Page 73 of Night of Shadows
"Surveillance. Continuous. Do not move on him. Today is Nora."
"Yes."
? ? ?
The kidnappers' first vehicle is found abandoned outside Worcester at 1:47 PM.
Declan calls it in. He’s been tracking the vehicle on the Mass Pike since 9:14 AM through a combination of license plate readers, Konstantinos’s contacts, and the patience Declan inherited from his father, along with the broken nose. The vehicle was abandoned in a strip mall parking lot. They have switched. The new vehicle is a 2017 silver Honda Pilot with a license plate Declan has already run.
"They are amateurs," Declan tells me on the phone.
"Tell me."
"They were Reznikov contractors. They have gone independent. The Reznikov organization is not financing this. These are two men who got told they were getting paid for a job and decided, when they had your daughter in their car, that they were going to be paid more."
"Names."
"One of them I know. Igor Volkov. Bag man. Low-level. Brooklyn. He’s done two pickups for us in the past, contract work. The other one I do not know yet."
"How long?”
"They will reach out. They are amateurs, and they are panicking. They will set up a meeting soon at a place convenient for them, likely somewhere outside Worcester they have used before. I am working on which warehouse”
"Find it."
"I am."
Declan finds it at 3:01 PM. The negotiation lasts six minutes.
The warehouse is empty except for the two of them and my daughter, who is in a back office I can see through the glass partition. Nora is in a folding chair. Brontos is on her lap. She’s awake. She’s not crying. She is looking at the ceiling and counting something I cannot see from this angle.
Igor Volkov is on the warehouse floor.
The other one is to his left. The other one is taller and is not as good at this as Igor, and Igor is not good at this either. They are wearing coats that are wrong for the weather, and it’s obvious they have not slept in twenty-four hours. Additionally, they are holding sidearms they have not fired in the last decade, and they are, by every measure of operational readiness, not in a position to do this work.
Igor speaks first.
"Konstantinos."
"Volkov."
"Two hundred and fifty. Cash. Clean transit out of the country."
"Where is the daughter?”
"Behind that door. She’s fine. She’s not been touched."
"I see her."
"Two-fifty, Konstantinos. We are not going to negotiate."
I do not respond. I let the silence do work for me. The silence is something I have been using since I was twenty-two, and it has not stopped working in fifteen years. The silence makes Igor talk again, which is what I want.
"You hear me, Konstantinos? Two-fifty."
"I hear you."
"Cash."
