He taps the first sheet. “A traffic camera on the Holland Tunnel approach picked up a van matching Viktor’s description at nine fourteen. No plates, but the make and the partial color match.” He taps the second. “The Newark property has been dark all morning. Nobody in or out.”
“Hoboken,” I say.
“Primary, yes. Newark stays live as backup.”
We push through the building’s front door. Three cars are at the curb, engines running, Pavel and Gregor standing beside the second one. I hand Kostya back the sheets.
“Gregor takes six men to Newark. Confirmation only, nobody moves without my call.” I look at Pavel. “You’re with me. Ten men, full kit, we leave in four minutes.” I look at Kostya. “I need Federov and Bashir in a room before I leave this building.”
Kostya looks at me. “Roman?—”
“Four minutes,” I say. “Make the calls.”
Federov picks up on the first ring. Bashir is with him inside three minutes. I put the folder on the hood of the car, and I walk them through it in the cold outside the Kessler facility, not in a conference room, not at a table, just three men standing on a pavement with the wind off the East River and fourteen months of evidence spread across the hood of a black car.
I tell them about Renko. Mishin. Brusin. The decoded communication. I tell them my wife was taken off the street this morning using intelligence that came from inside our own council.
Federov looks at the last page for a long time.
“Call the session back,” he says. “Right now.”
“I can’t be in that room,” I say. “I need to be in New Jersey.” I look at him. “You and Bashir take it in. Everything in this folder goes on that table. You present it, you move for suspension, you get the votes.” I hold his gaze. “Can you do that without me?”
Federov picks up the folder. “Go get your wife,” he says.
I get in the car.
“Hoboken,” I tell Viktor. “Fast.”
The car pulls away from the curb, and I look out the window at the city moving past, and I think about Mara’s voice sayingbring her homeand I think about Elena in a room somewhere across the water with her hands pressed against her stomach, waiting.
I’m coming.
I look out the window.
I’m coming.
33
ELENA
The van stops,and someone pulls the door open, and the cold hits me before the light does.
I’m on my feet before they tell me to be, my hands still pressed flat against my stomach, because I have decided somewhere in the last forty minutes that I’m not going to let them drag me anywhere. If I’m moving, I’m going to move on my own feet. I step out of the van onto wet concrete, and I look at what is around me.
A building. Industrial, low, the kind of structure that doesn’t advertise its purpose from the outside. Water somewhere close, I can smell it, brackish, cold. A fence line.
Two men behind me, two ahead, none of them looking at me with anything resembling personal interest. They are doing a job. I am the job. That’s the only useful thing I know right now, so I hold on to it, and I keep moving.
They take me inside through a side door, a corridor with bare concrete walls, fluorescent lighting that flickers once as we pass under it. My shoes are loud on the floor. Nobody else’s are.
We stop at a door, and one of the men opens it, and I go in because the alternative is being pushed in, and I am not giving them that.
The room is small. A table, two chairs, a window with frosted glass that tells me nothing about what is outside it. A smell of damp concrete. I sit in the nearest chair without being told to because standing is going to cost me energy I can’t afford to spend, and I press both hands against my stomach, and I breathe.
The baby.
I close my eyes for three seconds and I think about the heartbeat on the monitor two days ago, fast, steady, filling Dr. Park’s office. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth the way she taught me and I tell myself the baby is fine, the baby has not been harmed, the pain from this morning was round ligament pain and it will pass and the baby is fine.
