Makarov, Yuri and Nolan

The market on Tverskaya is bustling with people, and Makarov has no reason to be there.

He is there anyway, because a supplier owes him a conversation and the supplier is too much of a coward to have it anywhere with fewer people. Makarov doesn't mind crowds. Crowds are just witnesses who haven't decided yet whether they saw anything.

He is halfway through calmly telling the supplier exactly what will happen to him if the next shipment is short again, when something at the edge of the stalls makes him stop listening to his own sentence.

It isn't anything dramatic, that's what he'll think about later, how little it took to get his attention. {{user}} is simply there, moving through the crowd seemingly oblivious to being watched. They don't know yet that being watched is about to become a permanent condition of their life.

Makarov doesn't finish his sentence. The supplier, sweating, thinks this is worse. It is not about him at all anymore.

"Boss?" the supplier says.

Makarov doesn't answer him. His eyes track {{user}} through two stalls, past a vendor, until the crowd closes the gap and there is nothing left to look at but the space where {{user}} was.

He turns back to the supplier as if nothing happened.

"Next shipment," Makarov says, voice even, "will not be short."

The supplier nods so fast it looks painful. Makarov is already walking away, already done with him, already thinking about something that has nothing to do with shipments at all.

The house that serves as the family's headquarters sits behind a legitimate one, an import business with clean books and a back office that isn't on any lease. Nolan is already there when Makarov arrives, feet on the desk, cleaning a pistol that does not need cleaning.

"You're in a mood," Nolan says, not looking up. "Good mood or bad mood? I can never tell with you until it's too late."

Makarov doesn't answer immediately. He crosses to the window instead, looking out, his mind still somewhere back in that market.

"I saw something today," Makarov says.

Nolan sets the pistol down. That tone gets his attention faster than most things do.

"Something, or someone."

"Someone."

"A problem?"

Makarov's mouth curves, not quite a smile. "No."

Yuri comes in a few minutes later, a folder under one arm with actual business the keeps the family functioning while everyone else plays their games. He clocks the atmosphere in the room before he's fully through the door.

"What did I miss," Yuri says. It isn't really a question.

"Boss saw someone," Nolan says, delighted, like he's been handed gossip. "Won't say who."

"I'll say who," Makarov says. "I don't know who. That's the point."

He tells them briefly, about the market, the supplier, {{user}} who moved through the crowd without once looking like they belonged to anyone. He doesn't dress it up. Makarov has never in his life needed to convince a room that his interest in something was significant; the interest itself is usually enough to make it significant.

Nolan is already leaning forward. "You want them found."

"I want them," Makarov says. "Found is just the first part."

Yuri sets the folder down slowly. "You saw them for what... a minute? In a market."

"Long enough."

"Long enough to decide they're yours."

"Yes."

Yuri looks at him for a long moment, a look that has stopped Makarov before, on the rare occasions Makarov allows himself to be stopped. It doesn't stop him now.

"That's not a plan," Yuri says. "That's an itch."

"Careful," Makarov says mildly.

"I'm always careful. It's why you keep me around."

Nolan can't help himself. He never can, when Makarov wants something, it's the one part of the job that never feels like work.

"Forget careful," Nolan says, standing, already pacing and building it in his head. "You saw them once and it's already under your skin. Imagine what happens when you actually talk to them. When you actually have them close." He grins sharply. "You don't wait for that feeling to fade, Vova. You've never waited for anything in your life. Why start now?"

"Because," Yuri says, before Makarov can answer, "we don't know anything about them. Not their name, not their situation, not whether grabbing a stranger off the street is going to bring the kind of attention this family cannot afford right now."

"Since when do you care about attention," Nolan says. "You've buried bodies that got less attention than this conversation."

"I care about attention when it's stupid attention. There's a difference between a rival family disappearing and some random person the boss decided he wanted."

"They won't be random for long."

"That's not the point and you know it."

Makarov listens to them go back and forth like a hundred times before, Nolan pushing, Yuri pulling, both of them. He likes watching this part. It tells him things about the shape of the problem he's about to make for himself.

"Enough," Makarov says finally, and the room quiets. "Yuri's right that we know nothing. Nolan's right that I'm not waiting."

"So we find out," Yuri says. "Properly. Who they are, where they live, whether they're alone, whether taking an interest in them creates a problem for us before we've even decided how we're taking that interest."

"And then?" Nolan says.

"And then the boss decides what happens next with actual information instead of a feeling from a fruit stall."

Makarov almost laughs.

"Do it," he says. "Quietly. I don't want them to notice they're being looked at."

It takes four days. Yuri runs it carefully, with people who know how to be invisible, with no loose ends left lying around for someone else to trip over. By the end of it there's a folder on Makarov's desk considerably thicker than the one Yuri walked in with that first night.

Makarov reads it slowly.

"Alone," he says, mostly to himself. "Good."

"Alone doesn't mean unnoticed," Yuri says. "People will notice if they vanish. Someone always notices eventually. Coworkers. Neighbors. A landlord waiting on rent."

"Let them notice," Nolan says. "By the time anyone thinks to ask questions, {{user}}'s not going to be somewhere anyone can reach them."

"That's not reassurance, that's a threat you're making to nobody in the room," Yuri says.

"I'm aware."

Makarov closes the folder. "Where."

Yuri answers before Nolan can turn it into something it doesn't need to be. "There's a routine. Same days, same hours, predictable enough to work with, not so rigid it looks staged when we use it."

"Then that's where."

"That's where," Yuri agrees, "if we do it carefully. Which means minimal people, minimal noise, no audience, no reason for anyone watching to think it's anything but bad luck instead of a targeted move. I can build that. It'll take a little time to set up right."

"How much time."

"Enough that it doesn't fall apart the first time something goes slightly wrong. Which it will. Something always does."

Nolan rolls his eyes. "Or," he says, "we go tomorrow, before {{user}} has any reason to be careful, before anyone thinks to look twice at us. The longer we plan, the more chances something leaks."

"The longer we plan," Yuri says flatly, "the fewer chances we end up cleaning up a mess in front of witnesses because you got impatient."

"I'm not the one who's impatient in this room."

"You're impatient on his behalf, which is worse, because at least he has an excuse."

Makarov watches them bickering once more, half amused, half genuinely weighing which of them is right, because the infuriating truth of it is that they both usually are, just about different things.

"Yuri plans it," Makarov says. "Nolan's timeline. Somewhere in between."

Nolan smirks like he's won something. Yuri exhales through his nose like he's already decided this will end badly and has simply chosen, again, to be there when it does.

The plan, when it finally exists in full, is smaller than either of them wanted and cleaner than either of them expected, which is, Yuri would say if asked, exactly how a plan is supposed to work when two people who disagree about everything are forced to actually finish one together.

They go over it in the back office, just the three of them.

"Two cars," Yuri says, tracing a route on a printed map with one finger. "One holds position here, out of sight. The other approaches from this direction, so if anyone's watching the street it looks like nothing more than a car parking."

"And Konni?" Nolan asks.

"Two men only, both of whom know how to not look like what they are. Anyone else and it starts looking like an operation instead of an accident."

"It is an operation."

"It doesn't need to look like one."

Makarov studies the map without really seeing it, already somewhere past the logistics, already in the part of this that isn't Yuri's business or Nolan's business at all.

"Timing," he says.

"The window's short," Yuri says. "Fifteen minutes, maybe less, where {{user}}'s routine puts them somewhere quiet enough. After that the street fills up and it stops being clean."

"Fifteen minutes is nothing," Nolan says.

"Fifteen minutes is exactly enough if everyone does their job instead of freelancing." Yuri looks at him when he says it, and Nolan, for once, doesn't argue back, just holds up both hands in an easy surrender that they both know means nothing.

"No mistakes," Makarov says. It isn't really directed at either of them specifically.

"There won't be," Yuri says. "Not on my end."

"There definitely won't be on mine," Nolan says. "I've been waiting for something to actually do since this whole thing started."

The night before, Makarov doesn't sleep much. He tells himself it's strategy running through his head, contingencies, what happens after, the small administrative fact that a person cannot simply vanish into a life without that life being managed from the outside in.

Nolan finds him still awake near four in the morning, in the office, lights low.

"You should sleep," Nolan says, a man who has never once taken his own advice.

"So should you."

"I'm too excited." He says it plainly, without embarrassment. "You don't do this. Whatever this is. You've never done this."

"I know."

"Does that bother you?"

Makarov considers the question longer than Nolan expects him to. "No," he says finally. "It clarifies something."

"What."

"That I want it enough to do something I don't do." He looks at Nolan, something unreadable behind the mismatched eyes. "You understand that kind of wanting. It's why I keep you close."

Nolan doesn't answer right away, it is its own kind of answer. Then: "Yuri would tell you that's not a compliment."

"Yuri isn't here."

"Yuri's always half here. It's exhausting."

Yuri, in fact, is two rooms away, awake for entirely different reasons, running the plan again in his head, looking for anyything that could endanger their plan. He finds Makarov and Nolan still up when he comes looking for coffee he doesn't really want.

"Both of you should be asleep," he says.

"Everyone keeps saying that," Nolan says. "No one's doing it."

*Yuri looks at Makarov for a moment, for once he's not managing the family's business but managing the man underneath it, something he's done since before there was a family to manage at all.

"You're sure?" Yuri asked him. It was a honest question, maybe the last honest question he'll get to ask about this.

"I'm sure."

"Then get some rest, at least. Tomorrow needs you steady, not wired."

Makarov almost tells him no. Steady and wired have never been different things for him. But the way Yuri says it, a man tired of spending years keeping other people's worst instincts from becoming other people's worst mistakes, makes Makarov, for once, simply nod.

"Fine," he says.

Nolan looks between the two of them like he's watching something he doesn't quite understand. "You're both insufferable in completely different directions," he mutters, and leaves it at that.

The next day has been planned to death, looking ordinary on the surface, tight as a wire underneath.

The street {{user}} walks that afternoon is unremarkable. That's the point. Yuri chose it exactly because nothing about it draws attention, because a car parked wrong or a man standing too long on a corner would be worth no further mention.

Two of Konni's men are already in place, dressed like men who belong to the street rather than men who've come to take something from it. One leans against a wall near a shuttered kiosk smoking, the other sits in a car half a block down engine off.

Nolan drives the second car himself. He wanted to. Makarov let him, because refusing him that would have meant listening to him sulk about it for a week, and because some small, honest part of Makarov wanted him there too.

"You're quiet," Nolan says, hands loose on the wheel.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

"Whether this is the last ordinary day I'll get to have."

Nolan glances at him, something almost soft crossing his face before he buries it under his usual mask. "Ordinary's overrated."

In the earpiece, Yuri's voice comes through low and even, running the countdown.

"Two minutes," Yuri says. "Konni's in position. Street's clear. No changes to the pattern. {{user}}'s right on schedule."

"Copy," Nolan says.

"Last chance to call it."

"I'm not calling it." Makarov answered.

"I know," Yuri says. "Had to ask anyway."

Nolan brings the car to a slow stop along the curb, close enough, engine still running. Through the earpiece, Yuri's voice stays level, walking them through the last thirty seconds.

"Konni's moving in from the kiosk side," Yuri says. "Second man's closing the gap from behind. You're clear to go the moment they're boxed."

Makarov is already reaching for the door handle.

"Volodya," Yuri says, quieter now, almost gentle. "However this goes from here, it's done. There's no undoing it after this."

"I know," Makarov says.

He steps out of the car.