Page 72 of Captured By the Pakhan

That isn't, in itself, information. She gets up. She walks the house at night the way other people breathe, and there have been four occasions in six weeks where I have woken at three and found her standing at a window downstairs with a glass of water, looking at nothing.

I put a hand flat on the sheet on her side.

Cold.

Not four minutes ago. Not twenty.

I am on the stairs before I have made a decision about anything, and the front door is shut, and the alarm panel in the hall reads ARMED in small green letters, which it should, and which is the first genuinely frightening thing that happens to me tonight.

Because it should read ARMED, she would arm it behind her. She would arm it behind her because she has spent six weeks watching this house get worse at protecting itself, and because there is a boy asleep upstairs, and she would not leave a door open even on her way out.

She has been gone long enough to think about it.

I go through the house at speed.

Kitchen, terrace, pool house, the study — the study door is locked, and the keypad log reads clean, which I will discover in eleven hours to be a lie, but at four in the morning I look at a clean log, and I move on.

The garage. Two vehicles. Neither missing, and both sets of keys in the box, which is somehow worse.

Sergei's room, which I open silently and look into for about two seconds, and he is asleep on his front with one arm off the side of the bed, and everything in me unclenches for approximately a second, then goes tighter than it was.

And then I go back upstairs, into her room, turn the light on properly, and stand in the middle of it.

Her bag is here.

That's what stops me. Her bag is here, and the clothes I bought her are hanging up, and the weapon Andrei logged out to her is sitting on the nightstand in its holster with both spare magazines squared beside it.

She left the gun.

She has taken nothing that came from me.

I stand in the middle of that room and understand exactly what I am looking at, because it isn't a girl fleeing a house. A woman escaping a house takes the weapon. It is a woman closing an account.

Andrei is in the doorway. I have no idea how long he has been there.

"Gate," he says. "One twenty-two. She walked out of it."

"Walked."

"On foot. Down the service stair to Rennick and then east, which is the direction with no camera for six hundred meters." He is fully dressed. He has been fully dressed since the moment he woke. "She used the pad. The code is Sergei's — the boy's own code, the one he was given for the pool gate, which nobody has ever changed."

"Two hours and thirty minutes."

"Two hours and thirty-one."

I stand in the room.

"Grigor is on the road with two vehicles," Andrei says. "There are four hire counters in the city that will take cash, and I have men at three of them. The bus terminal on Alameda, the Hollywood terminal, and Union Station are covered. If she is moving on foot within a five-mile radius, we will have her inside two hours."

"She isn't within five miles."

"No," Andrei agrees. "She isn't."

"She has been planning this for how long?"

He doesn't answer immediately, and that is how I know.

"Andrei."