I waited. The candles kept at their work and the rain kept at the dome.
"Two of the men inside were my cousin's," he said. "Distant cousin, the kind nobody likes, but he is family. He has been on the phone with my father since six."
I did the math while he said it. Nigel had been chewing on this for hours by the time I walked into the church.
"How long do we have?"
"Until my father makes a decision I cannot walk back?" Izzy turned the hat on his knee. "Lunch. Maybe a little after."
"Then we give him something before lunch."
"Yes."
I shifted my weight off my bad knee.
"It's the same crew that ran the workroom we hit on Tuesday," I said. "Same man at the top. He cleared the counterfeit operation three days ago and the next thing he does is walk into a Greek flower shop. He's planting a flag. He'll keep planting until somebody puts him under the ground."
"I agree."
"Then we put him under the ground."
Izzy gave me a quarter of his attention and three-quarters to the candles. "How?" he said.
"I’m working on it."
Izzy gave the candles a long moment. The hat turned another quarter on his knee. Then he looked up at me.
"Doesn't Nikita have a man named Pavel working for him?"
"Probably."
"The bald one. Works in Nikita's office."
I shrugged.
Izzy reached into the inside pocket of his coat and drew out a thin envelope. He held it for a second against the dark wool of his lapel.
"One of my men gave me a gift this morning. One I cannot accept. I have no use for it." He extended the envelope across the space between us. "Considering your situation, it may be of use to you."
I took the envelope and turned it over in my hands before opening it.
Inside were three photographs. Pavel with a woman on his arm who wasn’t his wife—that was nothing. Half the men in theorganization had a woman who wasn’t their wife. It was the door behind them that stopped me. Saggio’s Italiano Ristorante. We’d made Saggio’s as an Italian hub months ago. Pavel knew that better than I did. He’d helped me make it.
I flipped to the next one. Pavel again, same telephoto grain, shaking hands on the sidewalk with a man I knew on sight. Tonio Marchetti ran the counterfeit pipeline for the Italians. You didn’t shake that hand by accident. You didn’t shake it at all unless you’d already stepped over a line I’d spent a year keeping men behind.
The third was the two of them at a table, heads close, Pavel laughing at something. Comfortable. Old friends.
Pavel had built the leak file. He’d stacked it on Doug and left himself one clean line at the bottom of his own page. He’d been the loudest voice in the room for handing Fin to the back room on Friday—the one man alive who’d worked that Italian operation from the inside, the one man who could put a name to everything the Italians didn’t want named. I’d read it as caution. It wasn’t caution. It was a man making sure the only witness ended up in his chair and nobody else’s. The leak was Pavel. It had been Pavel the whole time, and he’d handed me the file himself, and I’d read it exactly the way he built it to be read.
I closed the envelope.
The rain was steady on the dome. The candles at the iconostasis kept on at their work.
"Thanks for the gift," I said.
"What will you do with it?"
"Clean house."
