Page 75 of Captured By the Pakhan

We sit on the floor until nearly nine.

Yeremey calls at four in the afternoon, and I take it standing at the glass, and he knows within about six words.

"What's happened?"

"She's gone."

A pause on the line, and when he speaks again the entire register has changed — no lightness anywhere in it.

"How long?"

"Fifteen hours."

"On foot?"

"On foot, through the front gate, at one twenty-two this morning. She took nothing. She left the weapon." I watch the water. "Yeremey, she has no vehicle, no identification, no telephone, and forty-one dollars that she stole from a drawer in New York six weeks ago and has kept in a coat pocket ever since, and I know that because I have seen her count it twice."

"Ilya—"

"And there is a man with a real badge who has been photographing her for nineteen days and reporting to a case code with no name on it," I say. "So she is out there without one single protection in this world, being looked for by the one man who requires her to be found."

The silence goes on for some time.

"Then I am going to tell you the rest of it now," Yeremey says, "rather than in an hour, because it is worse in the light of that."

"Go on."

"I have the room in Maryland. Third Thursday, six days from now, and it is exactly as I described — private floor, no detail inside, six tables." Paper moving. "But I have also finished the family, and Ilya, I need you to hear the whole of it before you say anything.

"His grandfather came out of Palermo in 1931. The name on the boat was Danesi, and it has been Danesi since, but it is a cadet branch of a New York house you have been dealing with, indirectly, for eleven years. He isn't an FBI man with an Italian family. He is an Italian who has been building a federal career for twenty-two years, and there are four other men in three field offices with his fingerprints on their promotions."

I put my hand flat on the glass.

"How long has he known who I am?"

"That is the part I have spent two days on, and I am now confident," Yeremey says. "He doesn't know who you are. He has never known who you are. He has four cities, a supply chain, a nickname, and a very great deal of money spent — and eight months ago he took a chair above a task force to find out, and the only thing he has ever recovered from you is four sheets of Gulf routing that his own man carried out of a house upstate."

"And the woman."

"And the woman," Yeremey agrees quietly. "Who walked into that corridor by accident, and stayed, and got caught, and who has been in your house for six weeks."

I close my eyes.

"She is the only lead he has ever had," I say.

"She is the only lead he has ever had. And as of one twenty-two this morning she is walking down a road in California on her own, in the open, with forty-one dollars." A breath. "Ilya. He doesn't want her arrested. He never did. He wants her found — and now she has done the single most useful thing she could have done for him, which is to leave the only place on earth where anybody was standing between the two of them."

Chapter 20

Raven

Washington, D.C., 8:15 AM

It takes me four days to get across this country on forty-one dollars, and I do not recommend it.

Day one is the worst, and I do it entirely on foot and on adrenaline — down Rennick, east until the streetlights change character, and then eleven hours of walking because a woman on foot at four in the morning is a story, and a woman on foot at nine is a person going somewhere.

I do not use a bus terminal. I do not use a hire counter, a train station, or any building with a camera above the door and a man behind glass, because those are the four places I would have covered inside ninety minutes if I were Andrei, and Andrei is better than I am.