2026-01-25 21:37:56
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Chapter Four Hundred and Forty One
He drove to the Apollolaan in seventeen minutes.The door opened before he reached it, a staff member who had clearly been watching for his car, and he was taken upstairs with the efficiency of a household that had prepared for his arrival and was managing the situation with the controlled urgency of people accustomed to managing difficult situations.Alexei was in his room.The boy was on his bed with his knees drawn up and his face the color of someone whose body had stopped cooperating with the version of the day that had been planned, the sweat at his hairline and the breath coming in the shallow controlled rhythm of someone who had been managing acute pain long enough to have developed a technique for it."When did this start?" Lukas said, to the room generally, dropping his bag on the chair and moving to the bed."Two hours ago," Volkov said, from the doorway. He was dressed as though he had been somewhere formal and had come home to this. "He took his evening medication and wit
Chapter Four Hundred and Forty
Abdullah spoke for twenty minutes.Lukas sat at his desk in the Herengracht office with the canal outside the window doing its morning thing and listened to a man he trusted tell him the shape of the situation he was in with the honesty of someone who had decided that managing how the information landed was less important than making sure the information arrived completely."When Volkov approached me," Abdullah said, "it was through the Jeddah trade network. Men I have done business with for fifteen years. The introduction was structured the way legitimate introductions are structured, with context and mutual reference and the implicit professional vetting that those networks provide." He paused. "I assessed him as I assess anyone. What I assessed was a man of significant means, organized, genuinely concerned about his son, accustomed to getting what he paid for. I did not assess the depth of his other connections because the introduction suggested I did not need to.""You made a reas
Chapter Four Hundred and Thirty Nine
Lukas asked Konstantin to find somewhere quieter to talk.Konstantin led him to a small study off the main corridor, the kind of room that existed in houses like this one for the purpose of conversations that required privacy, furnished with the same careful attention as the rest of the house and carrying the same quality of telling him less than rooms usually told him about the people who occupied them.They sat."Tell me about the patient," Lukas said."My wife," Konstantin said. "She is sixty-three years old and she has been managing a chronic condition for four years that conventional medicine has addressed incompletely." He described the condition with the specific medical vocabulary of someone who had spent years in waiting rooms and specialist offices and had absorbed the language of the condition in the way that family members of chronically ill patients absorb it, as the vocabulary of a world they had not chosen to become fluent in. "The pain is significant. The current pharm
Chapter Four Hundred and Thirty Eight
He almost declined the dinner.He drafted the message to Volkov's assistant twice, the polite version and the direct version and found neither of them adequate to the task of refusing without creating the antagonism he had decided to avoid while he managed the exit from the network. The dinner was the easier problem. Attending it would tell him things he needed to know. He confirmed his attendance and put his phone down and told Elise about it on Friday morning over coffee."Volkov's dinner," she said."This evening," he said.She looked at him with the particular attention she had developed for situations she was not going to tell him how to handle but wanted to understand."What do you know about Volkov?" she said."Abdullah's assessment was significant wealth operating below the level of public documentation," Lukas said. "Consistent. Not warm. Genuinely concerned about his son." He paused. "The referral network he sent me has characteristics that have been accumulating into a pict
Chapter Four Hundred and Thirty Seven
He accepted the Petrov consultation.He told himself this was because refusing would create antagonism with Volkov at a point when his access to Alexei was still fragile, and this was true. He told himself it was because Mrs. Petrov's described condition was legitimate and she deserved treatment regardless of who her husband was, and this was also true. He sat with the honesty of both things and noted that neither of them was the complete account of why he had said yes, and that the complete account included the fee and the financial stability it represented for the independent practice, and he did not allow himself to be comfortable with not including that part.Mrs. Petrov arrived on a Thursday.She was in her late forties and had the specific quality of a woman who had learned to make herself difficult to read in environments where being easily read was a liability. Her medical concern was genuine, a rheumatological condition that had not responded to conventional treatment, and Lu
Chapter Four Hundred and Thirty Six
When Volkov left the room Lukas did not immediately speak.He picked up his pen and made a note in the clinical file and gave the silence the space it needed, because some silences in consultation rooms were productive and this one had the quality of a silence that Alexei was using for something."The bruising on your forearm," Lukas said, when the silence had done what it was going to do. "I want to ask you about it."Alexei's face did not change in the way faces change when people are surprised. It changed in the way faces change when people have been expecting something and it has arrived."I fell," he said. "The pain affects my balance sometimes. I catch myself on things.""Yes," Lukas said. "That happens with your condition." He held his pen and looked at the note he had just made and then looked at Alexei. "The pattern of the bruising was unusual for a fall. The distribution suggested contact with something that had a specific shape.""I caught myself on the edge of a table," Al
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