Page 82 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Through and through, low left. Pham has closed it."

"Grigor?"

"Leg. He will be walking in a fortnight and complaining for a year." I shift on the table and regret it. "Yeremey — the men in that room were federal. Not four. Eleven, in vests, staged behind a cashier's cage in a private club with a body double at the table."

The silence goes on for a while.

"Eleven agents," Yeremey says slowly, "doesn't happen on a whim. That is a tactical deployment with a briefing, an operational order, and a name at the top. He has used a federal SWAT element as a private ambush, and he will have papered it as something else entirely by breakfast."

"Which tells us what he is willing to do."

"It tells us he isn't hiding inside the Bureau, Ilya. He is using it. Those are different animals, and I have spent two days underestimating which one we have." Papers. "And it tells us something worse, which is that he was expecting the Hellhound at that table specifically. He knew you would come for him, personally, which means he has learned something about you in the last few days that he didn't have before."

And there it is.

I lie on a dining table under a bad light in a rented house in Maryland, and everything in me goes very cold and very clear.

"Yeremey."

"I know."

"He has her."

"I do not know that," Yeremey says carefully. "I want to be precise. What I know is that eight days ago Claudio Danesi had four cities and a nickname, and tonight he set a trap for a specific man on a specific Thursday, and something changed in between."

"She would not tell him."

"No. She would not. But she doesn't have to tell him anything, Ilya — she is the only person alive who has been inside your house, and there are eleven ways to take information out of a person who is trying very hard not to give it, and you know all of them better than I do."

I close my eyes.

"Find her," I say.

"I have eleven men on⁠—"

"No. Listen to me now." I get upright on the table, and Pham says something sharp, and I put a hand up, and she stops. "Everything else stops tonight. The Maryland file, the routing, the four brokers, all of it — off. Every man, every dollar, every favor I am owed on this continent goes on one thing, which is finding Raven West before he does."

"And if he already has?"

"Then finding out where."

"Understood."

"And Yeremey." I put my hand flat on the table. "Bethesda. Tonight."

A pause.

"Say it plainly."

"There is a house on Ellsworth Drive belonging to a woman of sixty-eight who has no idea that any of this exists," I say. "You have the address. You have had the address since the second day of March, because I asked you for it, and I want you to understand that I know exactly what I am about to ask you to do with the thing I built to hurt her."

"Ilya—"

"Four men. Tonight. Not on the street — I want a vehicle on Ellsworth and a second on the road behind it, and I want somebody awake at all times, and if anybody at all approaches that house they do not get to the door." My voice does something, and I keep going. "They are to be invisible. That woman is never to know that anybody is there. And under no circumstances does anybody speak to her, or knock on that door, or frighten her in any way at all, and if one of your men so much as⁠—"

"Ilya."

"—so much as waves at her⁠—"