CAGED IN CRIMSON

CAGED IN CRIMSON chapter 2

Chapter Two

Nikolai

She didn't call.

— 12 — I gave her three days. Originally I had planned to give her twenty-four hours — enough

time to understand the situation and make the rational choice, which was to talk to me before

the situation escalated beyond what talking could address. But on the first day I received a

report from my surveillance team that she had fixed her kitchen window latch herself, within

four hours of our conversation, using a screwdriver she'd had to search for in a utility drawer.

I read that report and felt something I hadn't felt in a professional context in twenty

years: something like delight. Which was inconvenient and told me everything I needed to

know about how compromised my objectivity already was.

I gave her three days because I wanted to see what she would do with them.

What she did: she worked. Sixteen-hour sessions at her desk, new contracts accepted and

executed, deadlines met, client emails answered with professional precision. She paid two

outstanding bills. She took her cat to a vet appointment she'd been postponing. She went to the

café at her usual time each morning and sat at the corner table with the good light and worked

until eleven, then went home and worked more. She dead-bolted her door every evening at

nine. She left the small lamp on every night.

She did not contact Elena Marsh with anything beyond their usual Thursday morning

coffee. She did not contact any journalist, any lawyer, any law enforcement agency. She did

not attempt to research Nikolai Vaskov or the organisation beyond what was already in the

public record, which was very little and very carefully managed.

She was processing the situation privately and thoroughly and she was not panicking,

which told me she was either very disciplined or very good at fear, and I was beginning to

suspect both.

On the fourth night I went to her apartment.

I want to be precise about my reasoning, because I have had occasion since to examine

it. I went because I believed she needed to understand her situation viscerally, not just

intellectually. People who have processed a threat theoretically often behave as though the

processing has resolved it, when in fact they have simply integrated it into the story they tell

about their lives. I needed Mara to understand, in her body and not just her mind, that the

— 13 — threat was real and present and that I was the more survivable version of it.

That was my reasoning. It was also true. And beneath it, in the part of myself I was still

not examining fully, was the simpler fact that I had been watching her for three weeks from a

remove and I wanted to be in the same room as her.

The apartment was a third-floor walk-up in a building that had once been something

grander and had subsided gently into the merely decent. Her door had a dead bolt and a chain,

which she'd been diligent about since our conversation. The kitchen window had a new latch.

She had placed a rubber doorstop under the front door as an additional measure, which

showed either that she'd researched home security or that she had a practical instinct for

supplementary systems.

I came in through the window anyway. Not the kitchen window — she'd secured that. A

different window, smaller, that she hadn't gotten to yet. This was information, not criticism:

one conversation had made her more careful than three weeks without one. I filed that away.

She was asleep on the couch. She'd meant to be awake — the laptop was open on the

coffee table, a half-eaten plate of crackers beside it, both lamps on, still in her work clothes

from that day. She'd fallen asleep working, or waiting, or both.

She slept on her side with her knees drawn up slightly, one hand tucked under her cheek.

Dark hair spread across the cushion. The tension she carried in waking hours — and I had

mapped it over three weeks, the way she held her shoulders, the particular set of her jaw —

was gone from her face in sleep, and what was underneath was younger and more unguarded

and something I found I could not look away from.

I sat in the armchair across from the couch. I sat there for forty minutes.

I am not going to pretend this was surveillance. It was not surveillance. I was sitting in

the apartment of a woman I had been watching for three weeks, in the dark, while she slept,

and I was watching her sleep, and the word for that is not professional. I knew that. I sat with

it.

— 14 — She woke at two seventeen. I know the precise time because I was looking at my watch

when it happened — an old habit, timing things, it had served me well for twenty years.

The first thing she did was see me.

Not startle. Not scream or reach for her phone or do any of the things that people do

when they discover something frightening in a dark room. She opened her eyes and she found

me across the room and she went completely still. The stillness of something that has

identified a predator and is calculating, not panicking. A still that contains motion rather than

the absence of it.

'Hello, Mara,' I said.

She sat up. Slowly, deliberately, moving like someone who understands that fast

movements have different implications than slow ones. She pulled her knees to her chest —

gathering herself, taking stock.

'You're in my apartment,' she said. Her voice was almost steady. Almost. I could hear the

control it took to make it so.

'Yes.'

'You broke in.'

'The window in the back hallway. I'll have it addressed — the frame is rotted, it's a

building-wide issue.'

'You're telling me about a building maintenance problem,' she said. 'While you're sitting

in my apartment in the dark.'

'I thought it was relevant.'

She stared at me for a long moment. I watched something move through her — fear, yes,

she was afraid, she would have been a fool not to be and she was not a fool — but underneath

the fear was something harder and more durable. Anger. Refusal. The same quality I'd seen in

her arguing with the cab driver, the constitutional inability to simply fold.

'Are you going to hurt me?' she asked. Direct. No preamble, no softening.

— 15 — 'That depends on the conversation.'

'That's not a no.'

'No,' I said. 'It isn't.'

She absorbed that. I watched her file it — threat level acknowledged, probability

assessed, continue operating. 'What do you want?'

'The same thing I wanted in the café. A conversation. About the documents, about what

you understood from them, and about what I intend to do.'

'About what you intend to do,' she repeated. 'To me.'

'About the situation.'

'Those aren't the same thing.'

'No,' I agreed. 'They aren't.'

She looked at me for a long time. The lamp by the couch was still on — the small one,

the one she left on when she slept, and it put warm light across her face and the dark room and

made everything look softer than it was.

'The documents,' she said finally. 'You want to know what I understood.'

'Yes.'

'I translated them. That's all.'

'Mara.' I said her name quietly. 'Tell me what you understood.'

Another long pause. I could see her making the calculation — the same calculation she'd

been making for three days, probably, the one about which version of this situation was

survivable. She arrived at honesty the way she arrived at everything: after a thorough

consideration of the alternatives.

'Money moving through shells,' she said. 'Structures that only make sense if the purpose

is to lose the history of the money, not to invest it. Property and business acquisitions that

follow patterns inconsistent with legitimate returns. And names.' She met my eyes. 'Names

— 16 — that appear in the early records and then disappear from later ones. Which could mean

reassignment or could mean something else.'

'Which do you think it means?'

'The second thing,' she said. 'For at least some of them. The pattern of their

disappearance is too consistent to be clerical.'

She was right. She had gotten there with nothing but language and intelligence and a

lifetime of reading Russian carefully, and she was right about all of it.

'What did you do with what you understood?' I asked.

'Nothing.' She held my gaze. 'I submitted the translation, took the payment, and tried to

forget about it.'

'You mentioned it to Elena Marsh.'

The colour in her face changed. 'I said the work had been interesting. I said nothing

specific. I said nothing that would allow her to connect it to anything.'

'She's a journalist.'

'I know what she is. I said nothing she could use.'

I studied her. Mara Voss was not a natural liar — not because she was naive but because

she was constitutionally honest, and her body knew it even when her mouth tried to do

otherwise. There was a quality of conviction she went into when she was telling the truth, a

particular settling.

She was in that quality now.

'I believe you,' I said.

Something shifted in her face — relief, I thought, and then something more complicated.

'But.'

'But belief doesn't resolve the situation. Other people know you had access to those

documents. People who are less patient than I am. Who prefer the simplest available solution.'

— 17 — 'And the simplest solution is—'

'Making sure you're never in a position to share what you know,' I said. 'Yes.'

The silence stretched.

'There is another solution,' I said. 'More complicated. With better outcomes for you.'

She waited.

'Ensuring that you are somewhere controlled,' I said. 'Somewhere the people who prefer

simple solutions can't reach you. Temporarily. While I address the situation.'

Her face went through several things in rapid succession. Then: 'You want to keep me

somewhere.'

'Yes.'

'That's kidnapping.'

'Yes.'

The word sat in the air between us, plain and unvarnished.

'You're being very honest about it,' she said.

'I find honesty more practical than its alternatives.'

She stared at me for a long, assessing moment. Then: 'You're insane.'

'Possibly.' I stood and retrieved my jacket from the arm of the chair where I'd placed it.

'You have until morning to consider it. I'll come at seven.' I walked to her door and unlocked it

from the inside, and paused with my hand on the frame. 'Get some sleep, Mara. And lock the

window in the back hallway — I'll have the frame replaced, but in the meantime a chair under

the handle will do.'

I let the door close behind me.

I walked to my car and sat in it for a while and told myself that the shape of the plan was

the same as it had been, that I was still operating rationally, that the forty minutes I had spent

— 18 — watching her sleep had not changed anything.

I was unconvincing even to myself.

~ ✦ ~