"How's the scratch?" he asks himself, in the firm's break room, while a federal Marshal photographs the contractor's identification.
"The scratch is fine," Cormac answers himself.
"The scratch will hold."
"The scratch is going to dine out on this for years."
Lex, beside me at the conference room table, makes a sound that is not quite a laugh.
Cormac winks at me through the doorway.
I file ‘the scratch’ in the column of my brain titled ‘Things Cormac O'Brien Will Never Stop Saying.’
? ? ?
The intel chain takes the rest of the afternoon.
Marshals identify the contractor through prints. Konstantinos surveillance independently confirms. The contractor is ‘‘Aleksei Karpov.’’ Bratva associate, late thirties, operational hand for a senior Reznikov lieutenant. Petrov runs the financial side and surfaces the conduit within ninety minutes: Karpov's payment trail routes through a Brookline-based forensic accountant named Richard Foley. South Boston Irish, federal connections, the same Foley who introduced Marcus Andreev to Mikhail Sokolov six months ago. Same network. Different operational hand.
Foley is the bridge.
Foley confirms what we already suspected: Reznikov Sr. has been putting tacit approval on operational moves against the Konstantinos family for at least nine months, and Karpov is the third contractor he’s dispatched in the last sixty days. The first was Volkov, whom Lex dispatched in the warehouse outside Worcester. The second was the man who took our daughter and was killed in the rescue. Karpov is the third. Reznikov Sr. isescalating because his son is dead and he’s decided to make us pay for it across as many calendar months as he’s left in him.
Federal arrest warrants are issued for Foley by 4:00 PM. Foley is picked up at his Brookline office at 4:18. He surrenders without resistance. He’s been expecting this for two weeks.
Reznikov Sr. is still out there.
He won’t be picked up today, tomorrow, or before the grand jury. He’s in St. Petersburg. He’s beyond the reach of the federal system and beyond the operational reach of the Konstantinos family. The book will close with him out there, hating us across an ocean, ending his life as the architect of every threat that has touched my daughter.
Book three's writer will inherit him.
I do not know that yet.
What I know, on the floor of my firm's conference room at 11:54 AM with Lex's hand still on the back of my neck, is that I am going to live through this. We are going to live through this. The thought arrives like ice water. ‘I am going to live through this.’ Sixty-three days of waiting for the next thing to happen, and the next thing has happened, and it didn’t get me, and I am going to walk out of this conference room and drive home to my daughter and live through this.
That is the thought.
That is the only thought I have for the next twenty minutes.
? ? ?
Lex drives me home at 5:47 PM.
Cormac is in the front seat with the bandage on his forearm. He’s refused to be looked at by anyone except the firm's nurse,whom he charmed into giving him a packet of Skittles in addition to the stitches. He’s eating the Skittles in the front seat while reading something on his phone.
Lex's hand is on my knee in the back seat.
Neither of us speaks.
When we get to the brownstone, Cormac peels off and goes to his apartment in Beacon Hill. Petrov takes over the lobby detail. Lex carries my briefcase in for me. I have not asked him to, and he hasn’t asked whether he should. The carrying is the quiet architecture of a husband who has made up his mind that his wife will not carry her own briefcase tonight and has made nothing of the carrying.
Inside the brownstone, the kitchen is quiet.
Eleni picked up Nora at 3:00 PM and is keeping her overnight per the standing arrangement we made weeks earlier because attempted-attack days qualify for emergency-grandmother coverage. Eleni doesn’t know about the attempt yet. Nico knows. Eleni will be told tomorrow morning, in person, by Lex, the Greek way.
I sit at the kitchen island.
Lex pours me a glass of red wine and sets it in front of me. He pours one for himself. He sits across from me. He doesn’t ask if I am okay. He’s been with me for the last six hours. He knows what I am.
