Page 61 of Captured By the Pakhan

There's silence.

"Say the rest," Ilya says.

"He took the post eight months ago. Ilya — eight months. Three weeks after the Kowalczyk plant." Papers moving. "He did not get promoted into the path of an investigation. He built an investigation and then walked into the chair above it. And I have now spent two days on his family and there is an old Italian name under the new one, and it is not a small name, and it goes back four generations in New York."

I stand in a dark corridor with my hand flat against the wall.

Assistant Director.

Not a supervisor. Not a SAC. An Assistant Director sits above four field offices and can classify a file, reroute a case, seal a personnel action, and make a serving agent disappear into a wire with four sworn statements attached.

And nobody came to arrest me because he doesn't want me arrested. He wants to know where I am.

"Then he is the one who put the team into my house," Ilya says.

"He is the one who put the team into your house, took your Gulf routing, and burned the woman who was standing in the corridor when it happened." A pause. "And he is inside two organisations at once, which means he knows what you are and he knows what they are, and there is exactly one way that ends."

"How much does he have?"

"Enough that I stopped sleeping. He has four of your brokers. He has the Newark structure. If he has been reading that routing file for six weeks he has the shape of everything from Veracruz north, and the only reason we are still standing is that he can'tmove on it without exposing himself, and the day he finds a way to do that without exposing himself⁠—"

"Then he does not get that day," Ilya says.

His voice doesn't change at all. That's the thing. It's the same voice he used on the terrace on Wednesday asking whether there was more bread.

"Ilya."

"Find him. Where he sleeps, where his children go to school, which of his men drives him and which of them he trusts, and how many minutes he is ever alone." A chair moves. "And then we will kill him, and I would like it to be quick, because a slow one is theatre and theatre is how you get caught."

"He's an Assistant Director of the FBI."

"He is a man who put a bullet through my son," Ilya says. "Find him."

And I stand in the corridor and wait for it.

I know what's supposed to happen here. I have nine years and three commendations and I have just heard a man order the murder of a federal official through a four-inch gap in a door, and there is a correct reaction, and it is supposed to arrive with a sound like a bell.

I wait for it.

It doesn't come.

What comes instead is a small, clear, entirely calm voice that says: yes.

Not he's right, but. Not I understand why he'd think that. Just — yes. Danesi shot a ten-year-old to steal four sheets of paper, buried a woman he'd never met to make it stick, and he's sitting in a building I used to badge into with the authority to do it again to somebody else next month.

So do it.

I stand in a dark corridor in a house on a hill with my hand flat on the wall and understand that I have crossed something and can'tsay when.

That's the moment. That's the actual moment, and it isn't the office floor and it isn't Kansas. It's a corridor, fully clothed, agreeing.

The call ends. Ilya doesn't come out.

I stand there for about a minute and then I push the door open.

He's got both hands flat on the desk, head down, and he is carrying something across the shoulders that he does not carry in front of anybody, and when the door moves he straightens up so fast it's almost violent.

"How much did you hear?"