Page 95 of Captured By the Pakhan

He stops.

His hands are eight inches from me, and he stops them dead in the air, and I watch every single thing in that man's face go through a door and close it, and he sits back on his heel and puts both hands out flat where I can see them.

"All right," he says.

I get myself up the wall. It takes a while. My hip has gone, and my shoulder isn't right, and I stand there with my back against 1911 brickwork, and my wrists still tied, and I look at him.

"The folder," I say.

And to his eternal credit — I will think about this for the rest of my life — he doesn't say now? He doesn't say later. He doesn't tell me there is a firefight happening two floors above us.

He answers.

"I had your mother watched from the second day," Ilya says. "The second day, when you were in the cabin, and I hadn't decided whether to kill you. I asked Yeremey for everyone in the world you would cross a state line for, and he told me what it was, and I told him it was because you knew my son existed. That was true, and it was not the reason. It was leverage. That is the word for it, and I am not going to find a better one."

"Say the rest."

"Six weeks ago I changed the order," he says. "It stopped being about where she was and started being about who was near her. And two nights ago I put four men on Ellsworth Drive with instructions that nobody speaks to her, and they are there now, and they have been there since the night I was shot, and that is the only reason I can tell you your mother is safe."

I stand against a wall with my hands tied.

"Both of those are true," Ilya says. "The second one doesn't undo the first. I built a rope for you in March, and it is the same rope that is around your mother's house tonight, and there is no version of this where I get to have only the good half of that. You will decide what it means. You have every right to decide it means the worst thing."

"You had her photographed at my father's grave."

"Yes."

"On the anniversary."

"Yes." He doesn't look away. "And when this is finished, I will give you every copy and every negative and the name of the man who took them, and you may do whatever you want with all of it, including with me."

Upstairs, something heavy comes down and the light in its cage swings.

"I am going to say one more thing," he says, "and then we are going to leave, because we have about ninety seconds. I didn't come here to be forgiven. I came because there is a man in this house who intends to kill you, and I would have come the same way if you never speak to me again after tonight."

He puts a knife on the floor, handle toward me, and steps back.

I look at it.

Then I pick it up, and cut my own wrists free, and hand it back to him.

"There's four of them on the ground floor and two on the stairs," I say. "Danesi's in the study on the second floor at the back — he came down here twice, and both times he came down from somewhere, not in from the street."

"Can you walk?"

"I can move."

I bend down and take Louis Mendez's weapon off the floor, and check the load, and it's a full magazine less two, and my hands are entirely steady.

"Left side's yours," I say.

Chapter 25

Ilya

Georgetown, 11:52 PM

We came in through a path created in 1974. That is the whole of it, and it took Yeremey nine hours and a very great deal of money to find: in 1974 the city of Washington ran a storm relief culvert under the rear gardens of eleven properties on that street. In 1991 the owner of this house tied a basement drain into it and filed a permit for the work, and the drawings have been sitting in a district records office for thirty-four years being looked at by nobody.