7. Naveed
seven
Naveed
The car pulls out of her block with two of my men behind us and one ahead, and I run the route in my head before the driver does.
Kent to Flushing, no left onto the avenue with the construction blind, over the bridge, down through Brooklyn Heights on the residential grid where a following vehicle has nowhere to hide.
Fourteen minutes. Twelve if the lights hold.
Kat sits with her arms crossed and a strip of gauze on the back of her hand and a duffel at her feet that I packed in four minutes because she was too busy arguing to do it herself.
"This is a kidnapping."
"You walked to the car."
"Under duress."
"You were still talking. Nobody under duress talks that much."
She turns to the window. The glass is armored but she does not know it. Her breath fogs a patch of it and she wipes it clear with two fingers, my eyes track the movement before I can stop them.
Eyes on the mirrors, Safar.
Mirrors. Clean. The sedan behind us takes the same turns because I told it to.
"You said no safehouse."
"I said no Echelon safehouse."
"That is a distinction without a difference."
"It's the only difference that matters." I check the side mirror again. "Echelon properties are on paper. Leases, vendors, utilities, cleaning contracts. Twenty people touch a safehouse before you sleep in it. Any one of them can be bought."
"And where we're going, nobody touches."
"Nobody touches."
She is quiet for six blocks. The tires hum on the bridge deck. The river sits black and wide under us and I hate every second we spend elevated with no cover.
"Whose place is it?"
"Mine."
Her head swivels. I keep my eyes forward.
"Yours."
"Most hardened residence in the borough. Reinforced door, sightlines I chose, no exterior fire escape, no shared walls, no doorman to bribe. Cameras I own on a system nobody outsources. Every variable in that building is mine."
Clean. Correct. I could brief it to Tariq in thirty seconds and he would sign off in five.
Then why did you not call Nathan.
Nathan has four properties inside the city that are just as hard, harder in two cases, staffed with operators I would trust with my own body. One phone call. She would have been secure inside ninety minutes with a rotating detail and no one in the building who has ever known her name.
I did not make the call.
"You could have put me anywhere," she says, her voice losing the fight in it.
"Correct."
"Naveed."
"We're four minutes out."
She lets it go. She is exhausted, bleeding, the word FIRE is still sitting behind her eyes, it's going to keep her up tonight, and I know exactly which room I am going to be sitting outside of when it does.
Not the reason. The building is the reason.
That is the sentence I keep handy for the others.
The truth is uglier, and I will not say it even in my own skull at full volume: Nathan's houses are harder than mine, and I drove her to mine anyway, because somewhere under the threat assessment is a man who wanted her to sleep one night inside walls that are only his, breathe air that carries his name on the paperwork, be — for eight hours, filed as an operational decision — kept.
I have wanted very little in eleven years.
I did not know the wanting still had a throttle until tonight, when it opened up and I let a route decision be made by the part of me I retired.
The car turns onto my street. Brownstones shoulder to shoulder, old trees, gaslight-shaped lamps some committee fought for.
Quiet, the kind that costs money. I take her up the steps with my body between her and the street, key in, code in, and the lock releases with the heavy sound of something built to hold.
I open the door.
Empty warm air greets us. No cooking smell, no laundry detergent. The only exception is the scent of lavender always permeating through the vents, and the faint metal of the safe in the hall closet. The lamp I leave on a timer throws light across an entryway with nothing on the walls.
She steps past me into it. I watch her stop three feet in and turn a slow half-circle, taking in the bare console, a single coat on the single hook, the corners with nothing in them.
Her shoulders drop.
"Naveed."
"Bathroom's second door on the left. Towels are in the cabinet."
"This is where you live?"
My hand closes into a fist at my side.
"Come in. I'll lock up."
She bypasses the bathroom, sets the duffel down where I put it and starts walking, and I know immediately the shape of what she is doing because I do it in every room I enter. Perimeter. Except she is not counting exits. She is counting me.
Living room first. She stops in front of the couch, gray, firm, positioned for the door and the window both. No throw blanket. No indentation in the cushions on one side, because I do not have a side. She touches the arm of it with two fingers, like a woman checking whether a display piece is real.
"Do you sit here?"
"I do."
She keeps moving. In the kitchen, she opens the fridge without asking. I should mind. I don’t. Eggs, yogurt, three containers of lamb and rice I made Sunday, one lemon. She closes it. Opens a cabinet. Shuts it. Turns.
"There's more food in your fridge than furniture in your apartment."
"Food is a requirement."
"And chairs are decorative."
"There are four."
"There are four," she repeats, and something about how she says it puts a hand around my throat and squeezes.
She moves down the hall. I follow a close four feet because closer is crowding and farther is negligent. She passes the closed door of the second bedroom without turning the knob, surprising me, and stops at the shelf outside my room.
Military history. Thirty-one volumes, spines cracked, the fourth one from the left held together with tape because I have read it to pieces. It is the only shelf in the residence. I built the rest of my life without handholds and she found it in thirty seconds.
She stands there not touching the books. She just looks at them for a long time. Then her eyes move to the wall above them.
Nothing.
"Naveed."
"Yes."
"Where are your pictures?"
"Not necessary."
"That's not an answer, that's a supply requisition.
" She turns to face me and her eyes are doing the thing I have not built a countermeasure for.
Pity I can stand in front of all night. This is different.
This is a woman reading the room like I read a stairwell.
"You know what I thought when I walked in?
I thought, okay, minimalist. Tactical guy. Fine. Very on brand."
"But."
"But minimalism is a choice about what you take out." She lifts her chin at the bare console, the bare walls, the squared boots by the door with their toes exactly parallel. "Nothing ever came in here. There's nothing to take out. You didn't strip this place. You just never moved in."
The air in my chest stops circulating.
Eight years I have slept in this building and the sentence took her four minutes. I bought this place the year before I left the special forces and drew up the renovation plan to my own specifications.
The part I actually use is between the gym and the pool. Every night before bed, I swim a few laps to unwind.
"It's secure," is what comes out of me.
"I know it's secure. It's the safest cage I've ever stood in." She responds without cruelty. "Better furniture than most. Still a cage."
"You're bleeding through the gauze."
"Don't do that."
"Do what."
"The redirect. You did it in the car too." She crosses her arms, the gauze on her hand catches the lamp. "I'm a reporter, Safar. I've watched senators do that with more polish and less charm."
"I have charm."
Something breaks across her face that is almost a laugh, and then it fades, and she is looking at the shelf again.
"You have thirty-one books about how other men died," she says.
I have no counter for that. I have never needed one. Nobody has ever been in here long enough to build the sentence.
Assess. Assess something.
Windows: covered, no exterior access. Door: locked, coded, logged. Threat level inside this residence: zero.
The count runs. The thing pressing on my ribs is not a threat. I don’t have a category for it. She is standing four feet away in my hallway, lamp light on her face, and she is right.
"Bathroom's second on the left," I say again.
She holds my eyes for another second. Then she takes the duffel and retreats, the door closes, and the water runs.
Outside, the light drains off the brownstones across the street. The lamps come up amber down the block, one at a time, as they always do. The apartment goes dark around the single timer lamp, and neither of us turns on another one for a long time.
Two forty-one. I know the number without checking because I have been awake since the twelve-minute stretch of sleep the couch allowed me. The kitchen tile is cold and honest against my feet. It helps.
I stand looking out at the city. The glass of water forgotten in my hand. City light comes through the window over the sink in a long gray bar that lays itself across the counter, the floor, and my forearm.
Her door opens down the hall and my body knows it’s her before my head does. Bare feet on wood. Slow.
She comes around the corner and stops.
I did not put a shirt on. There is no reason in this apartment to put a shirt on at two in the morning, there never has been, and the calculation of that fact arrives about four seconds too late to be useful.
She rounds the kitchen and stops in her tracks.
Her eyes roam from my face down and stop at my ribs, where a long scar sits, the one that ended a career and a life that was not mine.
The light from the window turns it to silver.
Her eyes continue their perusal up my forearms to the one under my collarbone that puckers when I lift anything heavy.
She reads them left to right like a page.
A normal person would look and then look somewhere else, pretend it was an accident.
My heart rate climbs. I tighten my grip on the glass until the tendons stand up along the back of my hand.