Chapter Fifteen

Yerevan, Armenia — Present Day

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Karam had not told Katz he was going, which he understood, boarding a flight he'd booked with money the produce business could not actually spare, was precisely the kind of decision the old Israeli would have talked him out of with the patient, infuriating logic of a man who had spent forty years learning exactly how badly amateurs got hurt doing exactly this — and had booked it anyway, in the specific stubborn arithmetic of a man who had spent eleven days watching professionals fail to move a research question forward and had decided, somewhere over the eastern Mediterranean, that a family member showing up in person might succeed where two careful phone calls and a borrowed intelligence desk hadn't.

Sona Petrosyan's address had not been difficult to find. That should have told him something, he understood later, walking up the third-floor stairwell of a Soviet-era apartment block in Yerevan's Kentron district with a bakery box under one arm because he had read somewhere, once, that showing up empty-handed to a stranger's door made everything harder, and he had wanted, badly, for at least one part of this to go the easy way.

She opened the door on the chain first, which told him the second thing, and looked at him through the gap for long enough that he understood she already knew exactly who he was before he'd said a word.

"You should not have come," she said, in careful, accented English, and Karam heard, underneath the words, the specific flatness of someone who had rehearsed this exact sentence for several days, waiting to see whether she'd ever have to use it. "I am sorry. I was excited about the registry, genuinely, and I should not have told you as much as I did, and I am asking you now, please, to leave before anyone sees you standing at this door."

"Sona. Please. Two minutes." He kept his voice low, steady, the specific careful register he used with frightened customs officials when a shipment's paperwork didn't quite match its cargo. "Someone came to see you. I understand that. I'm not here to make it worse for you. I need to know what they took, and I need to know whether you're actually safe, and then I will go, and I will never contact you again if that's what keeps you that way."

She was quiet for a long moment, and then, with the specific defeated resignation of someone choosing the lesser of two frightening options, unhooked the chain.

They had come three days ago, she told him, standing in her own small kitchen because she would not let him sit, would not let this take the shape of a visit rather than an emergency to be managed and ended. Two men, professional, unhurried, Iranian by their accents though they'd spoken Armenian competently enough that she hadn't been entirely certain at first. They had not threatened her, not directly — they had simply known things about her position at the archive, her mother's pension, a cousin's residency application currently pending review, and had made clear, without ever once raising their voices, that her professional future and her family's various small vulnerabilities would remain exactly as uncomplicated as they currently were, provided she found herself unable to recall, going forward, the specific contents of a 1660s merchant registry, or the name of the Beirut correspondent who had asked about it.

"They took the digitization files. All of them, not just the one entry I'd flagged for you — they were thorough, methodical, the kind of thorough that made me understand they'd done this before, somewhere, to someone else." She would not meet his eyes now, and Karam understood, watching her, that the shame she was carrying belonged entirely to the wrong person, and that there was nothing he could say in the next ninety seconds that would fix that. "I am sorry, Mr. Yonan. I found a name in that registry — Manukian, and beside it, a date, sometime in the 1680s, and a destination I only glimpsed before they arrived and I had to decide, very quickly, what kind of woman I was going to be for the rest of my career. I chose the kind who keeps her mother's pension. I understand if you think less of me for it. I do not think less of myself for it, and I would ask you not to either, but I understand if you can't help it."

"I don't." He meant it, and heard, saying it, that he meant it considerably more than the polite reassurance it might have sounded like from someone less recently acquainted with exactly this kind of impossible choice. "You did the only sane thing available to you. I am the one who should apologize, for putting you anywhere near a choice like that in the first place."

He left four minutes later, the bakery box still unopened on her kitchen counter, and made it as far as the stairwell's second landing before the specific, low-grade animal alertness he'd spent a year of checkpoints and shrapnel-scarred sidewalks cultivating told him, with total certainty and no evidence he could immediately name, that he was not walking down to an empty street.

The man by the newspaper kiosk across from the building's entrance had been there when Karam arrived, forty minutes ago, reading the same newspaper he was apparently still reading now — a detail Karam's eye had logged and dismissed at the time and now, walking out into the gray Yerevan afternoon, refused to let go of. Kentron's streets ran busy enough at this hour that a stationary man reading a newspaper should have meant nothing at all, and meant, instead, everything.

He did not run. Running, he understood with a clarity that surprised him, was the one thing that would confirm to whoever was watching exactly how much he'd correctly understood, and he made himself walk instead, unhurried, toward the metro station three blocks east, doing the same math Sona had just described doing — not fighting the situation, simply managing it, choosing survival's specific unglamorous shape over whatever version of this his pride might have preferred.

His phone rang halfway to the station, an unfamiliar number, and he answered it walking, not stopping, because stopping would have told the man from the kiosk something Karam did not want him to know.

"Don't react to what I'm about to say," Cho's voice said, without preamble, close enough to his ear that he understood someone had been tracking his phone's location since roughly the moment he'd booked the flight, and felt, underneath the surge of gratitude, a smaller, colder recognition of exactly how thin the line was between being protected and being managed. "You have a two-person surveillance team, Karam — the kiosk, and a woman in a blue coat about thirty meters behind you who switched sides of the street when you did. I need you to take the second right, not the metro, there's a hotel on that corner with a restaurant entrance and a kitchen exit onto the alley behind it, and I need you to walk through it like you have every reason in the world to be there and none at all to be hurrying."

He did exactly as she said, through a restaurant kitchen that smelled of grilling lamb and did not, thankfully, contain a single member of staff inclined to stop a well-dressed man walking through it with purpose, out into an alley that let him double back three streets over to a taxi rank Cho talked him toward with the specific patient precision of someone who had clearly done this before, for someone else, in a considerably more dangerous city than this one.

He did not feel safe until the taxi crossed back over the river, and even then, watching Yerevan's ordinary evening traffic through a window that no longer felt entirely trustworthy, understood something he suspected Katz had been trying, gently, to tell him for weeks without quite finding the words that would land.

"They were already three days ahead of us," he said, once Cho confirmed the line was as secure as a line could reasonably be, his voice steadier than he felt. "Professional. Patient. They didn't even need to threaten her outright — they simply knew enough about her life to make the threat implicit, and that was more than sufficient. I flew here thinking I could succeed where careful phone calls hadn't, Erin, and what I actually accomplished was confirming, in person, exactly how far behind we already are."

"You also accomplished getting out of Yerevan without becoming a second problem for us to solve," Cho said, and Karam heard, underneath the dry precision, something that might, in a less careful woman, have been relief. "That's not nothing, for a first attempt. But Karam — the next time you decide amateur hour is worth the risk, call first. We can get you there faster and considerably safer than a same-day ticket and a bakery box. Let us actually do the job you're currently attempting to do for free."