I cross the room and pick it up. It’s written on luxurious cream card.
I figured you could stretch your legs and your ambitions in the same room.
— A
I stand there holding the note and looking at the room and feeling, not for the first time, the full and validating feeling of being known by someone. Not performed at. Not impressed. Known.
I settle in and open my laptop. I have weeks of Foundation work to catch up on and under normal circumstances this is exactly the kind of thing that pulls me in completely—the architecture of making something good actually function in the world. It usually feels like flow. The best kind of activism. The kind with spreadsheets and legal frameworks and actual achievable outcomes rather than placards in sub-zero temperatures.
I type a sentence. Delete it. Type it again. Delete it again.
My mind keeps going to Alistair. The apartment. Elena's face as I imagine it—composed, waiting, entirely unsurprised to see him. I pick up my phone. No message. I put it down.
The garden is very still outside the window. The security team moves at the perimeter—unhurried, methodical. Reacher has appeared from somewhere and is asleep under the desk, warm against my feet, and the room smells of eucalyptus and fresh flowers and old books and it is, objectively, a perfect room in which to work, and I cannot work in it at all.
My phone remains quiet.
I’m finally able to lose my worries in work. I send Becks everything she’s asked me for and attack the rest of my inbox. An hour later, I hear Alex wake from his nap through the ceiling above me—that particular bright babbling, happy with himself.
Just let me finish this email,I think.One more minute.
Above me, Brumilde's footsteps cross the floor. Her voice, warm and low, answers him. He babbles back. She laughs—a small private sound.
Still nothing from Alistair.
CHAPTER 15
What Took You So Long?
ALISTAIR
We have been parked across the street for one minute when Henderson says: “Ground floor. Left of the entrance. Two more on the roof.”
I had counted three visible on the street level. There are more I haven't placed yet, which means the building has a rear entrance and Elena is not as lightly protected as Brodie's report suggested.
“Best way in?” I ask him, but before he can answer, my phone buzzes.
It’s a text from an unknown number, and my heart beats faster.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
What took you so long?
I show it to Henderson. “I guess we’ll go through the front door.”
The man at the entrance is large, blank-faced, professionally still. His eyes go to our weapons—the outline of mine under my jacket, Henderson's at his hip—and he does nothing. No movement toward us. No instruction to surrender them. He simply steps aside and opens the door.
A man who doesn't take your gun sends a clear message. Elena has a reason to not fear us, and we’re about to find out what it is.
We are shown upstairs by a second man, equally blank, equally unconcerned with our weapons. His scalp is covered in Russian tattoos. The staircase is carpeted, quiet, the building the kind of expensive that doesn't announce itself. At the top, a door. The second man knocks once and opens it and steps back.
When we enter, Henderson positions himself just inside the door and becomes, as he always does in these situations, functionally invisible.
Elena Kuznetsova is sitting by the window.
Late sixties, silver-haired, upright in her chair with the particular posture of a woman who was taught as a girl that how you sit tells the room everything about who you are. A small glass of wine on the table beside her—red, half-drunk—and on the windowsill behind her, a small framed photograph of her late family. She has been here for weeks and she has brought things with her. This is not a hideout. This is a residence.
She looks at me. Henderson is a piece of furniture she has already accounted for and dismissed.
