Page 139 of Nothing More

Again, the look that was almost a sneer. Flicker of a gaze back to Misha. “No. Chinese.”

Misha sent him a wrystupid Americanslook that Toly couldn’t seem to return.

“Then, I go here,” Pushkin said, and walked around the side of the van, toward a steel pedestrian door set in the side of the building. The street-facing façade was all gleaming modern glass, but down the side, in the access alley, it was flat-faced concrete, cold and unforgiving. A light was mounted above the door, glowing faintly given the shade in the alleyway, and a keypad waited to the left, into which Pushkin punched a code. The door unlocked with a whir and a click, and he pulled it open and ushered them to precede him.

Toly felt a flutter of doubt on the threshold, a tug at his spine, a desire to retreat. Not because he was frightened, but because that crawling sensation up the back of his neck had returned, the one that warned him of traps. But Misha marched ahead, shoulders square, as solid and strong as ever, so he followed, into a well-lit white hallway floored in industrial terrazzo.

Pushkin moved past them, and led the way to a bustling mailroom, where young employees with lanyards were sorting piles of envelopes and packages on a big table, and slotting them into bins on wheeled carts. Pushkin approached the table, set down the envelope, and nodded in response to an employee’s, “Delivery?”

The whole operation was so unsecured, it didn’t seem real.

Pushkin returned.

“That’s it?” Misha asked.

He shrugged and nodded. “Yes. I make drop, I leave.”

“No cash?”

“Wired into my account.”

Misha looked skeptical, but Pushkin said, “I can show you,” and pulled out his phone. They moved off to the side, and Pushkin tapped at his phone screen while Misha peered over his shoulder.

Toly wandered over toward the wall where a line of carts waited. Each bore a sticky-back printed label on the side, marking the floor to which it was designated. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve–

“Excuse me.” An employee brushed past him and grabbed the handle of Nine. Sent him a wary look. “Can I help you, sir?”

He turned away without speaking.

Misha stood in the doorway with Pushkin, and beckoned him with a tilt of his head.

In the alley, Misha said to Pushkin: “Send me that info.”

“Yes. I do it now.”

When they were back in the Cobra, Toly said, “Do you buy all that? That he’s never seen the man? That he pays him remotely and he never puts the stuff in his hand?” He held his own out, empty – just as Raven’s had been that morning, when he’d left her reaching, unanswered – and tried to imagine someone buying something from the likes of Pushkin and letting it pass through the hands of a half-dozen mail room kids.

“Pushkin’s scum,” Misha said, matter of fact, and pulled out his phone again. It pinged with an incoming message. “But he’s too much of a coward to lie about something like this, and our man wouldn’t risk being seen by him. I believe him. In this case.”

Toly frowned. “What now?”

“We need to get up to the twelfth floor and search his office. Even better: see if we can run into him. But not now.” He lifted his head from his screen and gestured toward the building. “We’re not dressed for it.”

Toly bit back a complaint.We could have come dressed better. But all his suits were in his locker at the agency changing room, and he couldn’t exactly maintain the fiction that he was spending all his time in the gym if he ran into Raven or one of her staff there.

When he turned his head, he found Misha studying him, intense as a tiger crouching in the bushes. “What?”

“He’s not taking the morphine himself.”

Toly lifted his brows, though he’d already had the same thought. “What’s it for, then?”

Misha’s look said,Are you going to make me say it?“If you were in the habit of capturing people, and killing them, and cutting them up, but you didn’t kill them where you captured them, you’d need a sedative, wouldn’t you?”

Toly felt his frown deepen. “But that would mean he’s still hunting, even though we haven’t gotten anything in the mail since the ear.”

“Hunters don’t stop hunting.”

“Is he still taking trophies, do you think?”

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