Page 96 of Captured By the Pakhan

Four men through a culvert and up through a floor in a utility room. Eleven men over the rear wall ninety seconds later when the first shots pulled the detail toward the front of the house.

It has worked. That is the strange part. Every piece of it has worked, and I am standing at the bottom of a staircase in a house I should not be able to enter, and none of that matters, because there is a woman four feet from me with sixty hours in her face and a weapon in her hand. She has just told me she can move rather than that she is all right.

"Left side's yours," she says.

The door at the top swings open and a man comes through it and Raven West puts two rounds into him before I have finished raising the rifle.

Then it is close work, and there isn't a great deal to say about it.

We take the ground floor in about four minutes. It isn't clean, and it isn't cinematic — it is doorways, and shouting, and a great deal of noise in confined spaces, and twice I put myself in front of her without deciding to, and both times she moves me out of the way with her shoulder and does it herself, better.

She is extraordinary.

I want that on the record, whatever comes afterward. I have fought beside professionals for twenty-five years. I have never worked with anyone who reads a building the way she does — she takes corners in a sequence that makes no sense until you realize she isn't clearing rooms, she is clearing lines, and she does it with a hip that won't take her weight and an arm she isn't using.

At the foot of the second staircase she stops and puts her back to the wall.

"Study," she says. "Second door. He's still in there, he hasn't come out, and that means either he's waiting or there's a way out I don't know about."

"Both."

"Yes," she agrees. "Both."

Grigor and two others take the landing. Raven goes left of the door, I take the right, and she looks at me across four feet of corridor with her weapon up, and I look back at her, and eleven weeks arrive in about a second and a half, and neither of us says one word about any of it.

Then she nods.

I put my boot into the lock.

Claudio Danesi is sitting behind his desk with his hands flat on the leather.

That is the first thing, and it is the entire man. No weapon. No cover. He has heard eleven minutes of gunfire come up through his own house, and he is sitting in a chair with his palms visible, and he looks at two people coming through his door with rifles, and he doesn't flinch.

"Mr Yaroslav," he says.

The room goes very still.

"That is a guess," he continues pleasantly, "and I have been making it for four days, and I would like the record to show that I have just watched your face and confirmed it. Thank you. That has been an expensive question."

"Hands."

"They are on the desk, and they will remain there." He doesn't move them. "There are two men in the hall behind you who are wondering whether to come in, and I would suggest that they don't, because in about ninety seconds three of us are going to make an arrangement, and it will be considerably easier without an audience."

"Raven," I say.

"On him."

"If he moves at all."

"Then he stops moving," she says.

Danesi looks at her, and something crosses his face which is the only genuine thing he does all night.

"Agent West." He sounds almost warm. "I want you to know that this hasn't been personal for one moment. I want you to understand that specifically, because I think it matters to you, and because you are about to hear an offer and it will land better if you know I have never once disliked you."

"You put two rounds in a corridor."

"I put an operation into a corridor. What Mendez did with it was Mendez." A small shrug. "He is dead, I assume."