Page 38 of Captured By the Pakhan

"And?"

"And she did nothing. Said nothing. Walked back to the house."

I stand in a glass office and feel that land somewhere under the ribs.

She found them and left them.

"Is she armed yet?"

Andrei is quiet for slightly too long.

"No."

"She has been in that house eleven days, she has run at my son's screaming twice, and she came back down a hill she did not have to come back down." I watch the traffic forty-one floors below. "Give her a sidearm."

"Pakhan—"

"You will clear it, you will log it, and you will be the one who hands it to her, because if it comes from me it is a gift and if it comes from you it is a decision by the man responsible for security on that property." A beat. "Which is what it is."

"...Understood."

"How is she otherwise?"

The pause this time is a different shape.

"She tried a tablet in the kitchen yesterday," Andrei says. "Karina's. Four characters into a message before I stopped her."

I close my eyes.

"To whom?"

"Foster. The one from the file who did not sign a statement."

"What did it say?"

"'R-W a-l-i.'" He says the letters individually, flatly. "R. W. Alive, I would assume."

And there it is.

Not get me out. Not a location, not a plea, not a description of a house or a man or a boy. Eleven days in my custody and four characters of bandwidth and she spent all of it telling one person on earth that she was not dead.

"You did not report this yesterday," I say.

"No."

"Why?"

Andrei takes a long time.

"Because I did not know what you would do," he says, "and I did not wish to find out."

We are both quiet for a moment on a phone line, two men who have known each other nine years and are now standing on the edge of a conversation neither of us is going to have.

"Thank you for telling me," I say.

"There will be a next time."

"I know."