Page 36 of Captured By the Pakhan

Thirteen minutes before that car ever came up the road. He was waiting.

Chapter 10

Ilya

Yaroslav Freight, Midtown, 7:40 AM

Yeremey is in my office before the building is properly awake, which means he has not been to bed.

"Nineteen minutes," he says, dropping into the chair. "You want to know how Andrei was at that window nineteen minutes early."

"I know how. I want to know from where."

"A man I keep at a diner on Route 9 called it in. Black Suburban, two occupants, stopped for coffee, neither of them drank and then turned north onto a road that goes to four houses, three of which are shut for the winter." He rubs his eyes. "That is the entire warning system, Ilya. One tired man in a diner. It worked this time."

"And the vehicle?"

"Plates come back to a leasing company in Newark that has eleven vehicles and no employees." He shrugs. "A shell company owns the company. I can walk it, but I already know what I'll find at the end of it, because I've walked four of these in the last year. It's Italian money."

I turn that over.

"Then why announce themselves? They sat on a private road with their lamps on for six minutes and then backed out two hundred meters nose-first. That is not surveillance. Surveillance does not want to be seen."

"No," Yeremey agrees. "Surveillance doesn't. But a survey does."

"Explain."

"They weren't watching the house. They were making the house watch them." He leans forward. "You sit outside a place at three in the morning with your lights on, and you learn everything. How fast a man gets to a window. Whether there's a rifle behind it. Whether anybody comes down the drive to have a conversation about it. In six minutes they mapped your response posture without firing a shot, and by backing out they made sure the only plate angle you have is one you can't run past a company with no employees."

The city is coming up grey outside the glass. Somewhere below us, 1,100 people are arriving to move 9,000 containers.

"They know it's a defended property," I say.

"They know it's a defended property with a heavy man on a long gun and a nineteen-minute warning cycle. They don't know whose. Which is the part that should worry you, because a man who doesn't know whose it is comes back with more people to find out."

"How long?"

"If they were Bureau, weeks. Courts and paperwork." He spreads his hands. "They're not Bureau. So — days."

I stand and go to the window.

Here is the arithmetic and it takes about four seconds.

The house upstate is the most defensible property I own. Every camera, every loop, I placed every man on that ground over three years with one purpose. It's also, since eleven nights ago, a property that a federal team walked into in under five minutes, and now a property that Italian money has sat outside of and measured.

It's compromised. Not breached — compromised, which is worse, because breached is an event and compromised is a condition.

"We move him," I say.

"Ah." Yeremey sits back. "There it is."

"Los Angeles."

"Los Angeles." He says it the way you'd repeat a diagnosis. "Which is glass. A hillside with four approaches and a public road below it, and which you bought in 2018 because you liked the view and it is, and I'm choosing my words with great care here, the single least defensible asset in your portfolio."

"It's also not on any list. It's held four companies deep, nobody has slept in it in two years, and there is no version of tonight's dinner in Los Angeles because nobody is looking there." I turn around. "The house upstate is a fortress that four people now know about. The house in Los Angeles is a bad fortress that nobody knows about. I will take the second one."

Yeremey doesn't argue with that, because it's correct.