12. Maxim
MAXIM
Lev’s call comes at four in the morning. “Kirill’s gone. Transport stop on the turnpike, the service plaza past Newark. He went through the van’s ceiling vent while Yuri bought fuel. Vanished into the truck lots.”
“Injuries?”
“Pride. Sasha has a wrist that will need looking at, from the garage, not from the escape. No one was cut, no one was shot. He did not even take their phones.” A pause travels down the line. “He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, Maxim. He was leaving.”
I stand at the window and watch the river shine under city lights beneath the bridges. I’m disappointed by the loss of Kirill and unsurprised as well. A combination only two living people produce in me. One is my son. The other is Kirill.
The man has been apprehended four times over the course of twenty years, to the best of my knowledge.
He was detained twice by adversaries, once by the Polish authorities in Gdansk, and once for a period of one week by the federal government of the United States.
He’s never been confined in any facility.
Alexei doesn’t keep him for his conversation. He keeps him because Kirill is the knife that always comes back.
“He permitted us to seize him.”
“How do you mean?”
“He fought sufficiently to appear credible in the garage, then lost the fight. Too easily. He didn’t get captured for nothing.”
“Then the question is what he collected while he was ours.”
“The question is why Sokolov sent him to be captured. What could he have possibly gathered in such a short span of time?” I watch a barge slide beneath the bridge.
It’s lit like a Christmas tree so it can be seen.
Otherwise, barges move like ghosts in the dark.
But this one wants to be seen. To be found. Like Kirill.
Normally, the man is a ghost. This time, he was a nuisance. Why? “Nothing on the interrogation?”
“Forty minutes of silence. He recited the service plaza menu in order, twice. Yuri says that it was the longest speech anyone had heard from him.” Lev exhaled, his frustration evident. “Get some rest, Maxim. He’s a message, not an attack. Alexei is telling us his reach has grown.”
Another message arrives at seven by courier in a gray envelope addressed to me in someone’s neutral hand. I open it myself. Two photographs, no note. A note would not be Alexei’s style.
The first is from the Meridian. Twelfth floor, my floor. It’s the corridor outside my suite, time-stamped in the corner, the morning on a date I do not need to check.
Thea is mid-step, shoes in one hand. Her hair is down, clothes askew, and she’s caught in the amber of the hallway sconces with her face in three-quarter profile. Unmistakable, lovely. Leaving.
Leaving me.
I brush aside the sting of that, but it lingers. The picture means Alexei already had a man there. Already knew where I was, and what I’d be doing.
Does that mean that Thea is his?
Doubtful, but not impossible. I’ve looked into her, and there’s nothing to imply she’s anything but what she says she is. Still, I have to keep my guard up with her. Just in case.
The love life of a pakhan is never simple.
Whatever the case, Kirill was in the corridor at four in the morning because Kirill had taken the neighboring suite. He was there before I ever brought her upstairs.
Which means she’s in Kirill’s crosshairs because of me.
The second photograph is daytime. In my garage, the executive sublevel, taken from an upper ramp with a long lens.
She is crossing to her car with a coffee and a folder.
Her sunglasses sit pushed up into her hair, and she’s talking to someone out of frame or to herself.
Given how dedicated she is, I assume she’s speaking to herself.
She’s never mentioned friends. The timestamp is from four days ago.
Four days. He has been following her in the daylight, on my property.
On the back of the first photograph in Russian are two words.
Pretty face.
I set the photographs on the desk, and I sit with my hands flat on the walnut until they are calm. They want to ball into fists I can shove down Alexei’s throat.
This is not a threat in a traditional way. And the last time he said a woman had a pretty face…
Alexei has seen her, and he’s telling me he has seen her. He will see her as one of two things. My woman or my informant.
As my woman, she’s a soft place to put pressure on a hard man. As an informant, she’s someone’s asset moving through my private floors and my archives at strange hours, a leak to be located and closed.
Or leveraged.
Either ends the same way once she stops being useful, and he’ll decide when that is, because that’s something I learned about Alexei Sokolov one funeral at a time.
He’s a man without a code.
The old rules, the ones I was raised under, leave wives and children untouched. They keep civilians left out of our world whenever possible.
But Alexei has killed accountants. He killed a man’s mother to make the man punctual. He’s tortured another man’s girlfriend because the man commented rudely about his suit.
Pretty face.
Two words to tell me he sees her, and that what happens to her next is a question he expects me to answer. My answer tells him what she’s worth to me, and what she’s worth to me tells him where to cut.
I won’t allow this to happen.
Lev arrives with coffee and takes in the photographs without touching them, and reads the back of the first one, and stands very still for a moment. “So… The woman.”
“The woman.”
He sets down the coffee. “One. Relocate her. New name, new city, money, a story for the family. Vanish her gently. It works if she cooperates and never calls her mother, which is to say, it works in textbooks.”
“Relocation rarely works.”
“I know. Two.” He pauses, and he looks at me, and he does not soften it. “Erase her. Not by our hand, by circumstance. By accident. It closes the question for good. It’s the only option where Sokolov gains nothing.”
“And the third option?”
“What makes you think there’s a third?”
I raise a brow. “You’re you. I assume you have a tenth plan up your sleeve. If you didn’t, you would not be my sovetnik.”
He nearly smirks. “Maxim. I’m obligated to finish the second. She runs your office, she reads everything, she’s in the archives excavating the exact records a prosecutor would subpoena, and you’ve known her for three weeks. She knows far too much to be left as a loose string.”
“You want her tied up all nice and neat?”
“What I want is immaterial. What you need is to tie her to a brick with that loose string and drop her in the river.”
There’s a tidy logic to his thoughts, but life is messy. Things with Thea are… messier. “Tell me what it is that you want, Lev.”
He sits back and sighs. “I want to know more about her before anything else happens. If she’s already someone’s, if Alexei reached her before you ever did, then relocation hands his asset a new identity at our expense, and it’s also pointless.
Killing her could take away Alexei’s asset, but we also don’t get answers from her, ending our chance to make her into our asset.
Bringing her closer hands her the keys.”
“But also possibly gives us Alexei’s asset.”
He nods once. “The cold answer is the second answer. The riskiest is the third option. Bringing her in makes you vulnerable.”
“It also has the highest cost-to-benefit ratio.”
Again, he nods. “I don’t like any of the options, to be honest.”
I see his points. All of them. But I will not entertain one of them.
“She’s not a leak. She handed me her own bias unprompted in our first meeting.
She’s a civilian, Lev. Probably the last civilian in that entire building, and I’m not my father, so if the second option is voiced in my presence again, I will treat the voicing as the act. Am I understood?”
“You are understood.” He sits with that for a moment before adding, “If you intend to bring her in, do it quickly. Quietly. Whatever you choose, she will not like it.”
“I’m well-aware.” The picture is clear in my mind. Thea, that defiant lip, the fire in her eyes. She won’t simply agree to what needs to be done. “She’ll fight it.”
“She threw wine on you in front of four hundred people. Of course she will fight it.”
“That was an accident.”
“We both know there are no accidents.” He collects the photographs, squares them, slides them into his coat. “But she will be alive to fight it, and that is the goal. Kirill is loose, and he has her schedule, and I would rather insult her freedom than attend her funeral. Perhaps approach her soon.”
He’s not wrong. If Kirill has a kill order on Thea, there is only one way to stop him.
Thea’s building in Queens is brick, prewar, three floors, a building out of history. I’m parked across the street with two cars I trust at either corner. Can’t have her running too far away.
I watch her kitchen light burn behind thin curtains. A fire escape on the alley side. It’s reachable from a dumpster someone can climb. The street door hangs a half-second before latching. Sixty seconds of looking and I know I have three ways into her building.
That means Kirill has three obvious ways into her building, and at least two obscure ones I spotted from the street. Probably another from underneath or on top of the building.
I climb her stairs and knock twice.
The locks turn, one, two, three of them because she’s always thorough.
Thea opens the door the length of her security chain at first, which I approve of, and then all the way.
She stands there in lounge pants and an enormous Penn State sweatshirt with a brown cat threading her ankles, and for one second her face does the thing I came all this way in the dark half hoping to see.
The softening.
Then it’s gone in a flash, and what replaces it is new and cold.
She steps back to let me in, but she steps farther than the door requires.
She holds her own elbows. Three nights ago, this woman pulled me to her by my lapels, and tonight she has put a kitchen chair’s worth of distance between us in her own home.
Thea’s watching me the way a principal watches the school bully.
“Maxim.” Zero warmth or affection. Considering I know how to make her come screaming, this is a strange turn of her attitude.
“If this is a, if you’re here to…” she gestures at the general concept, and does not finish it.
She does not smile either, and the cat yells once into the silence, as if he knows why she has gone cold.
“I’m not here for that, Thea.”
“Okay.” She swallows. “Then why are you in Queens?”
She knows something. Clearly. But she’s not prepared for this. No version of this goes well, no matter what she thinks she knows.
“Thea. You’ll be leaving town. Tonight. Now. Pack one bag, essentials, only. A car is downstairs, and two more sit at the corners. There is no running. I will explain what can be explained once we are moving. And I’m aware of exactly how this sounds.”
She does not move. The kettle ticks on the stove behind her, cooling. The cat sits down on her foot as if to anchor her to the floor, just as stubborn as she is. She glares at me across the room, pale, steady, working the problem as if this is a negotiation.
I watch her check the window with one eye still on me. She glances to the front door. And I see the moment it clicks that neither exit is available to her.
She gulps as her shoulders heave with her breath. “Are you kidnapping me?”
“I’m protecting you.”