Chapter 3
VICTORIA
Sleep never comes.
I lie in the dark of a bedroom in a dead man's safe house and count the names instead.
My encrypted phone sits on the mattress beside me, screen dimmed but never off, and each time it vibrates I add another entry to the ledger I've been building in my head since Roman walked through my door and rearranged the architecture of my grief.
Henrik in Copenhagen. Former Danish military intelligence, retired to a consultancy that brokered information between Nordic defense ministries and private clients.
I recruited him at a conference in Oslo, impressed by the depth of his analysis and his contacts across Scandinavian security services.
He owed me nothing. I owed him a debt I'll now carry for the rest of my life.
Sato in Vienna. A financial analyst who fed me Committee money trails through shell companies registered across Central Europe.
We met once, at a wine bar near the Ringstrasse, and he told me he tracked dirty money because his father lost his pension to men like the ones I hunted.
He had a dog named after an Austrian composer. I don't remember which one.
The Berlin courier whose name I'm not going to think right now because thinking his name makes him a person instead of a data point, and I need him to stay a data point for a while longer.
Baumann. Still in Berlin, still transmitting as of hours ago. Still alive.
I hold on to Baumann the way a drowning woman holds on to wreckage.
Not because he can save me, but because I can't lose everyone in a single night and maintain the operational clarity that has kept me breathing for most of my adult life in a profession that often kills people long before they reach forty.
My phone vibrates again. I read the message with the screen angled away from the door, where a thin line of nothing separates me from the main room and the man sitting in it.
Before I came in here, I sat on the kitchen counter and listened to Roman's satellite call to Kane from across the room while Roman kept his voice low and described my network's destruction with the clinical accuracy of someone who has been operating alongside it for years without telling me.
His intelligence was thorough enough to make me want to put my fist through the counter.
Instead I let him explain Budapest. I stood there and listened to the story of his survival, his choice, his decade of silence, and when he finished I told him the truth.
That it wasn't strategy. That it was betrayal.
Then I walked into this bedroom and closed the door because if I stayed in that room with him for one more minute, I was going to do something I hadn't yet decided whether to regret.
This is how I survive. Not through courage or resilience or whatever word people use to dress up the ugly business of continuing to breathe when the world is trying to stop you.
I survive by turning human beings into intelligence assessments, by converting grief into data, by refusing to feel anything that hasn't been weighed, measured, and assigned a strategic value.
It's monstrous. I know that. I've always known that.
Through the wall, I hear Roman shift in his chair — a small sound, leather and fabric and the specific gravity of a man who hasn't slept either.
I hate that I can still read him by sound alone. I hate that when I close my eyes, my body remembers his proximity involuntarily, down to the bone, a reflex that hasn't faded despite ten years of scattering flowers at his memorial and believing every word of the lie.
My hand finds the go-bag beside the bed and reaches into the inner pocket where the photograph sits between my passports.
I don't need to see it. I know it by touch, the slightly worn edges, the glossy surface that has traveled from Prague to London to this Shoreditch bedroom without losing any of what it carries.
James and me at a café table, laughing. The easy grin he wore right up until Webb's people killed him in Bratislava. I press my thumb against the corner of the photograph and let the edge bite into my skin, a small pain that keeps the larger one organized.
I put the photograph back. I don't look at it. Looking would make James stand out in my memory, separate from all the rest. And right now I need him filed alongside the others, cross-referenced with loss and sorted by urgency.
Somewhere beyond the blackout curtains and the sealed flat, London is still moving, still breathing, still conducting its ancient business of commerce and indifference. Webb's people are out there searching for me in a city that doesn't care whether I live or die.
I don't sleep. I catalogue.
The hours pass in increments measured by the vibrations of my phone and the gradual shift of sounds from beyond the walls, the city's breathing changing from the sparse rhythm of deep night to the thickening pulse of early morning.
By the time I check my phone and see dawn has broken, I've counted the confirmed dead and the probable dead and the ones who have simply stopped transmitting, which in this business amounts to the same thing.
The number sits in my chest like a stone, and I file it alongside the other numbers I carry: the years since Budapest, the contacts I've built and maintained, the price I've paid for every piece of intelligence I've ever traded.
I get up, dress in the clothes I packed in my go-bag, and open the bedroom door.
Roman is in the kitchen. He's made coffee, the cheap instant kind that comes with furnished safe houses, and two mugs sit on the counter.
He looks like he hasn't slept either, though with Roman the signs are subtle, a slowness in how he turns when I enter the room, a heaviness around his eyes.
He's still wearing the clothes from yesterday, the sleeves pushed to his forearms, the collar open.
His hands are steady around the mug, and I can see the tendons shift when his grip tightens, the coiled strength in his fingers that I remember far too well for a dead man's hands.
Those hands. I remember what they felt like on my waist in Moscow, guiding me through a crowded market while we ran countersurveillance on a Committee asset.
I remember the calluses and the care and his thumb finding the strip of bare skin between my jacket and my trousers without either of us acknowledging it was happening.
I take the coffee without acknowledging him and sit on the sofa with my phone.
The screen shows a cascade of encrypted messages, each one a fragment of my world collapsing in real time.
I scroll through them with the detached efficiency of a surgeon reading a chart, because if I read them any other way, I will not be able to read them at all.
"We need to leave London." Roman's voice is low and unhurried, the register he uses for operational briefings, and it rolls through the flat with an authority that has nothing to do with volume.
He doesn't look at me when he says it, which I appreciate because eye contact right now would feel like an intrusion.
"Tommy's intercepts show Webb's search teams have reached the Thames.
They're working in a grid. We don't have much time before they get to Shoreditch. "
"I know." I've been tracking the same data through my own channels, cross-referencing Webb's search patterns against the Committee's established protocols for asset recovery operations. They're thorough. They're also predictable, which gives us a narrow window to move. "Brussels or Amsterdam?"
"Brussels. Eurostar connection. Amsterdam means airports and cameras." It isn't a suggestion. It's a decision already made, offered to me as though I have a choice. Roman has always done this, presented his conclusions as options while positioning the room so there's only one logical answer.
"Brussels, then." I take a sip of the coffee. It's terrible, but caffeine is caffeine and sentimentality about beverage quality is a luxury I surrendered somewhere around the fourth dead contact.
My phone vibrates. I look at the screen, and the floor drops out from under me.
The message is from a relay I set up in Marseille, a dead drop communication channel that only activates when a pre-programmed trigger is met. The trigger, in this case, is a police report filed at a specific address.
Ines Leclerc, found dead in her apartment in the Panier district. Signs of interrogation preceding death.
My hand shakes. Once. I watch it happen the way you watch a glass fall from a table, with perfect awareness and zero ability to intervene.
Then I lock it down, fingers tightening around the phone until the tremor stops, and I read the message again because the first time couldn't possibly have been accurate.
It is.
Ines ran a signal relay through the Marseille port authority, intercepting Committee shipping manifests and forwarding them to me through a series of encrypted handoffs that took months to build.
She was brilliant at pattern recognition and terrible at operational security, which is why I insisted on managing her communications personally.
She was also warm, funny in a self-deprecating way that reminded me of James, and she made the best bouillabaisse I've ever eaten in a kitchen overlooking the Vieux-Port while her daughter drew pictures of ships at the table beside us.
They tortured her first. The report says "signs of interrogation.
" In the Committee's vocabulary, that means they wanted to know what she knew about me, about my network, about the channels she operated.
Ines would have given them everything within the first hour, because she wasn't trained for resistance and I never asked her to be.
She was a civilian asset, a woman with a gift for numbers and a hatred for the men who used Marseille's port infrastructure to move weapons and drugs. She didn't sign up to die in her own apartment while her daughter was at school.