Page 59 of Captured By the Pakhan

We're forty meters away when he sees us.

I watch him see us. Head comes up, hand moves, and he does the single most informative thing available to him.

He doesn't drive away.

He gets out.

That's what tells me. A watcher runs — a watcher's whole job is not being here — and this man opens his door and steps out onto the street and stands beside his own vehicle with his hands where I can see them, which is not what a criminal does.

It's what a cop does.

"Ma'am—"

Andrei hits him.

Not hard, and not with everything, and I'd argue afterward that it was the correct call, because the man's hand had gone toward his hip and neither of us was going to gamble a hundredth of a second on what was in it. He takes him into the side of the car and has both wrists behind him in about a second and a half, and I've got the door open and the glovebox and the console and the seat pocket in eleven seconds flat.

There's a camera with a long lens. There's a laptop. There's a cup of cold coffee, a sandwich wrapper, and a bottle he's been using because he can't leave the position, which tells me he's been on this street a great deal longer than ninety minutes.

And there's a badge. I hold it about four inches from my own face, examining it closely.

It's real.

Nine years. You know the stock, you know the weight, you know the way the seal sits under the laminate, and this is not a print job out of a garage in Van Nuys — this is a genuine credential belonging to a genuine special agent out of a field office I could drive to in forty minutes.

"Federal," I say.

Andrei's grip changes.

"Then we have a problem," he says.

"We have a bigger one." I turn the camera on and thumb through the back of the roll, fast, and my stomach goes somewhere unpleasant. "Andrei. These aren't of the house."

There are perhaps four hundred frames on this card, and I go through eighty of them in about twenty seconds, and there is not one photograph of Ilya Yaroslav on it. Not one of Sergei. Not one of Andrei, or the gate, or the vehicles, or a single thing about this property that a man investigating the Bratva would need.

They're of me.

Me on the terrace. Me on the beach steps with a towel. Me at the market on Vermont, from behind, holding a bag. Me in the pool house doorway at seven in the morning with my hands wrapped.

Dated. Timestamped. Going back eleven days.

"Ask him," I say, and my voice comes out from somewhere a long way off, "how long."

Andrei asks him. Andrei asks him in a way I'm going to think about later.

"Since Utah," the man gets out. "Since — Christ — since the eighth, we picked you up on 15 outside Cedar City⁠—"

"Picked me up. Who's we?"

"I don't⁠—"

"Who is running you?"

"I get a number." He's talking fast now, and he isn't lying; I've watched too many people lie. "I get a number and a schedule, and I file to an address. It's compartmented, it's got a case code, I don't get a name — lady, I don't get a name, I'm four years in, they gave me a car and a code and told me not to file locally⁠—"

And then the second vehicle comes around the corner at the bottom of Rennick.

Fast. Black, and it doesn't slow at the junction, and Andrei has me by the arm and off the road behind the parked cars before I have finished registering it.