Page 88 of Captured By the Pakhan

He thinks about that for a long time.

"Was it something to do with her mum?"

I look at my son.

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because she talked about her once." He picks at the seam of his sleeve. "In the pool house. She said her mum lives in a house in Maryland with a green door, and she hasn't seen her in a long time, and she said it in a way that meant don't ask me anything else." A small shrug. "So I didn't."

I sit on a step above the Pacific Ocean with a hole in my side and reflect that my son is more perceptive than eleven men who work for me.

"It was to do with her mother," I say.

"Is her mum okay?"

"Her mother is completely safe," I say, "and I have made very sure of that, and that is the truest sentence I will say to you today."

He accepts it. He accepts it the way children do, entirely, and something in my chest goes sideways.

"You're going to go and find him," Sergei says. "The FBI man."

"Yes."

"And Raven?"

"And Raven."

"What if she doesn't want to come back?"

"Then she doesn't come back," I say, "and I will make sure she is safe anyway, and that will be the end of it. She is allowed. That is what being a person is." I put my hand on the step between us. "But I am going to go and find her either way, because a man is looking for her who wishes her harm, and I am not going to sit in this house while that is true."

"Because you love her."

I do not answer for a moment.

"Yes," I say.

Sergei nods slowly, like a man confirming a figure.

"Okay," he says. "Good."

The rest of it is the hard part.

"You are going to England," I tell him. "Tonight. There is a house in Suffolk that nobody knows about with four men and Bogdan, and you will be there for a few weeks, and then we will see."

"With you?"

"No."

His face does something, and he gets it back under control in about a second, which is the worst thing I have seen this year.

"Why can't I stay with you?"

"Because the man I am going to find has already shot at you once in your own house," I say, "and because I would rather you were bored in Suffolk than reachable in California. And because if you are somewhere he cannot get to, then I only have to think about one thing, and I need only to have to think about one thing."

"Are you coming back?"

And there it is.