Page 93 of Captured By the Pakhan

"He wasn't supposed to be there."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the whole answer. There was no kid on any intel we had. There was no kid anywhere — nobody knew that man had a son; that's the entire point of him, and I come round a corner, and there's a witness who can describe six federal agents in a house we're not supposed to be in." He spreads his hands. "So yeah. I fired. That's the job. Anybody in the building is in the building."

"He was ten."

"He was a witness who was ten."

I sit against a brick wall with my hands zip-tied in front of me, and I have never in my life wanted to do something as much as I want to do something right now.

"And me," I say.

Louis's face changes slightly.

"What about you?"

"Two rounds, Louis." I hold his eyes. "There were two rounds fired in that corridor. Everybody's statement says one, including yours, and I've read yours three times because he showed it to me — three pages, very specific, and you put one round in the report." I let that sit. "But I was under him on that carpet, and I heard two."

The silence goes on for a while.

"You always were the smart one," Louis says.

"Say it out loud."

"You were never coming out of that house." He says it easily. Almost kindly. "That's the whole op. That's what it was always for. Six agents go in without a warrant, the team leader loses her head and shoots a kid, and then the team leader dies in the house — and that's a closed file, Raven, that's a beautiful closed file. Nobody investigates a dead traitor. Nobody looks at a routing document that walked out in the same hour. You were the reason the whole thing works, and you were never, at any point, supposed to be alive at the end of it."

"And you missed."

"I missed because you moved, and then the alarms went, and then you stayed." He shakes his head, genuinely bewildered, and it's the most honest expression I've seen on him. "That's the part I still can't get over. For weeks I've been chewing on it. You had two minutes. Every single one of us was gone. And you sat down on the floor with somebody else's kid and let them take you."

"Yes."

"Why?"

And I look at Louis Mendez, and I think about a boy on a terrace at two in the morning yelling my name into the dark.

"You wouldn't understand the answer," I say, "and I'm not going to waste it on you."

His face closes.

"Fine," he says, and stands up. "Doesn't matter anyway. He's decided."

Everything in me goes cold.

"Decided what?"

"You're going to be found." Louis picks up the empty bottle. "About two weeks from now, in a house upstate that belongs to a Russian, with a Russian bullet in you and enough evidence in the room to close nine files at once. Which means somebody has to go and put you there, and that's a drive, so it happens tomorrow night."

He goes up the stairs.

At the top, with his hand on the door, he stops.

"For what it's worth," Louis says, "I'm going to be the one that does it. Asked for it specially."

Then the noise starts upstairs.

I don't know what it is at first. It's four floors of house between me and it, and what comes down is a thud, twice, and then a sound like furniture going over.