Chapter 13: Bait

Volkov reached his decision the way he reached most decisions that troubled him — slowly, methodically, turning it over in the notebook until the writing itself made the shape of it unavoidable. Four of his six weeks were gone. The shape he had built of her remained a shape and not a position, patient and thorough and entirely useless for the one purpose the colonel actually required of it. He had spent months waiting for the ground to bring her to him. The ground had not obliged, and he no longer had the luxury of continuing to wait on its schedule rather than his own.

What he wrote, that night, was a single line he did not like writing and did not cross out. If she will not be found, she must be drawn.

He did not enjoy what the sentence implied, turning it over the way he turned over difficult wind, testing it from every angle for a version of the plan that did not require what it seemed to require. He found none. A shooter this patient would not be drawn by a convoy, a checkpoint, an ordinary target she had already proven she could decline without cost. She would be drawn only by something that mattered to her directly — someone whose loss she could not simply calculate around, the way she had calculated around every target he had studied so far.

He raised it with Farid the following morning, carefully, the way he raised anything that risked sounding worse aloud than it had sounded in his own head. “I need to know who moves with her. Not the cell’s leadership — the ordinary fighters, the ones who are with her often enough that her decisions might change if one of them stopped being available to make decisions alongside.”

Farid did not answer immediately, and when he did, his voice had lost some of its usual careful neutrality. “You are asking me to help you find someone to kill so that grief will do what four months of patience could not.”

“I am asking you to help me end this in a way that costs fewer lives than it will cost if it continues as it has continued. Six weeks becomes someone else’s assignment if I fail, Farid, and I do not have your confidence that whoever replaces me will share my care about which lives this costs along the way.”

It was not the whole of his reasoning, and he suspected Farid understood that as clearly as he did. But it was the part of the reasoning that could be spoken aloud, and Farid, after a long silence, gave him a name gathered from informants over the following days — a young fighter, often seen near the woman the valley had begun, in its own hushed way, to speak of as though she were closer to weather than to a person. Rasul, the name was. Volkov wrote it down, and felt, writing it, the quiet discomfort of a man doing necessary work he did not respect himself for doing well.

~ ☆ ~

Farid brought him the details two days later, reluctantly, laying them out the way a man lays out something he wishes he did not have to hand over. The boy moved supplies twice a week along a fixed set of trails, always alone on the shorter runs, always at roughly the same hour, a pattern born of practicality rather than carelessness — the cell could not spare a second fighter for every errand, and the shorter routes had never before drawn Soviet attention.