Page 90 of Property of the Bikers

Viktor was inside for ninety minutes, testing the response and deciding whether Ruthless would come to him or whether he needed to come to us.

He’s still in Millhaven.

Reeve has his location.

* * *

We meet at the compound gate at eight fifteen.

Reeve is in his truck with a bag on the passenger seat and the monitoring feed on his phone showing Viktor’s sedan still parked outside a motel on the south edge of town. The kind of motel that takes cash and doesn’t ask questions, which tells me Viktor did his research on Millhaven before he came here.

Doesn’t matter.

“He’s alone,” Reeve says.

“Confirmed?”

“No vehicle activity since eleven PM. No outbound comms on any channel I’m monitoring. No check-in with his network.” He looks at the phone. “He came here to make a personal move. He hasn’t made it yet. Which means he’s still deciding.”

“He doesn’t get to decide,” I say.

Reeve looks at me. “No,” he says. “He doesn’t.”

We drive separately. Different routes, different arrival times at the staging point Reeve identified two miles from the motel, a disused farm access road with no camera coverage and enough tree line to keep both vehicles out of sight from the highway.

I get there first.

I sit in the truck, look at the tree line, and think about nothing in particular, which is what I do before work that requires full attention afterward. Some men think through the details again. I’ve found that thinking through details before an operation produces diminishing returns past a certain point. The preparation is done. What’s left is execution.

Reeve arrives eight minutes later.

We walk the access road to the motel. Reeve has the room number from the check-in system he accessed at six thirty, room 114, ground floor, east wing, which is the wing facing away from the highway. Viktor chose it for the same reason I would have. Lower visibility from passing traffic. Direct access to the parking lot without going through the lobby.

He’s good at this.

Not good enough.

Room 114’s curtain is drawn, but the light is on behind it. I can see the edge of it under the door. Reeve moves to the left of the doorframe, and I move to the right, and he knocks twice, the knock of a motel maintenance worker, unhurried and unremarkable.

Fifteen seconds.

The door opens.

Viktor Sokolov looks at me first, then at Reeve, and the calculation runs across his face in about half a second. He’s in a shirt and trousers, jacket on the chair behind him, phone on the bedside table. He doesn’t reach for the phone. He doesn’t try to close the door. He takes one step back, and his posture changes.

He’s calm.

I’ll give him that.

“Come in,” he says.

We come in. Reeve closes the door.

The room is small and clean and generic, the kind of room that exists in every mid-range motel in every mid-size town in America, and Viktor stands in the middle of it with his hands loose at his sides and looks at us with boardroom composure.

“This was business,” he says. “Nothing personal. I want you to know that.”

Reeve looks at him. “Agreed,” he says. “Still ends the same way.”