I think about Roman in that council session this morning, his phone going off, the moment he understands. I think about what he does when he understands. I have watched this man handle crises for two years from the outside, and I know what his face looks like when a decision has been made, the stillness that means he has already moved past the problem and into the solution.
He is coming.
I don’t know how I know this with the certainty I know it. I just know it the way I know the sound of his footsteps in the corridor and the weight of his attention from across a room. He’s coming because that is who he is, and I’m here because of who he is, and those two things are the same fact from different angles.
I press my hands against my stomach.
I breathe.
Outside the room, something changes. A sound further in the building, muffled, voices moving. Then footsteps, more than before, multiple sets, moving fast in a direction I can’t map from this chair.
I sit up straighter.
The footsteps stop.
Then, from somewhere deeper in the building, a sound I cannot identify. Something heavy. Something that makes the floor under my chair vibrate once, briefly, and go still.
I press my hands flat against my stomach, and I stare at the door, and I wait.
34
ROMAN
The warehouse sits backfrom the waterfront behind a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate that one of Pavel’s men cuts through in four seconds flat.
I count twelve vehicles in the lot. Three vans, two of which match Viktor’s description close enough to matter, four sedans, and the rest utility trucks that could belong to anyone. The building itself is two stories, with a loading bay on the left side, three ground-floor windows on the right, all covered from the inside. A single light is burning on the second floor.
Someone is home.
Pavel crouches beside me behind the fence line and looks at the building and points out two entry points, loading bay, and the side door on the east face. I tell him the loading bay is a kill box, we go east, and he nods and starts moving, and the ten men behind us move with him.
The east door is steel, padlocked, alarmed by a panel on the frame that Kostya’s contact told us to expect. Dimitri, who has been handling this kind of panel since before I knew his name,puts his kit on it and has the alarm bypassed in ninety seconds. He looks at me. I nod. He cuts the padlock.
We go in.
The corridor inside is dark except for emergency lighting running along the base of the left wall, a thin orange line that turns everything above it into shadow. I go first. Pavel is two steps behind me, the others spreading into the corridor behind him, and I move through it with my weapon up and my eyes moving across every doorway, every junction, every shadow that is the wrong shape.
The first man comes out of a door on the right.
He sees me, gets his weapon up, and Pavel puts him down before he clears the holster. The shot cracks through the corridor, and somewhere ahead of us a voice shouts in Italian, and then there are footsteps, multiple sets, coming fast from the far end of the building.
Three of them come around the corner at the same time.
The corridor fills with gunfire, close, deafening, muzzle flash strobing in the dark. I’m moving to the left wall, shoulder against the concrete, firing twice at the leftmost figure who goes down. Pavel takes the second, the third fires, and I hear someone behind me curse. I fire again and the third figure hits the floor and the corridor goes quiet except for the ringing in my ears and the sound of someone behind me breathing through their teeth.
I turn. One of Pavel’s men has his hand pressed against his right forearm, blood between his fingers, his face doing the work of someone who has decided the pain is not relevant right now.
“Move,” I say.
He moves.
The staircase is at the far end of the building, metal, open-sided, the kind that transmits every footstep up through the frame. I take them fast anyway because slow on an open staircase is worse than fast. At the top landing another man comes out of the door to my left, and I put my shoulder into him before he can raise his weapon and drive him back into the wall, and the wall wins.
He goes down.
Pavel is behind me on the landing and ahead of us the second-floor corridor is longer than the first, four doors on the left side, a window at the far end throwing pale waterfront light across the floor. I move to the first door. Locked. Second door, locked. Third door, a padlock on the outside hasp, new, the kind you put on something you want to keep in rather than keep out.
I look at Dimitri.
