Password protected with the kind of encryption that suggests Pyotr Sokolova was significantly more careful than a man who moved numbers had any right to be.
She knows the code.
She has to know the code.
A man careful enough to build that kind of lock around those files would not leave the key with no one.
I’m already moving toward the door when Mike steps into the doorway.
“At least be decent to her,” he says.
I stop walking. “Move.”
“She’s grieving, Razvan. The girl has been in that cell for two days and she watched her father?—”
“You should not have given her food.” I say it flatly, looking at him directly. “I didn’t authorize that.”
Mike looks back at me with the steady unbothered expression of a man who has known me long enough to not be moved by my flat voice. “No,” he says. “You didn’t. And I’d do it again.”
He straightens in the doorway. Something in his face shifts, drops the easy warmth for something older and more serious underneath it. “Do you remember what you promised me,” he says, “before I agreed to come on board? Before I said yes to any of this?”
I say nothing.
“We would not touch women,” Mike says. “We would not touch children. We would not put our hands on people who have no part in what we do.” He holds my gaze, steady and even. “She’s a girl who lost her father, Razvan. She didn’t choose this world. Her father chose it for her and now she’s in a cell in your compound and I need to know you remember what you promised me before I walked through your door.”
The silence between us has weight.
“I remember,” I say.
Mike looks at me for one more beat. Then he nods, once, and steps aside.
From the corner of the office, Dmitri makes a sound.
He’s been there for the last hour in the armchair by the bookshelf, working through a glass of red wine with the leisurely energy of a man who considers other people’s crises excellent spectator sport. He swirls the glass now and doesn’t look up. “Maybe the issue isn’t the file.”
“Dmitri.” My voice carries a specific warning that functions on most people.
Dmitri is not most people. “I’m just observing,” he says pleasantly, “that a man who is purely professionally frustrated by an encrypted drive doesn’t pace like that. That’s a different kind of frustrated.” He lifts the glass. “She’s beautiful, from what I heard. Are you attracted to her?”
The temperature in the room drops several degrees.
“Say that again,” I say quietly, “and I’ll break the glass in your hand.”
Dmitri smiles into his wine.
Slow and unbothered, the smile of a man who has just proven his own point and knows it. “You didn’t need to be that heated about it…if it was rubbish.”
“Mike.” I don’t look away from Dmitri. “Take him somewhere before I do something that creates paperwork.”
Mike is already moving, reaching out and grabbing Dmitri by the back of the collar with the ease of someone who has performed this exact maneuver many times. Dmitri goes willingly, still smiling, lifting his wine glass carefully so it doesn’t spill as he’s steered toward the door.
“Don’t forget the oath,” Mike says, from the doorway.
Then he’s gone, steering Dmitri down the hallway, and I can hear Dmitri saying something and Mike’s low response then nothing.
I stand in the empty office.
She knows the code. I start walking.
