Page 92 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I’m pulling on my jacket when Federov says, as though it is an afterthought, “There is one thing.”
I look at him.
He reaches into his jacket and puts a single sheet on the table between us. A photograph, grainy, taken from a distance. A man outside a building I recognize as one of our Red Hook warehouses. Late forties, heavyset, a face I have never seen before.
“Who is he?” I ask.
“We don’t know yet,” Federov says. “He has been photographed outside three Petrov properties in the last two weeks. Always at a distance, always moving before our men can close in. He’s not Marchetti. We have checked every name we have.” He pauses. “He’s not affiliated with any organization we currently have on record.”
I pick up the photograph.
I look at the face. The body at an angle, half turned away from the camera, the posture of someone who knows where the cameras are and is staying just outside their useful range. That is not amateur behavior. That is someone who has been trained to surveil without being surveilled, someone who knows our infrastructure well enough to map its gaps.
“When was the first sighting?” I say.
“Eleven days ago.”
Eleven days. Two days after Grigori was handled. Two days after the council unanimously sanctioned my response, the Volkov faction’s influence was dismantled.
Someone moved into the vacuum before the vacuum had finished forming.
“I want everything,” I say. “Every photograph, every location, every timestamp. I want to know who trained him and who’s paying him and what he has been sent to find out.” I put the photograph down. “Today, Federov.”
He nods. He finishes his Bordeaux.
I take the photograph.
Viktor is at the curb, and Kostya is in the passenger seat, and I get in the back, and I put the photograph on the seat beside me, and I look at it on the drive home.
The council is stable.
The threats have been eliminated.
My position is uncontested.
I look at the face in the photograph, half turned, staying just outside the camera’s useful range, and I think about a vacuum that filled itself in eleven days, and I think about Elena at home in the kitchen with her mug, and I think about two heartbeats on a screen in a white room.
I put the photograph in my jacket pocket.
I look out the window.
Completeis never the right word.
41
ELENA
The dress is midnight blue,fitted through the waist, and at sixteen weeks, it sits differently than it did the night of the council dinner two months ago.
I stand in front of the mirror, and I look at myself properly for the first time in a while.
The bump is not large, not the kind that announces itself from across a room, but it is there, a distinct curve below my waist that was not there before. I press both hands against it for a moment the way I always do now, a checking in, a hello, and then I smooth the fabric over it and I look at my face in the mirror and I think about walking back into that room.
The last time I was in Roman’s world I ended up on my knees on the floor of a van in New Jersey.
I pick up my earrings and put them on.
Roman is waiting in the main room in his dark suit. He looks up when I come in and his eyes move over me once, the full length of me, and they stop at the bump and something happens in his expression that he doesn’t try to manage, a man looking at hiswife carrying his children and not having the words for it and not needing them.
