Chapter 4: THE DEBT COLLECTOR
[Hell's Kitchen, New York — Same Night]
The grey coat didn't move for twenty minutes.
I counted from the window, half-hidden behind the curtain, watching him smoke through the gap. His posture was wrong for surveillance — too visible, too patient, too comfortable standing under a streetlight at eleven PM in Hell's Kitchen. He wanted me to see him. Wanted me to understand that leaving was not part of tonight's arrangement.
The surveillance photos lay scattered across the bed behind me. Neal, Kate, Fowler. Keller's intelligence operation, now mine. But the man downstairs predated anything I'd inherited — he represented the debts Keller had been carrying when I'd landed in this body, obligations that didn't dissolve just because the original owner had vacated.
I poured two fingers of whiskey from the minibar — a brand I didn't recognize, harsh enough to strip paint — and drank it standing. The heat pooled in my chest. The tension in my shoulders didn't ease.
Going down was a risk. Ignoring him was worse. Men who stood openly under streetlights weren't the type who went away when you closed the curtains.
I grabbed Keller's wallet, checked the room key was in my pocket, and took the stairs.
---
[Street Level — Hell's Kitchen Hotel Entrance]
He looked up as I pushed through the hotel's front door. Dropped the cigarette. Ground it with the toe of an expensive shoe.
"Mr. Keller." The accent was Russian, softened by years of living somewhere anglophone. "I was beginning to think you preferred the scenic view."
Up close, the grey coat made more sense. It was cashmere — light, draped, not winter weight. A fashion choice, not a tactical one. The man inside it was late forties, square-jawed, with the kind of groomed stillness that came from years of sitting across from people who were afraid of him without needing to be loud about it.
"You followed me from JFK." My voice stayed flat. Keller's voice — I was getting better at it, the cadence, the unhurried precision. "That's a long cab ride for a social call."
"I prefer directness." He extended a hand. "Viktor Kaslov. I represent mutual acquaintances."
I shook it. Firm grip, dry palm, no squeeze contest. Professional. "Mutual acquaintances who send people instead of phone calls."
"Phone calls are for people who answer their phones." Viktor's eyes tracked across my face — measuring, cataloguing. "You went quiet in Monaco. Then you disappeared from Nice. My principals became... concerned."
Concerned. The word sat in the air like a dropped knife — casual and dangerous at the same time.
"Let's go upstairs," I said.
---
[MC's Hotel Room — Fourth Floor]
The room looked worse with a guest. The narrow bed, the clanking radiator, the peeling wallpaper behind the mirror — all of it screamed temporary, which was the point, but Viktor scanned the space with an expression that suggested he'd expected Keller to be living somewhere more appropriate for a man carrying his kind of debt.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Viktor took the single wooden chair, unbuttoned his coat, and folded his hands in his lap.
"Monaco," he said. "You were there on business. Our business. A delivery was arranged — artwork, in exchange for outstanding balances. The delivery was confirmed. The payment was not."
The phone from Monaco. Delivery confirmed. Payment incoming. The text I'd pocketed without understanding.
"Something went wrong in that hotel room," I said carefully. "The situation deteriorated."
"The man you left on the floor is named Grigor Petrov. He recovered. His memory of the evening is... vivid." Viktor paused to let that land. "He's spoken to Interpol. They have a description."
Cold spread from my stomach to my fingertips. Interpol. Keller's face on a wire — not mine, but the one I was wearing. Every passport in my bag, every alias in Keller's network, now operating under a ticking clock.
"What's the number?" I asked, because the question had to come first. Before the panic, before the calculation, the number was what mattered. Everything in this world reduced to a figure eventually.
"Three hundred thousand. Dollars, not euros." Viktor said it the way you'd announce the weather. "Originally due upon delivery in Monaco. Now overdue. My principals have extended courtesy by sending me rather than sending... alternatives."
Three hundred thousand. Against roughly a hundred thousand in liquid cash — the safe deposit box funds and what remained of Keller's European stash. The Degas sale money was locked on prepaid cards with daily withdrawal caps that would take months to drain. Against Viktor's number, I was short by two-thirds.
"I can do fifteen thousand tonight." The words came before I'd finished the math. Instinct — Keller's instinct, embedded in the body's reflexes like everything else. Lead with what you have. Don't show the gap. "Good-faith payment. The rest in six weeks."
Viktor studied me. The silence stretched long enough for the radiator to clank twice.
"You're different," he said.
My hand tightened on my knee. "Excuse me?"
"The last time we spoke — Geneva, four months ago — you were looser. Easier with the numbers. More..." He searched for the word. "Theatrical."
Keller had been theatrical. Charismatic in that volatile way that made people either trust him completely or reach for a weapon. I was running the performance from a script I'd watched on television, and this man had seen the original live.
"Monaco changed things," I said. "I'm reassessing my approach."
"Reassessing." Viktor repeated it like he was tasting something unfamiliar. Then he nodded once, a small efficient movement. "Fifteen thousand tonight. I will present the remainder — two hundred eighty-five thousand — as payable within six weeks. My principals will want evidence of progress at the halfway point."
"Three weeks. A status update."
"With funds attached. At least a third."
Ninety-five thousand in three weeks. Tight. Not impossible, but tight.
"Done."
I counted the fifteen thousand from the safe deposit cash — hundreds, banded, placed on the bed between us. Viktor collected them without counting. Another professional courtesy.
He stood, buttoned his coat, and moved toward the door. Then stopped. One hand on the knob, his head turned in profile.
"Grigor Petrov is not a forgiving man. Whatever happened in that room, he believes you tried to kill him. Interpol has your description — height, build, features. If you're planning to operate in this city under your own face, the window is narrower than you think."
The door opened. Closed. His footsteps faded down the hall.
I sat on the bed with the surveillance photos and eight-five thousand dollars in remaining cash and an Interpol description circulating through European law enforcement channels.
The whiskey glass was still on the nightstand. I picked it up. My hand shook — fine tremors, the kind that came from sustained tension held too long, like a wire vibrating after a plucked note. Not fear. The effort of wearing someone else's confidence for thirty minutes without breaking character.
I drank what was left.
The photos spread across the bedspread. Neal Caffrey behind prison plexiglass. Kate Moreau carrying a cardboard box out of a storage unit in Queens. Garrett Fowler exiting a government building with a scowl that looked permanent.
Kate's photo. The storage unit. Number 714 — visible on the door behind her, captured in the telephoto lens at a clean angle.
In Season 2, Neal had mentioned a storage unit to Mozzie. Something about Kate keeping things there, documents she'd collected, information she was stockpiling. The conversation had been brief — a single scene, maybe forty seconds of screen time — but my criminal memory had logged it with the precision of a filing system.
Kate's storage unit. Paid for by one of Adler's shell companies. Containing whatever intelligence she'd been gathering on Adler's behalf.
I needed two hundred eighty-five thousand dollars in six weeks. I needed leverage, information, and positioning in a city where Interpol was hunting my borrowed face.
Kate's storage unit might contain all three.
I pinned her photo to the wall above the nightstand and memorized the unit number one more time. Then I picked up the burner phone and started searching for the facility's address.
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