Chapter 26
NICO
Marco knocks at my study door before he opens it.
He has a sealed envelope in his hand. No box this time. Manila. Heavy.
“Came at the outer gate,” he says, low. “Same courier we bought yesterday. He’s not lying about not knowing what’s inside.”
He sets the envelope on my desk.
I cut the seal with my pen-knife.
I unfold the contents. One photograph.
Larger than a Polaroid. Black-and-white. Glossy. Long-lens. Taken from across the street.
Mila.
Walking through the front gate of Casa Lucia.
Sofia behind her with the notebook.
The angle is from a second-floor window in the building opposite the clinic. Recent.
Red marker on her chest. A circle. Crosshairs through it.
I stop breathing.
On the back of the photograph, the same Russian handwriting as the cross note.
Sleduyushchiy budet plot’yu.
The next one will be flesh.
Rage. Cold. Three years of it, and it won’t stay down anymore.
Marco has read the note over my shoulder. He’s seen the photograph.
His jaw locks. The muscle at the corner of his eye twitches once and stays. Not the quarter-inch move. The full Capo.
“Niccolò.”
“Take it to the back room. Lay it next to the cross. Get Dante, Renzo, Izzy. I’ll be there in ten.”
He picks up the envelope.
“Niccolò.”
“I said I’ll be there in ten.”
He looks at me one more second. He goes.
The door closes.
I sit at the desk.
Every part of me wants the car. The unmarked sedan. The pistol in the top drawer. The river road north out of the city. The plantation Yelena marked in the portfolio. Alexei in the dining room.
I stay.
I unlock the bottom right drawer with the key I’ve been carrying for three years.
The leather portfolio is inside. Three years of dust on the leather.
I clean the dust with the cuff of my sleeve.
I pick it up.
I walk down to the back room.
Dante at the head of the table. Cassia next to him. Renzo across from them. Marco at comms. Izzy at her laptop.
The cross from yesterday is on the table. The first note is beside it. The new photograph is laid out beside the note. The crosshairs in red marker are face-up.
I lay the portfolio on the table.
I open it.
Pages spread.
Dante is the first to speak.
“What is this.”
“Yelena Zakharova. Three years ago. Before she died.” I set my hands on the table. “She told me to bring it home. To give it to you. I didn’t.”
I don’t look up.
“Routes. Names. Money. Photographs. The plantation upriver. The accountants. The seven lieutenants. It’s everything.”
Marco pulls a page toward him. Reads. Pulls another. Reads.
“Cristo.”
Marco doesn’t curse in the back room.
He just cursed.
Izzy reaches across the table and pulls the photographs to her side. She lifts each. Studies. Slides them along the table to her laptop.
“Velikov network. Naples shell. Three safehouses we’ve been guessing at. The Belarus route.” Her fingers are moving on the keyboard. “Lieutenants. Seven. Of those alive, four. Of the four, three are in Alexei’s inner circle now.”
“Can we turn one.”
“Yes. Stepan Lebedev. Konstantin’s brother. Passed over for three promotions in a row. His daughter is in school in Berlin. He’s been writing emails about Berlin tuition in a tone that doesn’t belong to a man who’s going to last another year in the organization. He’s the candidate.”
“Get him.”
“On it.”
Dante speaks.
“Plan.”
I look at the maps Yelena drew. The plantation upriver. The brick outbuilding off the east side. The river approach from the south bank. The tree line.
“Hours upriver. Antebellum house. The dining room visible on the satellite. The brick outbuilding is used for storage and short-term confinement. Alexei eats in the dining room at dusk. He always eats in the dining room. Yelena said so.”
Dante. “Turning Stepan.”
“Izzy gets him in forty-eight hours. We use his comms to make Alexei think a counter is coming. He’ll be at the dining table. We come up the south bank at dawn the morning after.”
Renzo. “Boats.”
“Two boats. Your river crew. The compound to the south landing in three hours. Dawn assault. The brick building first. Marco’s team on the front of the main house. I’m in the dining room.”
Marco. “And the rest of his men at the property.”
“Yelena’s intel says six on site. Four guards, two lieutenants. Of the two, one is Stepan we’re turning. The other we deal with.”
The room is quiet.
Dante looks at the portfolio.
He looks at me.
“She gave you this three years ago.”
“Yes.”
“You knew this in your hand on the flight home.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t open it because if you’d opened it you would have come to me and we would have moved on Alexei and Alexei told you he’d find them first.”
“Yes.”
A long beat.
“All right.”
Same register he used yesterday when he said fix it.
“Build the plan around this. Stepan turns in forty-eight hours. Boats forty-eight more. River dawn. We move at first light.”
He looks at the photograph with the crosshairs.
“And Mila.”
“Oksana’s shower is at Casa Lucia this week,” Dante says. “She goes for that. Not the session, the session can wait. A shower is social, unpredictable, no fixed route pattern for anyone watching. We know who’s hunting her now. That changes how we move her, not whether we move her.”
He looks at me. “We keep her inside these walls until the shower. Doubled SUV. Nico drives. Doubled men at the perimeter, plainclothes. She goes, she comes back. One event. Controlled.”
My jaw goes tight. I look at the photograph. The crosshairs.
Cassia speaks for the first time.
“He’s right, Nico. She needs the room. We keep it. We just keep the perimeter.”
I look at Dante.
“All right.”
“You drive. You stay with the car. Engine running. You don’t leave the curb.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t go alone before then.”
My jaw tightens further. A muscle in my neck pulls.
Dante doesn’t make me answer.
He stands.
“Move on Stepan. Build the boats. Briefing tomorrow night before the river.”
He walks out.
The room moves into operational mode.
Marco at comms calling Renzo’s old river crew. Izzy at her laptop already running approach patterns on Stepan’s communications. Renzo with the schematic, drawing entries on the brick building.
I stay at the table long after the family thins.
I open a page of Yelena’s portfolio I haven’t opened yet.
A photograph.
Small. Black-and-white. Two girls in a garden. The older with dark hair pinned. The wooden cross at her throat. The younger with blonde hair down. Looking up at the older girl with all the worship a small child can carry.
Yelena and Mila.
I haven’t seen Mila as a child.
My chest pulls tight. My throat closes around whatever was going to come next.
I put the photograph in the inner pocket of my jacket.
The back room is empty.
The lights are off except the lamp at Izzy’s station, which she left on so the search she’s running can hum overnight.
I pick up the wooden cross from the table.
I turn it once in my fingers.
I take from my pocket the velvet bag. Mama’s bag. The cufflinks are in my watch pocket now. The bag is empty.
I put the cross in the bag.
I close it.
I put the bag in the inside pocket of my jacket beside the photograph.
I walk upstairs.
The corridor outside my door.
Her wing is dark. She’s behind that wall somewhere, not twenty feet. My hands go still at my sides. My breath comes wrong, slow and deliberate, because otherwise it won’t come at all.
Not tonight.
I open the door of my own bedroom.
I take the velvet bag and the photograph out of my pocket.
I set them on the nightstand. The bag beside the lamp. The photograph beside the bag.
Two objects.
I’m going to give them to her.
After.
Not before.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The mattress holds. The room is dark and quiet and I think about her walking through the gate of Casa Lucia tomorrow. The crosshairs in red. Me on the curb. Her back to me. The way her shoulders were in that photograph, the set of them, not knowing. My hands tighten on my thighs.
She doesn’t know I’m already at the curb. She doesn’t know she’s been the only thing I haven’t let myself want in three years. She will, after. When it’s safe to tell her.
My jaw stays locked.
I don’t lie down.
Stepan turns in forty-eight hours. Tomorrow Mila goes to Casa Lucia.
I drive her. I walk her in. I walk her out. I don’t leave the curb.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. Jacket on. My hand on the velvet bag in my pocket. I count my breaths until the rage goes back down into the place I’ve kept it for three years.
I get to four hundred.
It doesn’t go down.
I don’t sleep.