Page 32 of Captured By the Pakhan

I come apart on his hand on the edge of his own desk with my heels locked behind his thighs, and he holds me through the whole of it, and afterward he doesn't let go.

For about four seconds I let myself have it.

Then I open my eyes.

And over his shoulder, on the corner of the desk that didn't get cleared, there's a folder — plain, closed, tab out — and on the tab in small block capitals is my own name.

WEST, R. A.

The top sheet has slid half out of it. A photocopy of something. An address in Bethesda, Maryland, that I have not spoken aloud in this house or any other for eleven years.

My mother's street. Ilya follows my eyes. And he closes the folder — unhurried, without a flicker, the way you'd straighten a picture frame — and puts it in the drawer, and turns back to me.

"Where were we?”

Chapter 9

Raven

Yaroslav Estate, 6:15 AM

Iwrite the report in my head at six in the morning, lying flat on my back in a bed I didn't sleep in.

Incident summary: Subject exploited proximity and prolonged isolation to establish rapport with a compromised agent. The agent failed to maintain professional boundaries. Contributing factors: captivity, absence of institutional support, prolonged high-stress environment.

It's a good brief, short to the point, if it were true. The kind that gets read out at a hearing while somebody's career quietly stops.

The problem with it is that it's complete fiction.

Because nobody exploited anything, he asked. He asked in words, flat out, and gave me a full accounting of what walking out would cost me.

I asked him not to stop.

And then, because I'm a professional and this is what professionals do with a compromised position, I run actual damage control.

One. I have slept with the subject of an active investigation. Except there is no active investigation, because the investigation was a warrantless entry authorized by a man I now have reason to believe was working for somebody else, and there is no version of that sentence I could say in a courtroom without ending three careers, including my own.

Two. I have been told, freely, what he moves and how. That's the thing I broke into this house to find. Now, I have it. I got it in a leather chair with a drink in my hand, and it is worth precisely nothing, because a fugitive's word is worth nothing, and he knew that before he opened his mouth. And he didn't trust me with it. He calculated that it was safe to give me the information, and he was right.

Three. There is a folder, somewhere, in someone's hands that has more incriminating evidence than one and two combined. The folder is the one I keep coming back to.

I lay in bed for another twenty minutes contemplating. Then I get up and go to work. The office door is locked when I arrive.

6:40 am. There's a new keypad on the frame that wasn't there yesterday, a brand new brushed-steel one, still with the protective film on the bottom edge where somebody's thumb hasn't worn it off yet.

Installed overnight. Between three in the morning and now.

So we're both pretending it didn't happen, and only one of us is doing anything about it.

I go and make coffee I don't want, stand at the kitchen window, and run it properly.

Here's what I know. There's a folder in that office with my name on the tab and my mother's street inside it. It existed before last night. He closed it in front of me without explaining, then changed the lock.

Here's what I don't know: whether the lock is about the folder or about not trusting me.

Those are very different things. One is a man protecting an asset. The other is a man who has realized what he's holding and doesn't want the woman he's sleeping with to read it.

And the truly humiliating part — the part I'd cut out of the report — is that I want it to be the second one.