Chapter 11 #2
I work until noon. Revisiting Pavel's timeline, the Koshkin communication notes, and the account transfers David sent over.
I work, and I think, and I resist the urge to go across the hall, because she doesn't know what I know.
And I am not ready to have the conversation that knowing requires, and because some information needs time to settle into its proper shape before you decide what to build with it.
At noon, I call David.
"The Koshkin communications with Pavel," I say. "Anything yet?"
"Not yet. But I've identified the channel more precisely — it's routed through a server that the Koshkins use for family communications. Not business, personal." A pause. "Victor, whatever Pavel is offering them, he's offering it as something personal. Apart from our organization."
"He's using the family connection," I say.
"Which means whatever he's building, he wants it to look like a family matter if anyone finds it." David's voice is careful. "That's a very specific kind of cover."
"It is," I say.
The kind of cover you build when what you're doing needs to survive the organization's scrutiny, when you need it to look like something other than what it is if the wrong person looks at it directly.
Pavel building a relationship with the Koshkins through personal channels means he is specifically keeping it away from me, keeping it in a register I can't access through the normal monitoring, which means he has thought about the possibility of discovery and has built around it.
Which means he has been doing this for longer than I knew, and he has been careful about it, and careful people who build covers around their careful things are people who have already considered what happens when they're found out and have decided the risk is acceptable.
Pavel has decided the risk is acceptable.
That tells me the reward he's anticipating is significant enough to justify it, and the only reward significant enough to justify the risk of my finding out is the one I have been circling since the night at the club.
"How long has that channel been active?" I ask.
"At least eight months," David says.
Eight months. Pavel came to me three weeks ago with evidence against Mikhail.
Eight months ago, he was already talking to the Koshkins.
The meeting that never happened, the evidence that was curated, the shot that came four minutes early — all of it assembles itself into a sequence that has a beginning I can now date and a shape I can now see and an ending I have no intention of letting arrive on Pavel's schedule.
"Find me the content," I say. "Whatever it takes."
My phone buzzes with another call before David answers. A number I don't recognize, which means it's being routed through one of the secondary lines, which means it's someone who has my number through channels rather than directly. I switch over.
"Yes," I say.
"Mr. Rozovsky." A woman's voice, careful, young, doing the thing people do when they are frightened and trying to sound like they aren't.
"I'm sorry to bother you. My name is Rosa Barrios. I work with Alex — with Alex Riggs — at the café on Meridian." A pause. "I think something is wrong. I think she might need help and I didn't know who else to call. I found your number in her phone when she — when she left."
I am already moving toward the door. "Tell me," I say.
"A man came in this morning," Rosa says.
"About an hour into our shift. He asked for someone named Yarina.
He said it just like that, standing at the counter, like it was a completely normal question.
Yarina. He described her — he described Alex exactly, her hair, her eyes, her height, everything.
I told him I didn't know anyone by that name and he looked at me for a long time before he left. "
Her voice is tight with the specific tension of someone managing their fear through the logistics of what happened, keeping it factual because factual is the only version that doesn't fall apart.
"He left, but he didn't go far. He stood outside for almost twenty minutes.
And when Alex saw him through the window—" She stops.
"She went white. Like she recognized him.
She told me she had to step out the back for a minute and she took her jacket and her bag and she hasn't come back and it's been forty minutes and she's not answering her phone. "
"What did he look like?" I say. I am in the hallway now, moving toward the elevator, phone at my ear.
Rosa describes him. The description is not specific enough to be a name, but it is specific enough to be a category — the specific category of man that Nikita Koshkin employs, that particular build, and that particular quality of stillness that belongs to men who have been doing this long enough to stop finding it interesting.
The Koshkins have found her. Which means the thirty-seven months of distance she built so carefully have just collapsed, and she is somewhere in this city right now with her jacket and her bag and her phone going unanswered, running, because running is what she knows and what she is good at and what she promised Evie she was done with.
"Thank you," I say to Rosa. "Go home. Don't go back to the café today."
"Is she—"
"She will be," I say, and hang up, and call David.
"Alex's phone," I say, the moment he picks up. "Find it."
"Already on it," he says, because he heard Rosa's number come through and has been running it since. "Victor — she's moving. On foot, northwest from the café. She's not taking the direct route home."
"She's varying it," I say. "She thinks she's being followed."
"She may be right," David says. "I'm picking up a second phone moving in the same general direction, different pace, hanging back. Someone's behind her."
I am in the car before he finishes the sentence. "Send me her location," I say. "Both of them."
"Done." A pause, short and weighted. "Victor. If the Koshkins have found her this fast it means they've been closer than she knew for longer than she knew. This wasn't accidental. Someone pointed them at her."
"Pavel," I say.
"That would be my read," David says. "Yes."
I think about that for the length of the elevator ride and the walk through the lobby and the moment before Maksim pulls away from the curb, and what I think is that Pavel has been building this for eight months, that the Koshkins are a piece of it, that Yarina Koshkin walking into my club on the night Pavel shot Mikhail is not a coincidence I am willing to file as one, and that somewhere in this city a woman who has been running for thirty-seven months is running again because someone told the right people where to look.
"It never is," I say.
Maksim drives. The location pins on my phone show two moving points — Alex, northwest and fast, taking the long way home, the way she always does when she's afraid, the way she varied her route to the grocery store when she felt my eyes on her and didn't know yet what to do about them.
And behind her, steady and patient, someone else.
Gaining slowly. Not rushing, which means they're not trying to catch her yet, they're following her, which means they want to know where she goes, which means they don't have the address yet, which means we have a window that is closing.
She is running.
She has been running for thirty-seven months, and she made a promise to a twelve-year-old that she was done running, and now she is running again with her jacket and her bag and her phone going unanswered, and I am three minutes behind her in a car, and the cold, quiet monster within me has been awakened since the moment Rosa called, and it is not going back to sleep. Not until she is safe.
Nikita Koshkin is going to find out what it costs to come for what is mine. He just doesn't know it yet.