Somewhere beyond the blackout curtains and the sealed flat, London is still moving, still breathing, still conducting its ancient business of commerce and indifference. Webb's people are out there searching for me in a city that doesn't care whether I live or die.
I don't sleep. I catalogue.
The hours pass in increments measured by the vibrations of my phone and the gradual shift of sounds from beyond the walls, the city's breathing changing from the sparse rhythm of deep night to the thickening pulse of early morning. By the time I check my phone and see dawn has broken, I've counted theconfirmed dead and the probable dead and the ones who have simply stopped transmitting, which in this business amounts to the same thing. The number sits in my chest like a stone, and I file it alongside the other numbers I carry: the years since Budapest, the contacts I've built and maintained, the price I've paid for every piece of intelligence I've ever traded.
I get up, dress in the clothes I packed in my go-bag, and open the bedroom door.
Roman is in the kitchen. He's made coffee, the cheap instant kind that comes with furnished safe houses, and two mugs sit on the counter. He looks like he hasn't slept either, though with Roman the signs are subtle, a slowness in how he turns when I enter the room, a heaviness around his eyes. He's still wearing the clothes from yesterday, the sleeves pushed to his forearms, the collar open.
His hands are steady around the mug, and I can see the tendons shift when his grip tightens, the coiled strength in his fingers that I remember far too well for a dead man's hands.
Those hands. I remember what they felt like on my waist in Moscow, guiding me through a crowded market while we ran countersurveillance on a Committee asset. I remember the calluses and the care and his thumb finding the strip of bare skin between my jacket and my trousers without either of us acknowledging it was happening.
I take the coffee without acknowledging him and sit on the sofa with my phone. The screen shows a cascade of encrypted messages, each one a fragment of my world collapsing in real time. I scroll through them with the detached efficiency of a surgeon reading a chart, because if I read them any other way, I will not be able to read them at all.
"We need to leave London." Roman's voice is low and unhurried, the register he uses for operational briefings, and it rolls through the flat with an authority that has nothing todo with volume. He doesn't look at me when he says it, which I appreciate because eye contact right now would feel like an intrusion. "Tommy's intercepts show Webb's search teams have reached the Thames. They're working in a grid. We don't have much time before they get to Shoreditch."
"I know." I've been tracking the same data through my own channels, cross-referencing Webb's search patterns against the Committee's established protocols for asset recovery operations. They're thorough. They're also predictable, which gives us a narrow window to move. "Brussels or Amsterdam?"
"Brussels. Eurostar connection. Amsterdam means airports and cameras." It isn't a suggestion. It's a decision already made, offered to me as though I have a choice. Roman has always done this, presented his conclusions as options while positioning the room so there's only one logical answer.
"Brussels, then." I take a sip of the coffee. It's terrible, but caffeine is caffeine and sentimentality about beverage quality is a luxury I surrendered somewhere around the fourth dead contact.
My phone vibrates. I look at the screen, and the floor drops out from under me.
The message is from a relay I set up in Marseille, a dead drop communication channel that only activates when a pre-programmed trigger is met. The trigger, in this case, is a police report filed at a specific address.
Ines Leclerc, found dead in her apartment in the Panier district. Signs of interrogation preceding death.
My hand shakes. Once. I watch it happen the way you watch a glass fall from a table, with perfect awareness and zero ability to intervene. Then I lock it down, fingers tightening around the phone until the tremor stops, and I read the message again because the first time couldn't possibly have been accurate.
It is.
Ines ran a signal relay through the Marseille port authority, intercepting Committee shipping manifests and forwarding them to me through a series of encrypted handoffs that took months to build. She was brilliant at pattern recognition and terrible at operational security, which is why I insisted on managing her communications personally.
She was also warm, funny in a self-deprecating way that reminded me of James, and she made the best bouillabaisse I've ever eaten in a kitchen overlooking the Vieux-Port while her daughter drew pictures of ships at the table beside us.
They tortured her first. The report says "signs of interrogation." In the Committee's vocabulary, that means they wanted to know what she knew about me, about my network, about the channels she operated. Ines would have given them everything within the first hour, because she wasn't trained for resistance and I never asked her to be.
She was a civilian asset, a woman with a gift for numbers and a hatred for the men who used Marseille's port infrastructure to move weapons and drugs. She didn't sign up to die in her own apartment while her daughter was at school.
"Ines?" Roman has read my face. Of course he has. He read me across the room last night when I was trying to give nothing away, and he read me again when I told him his explanation for Budapest was betrayal. The flat is too small and the years between us are too many for me to hide anything from him, which is infuriating because I used to be able to hide from everyone.
"She had a daughter. Still young enough to draw pictures of ships at the kitchen table." My voice comes out level, which is a testament to the years I've spent perfecting the art of speaking through damage. "Who tells her?"
Roman is quiet for a moment. His jaw tightens, just slightly, and for a fraction of a second the operative disappears and I seegrief crack through, raw and unguarded enough that it looks like it could eat him alive if he let it.
The reaction is genuine, which makes it worse, because I don't want him to feel things about my dead contacts. I want him to be the monster I need him to be so that hating him stays simple.
"I'll make sure she's protected." His voice drops half a register, and the promise in it has an edge that doesn't need volume to cut. "I have contacts who can?—"
"Your contacts." The words leave my mouth with an edge I don't bother softening. "Echo Ridge contacts. Not mine. Because mine are dead."
Roman doesn't flinch. He takes the words with his weight centered and his expression unreadable and his eyes tracking mine for the next round. I've seen him stand exactly like this in the field, absorbing the tactical landscape, cataloging threats, deciding where to apply pressure.
Him doing it with me should be insulting. Instead it sends a lick of heat down the backs of my knees, because Roman at his most dangerous has always been Roman at his most still.
I give him the next round.
