstairs, something heavy comes down and the light in its cage swings.
"I am going to say one more thing," he says, "and then we are going to leave, because we have about ninety seconds.
I didn't come here to be forgiven. I came because there is a man in this house who intends to kill you, and I would have come the same way if you never speak to me again after tonight. "
He puts a knife on the floor, handle toward me, and steps back.
I look at it.
Then I pick it up, and cut my own wrists free, and hand it back to him.
"There's four of them on the ground floor and two on the stairs," I say. "Danesi's in the study on the second floor at the back — he came down here twice, and both times he came down from somewhere, not in from the street."
"Can you walk?"
"I can move."
I bend down and take Louis Mendez's weapon off the floor, and check the load, and it's a full magazine less two, and my hands are entirely steady.
"Left side's yours," I say.