I feel Roman across the room.
I don’t look at him. I don’t need to. I can feel the direction of his attention, the way you feel a change in light, peripheral and certain, and I know without looking that he is watching me.
I talk to four more people.
I eat something from a passing tray that I cannot identify, but that tastes expensive.
I accept a glass of sparkling water from a server and hold it the way everyone else holds their champagne so that no one asks why I am not drinking.
At some point, a man whose name I do not know stops beside me and looks at me with the envelope man’s expression and says, pleasantly, that it must be quite the adjustment. Going from managing the schedule to being on it.
I look at him. “I still manage the schedule,” I say. “I just do it from a better address.”
He blinks.
I excuse myself and go find Federov’s wife.
Roman says nothing in the car on the way home. He sits beside me and looks at his phone, and I look out the window, and the city moves past, and at some point his hand comes to rest on the seat between us, not touching me, just there, and I look at it for a moment, and then I look back at the window.
When we get to the building, he holds the elevator door.
When we reach the floor, he says goodnight and goes to his study.
I go to my room and I sit on the edge of the bed and I think about the man who saidquite the adjustmentand the way his face went when I answered him, and I think about Sorokin’s handshake and Federov’s wife touching my arm, and I think about Roman’s hand on the seat between us in the car, not touching, just there.
I’m still thinking about it when my phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I pick it up. It is not a number I recognize.
The message is four words.
You should be careful.
24
ROMAN
The Volkonsky dinnerproduced three things worth noting.
Federov’s wife spent twelve minutes with Elena and touched her arm twice, which means Elena said something that landed, and that she read the room correctly from the moment she walked into it. Sorokin shook her hand with the handshake of a man going through a motion he resents, which tells me where Sorokin’s head is after his dinner with Grigori last week. And a man named Brusin, who has been on the periphery of Marchetti-adjacent business for two years without ever giving me enough to act on, spent forty minutes in a separate conversation with Volkonsky that ended when I walked within earshot of them.
I file all three, pour two fingers of scotch, sit at my desk, and open the Renko file for the fourth time this week.
The council session is in six days.
I’m going through the financial transfer records for the third time when Kostya knocks.
“Come in,” I say, without looking up.
He closes the door behind him, and I hear him cross the room, pull the chair, and sit down, and I finish the page I’m reading before I look up because the page matters and Kostya will wait.
When I look up, he has his folder open on his knee, and his expression is the one that means what he has to tell me is not going to make the evening simpler.
“Another leak,” he says. “We have a name.”
“Tell me.”
“Mishin. Andrei Mishin. Mid-level, eastern corridor logistics. Been with the organization nine years.” He slides a photograph across the desk. “His connection to the Volkov faction runs through his brother-in-law, who works for a Volkov-owned import company in Brighton Beach. We have six weeks of communications between them, coded but not well, and four financial transfers from an account that traces back to the same Cyprus shell we found in the Renko investigation.”
