Page 79 of Captured By the Pakhan

"No — you don't. You walked in the front. You put your hands up in an atrium in front of nine cameras and forty people, and there is a log with your name on it, and I filed the arrest thirty-five minutes ago." He is already standing. "Thirty-five minutes. He has known for at least thirty of them."

He goes to the door and looks through the glass into the corridor, both ways, and comes back.

Then he takes a handcuff key out of his pocket, puts it in my palm, and closes my fingers over it.

"Logan—"

"Stairwell C. The camera on the fourth floor landing has been out since February, and it's on the maintenance list where it's going to stay." He's talking very fast and very quietly. "It comes out into the loading bay. There's a shift change at eleven, and it's ninety seconds of nobody."

"You'll lose your job."

"Probably."

"You'll lose more than your job. If it's him⁠—"

"Then it's him," Logan says, "and I'd rather be unemployed than be the man who put Raven West in a room and went home." He straightens his tie with hands that aren't steady. "Nine years. You gave a statement for me in 2019 that you didn't have to give."

I close my fingers around the key.

"There's one more thing," he says, at the door. "And you're not going to like it. Two days ago there was a request in the system for a welfare check on a residence in Bethesda. Routed through a county liaison, no case attached, marked closed within the hour."

Everything in me goes cold.

"My mother's house."

"Your mother's house," Logan says. "So whatever you're about to do, you do it fast."

Chapter 21

Ilya

Maryland, 9:40 PM

The room has six tables and a carpet from 1987, and it is the first genuine mistake I have made in eleven years.

I know this at nine forty on a Thursday evening, and I know it before anything happens. I want that on the record: I stand in a service corridor with four men behind me and a fifth on the roof, and everything is exactly as Yeremey described it, and that is precisely the problem.

The private floor is where he said it would be. The detail is outside on the street like he said. The tables are right, the entrance is right, the camera in the north corner is dead, exactly as promised, because we killed it forty minutes ago.

Everything checks.

Yeremey said it to me on a Sunday — a pattern this clean in a man this careful is either a genuine weakness or it is a door with a sign on it — and I said noted, and he said that isn't the same as heard, and he was correct, and I am going through the door anyway.

Because it has been several days since she walked out of my gate, and I have nothing.

Nothing from four hire counters, three terminals, eleven men, and a great deal of money. Nothing from Grigor on the road. She has crossed this country like water into sand, and every single day she is out there without a badge or a weapon, or one person on this earth who is looking for her with good intentions, except me.

And there is one man alive who can end it, and he plays cards on the third Thursday.

"Ilya." Andrei, very close, at my shoulder. "Say the word, and we go home."

"Positions."

"Say the word."

"Andrei."

He looks at me for about a second and a half, and then he is a professional again, and he goes.