Page 29 of Captured By the Pakhan

"No. I cannot."

"Because?"

"Because I don’t know what to do when I get there," Ilya says earnestly, "and he knows it."

I have no idea what to do with that. It's the most naked thing anyone has said to me in about nine years, delivered by a man in a thousand-dollar shirt who kills people who get in his way.

So I steer hard for the exit, which is what I always do. "Right. Well. Speaking of things I don't understand you said a file was taken."

"Which file?"

"The one that walked out of your safe the night you caught me." I sit forward. "Andrei said one was gone. You've never once asked me about it."

"I assumed you would lie."

"Try me." I say with a shrug.

He looks at me for a long moment. “Did you take that file?”

“No,” I tell him honestly. “I did not.”

I hold my glass out to him, a silent request for another. He watches me careful for a moment, then sets his own glass down on the desk beside him before taking mine and moving to refill it.

Then as he does so he says: "That file contained the Gulf routing information. Ports, brokers, it was four sheets of information that only a handful of people knew about."

"I never had it."

"Are you sure about that?" He presses as he moves back to the desk and hands me the glass back.

"I mean it. I photographed forty pages off your desk but I took nothing. Taking things is how you alert someone to your presence, its how you fold a case. But photographs are how you get evidence, I'd have had that and been out of this house clean if one of my own men hadn't fired on Sergei." I hold his eyes. "I didn't take your file, Ilya. Somebody standing next to me did."

He goes very still, and I can see him running it — the same run I've been doing for a week and getting nowhere with, because I've been asking why did they shoot a child and the answer only works if you ask a different question first. Why did they need a distraction?

"You believe that," he says.

"I've had days to think about it. Louis had to be the one who fired in that corridor with no order and no threat, and then he wrote three pages about it that put the gun in my hand." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to.

"That's not panic. Panic doesn't write three pages. Somebody sent my team into your house to take one specific thing and to make sure the only person who could contradict the story about it never made it out. I walked them in the door. But I was never intended to make it out. To this day I wonder if that bullet was intended for Sergei," I pause, sipping. “Or for me.”

"What was in the safe was not evidence," Ilya says slowly. "It was a supply chain. Ports, brokers, the men who sign for a container without reading it."

"For what? What are you actually moving?"

He doesn't blink.

"Weapons. Small arms, mostly, in legitimate freight, on paperwork that is genuinely correct up until the last two hundred miles. Yaroslav Freight moves about nine thousand containers a month and eleven of them are mine."

"Only eleven?"

"It isn’t necessary to be greedy when you are the only road in and out."

Well. There it is. No hedging, no euphemism, no import-export. He's just handed me the thing I came into this house to find, freely, with a drink in my hand — and the awful part is I know exactly why he can afford to. Nobody's coming for a fugitive's testimony.

"You just told a federal agent what you do for a living."

"I told a woman in my employment," he contradicts. "The federal agent is a legal fiction currently maintained by four sworn statements and a man with a broken nose."

I stand up, because sitting has stopped being an option, and cross to the window and look out at nothing.