"Yes, boss."
I walk down the corridor to holding cell B.
? ? ?
Marcus Andreev is at a metal table.
His head is in his hands. His coat is on the back of the chair. His shoes are off; Petrov takes shoes when he picks a man up because a man without his shoes doesn’t run for the door. Andreev has been crying. The crying is not new. He’s been crying for some time before I got here.
I sit down across from him.
He doesn’t look up.
I let the silence work for me. The silence was the tactic I used with Igor Volkov yesterday. The silence is the tactic that always works.
Andreev breaks first.
"I know what I am."
"Tell me."
"I am the man who sold your daughter."
"You are."
"I didn’t know they would take her. I swear to God. I didn’t know."
"Tell me how it happened."
And he tells me.
Anya was diagnosed at four. She’s now six. The diagnosis is a rare neuroblastoma that has not responded to standard treatment. The experimental program at Dana-Farber that has, in the last six months, halted the progression costs $80,000 per month. Federal insurance covers fifteen. The shortfall would have bankrupted Andreev and his wife in three months. He is, by his own account, a man who has been watching his daughter not die in monthly increments, and the increments are $80,000 apiece.
Five months ago, in a coffee shop in Cambridge, a man approached him.
The man's name was Dick Foley. Foley said he had heard about Anya. Said he had a friend who might be able to help. The friend was a Russian businessman with sympathies, the kind of man who liked to do good things quietly. Foley arranged the introduction. The Russian was named Mikhail Sokolov. Sokolov said he could pay Anya's treatment for as long as it took. He said all he needed was information. Schedules. Routes. Nothing that would directly harm anyone. The protection details, Sokolov said, would handle anything that went wrong.
Andreev told himself he was only providing logistics.
He told himself the protection details could handle anything that went wrong.
He told himself a great many things he believed less and less.
The first piece of intel he passed: the brownstone location. The second: the courthouse route variations. The third, a few days ago: Eleni's apartment camera blind spots and the rotation schedule he had personally proposed to the Marshals' lead two weeks earlier.
He didn’t know they would take Nora. He didn’t know they would take a child. When he found out, after the dawn phone call from Petrov, he tried to reach Sokolov. Sokolov had gone dark.
"I know what I am," Andreev says again, his head still in his hands. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I just needed her to live."
I stand up.
I have stood up because I am about to do what I came here to do.
My right hand goes to the holster under my coat. The Sig Sauer P226 has been my sidearm since 2014. The pit at the back of the warehouse is forty-seven yards from this room. The drive home from there is fifty-three minutes.
Then, in the small, specific corner of my brain that I have spent fifteen years teaching to be quiet, something happens I didn’t predict.
I think of Nora.
