Page 40 of Property of the Bikers

I unpack the vitamins and line them up on the new nightstand.

Reeve appears at half past two.

He knocks twice, and when I open the door, he has no food, no folder, and no visible reason for being there. He asks if he can come in, which he also always does, and I step back and let him.

He sits in the chair by the window and looks at the compound for a moment, and then looks at me. “Viktor’s medical directive,” he says. “The doctor whose name you didn’t recognize. I’ve traced the connection three levels back through the shell company structure, and I’m hitting a wall I can’t get through from this side.” He pauses. “You spent two years watching how he builds his networks. Is there a pattern to how he recruits institutional contacts?”

I sit on the edge of the bed and think about it.

“He doesn’t recruit,” I say. “He creates dependencies. He finds people already in financial or professional difficulty and solves their problems. Once he’s solved it, the debt exists, and he collects on it later.”

Reeve is quiet, processing.

“The administrator who approved my transfer probably has something Viktor fixed for them,” I continue. “A malpractice case that went away. A licensing issue that has been resolved. Something documented somewhere that, if you find the resolution, leads you back to one of his entities.”

Reeve looks at me for a long moment.

“That’s useful,” he says.

“I know.”

The corner of his mouth moves in a way that isn’t quite a smile but is adjacent to one, and he opens the small notebook he carries and writes something down in the economical handwriting of a man who writes only what he needs and nothing more.

We talk for forty minutes. He asks questions that are precise and listens to the answers as data, turning them over, cross-referencing them against things he already knows, occasionally asking a follow-up that tells me he’s been thinking about Viktor’s network longer and harder than anyone has let on. I answer everything directly because he treats the answers as worth having, and that, I’ve discovered, is an extraordinary quality in a person.

When he leaves, he says thank you, which I don’t think I’ve heard him say before.

I sit with that for a moment after the door closes.

* * *

Maya comes in the evening.

She brings tea, sits in the chair Reeve vacated, drinks it, looks at the south window and the compound outside it, and for a while we sit in the comfortable quiet that has developed between us over two weeks of proximity and honesty.

“Two days,” I say.

“Two days,” she agrees.

“Two days with nothing from Viktor. No financial pressure, no surveillance vehicles, nothing on any of Reeve’s channels.”

She drinks her tea.

“Maya.”

“Quiet doesn’t mean over,” she says. She says it plainly, the way she says everything, without cushioning it or apologizing for it. “Viktor doesn’t go quiet because he’s given up. Men like him don’t give up. They recalibrate.” She looks at me. “The quiet is him thinking.”

I know she’s right.

I know it the way I know my own blood pressure is down and the baby is moving well, and I’ve slept two full nights in a row for the first time since I left Seattle. Those things are also true, and they exist alongside what Maya is saying, and I can’t hold all of them at equal weight right now.

I’m tired.

Not the adrenaline-tiredness of the first week, which had a sharpness to it, a quality of forced alertness. This is deeper. The tiredness of a body that has been carrying a pregnancy and a siege and a claiming and a brother’s email and two weeks of rules and upgrades and blood pressure readings and tactical conversations, and all it wants is forty-eight hours of nothing being wrong.

“I hear you,” I tell Maya.

She looks at me and reads my face and does me the courtesy of not pushing further.