Page 98 of Captured By the Pakhan

I do not look at her. I want to. I do not, because looking would take a quarter of a second and I do not have one.

"That was a mistake," I say.

"I don't think so." Danesi is still perfectly composed. "I think it is the piece that makes the arrangement close, and I think you both know it, and I think in about⁠—"

I shoot him twice in the chest.

There is no speech. I want that understood by anybody who reads this afterward, because men in my business make speeches and they die making them. He has one hand coming off that desk toward a drawer as I fire, and he would have been eleven seconds from being right about everything, and the correct answer to a man who is right about everything isn't a sentence.

He goes back into the chair, and the chair goes over.

The room is extremely loud and then extremely quiet.

Raven hasn't moved. She is standing four feet to my left with her weapon still up; she hasn’t fired, and she is looking at the desk, and her face is doing something I cannot read at all.

"Ilya."

"We have four minutes."

"Ilya."

"Four minutes." I put my hand on her arm — the first time I have touched her since the basement, and she doesn't shake it off. "Whatever you are about to say to me, say it in a car."

We are in the culvert in ninety seconds and out of the district in eleven minutes.

She doesn't speak for the first four miles. She sits in the back of a vehicle with her hands in her lap, her hip clearly going to be a serious problem, and she looks out the window at Washington passing by.

Then, without turning around:

"You didn't ask."

"No."

"You had a whole man there telling you, you didn't even ask him any questions about it, and you haven't asked me either."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't his," I say, "and it was not his to say, and I am not going to receive that from a man in a chair with his hands on a desk. When you want me to know a thing, you will tell me, and it will be the first time I have heard it, and I will behave as though it is."

The car goes another mile.

"That's the correct answer," Raven says, to the window.

"It is also the true one."

"I know." Her voice hollows. "That's the problem, isn't it?"

We stop a lot outside Alexandria, and Yeremey's second vehicle takes Grigor and the wounded, and I stand on the tarmac in the dark and make myself say the thing I have been assembling for weeks.

"There are two versions of the next part," I tell her.

She turns around.

"In the first, I stay. I put everything I have into the paper — Danesi's files, the four agents, the routing, all of it — and I make it so that Raven West walks into a courthouse and comes out of it with her name. It will take weeks. I will be in the country and reachable, and you will see a great deal of me."

"And the second?"