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He falls back against the cabin door and slides down it, slowly, and sits there with his legs out in front of him on the deck of the Lyudmila. The pistol drops out of his fingers and slides away across the wet boards. He looks up at me.
“Tell her,” he says, wet and thick.
“No,” I say.
I watch until it’s over. Then I go into the cabin, find his second phone in a drawer under the chart table, and kill the engine.
I call Galana from Leo’s phone, standing on the dock with Geoff’s blood drying on my hands.
She answers before the first ring is finished.
“Caleb.” Her voice cracks straight down the middle.
“I’m here.”
“Are you hurt? I heard... the line went... Natasha wouldn’t let me...”
“I’m not hurt.” I close my eyes. “My phone took a bullet. That’s all. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you heard.”
She makes a sound I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Then she’s crying, hard, into the phone, and I stand on the dock in the wind with my eyes shut and let her, and I don’t say anything, because there isn’t anything to say.
“Is it over?” she whispers eventually.
I look down at the second phone in my other hand. There’s a message on the screen. It came in thirty seconds after Geoff died.
Status? Wheels up 0600. Confirm or I go without you. D.R.
“Almost,” I tell her.
Ivor finds Riddings for me.
Arkady traces the number through the night. The message came from a burner, but the burner pinged a tower outside Gary, near a private airfield where a Gulfstream is fueled and waiting under a shell company with a Delaware address.
Ivor calls me at three in the morning.
“I’m coming with you,” he says.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to, you stubborn idiot.” I hear him moving, keys, a door. “Independence isn’t isolation, Caleb. Remember? I’ll be outside in twenty minutes.”
He’s outside in fifteen. He’s brought six men and a sniper. He doesn’t say a word about it, and I don’t thank him. We’ve never needed to.
The hangar is cold and cavernous, lit by sodium lights. The Gulfstream sits in the middle with its stairs down, and Daniel Riddings is standing at the bottom of them with two suitcases and a laptop bag, checking his watch.
He’s exactly what I remember. Fifty, fit, tanned, in a navy quarter-zip with a gold watch. He looks like a man who sells software, until you look at his eyes.
He sees me walk in through the side door and his whole face changes.
His two bodyguards reach for their weapons. Ivor’s sniper takes them both from the gantry before they clear their holsters.
Riddings stands very still at the bottom of the airplane stairs. His pilot is frozen in the cockpit window.
“Reznikov,” Riddings says. His voice is almost steady. “Let’s be reasonable about this.”
I keep walking.
“I have money,” he says. “Rusakov’s money. Selin’s. I can give you all of it. I can give you names, routes, everything I sold, everyone who bought it. You’ll own half of Chicago.”