Chapter 87 Loose Ends

Chapter 87 Loose Ends
Katya was still in the city on the fourth day after the compound.

Dante told me at breakfast without being asked, which was itself something worth noting because in the early weeks of all of this he would have managed information like this carefully, deciding what I needed and what I didn't and delivering only the former. He sat across from me with his coffee and said her name and told me what his people had found and I listened and understood that the telling was its own kind of thing, a continuation of something that had been building since the night he came back and said home.

He told me because I had a right to know.

Because I was part of this now in a way that went past witness and past captive and past everything the early chapters of us had been.

"Where has she been," I said.

"Moving," he said. "Not randomly. She has been in three specific locations in the city over four days and none of them are accidental."

"Which locations," I said.

He told me the addresses and I held them in my mind and turned them over the way I turned everything over and looked for the shape of them.

"Those are all observation points," I said. "High ground or corner positions with clear sightlines to significant locations."

He looked at me across the breakfast table.

"Yes," he said.

"She is mapping something," I said. "Not hiding. Not running. Building a picture of something she intends to use."

"That is what my people believe," he said.

"What does she want," I said.

He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when the answer had several layers and he was deciding which ones to give me.

"We don't know yet," he said. "Viktor is gone and the operation is finished and she has no employer and no structure and no resources beyond whatever she had personally before any of this began." He paused. "Which may be considerable. We underestimated her once."

"You won't again," I said.

"No," he said simply.

I looked at my coffee and thought about Katya, who I had never met and knew only through the shape of what she had done, holding a stairwell with precision and then walking out through a passage nobody knew existed and disappearing into a city that was large enough to move through but not large enough to hide in indefinitely.

She was not hiding.

That was the thing.

A person who wanted to disappear disappeared. They crossed a border or changed an identity or went somewhere nobody was looking. Katya was doing none of those things. She was in the city in observation positions looking at things she had decided she needed to look at before she made her next move.

Which meant she had a next move.

"Is she watching this house," I said.

Dante looked at me steadily. "We believe she has been at a position with a sightline to the estate road twice," he said. "Not close enough to observe the grounds directly. Close enough to count vehicles and note patterns."

"She is learning the current security setup," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"Because she intends to approach at some point," I said.

"That is the most likely interpretation," he said.

I sat with that for a moment and felt the specific feeling of something unfinished sitting in the corner of a room you thought had been cleared and understood that Katya was going to be a problem that resolved itself on her timeline rather than anyone else's.

"Can you draw her out," I said.

He looked at me. "What do you mean."

"She is watching because she is building toward something," I said. "Which means she needs more information before she is ready to move. Which means if you give her information that accelerates her timeline you control when she moves instead of waiting for her to decide."

Dante was very still.

"You want to feed her false intelligence," he said.

"I want you to consider it," I said. "If she thinks the security is lighter than it is on a specific day she moves on that day and you are ready for her."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"That is not impractical," he said carefully.

"I have one more question," I said.

"Ask," he said.

"What is Biscuit's role in this," I said. "Because he has been sitting in different windows for four days and I am beginning to wonder if he knows something."

Dante looked at me.

Then he looked at Biscuit who was on the windowsill in question with his back to the room in the position he had occupied every morning since the operation ended.

Then he looked back at me and the corner of his mouth moved in the specific way it moved when something had caught him entirely off guard and he was deciding whether to let it become something visible.

He let it become something visible.

Not quite a smile and considerably more than the almost version and entirely real and entirely his and gone again in under three seconds but I had seen it completely and I filed it in the place where I kept all the versions of him that most people never got to see.

"Biscuit's role," he said carefully, "is outside the current operational parameters."

"I think he should be consulted," I said.

"I will take it under advisement," he said.

He picked up his coffee and I picked up mine and Biscuit continued his surveillance of the garden with the focused attention of a cat who had decided the rose beds required monitoring and was not going to be distracted from that responsibility by anything happening at the breakfast table.

Katya was in the city watching.

We were at the breakfast table watching back.

Somewhere between those two facts the next thing was assembling itself.