"My apartment. Volodya's down. Fin's gone."
Gregori grunted. He pulled back into traffic without asking where to.
I watched the phone in my lap. The footage took ninety seconds. Andrei had pulled the right cameras, and he had cued the right window, and when the file opened, I knew before I watched it which face I was going to see.
Pavel.
He came through the lobby with his coat collar up and two men behind him I didn't know. He took the stairs. The hallway feed picked him up at my door. The door blew in. He was inside for less than a minute before he came out with Fin between the two men, hood over his head, knees not working right under him. Pavel walked at the back. He didn't look at the camera. He didn't have to. He knew where every camera in my building was because he'd helped me set the security plan two years ago.
I watched it twice.
Then I picked up the phone and called Nikita.
"Aleksi."
"Change of plans. I'm handling this myself."
"What's happened?"
"I'll explain later. I'm handling it."
"Aleksi —"
"Later, Nikita."
I hung up, and the silence in the car was the silence of a man who had just hung up on Nikita Volkov for the first time in twenty years and was going to have to live with it.
I scrolled to the number I never called unless I had to. Murphy had been ours since before I made captain—a watch commander on the city’s east side who’d been cashing Nikita’s envelopes for fifteen years and burying our problems for just as long. Youdidn’t spend a man like that on something small. This was big enough. He picked up on the second ring.
"Murphy."
"Plate," I said. "I'm sending it now. Black BMW sedan. Pavel Antonov, Russian, fifty-eight, gray hair. Two men with him and a kidnap victim in the car. I want every fucking cruiser in this metro looking for that plate inside ten minutes."
"You got it."
"And Murphy. Spotted. Not stopped. He gets pulled over, he runs, and I don't get my package back. Spotted. Called in to me. That is it. We clear?"
"Understood."
I hung up. I forwarded Pavel's plate from the file Gregori had built on him years ago when Pavel had been the man checking the files, not the man inside them.
Then I sat back and let it move.
It moved fast. The first call came within seven minutes. Cruiser on 71 north of Morse had eyes on the plate. The cruiser dropped off at the next exit and didn't follow. The second call came four minutes later. He'd merged onto 161 east. Then 23. Then he stopped.
The third call gave me the address.
It was a clothing store. Bespoke menswear, the kind of place that does suits and ties and the small leather goods men in our line of work liked because they were beautiful and quiet and expensive. I knew the place. Pavel had a tailor there. Half the men in our organization had a tailor there, because that was where you bought a suit in this city if you wanted one that fit you instead of hung on you. Fin would have told me what the place was the second he saw it. He'd have read the leather from across the room. He'd have known the make.
Bespoke leather. Italian.
I closed my eyes for one beat and let it land.
Pavel was selling Fin back to them. To the men who had taken him out of Edinburgh, killed his father in front of him, and run him out of a workroom on the east side for six months until they'd left him to die in the warehouse where I'd found him. Pavel had been bought by Dario Kastelani, who men in our line called Mr. K because no one wanted his name in their mouth. Pavel was about to hand him over inside a shop full of the very product Fin was good enough to make.
I opened my eyes.
"Gregori!"
