ROMAN
JFKat six forty in the morning has the rhythm of a place that never fully sleeps and never fully wakes up. The international arrivals hall is already moving when I come through, other passengers dispersing in every direction with the focused urgency of people who have somewhere to be, and I move through it the way I move through every room, without hurrying and without stopping, Kostya two steps behind me with the carry-on and his phone already out.
I see her before she sees me.
She’s standing near the far end of the arrivals barrier, in her gray coat, with a leather folder under her arm, her hair pinned back, and she’s scanning the crowd. She finds me.
“Mr. Petrov.” She falls into step beside me without breaking her stride. “Welcome back. The car is in the short stay, and Viktor is already there. I have the briefing ready for the drive-in if you want to start there, or I can hold it until we reach the office.”
“The drive,” I say.
“Of course.”
We move through the terminal, and I look at her out of the corner of my eye, and she looks straight ahead with her folder and her composed face, and the thing I noticed the moment I saw her across that arrivals hall is still there, sitting underneath all of it. Something tight. Something she is carrying and not putting down.
Three weeks away, and she looks like she has not slept properly most of those nights.
I file it away and keep moving.
Viktor has the car running when we arrive at the short-stay. I get in, Elena gets in after me, Kostya takes the front, and the car pulls out into the gray Monday morning and joins the queue of traffic heading toward the city.
Elena opens her folder.
“The Harmon account closed on Wednesday,” she says. “Final terms as agreed, signed copies are on your desk. The Morrison filing went to the city planning office on Thursday morning, and they have acknowledged receipt. Legal sent over two new matters that came in while you were away, both flagged for your attention. I’ve summarized them in the folder behind the Harmon documents.” She turns a page. “Kostya has the Marchetti updates separately, but from my end, three calls came in from the Red Hook management team that I routed to him directly. He can brief you on those.”
“The Volkov session,” I say.
“Still scheduled for the end of the month. Grigori Volkov’s office confirmed twice while you were away, once the week you left and once last Thursday.” A pause. “His assistant called the second time, not his personal line. I thought you should know that.”
I look at her. She’s looking at her folder. The distinction she just drew, Grigori’s assistant rather than his personal line, is exactly the kind of thing that most people would not think to flag, and that tells me something specific about the temperature of that camp. She has been managing my office for three weeks, and she noticed it and thought it was worth mentioning.
She is, as I told her three weeks ago, the most capable person in this organization.
She also lied to me for three weeks, and I’m sitting eighteen inches away from her in the back of this car, and I am aware, in a way that is becoming difficult to be objective about, of every one of those eighteen inches.
“The Morrison summary,” I say.
She pulls it out and hands it to me, and our fingers do not touch, and she looks back at her folder, and I read the summary, and the car moves through the Monday morning city, and neither of us says anything about the conversation that is sitting in the back seat with us like a third passenger.
We don’t say anything about it for the entire drive.
The office building on 57th has six elevators and I have taken all of them hundreds of times without thinking about it. This morning I am thinking about it because Elena and I are in one of them alone. The doors have just closed and we have fourteen floors to go and the folder is closed in her hands and she is looking at the numbers above the door.
“You said you had something for me,” I say.
She looks at me. “I’ll bring it to your office.”
The elevator opens. She walks out first.
My office is exactly as I left it, which is what I pay people for, and the morning light comes through the windows at the angle it always comes through at this hour, and I put my bag down and take my jacket off and hang it up. When I turn around, Elena is standing in front of my desk with an envelope in her hand.
She holds it out.
I look at it for a moment before I take it. It is a standard white envelope, sealed, my name written across the front in her handwriting, and I already know what it is before I open it because I have known something was coming since the moment I saw her face across the arrivals hall this morning.
I open it. I read it.
It is two paragraphs. Professional and clean, and saying nothing except that she is resigning effective immediately due to personal circumstances. No explanation. No apology. Two paragraphs and her signature at the bottom, and the date, which is today.
