Page 82 of You Can Run

“And if he doesn't come down.”

“He will.” She said it with the certainty of someone who'd spent four years studying a man's psychology. “I've watched him talk about you, Daniel. I've seen what happens to his face when your name comes up. You are the one piece of unfinished business he's never been able to delegate or forget. When you walk through that door, everything else in the building stops mattering to him.”

Dante thought about what twenty minutes in a room with Borya Sokolov would look like, and what condition he'd be in at the end of them, and whether the condition mattered if the alternative was that it had all been for nothing.

“That's not a pleasant thing to admit to you,” Sofia added.

“It's accurate,” Dante said.

“Yes.”

He looked at the USB drive on the table. “And this?”

“That goes to a journalist. Claire Okafor, investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She's been working pieces of this story for six years.” Sofia held his gaze. “She knows it's coming. She's been waiting.” Sofia picked up the drive and held it out across the table. “She's at the Inquirer building on North Broad Street. She knows the name Sofia.” She set it down in front of him. “Don't lose it.”

He put it in the front pocket of his jeans.

“What happens to you after?” he said. “After the twenty minutes and the signal and the FBI.”

She picked up the case and closed it. “That's not something you need to plan for.”

“Sofia.”

“It's not something you need to plan for,” she said again, and there was something in the repetition that was quieter than the first time, that had a different quality. It was the tone of someone who has done the accounting and arrived at a number they've accepted and closed the book on.

He looked at her for a long moment. He didn't say what he was thinking, because she knew what he was thinking, and saying it wouldn't change her decision.

“What time do we go in,” he said.

“Tomorrow night. Ten o'clock. The club is busy on Friday nights. Full floor, full bar. A crowd works for us—it's harder to manage a situation quietly when there are civilians everywhere. Borya will have his personal security. Four men, usually. Two stay with him, two on the perimeter. The man on the door is named Sonny Fai. He's been there since before I arrived. He’s loyal to Borya in the way of someone who's been well paid for a long time.”

“I know Sonny,” Dante said.

She looked at him. “Of course you do.”

He almost smiled. “I'll handle Sonny.”

She nodded, stood, and picked up the case before she walked to the door.

He watched her open it and step out into the motel corridor and pull it shut behind her, and he sat in the quiet of the room. When he lay down on the bed without taking his boots off, and stared at the ceiling, only then did he let himself think about Jessica.

Then he turned off the light and lay in the dark and let tomorrow come.

THIRTY-THREE

Sofia and Danteparked two blocks east on Passyunk Avenue at nine forty-five.

“Twenty minutes,” he said.

“Twenty minutes from when I leave the floor.” She reached into the back seat for the bag—lighter than the hard-sided case, built to pass a casual search. Everything she needed to get into Borya's security room, and take apart the sanitization protocol that would erase the basement before the feds could touch it. “I go in first. You wait five minutes, then come through the front.” She looked at him. “Don't come in looking for a fight. Come in like a man honoring an arrangement.”

“Because I am.”

“Yes. Whatever happens in there, whatever Borya does before the signal, don't let him go back up to the mezzanine. If he gets to the back room, he gets to the kill switch. And if he hits that switch, everything I've spent four years building disappears in four minutes.”

“He's not going upstairs,” Dante said.

“Good.”