Then I pick up the Pride and Prejudice. The cover is the same cover it has had since my mother gave it to me on my twelfth birthday. The blue is the blue of a dress my mother wore in 1989 in a photograph I have on my dresser. The book is heavier than I remember.
I set it on the foyer table.
Lex is in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me. "What is that one?"
"Pride and Prejudice. My mother gave it to me when I was twelve."
"Have you read it recently?"
I don’t look at him. "Not in three years.”
He hums, "All right."
Then the front door opens, and Nora comes through it with Petrov's secondary at her side and Brontos under one arm, and the foyer becomes a foyer with a small girl in it, and the book stays on the table where I have set it, and the box stays open on the floor, and the morning is over.
Chapter 13
Lex
The Lake House
The forty-eight hours ran out on Friday.
Petrov called it in at 4:50 PM. A man had walked the block of Nora’s daycare twice — slow, hands empty, eyes on the door — and a third time with a phone up, filming the entrance and the pickup line. Maksim Orlov. The operative who had come through Logan on a Cyprus passport. He never moved on the children. He didn’t have to. The filming was the message: we know where she is in the daytime, and we want you to know we know.
Petrov had two cars on the daycare before Orlov reached the corner. Orlov saw them, lowered the phone, and walked. No shots. No contact. Nothing a federal report could hold.
It was the cleanest kind of threat — the kind that costs them nothing and tells me everything. Nikolai had given me forty-eight hours, and at the forty-eighth he put a man outside my daughter’s daycare to prove the clock was real.
I did not sleep Friday night. By Saturday the sedan was circling the block. Petrov added a fourth car. By 8:00 AM Sunday I had decided we were not going to spend another night in the brownstone.
This is not a decision I make lightly. The brownstone is the most defensible position I own in the city of Boston. The walls are reinforced. The cameras are mine. The neighbors are mine. The street is mine. To leave it is to give up control I have spent fourteen months building.
I am giving up the control because the four circuits of the black sedan have told me a thing about Nikolai Reznikov I had not yet known, which is that he wants me to know he can find them. The probe was not a reconnaissance. The probe was a message. The message was:we have you located.
I do not give Nikolai Reznikov the satisfaction of being located.
I have one piece of property he cannot find.
? ? ?
I tell Maeve at 8:14. We are in the kitchen. Nora is on the floor with Brontos and a stuffed dinosaur a Konstantinos cousin has sent. I tell her we are going to a place I own three hours north of Boston, in New Hampshire, on a lake. I tell her the property is in a name not on any document anyone in my family or my organization has ever seen, including Petrov. I tell her it has been mine since my father died. I tell her I have never had another person inside the building.
She listens. She does what she does. She considers the words before she chooses her response. I have learned, in the past few days, that the consideration is not hesitation. It is a calculation. She’s running the same risk assessment I would run if our positions were reversed.
"How long?" she says.
"Three nights. Maybe four. Until we have a better lock on Nikolai's position."
"Nora's daycare."
"Excused. Ms. Fitzgerald has been told there is a family emergency."
"My firm?"
"Cleared. They believe you are in upstate New York with your mother. Your assistant has been briefed."
"All right."
