Obscure

Chapter 10

Kirill

Ramachandra's office was a stark, cold room, with everything in shades of white and silver. There wasn't a personal item in sight. Kirill shivered through his thick shirt. Headquarters was on the cool side to begin with, and Ramachandra seemed to keep her office a full ten degrees cooler than the hallway outside.

The room smelled clean, a light lemon scent like dish soap. There was no personality in that smell. It made Kirill think of suds and scouring brushes, stains scrubbed away, a surface returned to a pristine and anonymous state.

In all his years with PERI, Kirill had only set foot in Ramachandra's office a handful of times. During his training, when Ramachandra needed to speak with him directly, she had come to him instead of the other way around. And that didn't happen often. Ramachandra preferred to hand over the everyday tasks of caring for her charges to her subordinates.

Once Kirill was a full-fledged operative, they had conducted most of their business over the phone or through secure messaging. Kirill preferred it that way.

Ramachandra was as blank a slate as the room, as pristine, as anonymous. Her white shirt and black pants were a timeless professional look that seemed untouched by decades of fashion trends. Her face was ageless, with only the faintest hint of crow's feet around her eyes. It hadn't changed since the day they had met.

She gave him nothing to reflect. He couldn't be what she wanted, because he didn't know what she wanted. She had always seemed to him like a creature who was above such mortal things as wanting.

He could only be what she needed. And the fact that he had been summoned told him he had failed at that.

"I'd like an explanation for this," she said, laying her tablet on the desk. Her voice was as crisp and even as the artificial voice on his navigation app. He wondered, not for the first time, if there was flesh or machinery under her skin.

She turned the tablet around to face him. It was a transcript of his latest interrogation session with Elias. Incomplete, of course. There wasn't a technology on earth that could transcribe a subject's memories. Those, the most important part of any interrogation, lived in Kirill's head alone.

"The explanation is right there." He tapped on the relevant line in the transcript. "I got more than I expected from his memories."

"Not as much as you asked for," said Ramachandra. She didn't blink.

Kirill had trained himself to meet that unblinking gaze, but now he looked away despite himself. He was out of practice. "Interrogations always take time."

"Normally, you have your information inside of a day."

"Normally, I'm looking for a single piece of information. This case is more complex."

"I read your notes." Ramachandra's tone said she wasn't impressed. "What you've provided us so far is incomplete. It will require a lot of legwork."

"The names of his contacts weren't enough for you?"

"Two of them were apparently aliases—they don't exist. We've tracked down the others. You are to be congratulated for that."

Interesting choice of phrase, that. Heaven forbid she be the one to congratulate him. She would rather push it off on some hypothetical third party. One capable of feeling pride in his accomplishments.

"The locations give us very little to go on," she continued. "Getting addresses would save us quite a bit of time. He could still give us those, if provided with the proper incentive."

"The emotional trigger of his son is still potent. It makes little sense to waste it. I want to get as much out of that trigger as I can. After that, if it becomes necessary, we can move on."