Chapter Nineteen #2
He smiled with the lower portion of his face only.
"Viktor's war is escalating," he said. "I'm sure you're aware.
The reception was a demonstration of capacity.
What comes next is a demonstration of reach.
" He folded his hands on the table. "We've been patient with the pace of your contributions.
The patience has reached its functional limit. "
"You told me to meet you," I said. "I'm here. Say what you mean."
He looked at me for a moment before speaking.
"We need Viktor's operation disrupted from the inside. Not incrementally. Substantially." He slid a folded paper across the table. I did not touch it. "Access points. Security rotation timing for the primary building. The command center's backup power configuration."
"I don't have access to his operational read," I said.
"You share his bed." The phrasing was clinical, not leering. "Access is a function of proximity."
"I am no longer—" I stopped. "The configuration has changed."
Both men looked at me.
"Viktor knows there's a leak," I said. "He doesn't know the full scope. But the access I had to his operational thinking is no longer available." I held the first man's gaze. "Which you would know if your intelligence about the penthouse was as good as you've implied."
A pause.
"Then we have a timeline problem," he said. "Because what you've described is an asset that has been identified and is therefore expiring. Expiring assets create specific risks." He looked at the younger man briefly and then back at me. "We have contingencies for expiring assets."
"I know what that means."
"We prefer you not to require the contingency.
" He smiled again with the lower half. "You are still positioned.
You are still in the building. You are still carrying his name on your hand.
" He glanced at the ring on my finger. "The question is whether you choose to make that positioning useful before the window closes. "
"And if I don't?"
"Then Viktor Golovin receives a very comprehensive package before the week is out.
Not just confirmation of the footage. The communications.
The timing. The complete record of every interaction between you and this network, assembled and presented in a format that leaves nothing to interpretation.
" He paused. "He's heard your version. He would then hear ours.
The difference between those two versions is considerable. "
The distinction was real, I knew that already.
I had given Viktor the truth last night—the full truth, my reasons, what I had done, and why.
Cruz's people would give him the operation's version: documented, stripped of context, assembled to show an asset who had been working against him systematically from the day they met.
"The access points and rotations I don't have," I said. "The command center configuration I've never seen." I kept my voice even. "You're asking for things I cannot provide."
"Then provide what you can." He unfolded his hands. "Viktor's movements this week. His next meeting with Mikhail. Any travel outside Las Vegas. The names of the people he's currently consulting on the leak investigation." He looked at me steadily. "Things a wife would know."
I looked at the table between us. The folded paper I had not touched. The two men, composed and patient, the older one with his professional smile and the younger one with his professional silence.
I had told Viktor the truth of what I had done. He had taken it and stepped back and closed a door.
Whatever I gave these men tonight would be a door he could not reopen.
"I need time," I said.
"You have until Friday." Same timeline as before.
The consistency of it told me the timeline was structural rather than negotiated—that it had been built into the operation's architecture before this meeting, that this meeting was not about flexibility but about allowing me to choose the option that was less costly for them.
"Friday," I said.
He nodded and stood. The younger man stood with him. "Enjoy the rest of your evening," the first man said, which was not a pleasantry.
They left first.
I sat at the table for two minutes after they were gone, looking at the folded paper I had not touched. Then I stood and left it there and walked out.
*****
The Strip at 9:30 pm was its fully operational self.
I stood on the sidewalk outside the Monarch Club with its renovation signage and looked at the neon and the traffic.
I had come to this city three years ago with a suitcase, a skill set, and some self-sufficiency. And then I had watched a man die in a private corridor and walked into a war I had not been equipped for, and had made choices that had compounded.
I was standing outside a venue run by a man who wanted to use me to destroy my husband, having just been given a deadline that ended soon, having spent last night hearing my husband tell me I had forfeited his protection.
Survival was the word the crisis had compressed everything down to. But even that word, which should have been simple—the most simple, the most fundamental, the one I had been operating on since my father's death—had become complicated.
Whose survival? Mine, obviously. Isla's. Elena's. These were the names I had been carrying.
Viktor's name had joined the list without my formal admission of it, and it was there now. The meeting I had just come from had made clear that the Friday deadline was aimed at his survival as much as mine. What Cruz wanted was not my disappearance but my usefulness in his destruction.
I was standing between two sides.
That was the accurate sentence. There was no neutrality available in the geometry of this.
I had made choices that had placed me inside it, and neutral was not one of the positions the inside offered.
I was between two sides, and I had been feeding one of them, and the one I had been feeding wanted Viktor's operation dismantled from the inside, with me as the instrument.
And I was wearing his ring.
I did not know which side I was on.
I knew the side I did not want to be on.
That was not the same as knowing what I would do about it.
Not yet.
I started walking.