Shevchenko frowned, impressed. “If you can deliver, why do you put your wife and daughter on plane?”
Nate moved to rise, but Misha shoved him forward again, back onto his knees. He was having trouble breathing, thinking, his left arm trembling. Sweat stung his eyes.
He forced the words out. “My daughter is willful. She gets in my way. It’s easier for me to do this with her gone. And”-he sucked in a moist breath-“I don’t trust you.”
The silence, dense as the air. Then Pavlo gave a resonant laugh. Genuine amusement that seemed to catch him by surprise. “These are first words of yours that are not lies.” He chuckled a bit more, a deep sound that held little mirth. “You have daughter you struggle with. Who no longer cares for you. Americans let their children speak to them with disrespect. This is why they do not obey.” For the first time, his face held a sentiment that Nate found familiar, human. “They are impossible creatures. Daughters. They wind barbed wire around your heart and tug.”
He gestured mercifully for Nate to rise. Nate found his feet, stooping in the heat, his legs aching.
“You have a daughter?” Nate asked. “I thought you made some Russian-mafia promise to have no family. Only the brotherhood of thieves.”
“Russian mafia.” Pavlo chuckled. “Sounds frightening. Like your Marlon Brando. We are not mafia. We are not even Russian. The only real criminals from Russia live in the Duma and the Kremlin. There are no laws. Only loopholes, favors, bribes. We have been under the heel of war for generations. We fear no God. We believe in nothing. To survive you need muscle. And will. Here you need only lawyers. And I have them. A team of them-Jews-working in concert, burning midnight oil. They protect my businesses. My freedom.”
His gaze sharpened, zeroing in on Nate’s aching arm, which Nate had been holding against his stomach. He dropped it, letting it dangle, though the skin felt scoured by sandpaper. “Your guy twisted my arm at the restaurant,” he said quickly. “Tore something.”
Pavlo sneered at him. “We are not our bodies. We are more. Greater. This, our skin, is a cage. We must be more.”
The firebox leaked a steady stream of heat. Nate’s vision dotted. He had never felt the disease so acutely, his muscles hanging about him like rags. It’s not always that easy, he thought.
Pavlo’s expression demanded a response, so Nate gestured at his tattoos. “But your body defines you.”
“Because I am decorated? No. I am my body no more than you are yours. I have pride in my code. These?” His hands slid across his sweat-slick skin, moving from tattoo to tattoo. “They are my passport, my story. They cannot lie. In prison do you know what most valuable currency is?” His thumbs rubbed across his fingertips. “Pigment. One burns a boot heel. Sifts the ash through handkerchief and mixes with urine. The needle? A guitar string sharpened on strip of a matchbook. In the worst conditions, we find a way to speak our truth. To say, ‘This is my promise. It is carved into my flesh.’” He slapped his flushed chest, leaving white handprints on both pectorals. “I fulfill every promise written here.”
“Then fulfill your word to me,” Nate said. “I didn’t break the code. Don’t touch my family.”
“Go home. Your wife and daughter will be waiting. They must now behave. You do not know when we are looking.” At last Pavlo sat, his bare flesh slapping the stone wetly. “Enjoy them for next thirty-six hours. The next time you see me, I will either release you or force you to watch your daughter die.”
Chapter 33
Dima pulled up in front of the house, Valerik lifted the gun barrel from Nate’s thigh, and Misha rolled back the door and prodded him out. A few shaky steps up the walk, Nate heard a whistle. When he turned, his cell phone was flying at him, and he moved to catch it in front of his face, but his hand couldn’t clench in time. The phone bounced unbroken on the pavement, and he stooped painfully to pick it up. The door slammed shut as the van pulled away, leaving Nate alone in the thickening dusk with the smell of wet grass and a cell-phone screen showing seventeen missed calls from Janie.
Moving toward the front door, he sensed a tingling in his ankle and realized that his left foot was dragging, ever so slightly, along the concrete. The first sign of the dropped foot that heralded, for the afflicted, the beginning of the descent. No wonder Lou Gehrig started having trouble with grounders. With concentration, Nate returned his stride to normal, his pace quickening at the thought of seeing Janie and Cielle.
The front door flung open, two backlit feminine forms crowding the opening, their bearings conveying distress and trepidation and-yes-relief at the sight of him. Firming his leg, he kept on, even as Janie and Cielle rushed out to meet him. His dread, as enveloping as the creeping nightfall, was penetrated by a single prick of light, a sharp gratitude for the embrace to come.
Three A.M.
Kneading his forearm, Nate sat on the couch with Janie, Cielle looking on with chagrin and flicking the edge of her scarf fretfully across her lips. Watching his daughter, he was reminded of what was at risk and had to look away to keep the dam of emotion from breaking inside him. It had been a day without beginning or end, just a prolonged episode of trauma, twisting through the hours like a trapped creature that refused to die.
After stumbling in from the coerced banya visit, he’d showered, changed into fresh clothes, and driven Janie’s car down to find Wendy Moreno-that last name they had from Urban’s list. His knock had gone unanswered, and he’d waited outside for six jittery hours until, assuming that Ms. Moreno would be spending the night out, he’d driven home in a state of exhaustion he could describe only as a stupor. While he’d been on his fruitless stakeout, Janie had scavenged every nook and cranny of the Internet to see if she could find anything about Patrice McKenna, the murdered schoolteacher from Brentwood, that might connect her to Pavlo Shevchenko. Janie had turned up little more than stunned testimonials from neighbors and relatives, variations on a common theme: Patrice was a pillar of the community, the last woman they’d ever expect something like this to happen to.
Twenty-one hours to zero hour, and Nate had not one scrap of evidence to bring to Abara. In fact, every dead end they hit reaquainted them with the alarming reality: They didn’t even know what they were looking for.
Now they were rehashing the contingency to their contingency plan. First thing tomorrow he’d drive back to Wendy Moreno’s and hope that he found her and could, through some Sherlockian miracle, scare up a piece of leverage that might flip the script on Shevchenko. Moreno’s house was near the airport, so on his way he’d drop Janie and Cielle at LAX to retrieve his Jeep from short-term parking, where it had been languishing since he’d been snatched by Misha. Janie would get the Jeep home, pack it, stay visibly present in the house in case Shevchenko’s men were watching, and wait to hear from Nate. Short of his finding the magical clue at Moreno’s to bring to Abara and the FBI, he’d race home and they’d go on the run together well ahead of Shevchenko’s midnight deadline.
“No credit cards,” he said. “No flight or hotel reservations. No phone calls.”
Janie looked across at Cielle. “That includes Jason.”
Cielle’s face wrinkled at the injustice of this, and she was about to reply when she registered something in Nate’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, honey.”
Her gaze hardened. “Remember our deal. No keeping stuff from me.”
He looked down at his hands. “I haven’t been able to draw a full breath since … The heat, I think it screwed with me. My arm and then my lungs and my goddamned ankle now-” A glimpse at his daughter’s face made him clamp his mouth shut. The words had flooded out, coming with more intensity than he’d intended.