Chapter 31 #2
I keep pressure on the wound while Anton pulls Niko’s body toward the deeper channel. My hand knows the bleeding has stopped for the worst possible reason, yet releasing him feels like agreeing.
Rounds strike the channel lip.
I place my body over Niko until Anton reaches cover, then fire twice toward the catwalk without seeing Igor. The shots create enough space for me to enter the deeper run as smoke closes across the warehouse doors.
We crawl beneath the fence one at a time. The culvert opens beside an abandoned machine shop where the observer waits with two vehicles, their lights dark. Anton loads the wounded man first, then Niko, while another team circles toward the beacon once the shooters begin withdrawing.
The machine shop smells of oil mixed with old rubber, while broken glass grinds under our boots as the last men enter. A medic cuts my shirt at the side, presses along the ribs, then listens to both lungs before binding the bruised area until breathing hurts in a new direction.
He shines a light into my eyes and asks whether I can hear him; the left ear catches the question. The right gives me only a shrill tone and the dull vibration of his fingers near the skin.
“Temporary disruption is likely,” he says. “You need imaging.”
“After extraction.”
“Extraction is complete.”
I look toward the men preparing to recover Denis and Pavel. “It is not.”
My right side has stiffened under the vest, and each breath pulls across the ribs, though the medic confirmed both lungs sound clear. My hearing remains divided, a sharp tone in the right ear set against distant sound in the left.
Boris’s coded warning waits on the observer’s device; the message contains one instruction.
Abort. Internal compromise probable.
The warning reached the observer forty-five seconds after our perimeter entry, nine seconds after the first blast.
“Who sent the warning?” I ask.
“Boris relayed it from Katie.”
Learning that Katie found the evidence does nothing to ease the pain. Her warning came too late to change the route or cancel the approach.
Inside the rear vehicle, a recovered packing label rests inside an evidence sleeve.
It carries the same serial range shown on Leonid’s manifest, proving the weapons existed.
Beside the label, someone has marked our entry route in red grease pencil, including the exact barrier where Ivan advised us to stage.
Ivan gave me that route.
He also gave me Leonid, whose genuine information brought us here. At the casino, Ivan pulled me beneath reinforced steel seconds before the explosion, saving my life while bleeding from his own hand.
The facts refuse to form a clean answer: either Ivan has been compromised through a source he trusts, or his rescue at the casino purchased enough faith to deliver me into this warehouse.
I want the first explanation because the second leaves Misha’s ring on a traitor’s hand.
The recovery team reaches Denis and Pavel after the shooters withdraw. By the time the final vehicle leaves the machine shop, three bodies lie under dark transport covers.
Anton records their personal effects before transport, reducing three lives to objects arranged under a work light.
Denis carried a cheap pocketknife rubbed smooth along the handle, his mother’s apartment key, and a folded grocery receipt with a woman’s number written across the back.
Pavel kept two photographs of his daughters behind his identification, the corners softened from being removed too often.
Niko carried a card inside his vest with his mother’s prescriptions and pharmacy hours written in his square, careful hand.
None of the objects is valuable. Together, they possess more weight than every weapon in the room.
Niko’s boots remain visible because the cover is several inches too short.
I call Katie once we reach the outer road.
She answers before the first full ring. “Artur?”
“I am outside.”
Her breath breaks across the line. “Are you hurt?”
“Ribs. Hearing. Nothing that requires surgery.”
“I have evidence concerning Ivan.”
The vehicle turns toward the private hospital, while the body transport follows a separate route to the service entrance. I watch its dark shape through the rear window.
“What evidence?”
“A burner phone from Lidia. The original voice message names Ivan and connects his office to the buyer who purchased my apartment address. Boris has the file details.”
“When did you learn this?”
Silence lasts long enough for the tone in my ear to become unbearable.
“Katie.”
“I suspected him five days ago. I didn’t have the phone until tonight.”
I look at Niko’s vehicle ahead and remember the card in his pocket listing his mother’s prescriptions, each hour written as carefully as an order.
“You suspected Ivan before I advanced the operation.”
“Yes.” Her voice shakes. “I asked you to wait.”
“You did not tell me why.”
“I thought you would kill him before we verified anything.”
Her fear is real: within seconds of seeing Sergei restrain her when she tried to walk away, I issued the order that decided his death while Katie’s hands were still shaking.
She heard one command and watched me make the result irreversible.
Later, I expected her to trust a promise of verification without showing her I had changed.
Understanding the cause doesn’t soften the result; Niko remains beneath a cover in the vehicle ahead, while Katie had a name that might have moved him to another route.
Anger rises through my chest, and pain turns each breath shallow. Ivan built the ambush after I chose to move when the convoy appeared, while Katie’s missing evidence cost us the chance to change the route before three men entered a building prepared for their deaths.
None of those facts erases another.
“Do not destroy the phone,” I say.
“Artur, I’m sorry.”
The apology reaches the place where Niko’s blood has dried beneath my fingers. If I answer now, grief will choose words that can’t be recalled.
I end the call.