Location: A private apartment, Lisbon, Portugal Year: 2011
POV: Raymond Reddington
The call ended, but the girl's voice lingered, an echo of steel and desperation in the quiet of my Lisbon sanctuary. I set the secure phone back in its cradle, the glass of my Château Margaux silently sweating in the night air. Outside, the lights of Alfama flickered like a thousand distant candles. Inside, silence reigned, populated only by the ghosts of conversation.
You're a good woman.
The words had escaped my mouth before I could stop them. It was a lapse in sincerity, a momentary crack in the façade I had spent decades building. But it was the truth. In her voice, I had heard not the frivolous socialite Gossip Girl described, but a queen defending her wounded king. There was no hysteria. There were no pleas. There was purpose, data, and an implicit faith that I would be able to execute the mission. It was the kind of clarity I respected. The kind of clarity one needs to survive in this ugly world.
On my screen, the files she had sent appeared. A dead mother's letter and a phantom father's photograph. I read the letter, my eyes scanning the words of fearful love and protective cruelty. I did not judge her. How could I? Of all the people in the world, I, more than anyone, understood the terrible mathematics of a parent's sacrifice. The lies we tell, the monsters we become, all to shield a child from the sins that are our inheritance. A frightened mother... the terrible things we do for a fearful love.
Then I looked at the photograph. Kaito Ishikawa, as I would later discover. A man with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face, with the same eyes as his son, but without the darkness, without the weight of a life built on a lie. I saw the image and felt nothing for the man, but I felt everything for the child who had lost him.
Because I too knew what it was to be a phantom to my own child. And I knew what it was to owe Renard Ishikawa my soul.
My empire, unlike the noisy, clumsy tentacles of governments, moves in silence and with singular purpose. I picked up my phone again. My first and only call was to Dembe.
"Dembe," I said, my voice calm. "Alpha priority. Person search."
"Understood, Raymond."
"I'm sending you a data packet. A thirty-year-old photograph and a letter. The target is Renard Ishikawa's biological father. Wake up our friends in the Mossad; I need access to their 1990s facial recognition archives. Activate our assets at Langley; I want a sweep of all transatlantic flight manifests and immigration records into North America from that period. And put Brimley on it. Have him torture the Zurich bank records. We're looking for a name, an alias, a paper trail. Anything."
"Consider it done. Raymond... is the boy alright?"
The concern in Dembe's voice was genuine. He, too, felt a deep affection for Ren. "No," I replied honestly. "But he will be. We're going to ensure it."
I hung up. The machinery was in motion. Heavens, seas, and land were being churned. I poured myself another glass of wine and walked to the window, watching the Tagus river snake its way into the Atlantic's darkness.
The world knows me as Raymond Reddington, the Concierge of Crime. A criminal, a traitor, a monster. And I am all those things. But before I was Reddington, I was someone else. I was a woman. A spy named Katarina Rostova. And I was a mother. A mother who made an impossible choice to save her daughter, Masha. To protect her from the world I had helped create, I erased myself. I let the world believe Katarina was dead, and I became this, this wraith, this whisper in the halls of power. I became a monster to keep other monsters at bay.
Ren was the only one who ever glimpsed the truth without me telling him.
Years ago, when I finally found a lead on my daughter's whereabouts, by then a young FBI agent named Elizabeth Keen, I found myself at a dead end. I was cornered by my enemies, my resources limited by the need for secrecy. I turned to a brilliant young prodigy I had met, a boy who had built a logistics and security firm from nothing, a boy who moved through cyberspace like a ghost.
I presented him with the case. Others would have seen a criminal seeking his protege or his heir. But Ren... he looked at the data, he looked at the photos, he looked at me. And he saw something more. He saw the desperation I hid so well. I don't know how he knew. Perhaps it was his genius for pattern recognition, or perhaps an abandoned child's soul simply recognized a broken parent.
He never asked me why. He never judged me. He simply said, "I will find her for you."
And he did. He delved into the digital darkness, risking his nascent empire and his own life to follow a cold trail across continents. He faced dangerous men on my behalf. And one night, he called and gave me a name and an address. He gave me Elizabeth back.
That act... it was not a favor. It was an absolution. It was a gift of incalculable value. The child who had been torn from his father helped me find my daughter. The debt I incurred that night was not one of money or power. It was a debt of soul. And Raymond Reddington always pays his debts.
My respect for Blair Waldorf, already born in our brief call, solidified. She had not come to me weeping, asking me to fix her broken man. She had gone to work. She had identified a problem, gathered the available intelligence, and activated the most appropriate asset for the mission: me. She didn't act like a lover. She acted like his partner. Like his field commander. She didn't weep for her fallen king, I thought. She went to work forging him a new crown. She was worthy of him.
A soft ping emanated from the laptop on my desk. The first fish had taken the bait.
It was from Brimley, my specialist in torturing financial information. He had found something. A trust fund, established at a private bank in Geneva twenty-eight years ago. It had been anonymously set up, but funded through a series of complex transfers originating from a Japanese technology corporation. The beneficiary was Renard Ishikawa, set to mature on his twenty-fifth birthday. Ren had never claimed it, likely never knew of its existence. But the name of the original settlor, buried under layers of legalese, was Kaito Ishikawa.
A name. The first thread.
I fed it into the system. Cross-referenced it with the information Dembe was pulling from Langley. And there it was. Kaito Ishikawa, a brilliant software engineer and entrepreneur, CEO of a successful Tokyo tech firm in the 1980s. He had abruptly liquidated his assets and resigned nearly thirty years ago. The same year Ren's mother had fled.
Then, the next ping. From the Mossad, via Dembe. The facial recognition software, working with the old photo and aging algorithms, had found a possible match. A man matching 92% of the profile, appearing in a Canadian immigration visa photograph from twenty-five years ago. The name on the visa: Kenji Tanaka. An alias.
Now I had two threads. Kaito Ishikawa and Kenji Tanaka.
I fed both names into my own vast web of intelligence, a system that tracks the shadows of people's lives. And then, the symphony reached its crescendo.
The system connected the dots. Kaito Ishikawa, the engineer. Kenji Tanaka, the immigrant. And then, a third name: Ken Tanaka, the discreet founder and owner of a boutique technology consulting firm based in Vancouver, Canada. A man living a quiet, almost anonymous life, despite owning several very lucrative patents. A man with no apparent family. A ghost, hidden in plain sight.
I activated the visual sweep for Ken Tanaka. The system scanned thousands of hours of security camera footage, event photos, social media. And it appeared. A photo, taken just three months ago at a charity event for the Vancouver symphony orchestra.
It was him. Older, of course. The once dark hair now a distinguished salt-and-pepper at the temples. There were lines of sorrow and time around his eyes. But there was no doubt. The same jawline. The same posture. The same eyes that now looked out at the world from his son's face. The phantom had a face and a name.
The hunt, which for any government agency would have taken months of bureaucracy and dead ends, had taken me less than three hours.
I looked at the face of the man on my screen. The father. The one who had loved and lost. The one who had been made a monster in his own son's mind. My heart felt a pang, not of pity, but of a deep, resonant empathy.
I picked up my secure phone. Not to call Blair. Not yet. It was too soon. First, the confirmation. First, the truth.
My call was to the captain of my private jet.
"Henri," I said, my voice calm, but with a new, hard purpose. "Prepare the jet. Have them plot a flight plan to Vancouver. We depart in one hour."
I hung up the phone and stared at the image of Kaito Ishikawa, the lost father. The debt I owed Ren would not be paid merely with an address and a phone number. It required something more. It required a personal touch. It required one phantom father reaching out to another.
The queen had made her move. Now, the Concierge was going to finish the game. The debt, at last, was about to be paid.