Piotr

Who they are

The second of Arkady Pashkin’s advance men, and the one who shoots. Where Kyril talks and pretends, Piotr is the man who crouches behind a table and fires into heads — he puts a round through James Webb in the first minute of the Needle’s meeting, and is killed by Marcus Longridge’s hidden gun before he can finish the job.

What they want

Nothing the book gives him a voice for. He wants the principal safe, the case unopened and the room controlled; he is the part of Pashkin’s operation that works exactly as designed, which is why the slow horses have to shoot their way out.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C04 — Denies the gun with Kyril, lies about the hotel, and is followed across the City by Min Harper on a bicycle.
• C14 — Frisks Louisa and Marcus at the Needle, and stands by while Pashkin refuses to let his case be searched.
• C15 — Shoots Webb in the chest, then fires at Louisa and Marcus and is killed by Marcus’s shot; his body is found later on the sixty-fifth floor with a chunk of his head missing, smeared on the wall.

Tells

The economy of him: he is described by what he does with his hands — the frisk, the crouch, the shot — and almost never by what he says.

Open questions

Whether he knew the de Koenig floor was the real target, or believed, like Kyril, that he was guarding a summit.