Page 60 of Captured By the Pakhan

It stops. Two men get out. They put our man in the back seat with a hand on his head, and they are gone in under nine seconds, and neither of them so much as looks up the hill at us, and the whole street is quiet again with a grey Impala standing empty and its driver's door open.

I stand behind a parked car with my heart going and the camera still in my hand.

Eleven days of photographs.

Nineteen days since Cedar City.

A federal agent with a real badge, working out of a compartmented file with no name on it, running surveillance on a woman whose face is on a wire in every field office in this country.

"He has been looking at you for nineteen days," Andrei says, very quietly, beside me.

"Yeah."

"There is a warrant with your name on it."

"Yeah."

"He has known where you sleep for eleven of those days."

"Yes."

"Then why," Andrei says, "has nobody come to arrest you?"

Chapter 16

Raven

Los Angeles, 9:20 PM

Nobody comes to arrest me.

That's the whole of the next four days. No vehicles on Rennick, no second man, no knock, no warrant served at six in the morning by eleven people in windbreakers. The grey Impala is towed on the Friday by an ordinary tow company and the street goes back to being a street.

I spend those four days waiting for a door to come in and it doesn't, and by Sunday night I have stopped sleeping properly and started doing the thing I do, which is turning one question over until the edges come off it.

Why hasn't anybody come?

There are three answers and I've been through all of them.

One: they're building. Watching me to see who I lead them to, which is standard and would be reasonable except that I've led them to a hilltop property with the Pakhan of a Bratva family in it and they have not photographed him once.

Two: the surveillance isn't Bureau. Except the badge was real, the man was real, and he'd been in the field four years and knew how to sit a position.

Three.

Three is that somebody with a badge and a case code is having me watched and specifically does not want me picked up, and I have been staring at three for four days and I do not like where it goes.

I'm still turning it at half past nine on Sunday when I hear Ilya's voice from the study.

He's got Yeremey on speaker.

The door isn't shut. That's the first thing — the door is standing four inches open, and this is a man who changed a lock overnight, and there's a part of me that notes it and files it and does not want to examine what the filing means.

"—no, I have it now. Confirmed twice." Yeremey's voice, tinny, coming through a laptop. "The five letters are Danes. D-A-N-E-S. And there is only one of those in a position to have generated that routing string, and I'm going to say his name and then I'm going to say the rest of it, and I would like you to sit down first."

"Say it."

"Claudio Danesi. Assistant Director, FBI."