Page 40 of Captured By the Pakhan

Interstate 80, Pennsylvania, 9:15 AM

Andrei hands me a gun on Thursday morning in the boot room, and neither of us makes a thing of it.

It's a Sig, compact, and he clears it in front of me and hands it over grip-first with two spare magazines and a holster that's been broken in by somebody else's body.

"Logged," he says. "Yours while you are employed. Not yours after."

"Understood."

"Don't carry it in front of the boy where he can see the shape of it under a coat. He notices."

"I know he notices."

He looks at me for a second longer than the transaction requires.

"You did not ask me for this," he says.

"No."

"I know." He turns for the door. "That is why you have it."

Well, I think, standing in a boot room with a loaded weapon on my hip for the first time in twelve days. That's about as close to an apology for the throat thing as I'm ever going to get.

The car is Ilya's and Ilya drives it, which apparently nobody is happy about.

I get that argument in fragments across the gravel at seven in the morning — Andrei wanting a driver, Ilya declining, Andrei pointing out with real force that the principal behind the wheel is the principal with his hands occupied, and Ilya saying something short in Russian that ends it.

So: Ilya driving, me in the passenger seat, Sergei in the back with a tablet, headphones, and a blanket he pretended not to want—Andrei behind us in the chase vehicle with two others and every bag we own.

Twenty-nine hours to Los Angeles. One stop.

For the first ninety minutes nobody says anything at all.

He's a good driver, which irritates me. Smooth on the brake, sits three seconds back, doesn't fidget with the wheel. He checks his mirrors on a rhythm I clock at about eleven seconds and never varies, and twice in the first hour he changes lanes for no reason I can see and then changes back, and both times a vehicle drops away behind us that I hadn't registered.

"You're running a route."

"I am."

"Since when?"

"Since the gate." He doesn't look over. "Nobody is behind us. I would prefer to know that four times an hour rather than once."

Somewhere past Clearfield, he says, without any preamble:

"What did you want to be? At nine."

I turn my head. "Sorry?"

"At nine years old. Every person wants to be something at nine, and almost nobody becomes it, and the gap is usually interesting." He indicates, passes a truck, settles back. "You were not planning on federal law enforcement at nine. Nobody is."

Here we go.

Because I know this technique, I have used it — you don't open with the thing you want; you open three rooms away from it and let them walk you back. Get somebody talking about being nine and forty minutes later, they've told you where their mother lives.

Except he already knows where my mother lives.

"Why do you want to know?"