I waited.
“The profile of this is—” He stopped, which was unusual for Viktor, who did not typically begin sentences he was not going to finish. He recalibrated. “If she’s been providing information under coercion—”
“I know,” I said.
“The response to coercion is different from—”
“I know, Viktor.” I held his gaze. “I’m not making a decision tonight. I’m gathering what I need to make the right one.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded.
“The structural footage should be available soon,” he said. “I’ll send it to your secure terminal.”
He left.
I stood in the corridor for a moment longer.
Coercion.
The word Viktor had offered and I had received. I had been turning it over since the early days of the investigation, since the shape of the interior leak had first begun resolving toward the household’s newest element. The two possible architectures: complicity, meaning she had known from the beginning and agreed to cooperate with full understanding of what shewas building toward. Or coercion, meaning someone had identified her vulnerability–the debt, the isolation, the specific desperation of a woman being pressed from all sides–and had used it, the same way Volkov had used everything else about her situation.
The complicity architecture did not survive the available evidence. I had been thorough about this because I had needed to be, because my instinct had been telling me for weeks that the reading was wrong. Elena had arrived in Las Vegas with a suitcase and a plan and nothing else.
The coercion architecture was consistent with everything.
The debt. The timing of its escalation to physical collection. The moment of intervention, the specific construction of a situation in which a frightened young woman would do what frightened people did when someone offered them a way out that seemed, in the moment of offering, to cost less than the alternative.
She had been built for this the same way she had been built as leverage. The mechanism was the same. Only the use had been different.
If I was right about this–and I was operating from instinct supported by accumulating evidence, which was not yet confirmation, and I did not move from unconfirmed evidence–then what Elena had done was not betrayal. It was the act of a person who had been cornered and had made the calculation that cornered people made, and who had at some point–weeks ago, based on the information flow that had stopped–made a different calculation.
The flow had stopped. I had noted this. She had stopped, and the people she had been providing information to had used what they had already accumulated.
I walked back toward my office and I thought about a library in a storm and the specific quality of the‘I’m sorry’she had said in the low half-asleep voice of someone who was sorry for something larger than they were naming. I thought about the way she had looked at me over the small dining table with the face she wore when she was about to say a true thing that cost something. The thing she had said about ground. About facing toward things.
She had been carrying this for weeks.
And she had been looking, with an increasing urgency that I had been watching and misreading as the general anxiety of a woman in an unfamiliar and frightening situation, for the way to put it down.
I sat down at my desk and looked at the reports and I thought about what I was going to do.
Before I left the office, I made a decision. I’d deal with this directly. I’d conduct a test, see if she opens up or chooses to lie to me.
Chapter Fifteen–Elena
The manor knew.
That was the feeling that arrived the moment I stepped through the front door. The entrance hall looked the same. The floors, the ceilings, the domestic sounds of a house conducting its evening operations. Mariya’s kitchen. The perimeter shift. The particular quality of light from the sconces that I had learned to navigate by.
All of it was the same, but now, all of it felt wrong. Felt suspicious.
I could not have pointed to the specific element. That was what made it worse–if there had been something concrete, a changed arrangement of guards or a door closed that was usually open or Viktor’s expression carrying a different load, I could have assessed it and known what I was dealing with.
Gregor and Pavel had deposited me at the entrance without incident. Gregor had said nothing on the return drive, which was consistent with every prior drive and which I had spent the entire twenty minutes trying to read for subtext and findingnothing definitive enough to trust. He was a man of four words and he had used them on the outbound journey and apparently considered his quota met.
I stood in the entrance hall and told myself that the atmospheric thing was my own guilt arriving ahead of its consequences, that I was feeling watched because I had been doing something that warranted watching. That my body had not caught up to the fact that no one had seen it.
I told myself this with the conviction I could muster, which was not much.
