Page 66 of Captured By the Pakhan

"So we fix the first one," I say, "and we do it now."

He turns around then.

"Explain."

"She stays because the alternative is a wire with her face on it and four sworn statements. She works because the alternative is a cell." I put my cup down. "I want it gone. All of it. The warrant, the file, the four statements, the classification — I want Raven West to be able to walk out of that door on Thursday and get on an airplane like a citizen."

Andrei is quiet.

"You want to take her off the list," he says.

"I want to take her off the list."

"That list is held by an Assistant Director of the FBI who built it specifically to bury her."

"Yes."

"And who is, as of Sunday, a man you have ordered killed."

"Also yes." I look at the water. "Those two things are not in competition, Andrei. They are the same operation. Danesi is the only person who can unwrite what he wrote. He is not going to do it, so we take what he has — the file, the routing, whatever he keeps and wherever he keeps it — and then we remove him, and then the four agents who signed those statements discover that there is nobody above them who requires the statements to stand."

"That is a great deal of work for one woman's paperwork."

"It's a great deal of work for a man who put a bullet through my son," I say. "The paperwork is what I get to keep afterward."

Andrei looks at me for a long moment and does not believe me, and does not say so, which is its own kind of loyalty.

"There is a version of this," he says slowly, "where it works. Where you take his files, and you remove him, and every charge against her evaporates in a fortnight."

"Yes."

"And in that version, Ilya, she is a free woman with a clean record standing in a house in Los Angeles that belongs to the Pakhan of a Bratva family." He picks his cup back up. "What happens then?"

I don't answer.

"You have thought about it."

"I have thought about very little else since Kansas."

"And?"

"And it does not matter what I have thought about," I say. "That is the entire point. It's not a decision I get to be in the room for, and if I arrange this so that she is grateful, or so that she is cornered, or so that she owes me something — then I have built a better cage, and I will have to live in it with her and know that I built it." I finish the coffee. "So we clear her. And then she chooses. And if she gets on an airplane, she gets on an airplane."

"You would let her."

"Don't ask me that today."

Andrei accepts this because he has known me for nine years and understands the difference between a man who says yes and a man who says, "Don't ask me that today."

"Then there is one more thing," he says, "and you will not like it, and I'm going to say it anyway because you pay me to be the last man in the building who will."

"Go on."

"She told you about the photographs."

"She did."

"She told you Danesi is not hunting you through her; that he is keeping her. That he requires her to be in a Bratva house when something happens to her." He sets the cup down again. "Ilya — she is right, and you and I both know she is right, and neither of us has said the next part out loud."