Chapter 21
SYLVIE
DO I TRUST Salisbrie’s man?
No. Not for a second. Not with one single beat of my heart.
What I did do was put him against a wall in a parking structure at Buzzard Point at gunpoint, in daylight, forty feet from a hot dog cart and a man selling counterfeit sunglasses. I searched him like a customs officer with a grudge.
Ankles. Calves. Inseam. Waistband, front and back. Under the arms, along the ribs, the small of the back where every henchman in the world keeps a pistol. I ran two fingers along every seam of that jacket. I even made him take his boots off and I looked inside them.
Nothing.
No gun. No blade. No wire, no chain, no sap, no telescoping baton, no ceramic anything. A wallet with two hundred dollars in it, a burner identical to mine, and a packet of cinnamon gum.
He let me do it. Arms out, head tipped back, eyes on the ceiling of the garage. He yawned twice.
I made him turn out his pockets onto the hood of a Honda. I made him lift his shirt and turn around. A woman walked past with a stroller and looked at us and decided not to get involved. Smart cookie.
A bird without wings is what I decided. Harmless, and I’m the one with the gun.
After passing my thorough check, we headed to our destination by the docks and have been waiting here in near silence ever since.
At ten forty at night, the Anacostia doesn’t move.
I’ve seen this river before. It looks alive during the day, the sun glistening off the surface creating a pseudo-sense of movement.
But at night, it’s eerily still. It doesn’t run; it sits.
Black and flat and thick as poured tar, the only time the river does anything at all is when the wind surges and the surface ripples, like something still asleep, letting out a deep exhale.
I wonder if there are bodies at the bottom. I wonder if this river is so quiet because it’s keeping secrets.
We’re up past the boathouses, where the city gives up.
There’s a dock here that used to belong to something.
Concrete, cracked, sixty feet of it running out into the water on rotted pilings, with a chain-link fence at the landward end that somebody cut open a decade ago and nobody has ever fixed.
Weeds through the seams. A bollard the size of a dog, orange with rust. Behind us the bank goes to trees and vines looking like twisted teeth against a dark, open mouth at this time of night.
Across the water there’s a rail line. Every twenty minutes a freight goes by and the whole dock hums under my boots.
One road in. Same road out.
I picked it for that reason. I would see anybody coming from a quarter mile out, and because there is no cover on the approach. I am not dumb; I took ample precautions.
I’m in black. I’m always in black, but tonight it’s tactical and I dressed like it: cargo pants, boots laced tight, a long-sleeved shirt under a light jacket I do not need in this heat and am wearing anyway because it has eleven pockets. Empty pockets.
That was the insurance exchange. Just as I searched Salisbrie’s henchman for weapons and came up short, he repaid the favor. I was armed with one pistol which I left in the car. There will be no bloodshed tonight. All I’m luring Belai into is a conversation.
“Those are pretty,” he grunts, gesturing to my mother’s diamonds in my ears.
He calls me Saoirse. His name is Ruslan.
That’s what he says, anyway. Nobody in this line of work gives you the one on their birth certificate, and I don’t care, because in two hours I am never going to see him again.
He is enormous.
Six five, easily, maybe more, and built like something you’d hang a coat on—long arms with posture that reminds me of a gorilla.
Hands so large he could palm my skull. Dark brown eyes, so dark you can’t find the pupil.
Hair down past his shoulders and pulled back into a bun so neat it’s almost prissy, not one strand loose.
His nail beds are also immaculate as if he gets manicures.
There’s something off-putting about that level of grooming on a man who is very obviously here to kill somebody if asked.
He’s been standing at the edge of the dock for an hour and a half without fidgeting.
That’s also unnerving. Every crook I have ever worked beside has done something with his hands.
Smoked. Checked a phone. Cleaned their guns, polished their knives.
Ruslan stands like an action figure someone set in place and never touched again.
He watches the water, and he does not move.
In fact, I have been on this dock for over an hour with him and I have not once heard him breathe.
Then, at ten till eleven, out of nowhere, he compliments my jewelry.
“My mother’s.”
“Oh. And where’s she?”
I only tell him because it’s not like he could do any harm. “In a royal cemetery in Ireland.”
“Oh. You’re a royal?”
“To a lost kingdom, I suppose.” My father left a legacy, his name whispered when they talk about dark times; lands ruled by the ruthless mob. But that might as well be a fairy tale by now.
“Where after this?” Ruslan says.
I don’t answer.
“Germany, for me.” He rolls a shoulder, suddenly so chatty. “Hamburg. There is a thing. Another job, another payday, and then perhaps I sleep for a week.” He glances over. “You?”
Good question. What’s next for me?
“Home,” I say.
“Home.”
“Yeah.”
“Ireland?”
I watch the black water not move.
“No. Home is where my family is. All this…I’m leaving it behind. Starting fresh.”
Ruslan considers this. “You are too young to retire.”
“Doesn’t feel that way.”
“And what will you do instead?”
I think about Callen and Indian takeout, spontaneous sex, cuddles after. I think about moving into his apartment, picking out a few throw pillows. Showering together every morning, the way he likes to wash my long hair. I imagine feeding a prissy cat paté on a small, silver platter.
“Something worthwhile,” I answer.
He laughs like I made a joke, but I don’t care enough to be offended. This will all soon be behind me.
Then, finally, an hour late, something moves at the fence line.
I’m up in an instant.
A shape, coming through the gap in the chain link, small and slow and careful. The freight is going by across the water so I can’t hear a thing over it, and the security light on the pole is flickering, only giving me flashes of visibility.
The figure stops thirty feet away.
Just stops. Stands there in the dark with the train noise washing over him and lets us look.
The train passes.
In the silence after it, in the little grubby glow that comes off the city and the water, I see him properly for the first time.
Belai is not a big man. He’s slight, and he’s stooped a little at the shoulder.
Dressed like this is an interview, he’s wearing gray dress pants, and a white dress shirt buttoned all the way to the collar in ninety-degree heat: ironed and neatly tucked.
He wears glasses. Gray hair combed with water, forward and across, arranged to cover a place where it’s thinning.
A canvas backpack over one shoulder.
He’s holding the strap with both hands, high on his chest.
He looks at me. He looks at Ruslan. He looks past both of us at the empty dock and the empty water and the dark, and he’s searching, and I watch him not find what he came for.
“Callen?” His voice is thin and it goes straight out over the river. “Where is Callen?”
I put my hands up. Open. Wide. Slow.
“Belai.” I keep my voice easy. Warm. I have never worked so hard at a specific tone in my life. “My name is Sylvie. I’m a friend of Callen’s. I’m here to help you.”
He doesn’t move.
“He couldn’t come himself. It wasn’t safe for him to come, and he wouldn’t risk you.” The lie slides out smooth as an egg. “He sent me instead. He trusts me.”
Belai stands very still.
He’s looking at Ruslan now, and I watch him assess the danger.
His hands tighten on that backpack strap.
He’s an old man on a dock near midnight and there are two strangers in front of him.
One of them is six and a half feet tall, the other is a woman dressed in black, head to toe, as if she’s trying to cover bloodstains.
And the one person he trusts, the one he came to see, is nowhere in sight.
Of course he’s scared.
“That is our guy?” Ruslan asks behind me.
“Yes.”
“You are certain.”
“Positive.”
I don’t take my eyes off Belai. I keep my hands up. I keep them open, I keep them where he can see them, and I say the thing I’ve been rehearsing for three weeks.
“Unarmed, my friend. Look at me. I’m unarmed, you’re safe, and nobody is going to hurt you.” I take one slow step. “Let him come to us,” I say over my shoulder, low. “Don’t spook him. We ask for the box, he hands it over, that’s it. That’s the whole of it. Clear?”
Silence behind me.
“Clear?”
“You are certain,” Ruslan says again slowly, “that this is the man.”
“Yes, I told you…”
Something in my spine goes cold when I realize he’s not asking out of curiosity. He wants a verbal confirmation of a target. And I just stupidly gave it to him.
There’s a click.
Small, mechanical, like a lighter. It comes from down by the ground.
Then the outside of my left calf opens up.
I don’t understand it. That’s the first second. There is no pain, there is only a sensation of enormous wrongness, a hot line drawn where no line should be, and my leg stops taking my weight and I go down onto that knee.
The second one takes me across the back of the thigh and my pants and my flesh rip open.
I feel that one. God, I feel that one. A blade goes in, then comes out clean, and there’s a sound to it: a wet zip, and my hamstring lets go of the tension that keeps my leg functioning and my whole left side folds.
The third slice is to the hip.
He’s fast. He is so fast. Three strikes and I have not yet finished falling from the first one. The strikes come in low and snapping, out and back, out and back, and the whole time this enormous man is standing perfectly upright with his hands at his sides.
His boots.