Page 99 of Captured By the Pakhan

"In the second, I do the same thing," I say, "and you never see me again. Yeremey delivers it through three cut-outs, you never learn where it came from, nobody ever connects your name to mine, and I am on an aircraft to Suffolk tonight, and I do not contact you for the rest of my life."

She stares at me.

"You'd do that."

"It isn't a bluff, and it isn't a negotiating position. Both are real, and both are already arranged, and Yeremey has instructions for either." I put my hands in my pockets. "You have been in a house you could not leave since March. A woman with no other option said every single thing you've said to me, and I have been aware of that the entire time, even when it suited me. So this is the first choice you've actually had, and I am not going to stand here and put my thumb on it."

"And if I say go?"

"Then I go," I say, "and you will still be clear, and your mother will still have four men on her street until I am satisfied, and neither of those is conditional on anything."

She stands in a car park in Alexandria at half past one in the morning with sixty hours in her face and blood on her sleeve that isn't hers.

"Stay," she says.

I do not trust myself to answer for a moment.

"All right."

"That's not — " She puts a hand up. "That isn't me saying it's fine. The folder isn't fine. It's not going to be fine in a week, and you don't get to have decided it's finished because I said one word in a car park."

"No."

"I mean it, Ilya."

"I know you do," I say. "I am not asking for it to be finished. I am asking to be in the room while it isn't."

She looks at me for a brief moment.

And then she gets into the car, and I get in next to her, and eleven miles later, somewhere past the airport, she falls asleep against the window with her hand flat and splayed low across her own stomach.

Yeremey calls at four in the morning while she is still asleep.

"It's on the wire," he says. "Assistant Director found deceased at a residence in Georgetown, and there are eleven agencies making noise, and by breakfast this will be the largest story in the country."

"Understood."

"That isn't the part." A pause on the line, and something in his voice makes me sit up. "Ilya. The Bureau has released a name in connection with the death. Not a suspect — they are being careful; it is sought in connection with — but they have put it out at two in the morning to every outlet in the country with a photograph attached."

I look at the woman asleep against the window beside me.

"Say it," I tell him.

"Raven West," Yeremey says.

Chapter 26

Raven

Washington, D.C., 9:40 AM

It takes a few days, and it isn't one dramatic morning in a courtroom, and I want to set that down properly, because everybody imagines it as a scene, and it is actually a filing cabinet.

Day one is a hotel room in Arlington with two lawyers Ilya has retained and a woman from OPR that Logan produced from somewhere.

Day two is the paper starting to arrive.

Because here is the thing about Claudio Danesi that eleven agencies discover in the same week: he was a man who built the version of everything that goes the other way. He said it out loud in his own study — I do not build a thing without building the version of it that goes the other way — and he was not exaggerating, and he was not careful about where he kept it.