"I hear you."
"And the country we choose."
"I hear you."
Igor exchanges a look with the other one. The look is that of a man who has just realized the room is not going the way it was supposed to.
Then Igor makes a mistake.
He looks at the back office door, where my daughter is sitting. The look is a half-second long. It is the look of a man checking that his leverage is in the room. The look gives me the angle I have been waiting for, which puts his sidearm in his right hand, pointed at the floor, and his eyes off me for the half-second I need.
I draw.
I shoot the other one first because he’s closer to the door, Cormac is at the door, and it’s the higher tactical priority. The round goes through the meat of his sternum at a downward angle that exits between his fourth and fifth ribs on his right side. He’s dead before he hits the concrete.
Igor turns. Igor is too slow.
I shoot Igor in the right knee. The knee goes. Igor goes down. The sidearm clatters across the concrete. I cross the warehouse in five steps, and I kick the sidearm into the corner, and I look down at Igor Volkov, low-level Brooklyn bag man, who has just spent the last fourteen hours in a vehicle with my almost-three-year-old daughter for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Igor is bleeding. He’s in shock. He’s also still talking.
"Konstantinos. Konstantinos. We didn’t hurt her. We didn’t lay a hand on her. Konstantinos."
"Where did you get the photograph?”
"What?”
"The photograph you sent me. Where was it taken?”
"Back seat. Of the vehicle. After we left the apartment."
"Whose phone?”
"Mine. I sent it from a burner. The burner is in my coat pocket."
I take the burner from his coat pocket. I check the messages. The messages are clean. There is one outbound text. There is no inbound conversation with a handler. They went independent. The handler didn’t know they took her.
That is information I will need tomorrow.
Today is Nora.
"Volkov."
"Yes. Yes, Konstantinos."
"You took my daughter."
"I am sorry. I am so sorry. I have a daughter. I have a daughter, Konstantinos."
"You have a daughter."
"Yes. Yes. She’s in Brooklyn. She’s six. Her name is?—"
"Stop."
Igor stops.
I look at him for a long second. I do not feel what I am about to do. I do not flinch from it. I do not enjoy it. I am the man I am, and the man I am has a daughter in a folding chair behind a glass partition twenty feet from this concrete floor, and the man I am has a woman he loves in a brownstone in Brookline, depending on me to bring our daughter home. The man I am doesn’t have the luxury of letting Igor Volkov leave this warehouse to do this to someone else's daughter next month.
