Page 86 of Captured By the Pakhan

Okay. Okay, that's a plan. That's a stupid plan, and it's a plan.

And I get up to get a glass of water before I lie down and try for two hours' sleep, and I go into the kitchen and turn the tap on, and while it runs I crouch to get the glass out of the cupboard under the sink because there's nothing in the drainer.

And I stop.

Because there's a shape behind the trap that isn't plumbing.

It isn't large. It is about the size of a matchbox, and it is grey, and it is cable-tied to the underside of the pipe, and the tie is white and clean and new, and the pipe is thirty years old with a skin of dust on it, and there is a wipe-clear ring where somebody's fingers held it steady.

I do not touch it.

I crouch on the kitchen floor of Logan Foster's apartment with the tap running four inches above my head and look at a device that isn't Bureau issue, because Bureau issue has a serial number, a case tag, and a chain of custody, and this has a bare housing and a hand-soldered tail.

How long.

The cable tie is clean. Not new-clean — a week, maybe two, and there's the beginning of dust on the top face of it.

Two weeks.

Which is before I got here. Which means it was never about me at all; it was put in this apartment because Logan Foster is the man who wouldn't stop asking questions in week one, and it has been sitting under his sink listening to him make telephone calls about a signature block.

And I have been in this apartment for eleven hours.

I have said Danesi's name out loud in this apartment. Twice.

I straighten up very slowly and turn the tap off, and the quiet afterward is enormous.

"Logan," I say.

Nothing.

"Logan."

He comes out of the bedroom with his hair everywhere. "What⁠—"

And the door comes in.

Not a knock. Not a warning. The frame goes at the strike plate with a crack like a tree breaking, and there are men in the room before the door has finished swinging, and there is light — hard, white, moving light in my eyes from three directions.

I get a hand into the drainer.

There's a knife in there, a bread knife, and it is the single most inadequate object in the history of this country, and I get two fingers on it, and I am moving toward the window near the fire escape side because that is the only exit that exists, and I make it four feet.

And then somebody takes me off my feet from behind, and the floor is coming, and I have about a half-second of clarity in which I make one single decision.

I turn.

I get my shoulder underneath and my arms in, and I take the entire impact on the point of the shoulder and the side of my torso. It is a bad landing and something in the arm goes, and I do it anyway, and I lie on Logan Foster's floor with a knee in my back and my cheek on the boards and my free hand flat and splayed low across my own stomach.

Somebody is shouting Logan's name.

Somebody else says, very close to my ear, in a voice with absolutely nothing in it:

"That's her. Don't mark her face."

Chapter 23

Ilya