Page 37 of Captured By the Pakhan

He argues with the next part.

"Fine. Move Sergei. Move him tonight, I'll have a team on the road in three hours." He taps a finger on the arm of the chair. "Leave the woman."

I say nothing.

"You have a serving federal agent," Yeremey says, "with an active warrant, whose face is on a wire in every field office between here and Sacramento, and you are proposing to put her in a vehicle with your son and drive her across four state lines. Do you know what that is, legally? That's not harboring. That's transport. That is the charge they give you when they can't be bothered to prove the interesting ones."

"She is his bodyguard."

"She is a hostage you have started calling a bodyguard, and I'm the only person in your life who will say that sentence out loud, which is precisely why you keep me." He is not smiling now. "There are four women on my list who could do that job. Vetted, armed, and unencumbered by a federal manhunt. I can have one in the house by Friday."

"He would not go near them."

"He'd manage."

"He would not go near them." My voice comes out harder than I intend, and I hear it happen. "He has spoken more in the last eleven days than in the four years previous. He has been outside. He cooked a meal. On Tuesday, he told me — unprompted, in a corridor — about a documentary, and I stood there unable to think of a single thing to say back to him, and that is my failure, not hers. You want me to remove the only variable that has changed and replace it with a vetted stranger and see whether he holds."

Yeremey looks at me for a long moment.

"That," he says, "is the best argument I have ever heard you make for a thing you are doing for a completely different reason."

"Yeremey—"

"No, it's a good argument. It's actually a good argument, that's what makes it dangerous." He stands and collects his folder. "So let me ask the other one, and then I'll stop. If it were only about the boy — if she were sixty, if she were a man, if she were anything other than what she is — would you be putting her in your own car? Or would she be in the chase vehicle with Andrei?"

I don't answer.

"Right," he says. "I'll arrange the route."

He is at the door when I stop him.

"The list."

"Eleven down to three." He half-turns. "Two are yours, and I'm not naming them until I'm certain, because you'd do something and then we'd have a funeral and no information. The third came out of a routing header on the file they pulled from your safe — five letters of a surname, buried in a distribution string that shouldn't have existed."

"Five letters."

"D-A-N-E-S. Or D-A-N-E-Z, the character's degraded." He shrugs. "It's a name that goes somewhere. Give me a week, and I'll tell you where."

He goes.

I stay at the glass for a while after that with my hands in my pockets.

There is a thing I have not said to him, and it has been sitting behind my teeth since he said, "leave the woman." It is not romantic or sentimental, and it is the actual reason.

If she stays in that house without me, and the Italians come back with more people to find out whose property it is, then the woman on the ground is a federal fugitive with no badge, no radio, no backup, and a name on a wire.

Nobody would come for her. Nobody would even look.

I know that with total precision, because I'm the one who made sure of it.

I call the estate at ten.

Andrei answers on the second ring and reports in the flat voice: the property is quiet, the boy is at his lessons, and the woman ran the fence line yesterday afternoon.

"How far?"

"All of it. Both flanks, the kennel end, the service gate." A pause. "She found the two gaps at the south corner."