Page 36 of The Pakhan's Captive
“When did she leave this floor?”
“Sir, we weren’t told she’d been moved from the?—”
I stop listening. I turn, pulling out my phone. By the time I reach the main level I have six men mobilized, by the time Ireach my office I have twelve, and by the time the sun comes up fully over the compound I have every available body in this city turning over every street, every station, every border crossing, every hostel and safe house and transit hub within a hundred kilometers.
I stand in the center of my office and I am very, very controlled about all of it.
Controlled.That’s what I tell myself while I systematically dismantle the furniture.
The chair goes first. Then the bookshelf, cleared with one arm, everything on it hitting the floor in a cascade of glass and paper. I put my fist through the wall once, feel the plaster give, and leave it there. Mike appears in the doorway at some point, taking in the state of the room and saying nothing. Just leaning against the frame and waiting, which is either wisdom or a death wish and with Mike it’s usually both.
Lyosha arrives twenty minutes later from wherever he spent the night, takes one look at the office and says, “She escaped?” with the tone of someone reassessing their threat level estimates.
“She had help.” I say it with complete conviction because the alternative—that she walked out of a guarded compound alone and disappeared into the city without a single contact or resource—is not something I’m prepared to examine right now.
Dmitri comes in straightening his collar, some woman’s perfume still faintly on him, and sits down in the one chair still upright and opens his laptop without being asked. “I’ll run her contacts again. If she reached anyone in the last twelve hours there’ll be a trace.”
Hours pass.
The trace produces nothing. The contacts produce nothing. The border checks produce nothing. The station cameras produce nothing usable. She is gone with the completeness of someone who has been running long enough to get good at it. By early afternoon I am sitting at my destroyed desk with my hands flat on the surface and the particular stillness of a man who has run out of things to throw.
I tell them what happened. The version I’ve prepared, which is accurate in its facts and missing in its soul.
“She got free in the night,” I say. “I don’t know how. She took the drive and the phone. She ran and we lost her.”
Lyosha stares at me. “She got free,” he repeats slowly.
Dmitri makes a sound into his laptop that he converts very quickly into a cough.
“We find her,” I say. “That’s the priority. The drive has information that can bury this family and she has it and we find her. That’s the only thing happening in this organization until it’s done.”
“Of course,” Dmitri says, smooth as water. “Nothing else going on. Certainly not whatever happened in the compound last night that caused our most controlled man to redecorate his office with his fists.”
“Dmitri.”
“Finding her. Absolutely. On it.”
Lyosha is still looking at me with that slow evaluating expression, the one that means his brain is working harder than people give it credit for. He opens his mouth.
“Not a word,” I say.
He closes it. Nods. Gets up and leaves with the energy of a man saving something for later.
Mike doesn’t move. He stays in the corner where he’s been since the beginning. When the other two are gone he looks at me across the wrecked room with that quiet expression he gets, the one that sees more than I give him permission to see.
“You let her go,” he says.
“I didn’t let her do anything. She?—”
“Razvan.” Just my name. Gently.
I say nothing.
The smile that crosses his face is small and tired and complicated, the smile of a man who has done the math and found the answer both better and worse than he was hoping for. “You may have just found your redemption,” he says quietly. “Or your ruin.” He straightens off the wall. “I genuinely don’t know which one to hope for.”
He leaves before I can respond, which is probably deliberate.
I sit in the quiet of the destroyed office and stare at the wall and don’t think about her mouth or the way she cried in the dark or the knife she picked up and put back down.
