CHAPTER 20
Ana
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“— and he asked me to say it to you in my own voice, instead of putting any of it in writing.”
The handset lay face down on the kitchen counter beside the kettle, and Colette Hargrave’s voice came out of it before I’d decided anything at all. Rain went down the window over the sink in sheets and had been going down it since before first light. I picked the handset up.
“Writing is what brought every one of us here,” she said.
“Colette. I am here.” I said it quietly, which is the thing I do instead of raising my voice. “Tell me everything, and do not leave the ugly parts out.”
“There are no ugly parts.” Her breath went in and came out wrong. “That’s what I’ve been sitting with since four this morning.”
“He isn’t asking you to lie. He’s asking you to be slow.”
“Tell me what slow means,” I said. “Slow is a word with edges when a man like him uses it.”
“It means you stop re-authenticating.” I could hear paper moving at her end. “The instruction ages out, nothing fires, and nobody explains anything to anybody.”
“When does he want this?”
“Before it gets dark tonight,” she said. “He never leaves room.”
“You used to tell me that was a virtue.”
“I used to be wrong about a great many things.”
“And what is he putting on the other side of that.”
“Everything you haven’t already spent,” she said. “Your license survives, because your self-report stands.” Somebody closed a door behind her and she waited for it. “You go back to your desk, or you go somewhere better.”
“He will let your mother keep her garden and her bad knee and her whole quiet life.”
The handset had gone slick in my grip. My body works these things out well ahead of my head, and it’s never yet been wrong.
“You’ve left something out,” I said. “Tell me what it says about the men who took me.”
“It says nothing about them at all.” She paused. “I went through it looking for them, and they’re absent.”
“An offer that leaves them out has already decided about them.”
“Yes,” Colette said.
“You said her name out loud,” I said. “In all these years you have not done that.”
“He doesn’t say it,” she said. “He never says the sentence that would make it a threat.” A pause came down the line. “I’ve watched him not say it in rooms full of lawyers.”
“And you are the one who says it.”
“I am the one who says it.” She said it the way she used to read out a docket number. “That appears to be what I am for now.”
“Is he sitting there with you while we do this?”
“No, he doesn’t listen to calls,” she said. “People tell him afterwards, and he’s always preferred that.”
“Then I will give it to you, and you can carry it up.”
My mother is Delia Verdugo, she’s in Beacon with Kestrel people on her street, and a man on the fiftieth floor had just told me he knew which street.
I squared my shoulders to a woman ninety-one miles away who could not see me do it.
My mouth shaped the beginning of the sentence before I gave it any air.
“Tell him I read the offer twice and it still says the same thing both times.”
Colette was quiet for long enough that I heard the weather at her end as well, or believed I did.
“I am not calling because he made me. I am calling because I could not think what else to be.”
“I won’t pretend that I understand you,” I said. “I’d be lying, and we’ve both had enough of that.” She was breathing and saying nothing. “I’ve never thought you were stupid, Colette. I am still not thinking it.”
The channel closed and the handset went to a flat electronic nothing against my ear.
This hill takes its signal from one place only.
There’s a mast bolted along the ridge of the roof, and everything that reaches this kitchen comes down through it.
A call that finds the mast has found the hill.
I got there about one sentence too late, standing in a warm room with a dead handset in my hand, and the understanding arrived in my stomach before it arrived anywhere I could use it.
Three days.
Cassian came in off the gravel with the yard streaming behind him and got his coat onto the peg.
“Get the other three in here,” I said. “I’m saying this once, in her words and her order.” I set the handset down. “Then you can all have opinions at me.”
They came. Rian stood because Rian doesn’t sit with a door behind him, and the sling made his left side look borrowed from somebody smaller.
Luca arrived with a dish towel over his shoulder and put it down slowly, which is what he does instead of swearing.
Matteo came in last from the barn with rain in his black hair and didn’t take his eyes off my face.
I gave it to them the way she gave it to me, with the pauses in the same places. A sentence repeated exactly is a sentence you’ve taken the power out of, and I needed the power out of that one before it got dark.
“He offered me my mother, which means he’s run out of things I want.”
Rian’s chair went over backwards and nobody picked it up. Luca kept his eyes on my face the whole time.
“We do not trade principals,” Cassian said. “There is no version of this where I trade you.”
“It’s beautiful work, and I want that said in the room.” Luca had gone the color he goes when he isn’t performing. “He hasn’t threatened one living person on that list.”
“Say the part you are keeping behind your teeth.”
“Every one of them is standing on it.” He picked the dish towel up and put it down again. “Refusing it is a thing you did to your mother.”
“Where is Delia tonight?” Rian said.
“In Beacon,” Cassian said. “Our people have been on that street since the beginning.” He kept his eyes on me while he said the rest. “It was doubled while Ana was still on the telephone.”
“If you walk out that door I will come through every wall between us.”
Rian said it from across the table with his good hand open on the wood, and he said it quietly, which from him is the alarm and never the reassurance.
“Then let me ask the only question I came in with,” I said. “Is there any version where I get to sub-level two with the four of you in that building?”
Cassian didn’t move at all. He’s the only man I’ve ever met who answers a hard thing without shifting his weight first.
“None that ends with you alive, and I have looked at it from every side twice.”
I heard it. I set it down carefully somewhere I could find it again, and then I gave them the other thing, because I don’t keep things back from people standing in the room with me.
“She called a mast,” I said. “There’s one line onto this hill, and she used it.” Four faces changed at slightly different speeds. “She knew what that would do when she dialled it.”
“How long have we had?” Rian said.
“I got there about a sentence too late.”
“Which channel?” Matteo said.
“The repeater. The handset was already talking when I reached it.”
“Then they have the hill and not the house.” Matteo was already moving for his coat. “That’s a difference worth having tonight.”
“Assume they have the house,” Cassian said.
“I’ll take the yard,” Rian said.
“The north line first, before it’s properly dark.” Matteo pulled the coat on and looked at me instead of at Cassian. “I left a gap on the gable camera.” He did the zip up one-handed, badly. “I’m not sleeping with it open.”
“Go the long way and stay off the flat,” Cassian said.
“I always do.”
Those are the last words he said to any of us, and they were addressed to the room, and I’ve thought about that ever since. He did not look back from the door.
He went out at dusk. The camera on the barn gable had been dead since the frost. The rain was heavier by then. The wire rang once at the strainer post, far off, the sound a fence makes when something two fields away touches it, and then it did not ring again.
His channel went quiet at ten past six. Nobody in that kitchen spoke for a while, and then all three of them moved at once.
Rian went out into it one-armed, and Cassian let him, which told me more than any of them said out loud. He came back a long while later with mud to the knee and water running off his jaw, and he stood in the doorway and said nothing at all.
“Tell me what is up there,” Cassian said.
“Flattened grass, and a gate standing open that we don’t open.”
“Anything on the ground?”
“Water. Everything up there is water now.” Rian was breathing through his nose and wouldn’t admit he’d run. “That’s it. That’s every damn thing I have.”
“It is where he came in and where he went out again,” Cassian said. “That is two facts. You will keep both of them.”
The photograph came in on the link at seven o’clock.
Matteo was on a concrete floor with his back against a wall, wrists zip-tied in front of him, left hand pressed flat over his left side.
He was sitting up because he couldn’t have lain down, and his breathing was shallow enough to read off a still image.
Behind him a window had been taped over from the inside, and the tape had been put on by somebody in a hurry, and one end of it had lifted.
“That is tape on the inside of the glass and that is a loading bay behind him,” I said. “That is Red Hook. That is the staging house.” I put my thumbnail on the lifted end of the tape. “You’ve all been saying that name since before I met you.”
“How are you getting that off a photograph?” Luca said.
“I read documents for a living,” I said. “A photograph is a document nobody proofread.”
“Is he sitting up because he wants to?” Rian said.
“Because he cannot get down. Look at the hand.”
Nobody argued with me. Luca put his own hand over his mouth and left it there. The handset went off again before I’d put it down.
“Good evening, Ms. Verdugo. This is Ivo Kranz.” It came out of him level, an appointment read back to me. “The terms should come from me and not from my people.”
“I am listening.”
“I am paid for the woman and the key. Your technician was never on my invoice.” A pause, unhurried, entirely without pleasure in it. “He is drinking water and he is sitting up. I do not charge for cruelty.”
“Is he hurt anywhere the photograph did not show me?”