Page 89 of Captured By the Pakhan

I am ten years too late for most things with this boy, and I have exactly one asset left: I have never lied to him about anything important, and I am not going to start today to make a plane journey easier.

"I don't know," I say.

He looks at me.

"I intend to," I say. "I have very good men and a very good plan, and I intend to come and collect you in three weeks and be extremely irritating about English food. But you asked me a real question, and I am not going to answer it with a promise I cannot keep, because you would know, and then you would not be able to believe anything else I told you."

Sergei's chin does something.

And then he leans over and puts both arms around me.

He does it hard. He does it hard enough that it goes directly through the dressing on my left side and the pain is genuinely astonishing. I sit absolutely still on that step with my son's face against my shoulder and my arms out to either side like a man who has never had a pair of arms before.

Two seconds.

Then I put them down. Both of them, flat, the whole weight, no delicacy anywhere.

We sit like that for a while.

"You're bleeding," he says, into my shirt.

"Probably."

"Sorry."

"Do not apologize," I say. "Do not ever apologize for that."

Andrei takes him at nine that evening.

At the steps of the aircraft, Sergei stops and turns around, and it isn't me he looks for.

He looks at Andrei.

And Andrei stands there — six foot four, armed, entirely still, a man who has spent four years arranging never to be alone in a room with this child — and looks back at him.

"Andrei," Sergei says.

"Da."

"You were at the gate."

Everything on that tarmac stops.

Andrei doesn't move a muscle. I do not move. I have no idea what is happening, and I have the very strong sense that I am watching something I have no right to see.

"That day," Sergei says. His voice is perfectly steady. "You were at the gate, because a man came about a delivery. And you told me to stay at the table, and I didn't."

"...Yes."

"I know you think about it." My son looks up at a man twice his size. "I think about it too. But you were at the gate, and I went up the stairs on my own, and that's what happened. That's just what happened."

Andrei says nothing at all.

"You can be my bodyguard on the plane," Sergei says. "If you want."

And then he turns around, goes up the steps, and doesn't look back, because he is ten years old and he has just done the single bravest thing anybody in my organization has done this year, and he doesn't know it.

Andrei stands on the tarmac.