Page 21 of Captured By the Pakhan

Nothing.

Then the long ground.

There's two hundred metres of open lawn between the hedge and the tree line and it slopes up, which is a small cruelty, and I run it in a low crouch that turns my thighs to acid inside of sixty seconds. The grass is soaked. My boots come down with a sound I hate every time. Halfway across I go flat because a light comes on in the east wing, and I lie in the wet with my heart going like a bird for ninety seconds until it goes off again — somebody up for a glass of water, somebody's bad night, not mine.

Move.

I move.

The tree line is a relief so physical it's almost sexual. Cover. Trunks and dark and the ground going soft underfoot. I get thirty metres in before I let myself stop, one hand flat on the bark of a birch, breathing like a bellows and grinning like an idiot in the pitch black.

I’m out.

Four hundred metres of woodland, then the fence, and the fence is a fence — eight foot, no razor, sensor line at the base that I can get over if I go up a tree and out along a limb, which I have picked out in daylight from the window seat in Sergei's room while pretending to look at a model ship. Then two miles of state land to the county road. Then a truck stop, a phone, and somebody who isn't Bureau.

That last part is the part I hadn't solved. Nine years of contacts and every one of them has now read three pages by Louis about a corridor. There's my mother in Bethesda, who I can't go near — first place anyone looks, and putting a sixty-eight-year-old woman between me and a federal warrant is not something I'm prepared to do twice in one lifetime. There's Foster, who arrested nobody and signed nothing, and whose apartment is probably being watched.

So the plan past the fence is thin. The plan past the fence is get past the fence and become a problem somewhere else, which is not a plan, it's a direction.

You take the door that's open and you solve the next problem from inside the next room.

I move through the woodland faster than I should. Roots and leaf litter the ground, and I’m met by the smell of wet earth. Somewhere off to the left a deer breaks and crashes away through the dark and my whole body goes liquid for a second before my brain catches up.

Two hundred metres. My hands are shaking and it isn't from the cold and it isn't fear. It’s from excitement. Six days of being cooped up in that house and every muscle in my body is ready for chaos.

I'm three hundred metres in and moving well when I hear it. At first it's nothing. A bird, maybe. The kind of noise the woods make. Then it comes again and I know instanlty it isn't a bird.

It's a child screaming.

I stop.

I stop so completely that I hear my own coat settle, and I stand in the dark with one hand on a tree and I listen to Sergei Yaroslav screaming my name across two hundred metres of open lawn.

Not crying. Not the nightmare, either — I know the nightmare, the nightmare doesn't have words in it. This is the other thing. This is a kid out on the terrace in the dark yelling for somebody, over and over, and the sound is climbing at the end of every repetition, and I know exactly what that climb means because I have heard it twice this week.

Behind me: four hundred metres of woodland, a fence, two miles, a truck stop.

Go.

I don't move.

He's ten and he's in a house with six armed men and a doctor on the property. He is the single most protected child in the state of New York. Somebody will reach him in thirty seconds and they will do exactly what they have been doing for years.

Which is stand there and do nothing.

That's the thing. That's the thing that has me by the throat, standing in the wet dark three hundred metres from the fence.

They'll reach him. And they'll get it wrong. Andrei will fill the doorway and make it worse. Karina goes home at seven. His father stands in a corridor with his hand flat against the wall and waits for it to stop.

Nobody in that house knows how to help bring him down.

I do.

I look at the trees around me. Four hundred metres.

Twelve minutes, of which I have burned maybe five, and I will never have this again — they will find this seam within a week, they will move Grigor's cigarette or reseed the cameras, and I will spend eighty-four more days in a house I cannot leave while somewhere Louis writes another three pages about my false sins.

This is my life. That's what's on the other end of these trees. My name, my badge, my family. Everything I built out of a bad situation, a worse boyfriend, and a father who got shot for saying no.