Page 101 of Captured By the Pakhan

I'm four steps down when a voice behind me says, "Agent West."

Deputy Director Alan Weiss is sixty-one and has been in this building since Reagan, and I have met him precisely twice, and he comes down the steps beside me with his hands behind his back like a man taking a stroll.

"I'll be brief, because everybody wants a piece of you today and I've queue-jumped shamelessly." He gets to the third step and stops. "The Bureau has behaved appallingly toward you. I'm not going to hedge that with the word 'regrettable' — it was appalling, it happened on our watch, and eleven people in this organization should have caught it and didn't, and I was one of them."

"Sir—"

"Let an old man finish. I've been rehearsing this since Tuesday, and I'll lose it if you interrupt." He looks out at the plaza. "The New York SAC's post comes free in September. I'd like you to take it. That's not a consolation prize, and it isn't public relations, before you ask — it's been coming to you for three years and it got sat on twice by a man who is now dead, which I only discovered on Monday and which hasn't improved my week."

And there it is.

The thing I have wanted since I was twenty-four years old, standing on a set of steps in the sun, being handed to me by a Deputy Director.

I think about a corridor in March.

"Thank you," I say. "Genuinely. That means a great deal, and I'm not being polite."

"But."

"But I'm going to need some time first." I take a breath. "I'm pregnant, sir. The last three months have been what they've been, and I'd like not to spend the next six standing up in front of a grand jury and a press office."

Weiss's eyebrows go up about a millimeter, which, for him, is a brass band.

"Well," he says. "That's a considerably better reason than the one I'd braced for."

"Which was?"

"That you'd had enough of us. Which you'd be entitled to." He puts a hand out. "September's flexible. So is next September. Take the leave, take all of it, and telephone me when you want it and I'll make it happen if I'm still here — and if I'm not, I'll have written it down for whoever is."

We shake hands.

"Agent West." He's already turning. "For the record, I read the transcript of your ninety minutes. In thirty-eight years I have never seen anybody give an account of the worst thing that ever happened to them without once making themselves the hero of it."

Then he goes back up the steps, and I stand there for a moment with the warmth on my face.

Ilya opens the car door for me.

He does it without ceremony, and he doesn't offer me his hand, and he doesn't ask about my hip, all of which are decisions, and I get in.

The divider is up. Grigor is driving and has been told something at some point, because he pulls out into traffic and doesn't look in the mirror once.

"Well?"

"Cleared," I say. "Vacated on the record. There's a paper somewhere that says I was a serving agent the entire time and nothing else."

He lets out a breath he has evidently been holding for several days.

"And the man on the steps?"

"Deputy Director. He offered me New York."

"The SAC post."

"How do you—" I stop. "Of course you know what post it is."

"I have known which post it was since March," Ilya says, "because it was in the file, and because I have spent a great deal of the last three months being extremely aware of exactly what you were going to have to walk away from if this went badly." A pause. "What did you say?"

"I said I need time."