Page 63 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“Which he knows.” I turn around. “He knows what I have on him. He knows the session is in five days. He knows he cannot stop it.” I look at Kostya. “So what does a man offer when he has nothing left to offer except one thing that his enemy values above everything else?”
Kostya looks at me steadily across the desk and he does not say anything, and he does not need to say anything because we have both arrived at the same answer at the same moment, and the answer is sitting in the room between us like something with weight and edges.
“Put everyone on it,” I say. “Every contact, every wire, every asset we have in the Marchetti network. I want confirmation before the end of today.” I move to the desk, and I pick up my phone. “And Kostya. The security detail on Elena.”
“Four on rotation.”
“Make it six. And I want two of them inside the building at all times, not just the lobby.” I look at him. “Today.”
He stands immediately. He’s already reaching for his phone when the study door opens.
Elena comes in with a mug in each hand, her hair loose, in dark trousers and a cream blouse, and she stops when she sees Kostya standing and looks between the two of us.
“I made coffee,” she says. “I didn’t know you had company.”
“It’s alright,” I say. “Kostya was leaving.”
Kostya takes his folder and his phone, and he nods at Elena once, and he goes. The door closes behind him.
Elena sets one of the mugs on the desk in front of me and wraps both hands around her own, and she looks at me, and I look at her, and I think about last night. She sat on the arm of the sofa and told me her father wants to meet me. She said it all in the tone of a woman who has decided what she is going to say before she says it, which is a tone I know because I use it myself.
She’s not telling me something.
I don’t know what it is yet. I’ve been putting it behind the Grigori problem because the Grigori problem is immediate and structural, and the thing Elena is not telling me is likely manageable, but I am aware of it, as I am of everything I have not yet resolved, as a thread I have not yet pulled.
I will pull it.
Not today.
“How did you sleep?” I say.
She looks faintly surprised, which tells me I do not ask her this often enough. “Fine,” she says. “The baby was quiet.”
“Good.” I pick up the mug. The coffee is the right strength, which it always is when she makes it, because Elena makes coffee the way she does everything, paying attention. “Your father. What time suits him?”
“Sunday afternoon. He likes Sunday afternoons.”
“Sunday afternoon,” I say. “Arrange it.”
She nods, and she goes, and I watch the door close behind her, and I stand at the desk, and I drink the coffee she made, and I think about a man across this city who has promised the Marchetti syndicate something that requires forty-three specialists and four safe houses and five days to execute.
Five days.
27
ELENA
Roman’s shoulders are a disaster.
I find this out at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night when he comes into my room and sits on the edge of my bed without saying anything.
I put my book down, look at him, and say, “Turn around. He looks at me for a second like he’s going to ask why, and then he turns around, and I put my hands on his shoulders and I feel it immediately, the hard, knotted tension running from the base of his neck across both trapezoids and down into his left shoulder blade where he holds his phone pressed to his ear for hours every day.
“How long has it been like this?” I say.
“It’s fine.”
I press my thumb into the knot above his left shoulder blade, and he makes a sound through his nose that is not agreement.
