Chapter 9 #2
“When you’re uncertain, your shoulders come forward. Katya didn’t do that. She went still instead.”
We run through it for an hour. My rehearsed Russian is functional, and Nadia refines it to operational. She gives me three phrases coded to signal distress without tripping obvious wires. I repeat them until they come naturally.
“Hand placement.” Nadia moves my left hand from the table to my lap. “Katya kept her hands below frame during calls. Right hand on the desk for the mouse, left hand out of view. It read as control. Yours reads as nerves.”
I adjust.
“Chin down half an inch. You lift it when you’re defensive. If your chin is even a quarter inch too high, the facial recognition angle shifts, and the match weakens. Katya never defended. She delivered.”
I drop my chin and hold it. Nadia watches the laptop screen where my image sits in a rectangle of cool light, and what she sees stares back at me. A woman who could be Katya if Katya had been running for months and forgot how to sit like she owned the space.
“Now the stakes.” Nadia pulls up a second window.
“If you hesitate on the wrong word, Kirill’s handler will request a callback with secondary verification.
That means a second call we haven’t prepared for, with questions we can’t anticipate.
If you correct a false detail the wrong way, you expose the script.
If your cadence breaks for even two seconds, the voice analysis flags it, and someone on Kirill’s end starts running comparison. ”
“What happens then?”
“Then we lose the operation, and Kirill knows someone is impersonating his missing courier.” Nadia holds my gaze. “Then he knows someone has Katya’s files, Katya’s identity materials, and a woman willing to wear them. That trail leads back to Valentin’s organization in about six hours.”
I absorb that without looking away. Six hours between a broken cadence and a dead operation.
Nadia leans back from the screen. “There. Hold that.”
She taps the lower corner of the screen.
“One more thing. Katya had a visual tell before risky exchanges. A readiness marker.” Nadia demonstrates, two fingers resting against the table’s edge, one deliberate tap with the index finger.
“She did this before she answered anything dangerous. It told the receiver she understood the exchange was live. Subtle enough that anyone watching just sees someone at a table.”
I practice the movement. Two fingers against the edge, one tap. It feels mechanical the first few times. Nadia watches without comment until I do it without thinking.
“Good. Don’t rehearse it during the call. Let it come.”
Kolya comes in during the second hour, with Nathan trailing behind him carrying coffee.
Kolya positions himself against the wall with his arms crossed and watches.
I keep going. Nadia runs me through the visual framing, where to sit, where the light should fall, how to make a laptop camera lie about the room behind me.
Then Kolya steps forward. “Do it under pressure. Nadia isn’t Kirill’s man. She isn’t going to push back.”
We try it. He interrupts early and sharply in Russian too fast for me to catch. I fumble the cadence and lose the thread.
“Again.”
We go again. He comes in harder, claiming that something I said in the first pass contradicts the cover story.
He asks about the south-side contact by the wrong name, testing whether I’ll correct him or accept the error.
I correct him. He fires the next question before I’ve finished the answer, overlapping my cadence with his own, and when I hesitate on the Bridgeport address, he steps closer and asks it again in Russian with a tone that turns the question into an accusation.
Kirill’s people will do worse. I know that.
Kolya is pushing too fast, though, layering the corrections before I’ve integrated the last one, and when I miss a cue, he mutters something in Russian that Nadia doesn’t translate.
The pressure isn’t unfair. It’s the pacing that’s wrong, and the difference matters because a woman who’s been drilled into panic performs worse than a woman who’s been trained through it.
“Stop.” I set my hands on the table. “I need a minute.”
Kolya doesn’t move. “You don’t get a minute on the live call.”
“I’m not on the live call. I’m in training.” I somehow keep my voice steady. “Back off the pace or I walk out of this room.”
He steps closer. “You walk out of this room, we lose the window.”
“Then stop treating my panic like disobedience.” I glare at him. “I know what it looks like when someone pushes past what you’ve said you need. I’ve seen it up close. I won’t train under those conditions.”
Nobody speaks. Nadia doesn’t move. Kolya’s face is very controlled, which is different from calm.
“She told you to back off.” Valentin speaks from the doorway.
I didn’t hear him come in.
“She needs pressure.” Kolya turns toward him. “The call is in?—“
“I heard what she said.” Valentin crosses the room without raising his voice. “She identified the problem. Adjust your approach.”
Kolya looks at him for a long beat, clearly considering the cost and repackaging whatever he’s feeling as professional deference. “Understood.”
It isn’t understanding. Kolya swallows the objection whole, and his compliance is clean enough that only someone watching closely would notice the effort.
Nathan is leaning against the far wall with a coffee mug. He looks at Kolya, then at me, then at his brother. He misses nothing.
Nadia turns back to her laptop. “We’ll resume with pacing adjustments. Margot, from the top. Second greeting, coded phrase, then the Bridgeport address.”
I straighten in the chair. I’m not shaking. Not because the fear left, but because I said what I needed and they listened, which hasn’t happened to me since before Grant.
Kolya stays. He adjusts, runs the pressure test at a pace I can absorb, and every correction he offers is clean, professional, and stripped of the edge that was there before Valentin walked in.
He’s good at his job. A man who’s good at discipline looks identical whether he’s following it or performing it, and I can’t tell which one Kolya is doing right now.
Valentin watches from the doorway for another twenty minutes before he leaves without saying anything else. Everyone heard him the first time.
I run the drill six more times. By the fourth pass, Nadia stops correcting my cadence. By the sixth, Kolya tries a new interruption I haven’t heard before, but I hold the character through it without breaking stride.
“Better.” Just the word. Nothing attached to it.
Nadia closes her laptop. “We’ll run audio comparison tonight and do the full dress rehearsal tomorrow morning. Get sleep if you can.”
Everyone clears out. I stay in the chair for a minute after they’re gone. Valentin backed me in front of his own people. He chose my limits over Kolya’s timeline, and everyone in this building will know it soon.
I keep hearing Kimberly. Can you tell the difference between wanting someone and needing him because he’s the only option in the building?
I want Mara’s case reopened. I want Grant’s protection network exposed. I want to stop running. Those are mine. I owned them before Valentin’s men pulled me off a stairwell, and I’ll own them after this is over.
What I want from Valentin is newer and less clear. Kimberly is right that I need to know the difference.
I stand up and push the chair under the table. The training room door is open. Nobody locked it behind me.
I walk through it because I choose to, telling myself that tomorrow Kirill Antonov is going to look at my face and believe he’s seeing a woman who vanished. I can be Katya because I must.