Chapter 14 #2
“I ran the plan before I walked in here. Accelerate the transfer, float the pieces, and draw Lazar’s man into a room we control.” He closes the laptop. “It’s the plan I’d have handed you a month ago. You’d have taken it, and we’d both have called it aggressive but correct.”
I don’t argue. “What changed after Palm Beach?”
“Now I watched you kill it in half a second, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t know why.
” He says it without inflection, in the same voice he uses to report a plate number, which is as close to kindness as the job allows.
“I’m not arguing the call. A month ago, you’d have used her as bait because the route was fast. Today, Adrian gave you the plan knowing you’d refuse it. ”
He picks up the laptop. “You’re harder to secure now.
The second an enemy works out there’s a person you won’t trade away, they’ve found the lever that moves you, and they’ll reach for her every time.
You’re also making better decisions than the man who treated everyone he loved like a weakness he had to contain.
I’ve kept that man alive for ten years. This one is harder to protect and easier to respect, and at some point you’re going to have to tell me which one is running the operation. ”
He leaves before I can decide whether that was permission or a warning, and I suspect he intended the ambiguity, because Platon has spent ten years teaching me things by refusing to state them.
Angelina remains after Platon leaves. She sat through all of it without moving, obviously picking up the proposed plan from what Platon said.
Weeks ago, near the end of the seven days she gave me, I told her the operational version of the four years.
Every safe house, every alias I chose for her, and every reason.
She listened to all of it and told me at the end that I’d answered the question she asked and not the one she meant, and that she’d wait for me to understand the difference.
She hasn’t stopped waiting. This is what the waiting looks like.
“You refused that plan before you finished hearing it?”
I shrug. “It was a bad plan.”
“It sounded like a good plan from what Platon said, and you know it. You argued the tactics after you’d already decided.
You heard ‘put Piper in the room’ and rejected it, then built the operational case.
” She leans forward. “Papa’s men could all tell you to the dollar what a decision would cost before they made it. You didn’t run the cost of this one.”
“I’m managing an operation.”
“You’re managing yourself, badly, and I’m the only person here who loves you enough to say it to your face.
” She isn’t cruel about it. That’s what makes it worse.
“You can call it operational judgment, or you can admit that loving her changed what you’re willing to risk.
Papa never admitted it. That’s the only difference left between you and him, and it’s closing. ”
“What’s the true thing, then,” I say, and it doesn’t come out as a question, because I already know what it is and I’m furious at how small the distance is between not-knowing and knowing.
“You tell me. You’re the one who said no before you thought it through.”
She’s right, and I have no answer that isn’t agreement.
Somewhere in the last three weeks, Piper stopped being someone I was willing to risk. I didn’t decide that, so I can’t undecide it, and I’ve known the reason for longer than I’ve let myself acknowledge.
I don’t say it to Angelina. Saying it to her before I’ve admitted it to Piper would be wrong. “You’ve made your point,” I say, and there’s no edge to it. “Successfully, as you usually do.”
“I’m not trying to win, Nikita.” She stands, and at the door she stops, as she always does, because she’s incapable of leaving a room without the last word.
I’ve stopped resenting her for it. “I’m trying to make sure that when this is over, there’s a version of you left that she’d want to stay with.
Papa didn’t leave one. Don’t make me watch you do the same thing with better manners. ”
She goes.
I sit with the photographs and the cold coffee Platon left me, thinking about the plan I refused, and I make myself look at the refusal as coldly as I’d look at anyone else’s, an operator studying a decision for the flaw that will get people killed.
The flaw is obvious. I chose her over the fastest route to the man hunting us.
I’d do it again in the same half second.
That’s not a lapse I can train out of myself before the next meeting. It’s a new fact about how I work now. Platon already knows it, Angelina already knows it, and the only person who doesn’t know it yet is the woman it’s about.
My phone lights on the table with a text from Mila.
She’s all right. She went lightheaded getting dressed and I caught her before she went down. Nothing appears acute. She wants me to tell you it was the travel. I’m telling you what she wants me to tell you.
I read it twice. Mila doesn’t editorialize, and she just did. She thinks the symptoms deserve attention even if Piper wants them written off as travel, and she’s telling me so in the only sentence she can send without going around her patient.
I take the stairs two at a time, and I don’t slow down long enough to be ashamed of how fast I left the evidence behind.