The study goes very quiet.
Three days. Grigori does not know about the Renko file or the Brusin connection or the fourteen months of documented evidence sitting on my desk. What he knows is that Mishin has gone quiet in the last twenty-four hours and that silence, to a man running an intelligence operation, means one thing.
He knows we are close.
He’s trying to get into that council room before I can present.
I look at Kostya across the desk. “Deny it,” I say.
“On what grounds?”
“Procedural. The scheduled session takes precedence. He has no standing to convene an emergency session without majoritycouncil support, and he does not have majority council support yet. Make sure he knows I know that.”
Kostya stands. “Denying it tells him we know what he’s doing.”
“He already knows we know. That’s why he filed the request.” I look at the window. “He’s not trying to surprise me. He’s trying to move faster than me. He wants to get into that room and frame the narrative before I can present the evidence.” I turn back to Kostya. “He is not going to get into that room first.”
Kostya nods and moves to the door.
“Kostya.”
He stops.
“Elena. The dinner tonight.”
A pause. Then he says, “She handled herself well.”
I look at the window.
“Yes,” I say. “She did.”
He leaves.
I stand at the desk and I look at the Renko file and I think about Grigori filing an emergency session request at three in the afternoon on a Saturday, which means he filed it from wherever he was the moment he understood that Mishin had gone dark, which means he’s scared, which means for the first time in fourteen months of running this operation he’s reacting instead of directing.
Scared men make mistakes.
I pick up the file.
I get back to work.
25
ELENA
I stopat the grocery store on the way to my father’s.
Not the small one near the subway that I’ve been using for years, but the proper one three blocks further, the one with the good produce and the butcher counter and the bread that comes out of the oven at ten in the morning.
I fill a basket with things I know my father likes, the dark rye bread he has eaten every morning since before I was born, a good cut of beef for the stew Carla makes when she’s in a cooperative mood, fresh vegetables, two kinds of fruit, coffee that is not the cheap kind he buys for himself because he doesn’t think he deserves the good kind.
I add a small tin of the cookies he keeps by his chair for no particular reason except that he likes them.
The bags are heavy by the time I get to the car. Viktor takes them from me without being asked and puts them in the trunk. I get in, and we drive to Queens.
My father opens the door before I knock.
He looks better.
