Page 70 of Captured By the Pakhan

I get it on the fourth try.

Nineteen ninety-eight, four, and the year he killed his uncle.

And I stand in the study of a Bratva Pakhan with the door open behind me and my heart going, and I understand that whatever is in this room, I am going to have to live with having looked.

It takes eleven minutes.

He's not careless. There's a safe behind the books that I'm not getting into, and there's a laptop I'm not touching, and the drawers of the desk are exactly what you'd expect — freight, port schedules, the legitimate half of a legitimate business.

It's the bottom left drawer, and it isn't even locked.

WEST, R. A.

The same folder. The same folder from the office two thousand miles away, tab out, closed, sitting in a drawer in a house on a hill in California.

I put it on the desk, and I open it.

The first page is the Bureau file: mine, the doctored one, the four statements. I already knew that.

The second page is my mother.

Her address in Bethesda, typed. Her full name, her maiden name, her date of birth. Her doctor's name and the practice on Old Georgetown Road, and the days she goes.

The third page is a photograph of her.

She's coming out of the Giant on Rockville Pike with two bags, wearing the green coat she has had since I was in high school, and she looks old, which I was not prepared for, because the last time I saw my mother in person was fourteen months ago and she didn't look like this.

It's timestamped in the corner.

I check the date twice because my brain refuses it the first time.

It is the second day—the second day of my captivity. I was in a shed with a chemical toilet and a split-lip and no idea whether I was going to be alive on Friday, and somebody was standing across a car park in Rockville with a long lens photographing my mother buying groceries.

There are eleven more.

Her at the practice on Old Georgetown Road. Her on her own front step with the door half open, talking to somebody I can't see. Her at the cemetery — at my father's grave, on the anniversary, which is a date this man could only know because somebody looked it up.

Weekly. Every single week.

Logan Foster's building on Q Street. Logan's car. Logan's car outside a bar in Adams Morgan with the plate legible. A page listing his mother in Ohio, his sister, and his sister's employer.

And behind that, a single typed sheet with no letterhead, which is a list.

It has eleven names on it. Foster is number one. My mother is number two. Number four is a woman I roomed with at Quantico and haven't spoken to in three years. Number nine is my father's former paralegal, who is 71 and sends me a card every Christmas.

At the top of the sheet, in his handwriting, three words:

Would cross for.

I sit down in his chair because my legs are not currently participating.

Because I know exactly what this is. I have built one of these. There is a version of this document with my handwriting in a case file at 26 Federal Plaza right now, and it exists for precisely one reason: so that, when the subject stops cooperating, you know which person to put in front of them.

It's not a background check. It's not vetting. Nobody needs a seventy-one-year-old paralegal's name to decide whether to hire a bodyguard.

It's a leash.

And it was built on day two.