Page 90 of Captured By the Pakhan

He doesn't look at me. I do not look at him. We stand four feet apart in the dark next to an aircraft for perhaps fifteen seconds while a very large man does something with his breathing.

"Pakhan," he says eventually.

"Go."

"I will call from Suffolk."

"Andrei."

He stops.

"How long has he known?" I ask.

"I do not know," Andrei says. "Four years, I think. I think he has known for four years and has been being polite about it."

Yeremey lands at Van Nuys at two in the morning and comes straight to the house, and it is the first time in eleven years he has been in a room with me on the same day as bad news, which tells me what kind of news it is before he opens his mouth.

He looks at me for a while.

"You look terrible."

"I have been shot."

"I know. I paid the woman." He puts a laptop on the table and doesn't open it. "Sit down, Ilya."

"I will stand."

"Sit down."

I sit down.

"I have found her," Yeremey says.

Everything in the room goes very quiet and very sharp.

"Where?"

"She walked into the Washington Field Office six days ago at eight in the morning, with her hands above her head, and surrendered." He lets that sit. "She was processed and put in an interview room on the fourth floor, and forty minutes later she left through a stairwell with a dead camera, which means somebody in that building gave her a key. The arresting agent was Logan Foster."

"She is in custody."

"She was in custody for forty minutes, and then she was not. Then later she surfaced at an apartment on Q street belonging to Foster–”

"Yeremey."

"Two nights ago there was an entry at an apartment on Q Street belonging to Foster. Not a raid. There is no warrant on any system, no arrest logged, no booking, no charge, and no report filed by any office." He opens the laptop now. "Foster was taken to a hospital in Georgetown with a fractured orbital bone and admitted under his own name, and has been interviewed by nobody, and is refusing to speak to his own supervisor."

"And her?"

"She was removed from that building at two forty in the morning in a vehicle with government plates," Yeremey says, "and she hasn't been booked into any facility in this country. There is no custody record. There is no arrest. As far as every system that exists is concerned, Raven West is still a fugitive at large, and nobody has laid eyes on her."

I sit very still.

"Where is she?"

"I have a man in the county liaison office who has cost me a great deal of money and who has now given me one single thing that I believe." He turns the laptop around. "There is a residence in Georgetown. It is Danesi's. And two nights ago, at approximately three in the morning, a vehicle entered the rear of that property and a woman was taken into the house through a service door, and she was on her feet, and she was restrained, and there were four men."

I look at the screen for a long moment.