Page 5 of Captured By the Pakhan

He tells me everything. The security envelope went down as a power event and came back on its own after five minutes and eleven seconds, which is a thing that has never happened in the three years since its installation. By best count four or five men had entered the house. Federal, by the movement — he says this the way a man identifies a rifle by its report. They went for the office and the east wing and they were gone through the tree line before the extra security reached the gate.

Except one.

"We have one of them. Alive. I’m having him held at the cabin.”

"And the office?" I ask instead.

"A file is missing."

I close my eyes.

"Which file?"

"The Gulf routing. Ports and brokers." He lets that sit for a moment. "They left no prints behind. Nothing, the cameras were down and didn’t catch their faces either, and a five-minute hole in the recording where they were down. What I have been able to gather is minimal, but something."

"Send it to the car."

The car is alread ready downstairs, Grigor had been alerted of the incident and was there waiting. He’d been driving for me for eleven years now and knows what the phone at a half past one means. Nothing good. We are on the Palisades in under a quarter hour and I watch the footage on the tablet in the back seat.

There isn’t much. The loops come back on and the corridor camera catches perhaps nine seconds before the feed cuts again, and it is nine seconds of a masked figure in black going down onto the carpet shielding my son.

I watch it four times.

Medium height. Slight build. Moves like he’s had extensive training — or experience. Not military, the footwork is wrong for military, it's tighter than that, it's the movement of a person taught to control a situation without over-filling it.

Going to one knee in front of the boy. Hands off their weapon. It is left to hang, which is either the most reckless thing I have ever seen a professional do. Or it’s deliberate. Because nothing else in those nine seconds is quite as reckless.

Then someone else comes through the door at the end of the hall, also dressed in all black, the figure moves faster than the frame rate can follow, and my son is on the floor under their body in a microsecond, and then the feed dies.

I watch it a fifth time. You put your own body over his to protect him.

I set the tablet face down on the seat and look out the window at nothing for the rest of the drive. By the time we turn off onto the county road I have decided the order of what I am going to do to the person in that cabin, and it’s a long list.

The house is lit up like a holiday party when we arrive. Six of Andrei's men on the premeter and two more on the roof. Every window blazing with light, which is exactly the opposite of what I want right now.

Let’s just announce to the world that I’ve been robbed. I chastize internally, making a note to remind Andrei that appearances matter later. Pushing the irritation aside it only takes me half a dozen strides to breach the front door, there is only one thing in this house I want and it is upstairs.

Bogdan meets me in the hall. He is sixty-one and has taken more bullets out of my people than any surgeon in the state. Thankfully, he doesn’t bother with the greeting.

"Four centimetres wide, no muscle involvement. It will scar. He impressed me, was calm when I closed it up." He hesitates, which is unlike him. "He was calmer than you usually are even."

"Is he awake?" I ask.

"He is awake." He confirms.

I go up the stairs two at a time. When I reach his door it’s open and the lamp is on and my Sergei suddenly seems so very small in a bed that is too large for him. He sit’s there propped up on three pillows with his left arm wrapped from shoulder to elbow. Dark hair flat against his forehead where the sweat has dried.

He sees me and a look of silent relief crosses his face. I stop three feet from the bed.

This is the part I don’t do well.

I can take a room from four armed men. I can sit across a table from a Sicilian who wanted me dead. But I cannot cross three feet of carpet to give my own ten-year-old flesh and blood reassurance that a child surely deserves.

"Does it hurt?" I ask, breaking the awkward silence.

It comes out flat. Worse than flat — it comes out like the first question in a job interview.

"Not much." He says with a small shrug, his voice thin. "Bogdan gave me something for the pain and in case of fever."