Page 67 of Captured By the Pakhan

I wait.

"If Danesi needs Raven West to die in your house," Andrei says, "then the safest place on this earth for that woman is away from you. Every day she stays here, she is standing exactly where he needs her to stand. You are not protecting her. You are holding her in position."

The ocean goes on doing what it does.

"I know," I say.

"You know."

"I have known since Sunday night."

"And?"

"And I'm going to keep her here anyway," I say, "because the alternative is putting her on a road alone with no badge and no radio and no one at all, and I will take the risk I can put men around over the one I can't." I look at him. "And because I want her here. Both of those are true. I'm not going to pretend the second one out of the room to make the first one sound better."

Andrei nods slowly.

"That," he says, "is the most honest thing you have said in four years, and it is going to get somebody killed."

"Very possibly."

"Which somebody?"

"That," I say, "is what today is for."

I take the call in the study at eight.

Yeremey has been awake all night again — I can hear it; he gets precise when he's exhausted rather than sloppy, which is one of the several ways he is not a normal man.

"Danesi's residence is in Georgetown, and before you get excited, it is not a house; it is a position. Federal protective detail on the street because of the office. Cameras that belong to the government. Two men who are not detail and are not on any payroll I can find." Paper moving. "There is no version where you approach that building."

"Then not the building."

"Then not the building. He moves four times a week — the office, a club on H Street, a restaurant in Bethesda he has used every second Thursday for nine years, and a casino in Maryland where he plays badly and loses on purpose to a man he owes something to." A pause. "The casino is the softest of the four by a considerable margin."

"How soft?"

"Private gaming floor, six tables, members only. His detail waits outside because the room does not permit them and he enjoys that it does not." Yeremey exhales. "It's the only place in his week where an Assistant Director of the FBI is a man alone in a room with a drink."

"When?"

"Thursdays. Third Thursday of the month, without exception, for two years."

"That is nine days."

"That is nine days," Yeremey agrees. "And Ilya — I want to note, on the record, that a pattern this clean in a man this careful is either a genuine weakness or it is a door with a sign on it."

"Noted."

"That is not the same as heard."

"It's what you are getting." I turn a pen over. "Get me the room. Every entrance, every camera, every man on that floor and who pays them. And find out what he keeps and where he keeps it, because the man himself is only half of this — I want what he has taken out of my house, and I want the file he built on Raven West."

There's a pause on the line.

"Say that last part again."

"You heard it."