Page 17 of Captured By the Pakhan

He came up here still wearing his coat, with his keys in his hand, and stood outside that door — and he didn’t ask what the nightmare was about, or whether it had happened before, or how often.

He didn't ask because he already knew.

Which means the man in that corridor has done this before. Many times. Standing exactly there, just outside his sons reach, for however long it takes. And every single time, he has waited until it stopped, and then gone back to business.

Chapter 5

Ilya

Yaroslav Freight, Midtown, 10:15 AM

"—so the exposure is on the Houston side," Delgado is saying. She has the floor and she has earned it; she is the best operations mind in this building and she is entirely legitimate, which is why I hired her. "Gulf capacity is committed through October at rates we negotiated in a very different market. If bunker fuel holds where it is, we're carrying about four million in unrecoverable spread."

There are eleven people at this table and nine of them believe they work for a transportation company.

"Then we don't hold it," Perlman says.

"We hold it because we signed it." She pushes back.

"We renegotiate."

"With whom, Marcus?" Delgado doesn't raise her voice, which is one of the reasons she usually wins. She let’s the fight settle itself without it ever escalting. "There are four carriers who can take that sort of volume out of Houston and three of them are already at capacity. We renegotiate and we lose the corridor, and then we're paying somebody else's spread to move our own freight."

Perlman looks at me for my input. They always look at me.

"Ms. Delgado is correct on the arithmetic," I confirm. "But the arithmetic does not automatically make the decision. The corridor does. We are not in the business of quarterly margin, we are in the business of being the only company that can move a container from Veracruz to Chicago without an ounce of red tape or delays. That takes eleven years to build and one bad October to lose."

I close the folder in front of me. "We carry the spread. Marcus, find me two million of it somewhere that isn't the Gulf. Elena, I want the November renewals structured so this cannot happen again."

"Yes, sir."

"Anything else?"

There isn't; the meeting has run forty minutes and accomplished one decision, which is forty minutes and one decision more than most boards manage in weeks.

They file out one by one. Delgado is last, and she stops at the door.

"Thank you for backing the corridor."

"I backed the analysis.” I tell her.

She smiles softly and then goes. I sit alone in that glass room forty-one floors above Sixth Avenue and think about the fact that everything I just said was utterly true.

That is the part nobody understands about this company. It isn’t a front. A front is a laundromat with no washing machines and a man reading a newspaper. This is a five-hundred-million-dollar logistics business with eleven hundred employees and an unblemished federal compliance record.

It makes money, and I like running it — and it is also the most beautiful instrument I have ever held, because a company that can move anything anywhere is an asset above all others.

Yeremey comes in then. "Elena's right about Houston," he says, dropping into the chair Perlman had just vacated, putting his feet on the neighbouring one.

"Elena is right about most things."

"So's Perlman. That's the problem with hiring people who are good at their job, you have to keep listening to them." He tosses a folder onto the table, it slides to a stop against my hand. "Vladivostok is fine. The Sinaloa issue is not fine but it's not urgent. And the Armenians want to renegotiate the Newark arrangement, which I have told them is not happening, twice, in fact."

"And fourth other thing?"

"Ah, the fourth thing." He echos, taking his feet down. "I've combed through the eleven people who knew that house existed."

Behind him, on the long wall, is the map.