Conspiracy in Kiev

FIFTY-TWO

At a few minutes past 7:00 p.m., Alex sat at her desk, delaying before going home. Springtime had finally come to Washington, and the city enjoyed its best weather of the year. Then the heat of the summer gripped the city in mid-June.

She stared at her two computers. The ice of Kiev seemed a world away, a bitter memory. But it still haunted her. Evenings were difficult. She was afraid of loneliness, afraid that missing a certain someone would overtake her.

She had started to work past her grief. Now she wanted answers.

How long had it been since Kiev? There had been times in the last few weeks when she could have instantly given the answer. It’s been two days, it’s been three. It’s been a week, two weeks. A month. Then a second month. Then a third. Gradually, the story disappeared from the newspapers and the attention of the American public, replaced by other events, other intrigues.

This evening, on a whim, she entered her clearance for a secured Intranet site dedicated to the Kiev visit and the debacle that had transpired there. The screen went blank and she sighed. Then a dialogue box opened that asked for her name.

She entered it. If it was receptive to her name, no one could get on her case for getting access.

The dialogue window accepted her name. Surely someone had failed to purge her. But the next thing she knew, she was in the HUMINT-the human intelligence-leading up to the trip to Kiev.

Except, what was this she saw?

She leaned forward.

The file took new directions with new references. Surely further access codes would cut her off. But they didn’t. She kept exploring.

For the next hour, the files attached to the presidential visit to Kiev took up the known story of what had happened and its aftermath. It was typical of the code of conduct of such things that, having been a principal player in the events of Kiev, she had received no subsequent briefings of how things had gone down or why. She had answered plenty of questions but had received no explanations.

She read report after report, analysis after analysis, of what had happened.

Something bothered her immediately.

Almost everything was written by investigators who had not been there.

She began to notice strange small discrepancies, none that made any significant difference by itself, but enough to bring to mind the principle that if you pushed together enough grains of sand, you would build a beach.

The attackers who had fired the rockets, their weapons and their vehicles, were described differently than she had remembered.

A small mistake? Maybe.

But she recalled that five men had charged the presidential limousine and found it recounted in several records that there were four. The Secret Service detail assigned to the president was listed as twenty-four. She knew there had been twenty-eight.

The official record had been tweaked. Why?

Leaning forward, she attacked the keyboard with more gusto. She referenced names including her own. She traveled through cyberspace to the personnel files and biographies of the government people who had attended the visit to Kiev.

Thirty seven names in all. She scanned them, including her own again, to see if any backgrounds had been fudged. None had that she could see.

She went back and picked up the story. It was now past 8:00 in the evening. The disinformation was accelerating. She brought up her own name and factored in several cross references. She attempted to access the files that she herself had contributed in the lead-up to the trip, mindless low security stuff on trade delegations, black market currency issues, the penny-ante balance of payments stuff, and then the more substantial stuff on Federov.

She found these files had been tampered with too. With a rush, she then went after the reports that she herself had filed in the aftermath of Kiev. These were missing entirely.

She leaned back from her screen.

What was she looking at?

Typical Washington bureaucratic bungling? Or a far larger issue?

She tried to work around the files. She was typing furiously now. Her fiancé was dead and someone-or some agency-was playing fast and loose with the official version of truth.

She reaccessed her own name. She brought up her own reports via a different cyber thread. She found key parts had been deleted.

Her fingers froze again on the keyboard.

She paused. Now her mind was in overdrive. She had been around the government long enough to know that when something came up missing, particularly where the official version of events was concerned, there was never much in the way of coincidence. Bureaucratic incompetence was coin of the realm in government circles, but official tampering always smelled of a rat.

A big fat filthy rat.

She circled back. She reexamined every oblique inference. She went back to the accounting of security people on the trip and counted again. Something smelled wrong here too. She looked for the transcript of the endless interviews she had done with that sick ape named Lee. They were classified elsewhere. Technically, they had never happened, even though she knew they had.

They were like Lagos, Nigeria, and those lousy 419 frauds. She wouldn’t have believed they existed except she had lived through them.

Then she looked for Michael Cerny’s name. She had not seen him for six weeks now. She found no reference. No Olga Liashko, either. Instead, there was a reference to Gerstmann-which was contradicted one page later when the spelling changed and Gerstmann became Gerstman-who had been listed as her case officer before Kiev. In itself, that wouldn’t have made much difference as frequently NSA or CIA people used their work names. It was just that they usually got the spelling of the name right.

She tried to access the work names, Cerny, Gerstman, and Gerstmann. It sounded like a law firm.

Nothing. The cyber-system returned her to “Start.” She glanced at the time in the lower right corner of her computer screen. It was now past 9:00 p.m. She wasn’t even hungry for dinner.

The Treasury corridors were quiet around her, aside from the cleaning crew. She looked up as one of the cleaning ladies went by. “Buenas noches,” she said.

“Buenas noches, señorita,” the cleaning lady said with a smile.

Then Alex jumped. Her computer, the small secure one, suddenly went down. She drew a breath, calmed herself, rebooted her computer and reaccessed her information system.

She had enough questions to fill a volume. Who could answer them? Who could even give her a clue?

She picked up her cell phone. She called the number she had for Michael Cerny. She would pick his mind, whatever his name was, Cerny or Gerstman or Gerstfogle or-

An electronic voice answered. It too startled her. The number she had for the man she had known as Cerny was invalid-a nonworking number.

Slowly, she put her cell phone back down on her desk.

She tried to be rational. Logical. Where was this leading?

A quite extraneous vision of herself assailed her. She pictured herself in Kiev with Robert, the night before he died. Now she kept trying to reconcile her own memory to what she read in the files. She felt a pounding headache creep up on her.

She plunged herself back into the darkest chambers of her memory and found herself sorting through the events of the previous February. She was in some of the worst reaches of her memory; when suicide scenarios tiptoed across her psyche every day.

“If I did die suddenly,” Robert had said not long before his passing, “I would want you to pick up and go on. I would want you to have a life, a family, a soul mate, happiness.”

It was almost as if he was in the room with her, invisible, a ghost, projecting such thoughts.

She glanced back to the monitor. It was alive again. She noticed a box concealed with the security issues. A menu item stared her in the eye: OPERATION CHUCK AND SUSAN.

She heard her own voice fill the room “What the-?”

She tried to access it. Then the screen flashed again.

ACCESS DENIED.

She returned again to “Start” and attempted to retrace her path. But the security system blocked her from her first strokes. In terms of intelligence pertaining to Kiev, she might have lived it personally, but she was now locked out.

FIFTY-THREE

The next morning at 10:00 a.m., Alex knocked on the door to the office of her boss, Mike Gamburian.

“Got a minute?” she asked.

“Uh oh,” he said. “Sure.”

She entered. He motioned that she should close the door.

“I have to tell you,” Alex said. “I think I came back here too soon.”

“We can’t blame you for trying,” he said. “And God knows the president wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t reacted the way you did. So your government and your employer owe you a big one.”

She managed an ironic smile. “God knows a lot of things that I know,” she said, “but God also knows a lot of things that I don’t. Mind if I sit?”

“I can use the company,” he said.

Alex sat. “Why am I a pariah?” she asked.

Mike Gamburian looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Don’t play games, Mike. You’re my boss. If my access to information has been curtailed, you would know about it. If you know about it, you would also know why. That’s why I’m in your office right now, and that’s why I’m going to present you with my resignation in one minute.”

He sighed. “Let’s go downstairs for a smoke,” he said.

“Neither of us smoke,” she said.

“I just started,” he said. “Bad habit, I know. I need to quit. So let’s go have a cigarette.”

At the same time he made a gesture with his hand, pointing to the two of them and the doorway. She got it. They went down the elevator together in silence, not a single cigarette between them.

Then they stood on the outside of the front entrance of Treasury, standing a careful distance away from those who really were smoking.

They talked around the issue for several minutes.

“Look,” Gamburian finally said, “the first thing… I’m your friend. You’re a great woman and a fantastic employee. If you need to leave, I don’t blame you, but I want you to know I’d hire you back in a flash any day of the week.”

“I can’t do my job if I can’t access information, Mike. And I resent being excluded from an investigation of an incident that cost Robert his life. I want answers and I’m not getting them here.”

“Okay,” he said. “I understand. There’s been some talk. Crap I can’t do anything about. No one in the Western Hemisphere has a single negative thing to say about you. The way you handled things in Ukraine was beyond reproach. The first thing I need to tell you is that you can stay here. There’d be a promotion coming your way, added pay, the works.”

“In a job with no responsibility, right? Where someone’s going to be looking over my shoulder the whole time, right?”

He blew past her point.

“The second thing is that if you wanted to take more time off, with pay, that option is open to you too. No one’s going to hold it against you.” He paused. “I had a talk with the big boss. You could take up to a year if you wanted without a problem.”

“You’re talking in circles, Mike. If everything is hearts and flowers, what is the problem?”

“They think you know something,” he said. “Something more than you’re telling them.”

“Why would I conceal anything?”

“That’s what I asked them also.”

“Who’s ‘them’?” she snapped. “Who are we talking about?”

“The powers that be.”

“CIA? NSA? White House? Secret Service?”

He blinked twice. “I honestly can’t answer that.”

“You don’t know or you can’t answer?”

“I can’t answer,” he said crisply.

She seethed and stifled a profanity. “I’ve told them everything I know. Probably about three times with every detail I can remember.”

“I’m sure you have,” he said. “Thing is, they think you might know something that you’re not even aware of.”

“Have they questioned you?”

“Quite a bit.”

She sighed. She nodded. “Okay,” she finally said. “Then I want to clear out of here. I’ll accept that leave of absence.”

“Where will you go?”

“I received a message from Joseph Collins after Kiev. The businessman. You know who he is.”

“Everyone knows who he is,” Gamburian said. “He’s like Donald Trump but without the funny hair.”

“Mr. Collins has contacted me three times since Kiev.”

“How do you know him?”

“I worked for him several years ago. He mentored me in a way. Summer of 2001.”

Gamburian nodded.

“He’s a decent man and a good employer. He has an offer he wants to make to me. A job. I don’t know anything about it, but somehow he knew I might want to take leave of here.”

“He’s savvy to the ways of the world, Collins is, which is why he’s so wealthy. He also knows how the government works.”

“The job would take me back to New York. I should listen to what he has to say.”

“You’d be a fool not to.” Gamburian nodded sadly. “What type of job? Do you have any idea?”

“Mr. Collins is in his seventies now. He’s been using a lot of his fortune to help the Christian churches fight poverty and disease in the Third World,” she said. “That has its appeal to me right now. So I’m going to listen to what he has to offer, do some soul searching, look for some divine guidance if I can get some, and then see where I am.”

Gamburian followed.

“Hopefully at the end of the day I’ll be in the right place,” she said.

“I have no doubt you will. No doubt at all.”

He embraced her.

“I’m sorry it turned out like this here,” he said. “Really, I am.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

FIFTY-FOUR

Lt. Rizzo finally was making progress. Or at least he thought he was.

He remained visibly furious that people from the US Embassy had removed the two bodies from the morgue and sent them back to America. But he was not about to let that stop his investigation. Inside, he didn’t care much what they did with those corpses, but he was not shy about vocalizing his stated displeasure.

Allora bene, he thought to himself. Very well. If they wanted to block his direct access to resolving four murders by blockading his route to two of the bodies, he would pursue the matter from a different direction. Over the last decade, the Americans had been directed by a bunch of know-nothings who lacked the sophistication to understand how other countries, other governments, worked. He would fly under their radar, he told everyone he worked with, then bored everyone with another rant about American duplicity and interference.

Accordingly, his people had tracked down the drug-addled musician by going through pay receipts in the apartment where he had lived. Rizzo personally had interviewed the dead guitarist’s disgusting band mates and the owners of the club where he had played. He had even found the marriage license of the girl who had died with him in the apartment and now knew her name was Lana Bissoni and she was indeed from Toronto.

From there he had the location of the wife’s family back in Canada. Rizzo was not surprised to learn that they hadn’t heard from her in five years. Nonetheless, Rizzo allowed her body to be shipped to Ontario.

Rizzo and his other detectives spent hours canvassing the building where the couple died and the club where the musicians had played. He knew that the key to any criminal investigation was talking to the day-to-day people who are in the same place every day. The people who see things and eventually tell you something.

From there he accessed some of the girl’s friends and people who knew the couple from the nearby cafés. Apparently, Lana and her husband had had some fallings out of late. She hadn’t been in the habit of showing up in the clubs where he was playing. In turn, she seemed to have fallen in with some of the Eastern European underworld that populated Rome.

Well, no wonder she “woke up one day and was dead,” as Rizzo liked to say. You can’t sleep with a dog without waking up with fleas. And certainly, in his opinion, many of these Eastern Europeans from the old Soviet republics were packs of mutts.

Now at least he had a direction to send his investigators.

He called another special meeting at his headquarters. He assembled all four of his newly acquired homicide people. They were each allowed to select one top assistant. So now he had eight people on this case, in addition to the ragazzi in the computer rooms, the interns, who acted as wild cards and who knew when they were going to come up with something good.

Then, finally, he used the extensive contacts he had with the underworld to make inquiries about the mafia ucraina in Rome. Had there been any special activity, he asked. Did anyone know of any shooters who had come into the city, done a job, then vanished? The local Italian hoods had no love for the foreigners who were coming into the city and cutting into their rackets. They hated the Russian and Ukrainian mobsters almost as much as Rizzo did. They would welcome the opportunity to put the heat on some of them.

But the inquiries turned up nothing. Whenever Rizzo and his people mentioned the Ukrainians, someone always changed the topic to the near-death of the American president in Kiev.

A lawless place and a lawless people, the Italians said. A true frontier of civilization. Dangerous.

FIFTY-FIVE

The Stanhope Hotel was on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-third Street, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a regal old building dating from the 1920s, parked on some of the world’s most expensive real estate. Its open-air terrace on street level stretched to the neighboring building that was every bit as distinguished.

The terrace was a relaxing place for drinks. In the middle was an island bar, surrounded by tables. Thick dark wood, accented by potted palms.

Alex arrived a few minutes before noon. Her one-time employer, the entrepreneur Joseph Collins, arrived almost simultaneously from the opposite direction, walking briskly.

Collins was a sturdy man for his age. He had led a good life, staying away from vices and excesses, active in the Methodist Church all his life. He had been married to the same woman for forty-two years, a woman whom he still referred to affectionately as “my best girl” and whom he described as “a cookie-baking Methodist.”

The clean living showed. Collins possessed an easy grace. He kept one of his many residences a few blocks up Fifth Avenue, a co-op encompassing the top three floors of one of Manhattan’s most exclusive buildings. He owned an even more impressive spread in London, and then there was his “little boat,” as he liked to call it, the two-hundred-foot one, in Key Biscayne.

Mr. Collins’s bodyguard, burly and pink-faced, in dark wraparound shades, a suit, and an open-collared shirt, took up an unobtrusive position by the front entrance, saying nothing. The bodyguard buried himself in a New York Post as he kept one eye on the entrance to the terrace. To Alex, the bodyguard had ex-NYPD written all over him. An even closer glance told her that he carried his weapon on the left side under the arm.

Alex and Joseph Collins found places at a reserved table on a far edge of the terrace, recessed back into a carefully secluded corner.

A waitress, young and pretty, cleared the extra place settings and brought them coffee. They ordered fruit and a plate of breakfast rolls. The waitress wore a name tag that said Priscilla. Her softly accented English suggested that she came from somewhere in the Caribbean.

“So,” Alex said at length, turning to her former boss and breaking the ice, “normally when we meet you tell me ahead of time what’s on your agenda.”

“Well, first I wanted to know how you might be feeling, how you were recovering,” Collins said. “God knows, you’ve been through hell and back, haven’t you?”

“The answers are ‘okay’ and ‘okay,’ ” she said.

“So I see,” he answered.

“I appreciated the flowers and the notes. And the calls. Honestly, I did.”

“The least I could do. I know how horrible it must have been,” he said. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention it.”

“Thank you. I’m trying to move on.”

“Is the government seeing after you?” Collins asked.

“To the extent that they ever do,” she said. “There are some wrinkles.”

“Anything I can help you with? I know the president personally, plus both of the current New York senators.”

“I’ll be okay,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just going to take me some time.”

“What are you planning to doing with yourself other than meditate, haunt art galleries, and go to Yankee games while you’re in New York?” he asked.

“It depends how long I can use your son’s apartment. Very generous of you, by the way. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“He’s away on one of his missionary visits?” she asked.

“Yes. We have a few places around the world, as you know. He’s in Brazil right now. Rough posting. He brought it on himself. It’s the work he wants to do.”

She smiled.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Let’s talk about why you’re here. ¿Qué tal tu español?”

“Buenísimo. Excelente. Hablo muy bien todavía. ¿Y por qué?” Very good. Excellent. I still speak well, I think. Why?

“How do you feel about some travel?” he asked.

“To where?”

“South America. A trouble spot.”

The waitress arrived with the fruit and the rolls. Alex appreciated the breather. Mini-Danishes and mini-croissants. Collins offered the plate to Alex before taking anything himself.

A noisy group of women, tourists, moved into a nearby table. One of them noticed Collins and nudged her acquaintances, a celebrity sighting in Manhattan.

“I know it’s only been a few months since Kiev,” he said. “That can seem like a short time or a long time. Do you think you’re ready for something new?”

“I’m ready to listen,” Alex said.

“Then I’m ready to make you an interesting offer,” he answered. “Have you ever been to Venezuela?”

“A couple of times. When I was with the Treasury Department.”

“Caracas?”

“That and Maracaibo.”

Collins drew a breath and began. “I need someone to fly down to Venezuela and troubleshoot a problem for me. Someone who’s good with people, speaks the language fluently, has good instincts for trouble, and most of all someone I can trust.”

“I’m flattered.”

“First class airfare, the proper support and security when you get there. Just meet some people, assess what’s going on, come back, and report to me.”

“Sounds easy,” she said. “It couldn’t possibly be.”

“You’re right. It won’t be. I’d guess it would take you maybe a month to properly complete the assignment. I’d pay you twenty thousand dollars for the month, plus expenses. You’d need to go almost immediately. Sorry about the weather conditions this time of year. It’s brutally hot.” He smiled. “You’re going to think you died and went to the wrong place. How’s that sound? Miserable?”

“I’m still listening,” she said.

“For almost five years, I’ve been financing a group of Christian missionaries who have been living among a large tribe of primitive indigenous people,” Collin explained. “They’re in a village named Barranco Lajoya. It’s a very remote area south of the Orinoco River in the Guayana region. Very rugged area in the southeastern quadrant of the country, not far north of the border with Brazil. Not that there are signs posted in the jungle. Most of the region doesn’t even have accurate maps yet.”

“What are they doing, the missionaries?” she asked.

“They import medical care and are also trying to bring electricity to the area. They also support the local churches. Methodists, Episcopalians, and a cross section of evangelicals. Americans mostly, some Canadians, several others. Our people have also learned the indigenous language. It’s mostly an Indian dialect, but with a lot of corrupted Spanish. They’re translating the Bible into the indigenous language. That way they can bring the good news to the people. If they want it.”

“Commendable,” she said.

“I like to think so,” he said. “My gift, if they choose to accept it. Look, it’s not even that big an operation. The costs on the ground are quite minimal. I think my whole budget on this is maybe two hundred thousand dollars a year. Maybe two twenty-five. Small stuff.”

“For you, maybe.”

“Granted, for me. I’ve been blessed in my life, so I try to pass it along while I’m still on this earth. And this is also a pet project, you understand, translating the Bible into a new tongue. I’m convinced it’s helping the people who are there, and the missionaries like what they’re doing. I’d like to keep things going in the right direction.”

“So what’s the problem?” Alex asked.

“Well, after some considerable early success, we’re being sabotaged. A lot of our work gets undone. There seems to be an effort coming from somewhere to discourage our people and drive the missionaries out of the country.”

“That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

“Very. Most countries in Central and South America encourage missionaries even if they don’t like them. They bring dollars and provide social services the governments are unwilling or unable to provide.”

“ ‘An effort coming from somewhere,’ ” Alex repeated, thinking back a beat, framing Collins’ own words. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Caracas. Washington. Maybe Havana.” He paused. “There are a few ragtag guerrilla organizations in the area, but the army keeps them in check.”

She sipped her coffee. “So interference with missionaries doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s South America. It’s Venezuela. It doesn’t have to.”

Collins produced a sealed manila envelope and handed it to her.

“Obviously, your ultimate job is to report back to me on where the problems are coming from. And what we can do about it, if anything.”

She nodded.

“The Venezuelan government is hostile to us right now, as you know, I’m sure. And the country is almost as lawless as Colombia, next door.”

She nodded. “I’ll take your file with me today,” she said. “Whatever is in it, I want to give it some thought.”

“Fair enough,” he said. He paused, then added, “I should mention one or two more things. Right up front.”

She waited. From the nearby table, the tourists had stopped staring. They turned their attention to the menus.

“I sent someone down there seven weeks ago,” Collins said. “A security man named Diego. Former marine. A very good man. Someone set him up with a mobile phone that was rigged as a bomb. In a hotel bar in Caracas. When he used the phone the first time, he was-how did they say it locally?-decapitado.”

A pause. “So someone’s playing for keeps.”

“Someone doesn’t want us there, for whatever reason. And I fear that some of my missionaries and their villages are coming into the line of fire, too.” He paused. “You’ll need to wear a gun for protection. God forbid that you ever have to use it. But as I said, it’s a rough area. Jungle cats. Poisonous bats. A lot of snakes.”

“As well as the two-legged dangers,” she said. “Correct?”

“I want to be right up front about what you might be getting into.”

“Then I’ll be up front with you,” she said. “You’re asking me to do something for you and for the church. I’m appreciative of that. But…” She paused. “You’re talking to a woman whose faith… is badly shaken right now. I’m still recovering from Kiev and asking a whole lot of questions about how God could let something like this happen to me.”

“I know that, Alex. But I also know what you’re like. You need to plunge right back into something.” A shadow passed over his face. “Do you know what Gandhi, a Hindu, said to some British army officers during the battle for Indian independence?”

“What?” she asked.

“He said, ‘Jesus was a good and moral man. The trouble with many of you Christians is that you’re nothing like him.’ That’s why I keep the missions going, feeding the hungry, supplying medical care, doing what I can to fight poverty and illiteracy. I asked myself what Jesus would have done if he’d made all this money in hotels and restaurants.”

She laughed.

“And that was the answer that came to me. So these missions will continue while I’m alive and afterward. I hope you can help.”

“I’ll do my reading tonight, Mr. Collins,” she said.

She reached to her neck, where the gold cross used to be. Nervous tic time again. The jewelry was missing, of course, except in her memory.

“If you’re willing to go forward after you read the file,” he said, “I’m going to put you in touch with a man I’ve recently hired to advise me on some Latin American issues. His name is Sam Deal. Ever heard the name?”

“I might have. It rings a bell.”

“Sam used to work for Washington. I’ve known him for many years. He’s no one’s fool. He can give you an objective picture of what you’re getting into.”

Alex nodded. Somewhere she had heard Deal’s name. Then she pegged it. Her friend Laura who worked at the White House had had issues with him.

“I’ve tentatively arranged for you to meet with Sam tomorrow morning at eleven if you wish to proceed. He’s in town for a few days. He has time to meet.”

Alex nodded again.

“Sam would also be your weapons guy when you get to Caracas. You won’t be able to fly with a gun, obviously, but I’ll make sure you have protection as soon as you get there. Sam won’t be in Caracas, but one of his people will arrange things. Don’t worry about clothing for going out in the jungle. What size do you take?”

“Ten, American.”

“I’ll arrange for some gear. Shoes?”

“Nine. Wardrobe and firearms. You think of everything.”

He laughed.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Collins,” she said, “you can be a bit of a contradiction.”

“How’s that?”

“You want to send me on a mission of peace, but the first thing you do is supply armament.”

“It’s a cruel, mean world,” he said. “I want you to be safe.”

She smiled. “Sounds like you think I’m going.”

“I rather have my hopes up,” he said.

She grinned slightly and pushed back from the table. If nothing else, the offer was both flattering and exciting. But she wasn’t sure how much flattery or excitement she was in the mood for these days.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll look at everything. Then I’ll call you tomorrow.”

From Collins’s lips, she saw the trace of a grin.

“Thank you, Alex,” he said.

By the entrance to the terrace, there was a sudden commotion that grabbed her attention. Outside on the sidewalk, a noisy homeless man accosted an older couple passing by. Alex watched as the man aggressively pursued them. The older couple hurried their pace. Alex rose to her feet. If no one else would do anything about it, she would.

Collins placed a gentle hand on her wrist. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said.

“But-?”

Collins then nodded to his bodyguard. The bodyguard, obviously seeking any small piece of action he could find, moved with the grace and speed of a much younger man. He interposed himself between the couple and their assailant.

The panhandler attempted to shove the bodyguard in return. Bad idea. Mr. Collins’s hired hand sent the vagrant hurtling in a different direction, and he disappeared.

FIFTY-SIX

Alex’s apartment on East Twenty-first Street in Manhattan was a very quiet unimposing place, considering its location, and perfectly suited to her needs.

It was nestled into the back of a walk-up building first constructed in 1900, third floor rear, just twenty yards east of Second Avenue. The block itself was quiet, although traffic rumbled southbound on the avenue all day and all night.

Inside the furnished one-bedroom apartment, all windows overlooked a rear courtyard. The two rooms were a witch’s brew of clashing wallpapers, lamp shades, aging furniture, and worn carpets. It reflected the lifestyle of Joseph Collins’s son, Daniel, whose interests were far from the worldly or the run-of-the mill.

The younger Collins, single and about forty, had grown up wealthy, had worked in his father’s businesses for many years, but had also gone to seminary at Southern Methodist. Alex had never met him but had spoken to him on the phone from time to time. At age thirty-five he had left his father’s industries to help administer his father’s Christian philanthropies. There were a collection of pictures on the walls and on tables of Daniel trotting the globe; in Africa, in central America, in South America, in New Mexico, and one-presumably to get a nasty dose of some colder climates-in Labrador.

The pictures showed the young man-these days forty was considered young-in various villages or cities. He looked content with his mission and his missions. Everyone should be so lucky.

Alex quickly took a measure of the other people in the building. The upstairs neighbor was an actor who was out of town, and the downstairs neighbor was the landlord, “Lady Dora” Rose, as she called herself.

“Lady Dora” was a quintessential New Yorker, an elf of a woman in her late sixties. She had been left a pair of brownstones including this one. But the story, as Alex heard it on arrival, got even better.

Lady Dora’s late husband, Marvin, had owned a newsstand that had specialized in thoroughbred and harness racing tout sheets and sporting publications. His store also featured a telephone that never stopped ringing. Marvin, who was fifteen years older than Dora when they wed, had gone out for a walk one night in June 1977 and never came back. Presumably he was still walking.

The “Rose” in Lady Dora’s name was a truncation of “Rosenberg,” which had been Marvin’s name, and the “Lady” was a figment of her own inflated sense of grandeur.

“I made it up so I could be an interesting person,” she told Alex when Alex asked about it. “Then for ninety-four dollars I had had it legally added to my name.”

Lady Dora showed Alex a New York State driver’s license to prove it. Not that she drove or owned a car. Over the years, Lady Rose had also acquired a hint of a British accent, though more often than not the Brooklyn one she had been born with also surfaced. Lady Dora also introduced Alex to Sajit, the handyman, who came in for ten hours a week off the books to sweep the floors, fix the plumbing, and replace lightbulbs.

Sajit was from Sri Lanka. He was a slim, tiny, fastidiously neat man who always wore a white dress shirt with shiny black pants. Today was no exception. Under Lady Rose’s critical eye, he set up a rickety card table with a pair of heavily dented metal folding chairs, the type often seen as props at wrestling matches.

“You will take good care of everything in Daniel’s place, won’t you?” Lady Rose asked. “Daniel’s a wonderful young man. He has a famous father, you know.”

“Daniel’s father arranged with you to let me in,” Alex said.“ Remember?”

“Yes. Of course.” Lady Dora shook her head. It was four in the afternoon the day that Alex had met with Joseph Collins at the Stanhope. The landlady was barefoot in the front vestibule and wore a pink bathrobe, her gray hair in bobby pins. She was on one of her daily rants. This one ended when she spotted the resident of 3-C, a self-proclaimed “documentary film maker” whose work was sold only over the Internet. Alex had a hunch that the man’s oeuvre might be unsuitable for family viewing.

He was in trouble with Lady Dora for something, so Alex headed upstairs with the file in her hand and closed her door on the argument that ensued. It was at this moment that she made a note to phone Ben later that evening, just to vent. Calls between them were becoming more frequent. Alex appreciated the friendship more with each passing week.

That evening, Alex settled into this cozy atmosphere on East Twenty-first Street. She spread out some yogurt and fruit on the small dining table, turned it into her evening meal, and then repaired to the sofa in the living room to read.

Alex embarked upon her reading at a few minutes past eight in the evening.

For years, as the file explained in detail, Collins had been quietly financing the missionaries at a village named Barranco Lajoya in a mountainous region of southeastern Venezuela. The missionaries rotated in and out. There were several teams of them who worked in shifts ranging from six months to two years.

They had been living among a large tribe of primitive indigenous people, learning their language so that they could translate the Bible into it and bring the Christian faith to them. Some of the missionaries doing this work lived with the Indians for at least a year or two in order to learn the language and create an alphabet for it, and then translate the Bible. Some of them brought their families. Their children grew up in these remote villages. There had been considerable early success, first bringing literacy itself to these people, then bringing the Christian faith. And yet, after considerable early success, there then appeared to be an effort to destroy the missionaries’ work and force them to leave the country.

A school built by the missionaries and the villagers had caught fire one night. Livestock had disappeared. The local streams, tributaries of the Rio Xycapo, had been polluted by industrial waste from a higher elevation. Yet there was no industry at higher elevations, and no known settlements. That meant that the waste had been brought in and dumped.

But why? The villagers had nothing that anyone would want. They were simple people who had been self-sufficient for centuries. Why should anything change now? The people were so remote that who could care enough about them to victimize them?

Perhaps, conjectured the writer of this document, the interest of outsiders was enough by itself to put the small tribe on someone’s list of enemies.

Alex began making notes in the margins, observations and questions to ask Mr. Collins when she reported back to him. She started to feel a pull toward these people. It was as if this was the path now intended for her. This mission to Venezuela emerged as something different than anything she had ever done in her life, exactly the type of thing she wanted to do. Against what she had expected, she was interested. An open mind could be dangerous.

She skipped ahead to a photo section. She scanned through several dozen photos of the village of Barranco Lajoya and its people; smiling faces of barefoot children, a classroom bringing literacy, a medical clinic set up, a joint Episcopal-Methodist-Baptist service in a small church. Kids playing soccer.

There were before-and-after shots of people who had received care from Collins’s medical people. She was impressed. The man was doing good in corners of the world that badly needed benefactors. In return, he asked for nothing.

She waded through a background section on their village culture, then ran smack into an assessment of current-day Venezuela and its government.

The government of Venezuela was headed by President Hugo Chávez. His fanatically anti-American policies didn’t make life any easier for Collins or his missionaries. Collins had had the foresight to send Christian workers with supposedly neutral passports-there were three Canadians, two Hondurans, and one English nurse there at the time that Alex read the dossier-all of whom spoke good-to-native-speaker Spanish. But the activities of foreigners in a village in the jungle aroused the ire and suspicion of paranoid rulers in Caracas.

Chávez, Alex knew, was a former paratrooper who staged an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992. He was a latter-day blend of the populist Juan Perón and the totalitarian Fidel Castro. Chávez had assumed office of president democratically in 1998 after winning an election in which he ran on a populist platform. Chávez had long been convinced-not necessarily incorrectly and not that he hadn’t brought it on himself-that the United States government had a hand in an unsuccessful coup attempt against him in 2002.

He remained obsessed with the idea that the US wanted to assassinate him. Given the long history of CIA involvement in almost all left-leaning countries in Latin America, there was a real rationale behind his fears. Castro had survived an exploding cigar, a booby-trapped conch shell, and a poisoned milk shake among numerous other “gifts” from the enterprising souls at various workshops in Langley, Virginia.

Further, as Chávez had already survived two attempts on his life, there was possibly something imminent to his assassination fears.

Chávez not only made no secret of his concern, but also paraded it regularly on his highly popular radio talk show, Aló Presidente, which was aimed at his power base, the poor and working-class people of Venezuela. Further, his overt hostility to the US, open admiration for Fidel Castro, close ties with the FARC-las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-guerrillas in neighboring Colombia, and tight control over the huge Venezuelan oil industry, had made him a thorn in Washington’s side.

Alex read carefully. The dossier continued.

Chávez recently seemed to have made overtures of toning down the anti-American rhetoric and making Venezuelan oil more accessible to North America. But he would do this only if the new US administration would cease both its efforts to undermine him and to isolate him from other Latin American countries.

The author of the document wrote: “The United States government is anxious for a shot at a more ready access to Venezuelan oil. We are ready to reconcile with him.”

Yet next Alex ran into a set of political contradictions. While a US-Venezuelan rapprochement was in the offing, it still appeared that there were powers attempting to run the Indians off their land. Considering the mood of the two governments, who could have been behind that?

Chávez? Washington?

The international petroleum cartels?

Business interests would not have wanted to antagonize either government, and the local Indians didn’t seem to have anything worth taking. They had no other tribes in the area that they were at war with, and there were no guerrilla activities in the area.

Applying what she knew about the area, the land, the political climate, and the geography, it was unlikely that there was any “spill over” activity from Colombia or Brazil. Was it just the proposition that Christianity was being spread to a native people that had antagonized someone?

Something was missing from the overall picture. As Joseph Collins had described it, it didn’t make sense. She was forty pages into a forty-six page document and increasingly drawn to the assignment. After all, as Collins had suggested, her assignment was to go and observe.

To troubleshoot. To report back and not get involved.

She turned the page to the final section. And then suddenly, almost out of nowhere, she was smacked in the face by what she was reading.

An eerie series of events and associations began to come together.

A visit of the US secretary of state to Caracas was currently being planned for sometime in the following year.

Alex cringed and felt like slamming the file shut right there. The president had not left the United States since the bloody debacle in Kiev. The mission of the US secretary of state in Caracas was a test to see if potentially a US president could make a safe visit to a foreign country. American foreign policy had been so unpopular around the world in the last decade-the residual legacy of one particular US administration-that conventional wisdom suggested that the American president could no longer travel abroad. The catastrophe in Kiev was the event that was viewed as proof of this theory.

Yet despite Kiev, the new administration in Washington was pushing hard to distance itself from its predecessor. What influence did America have around the world if its heads of state couldn’t make state visits? A successful visit by the secretary of state would be a key step toward reestablishing that position, just as new the administrations of Sarkozy in France and Brown in Britain had renewed French and British influence respectively, at least until the new leaders could muddy their own waters.

Alexandra’s old instincts and skills started to kick in, even though she was in a “civilian” role now. To her it was obvious: in Venezuela, a massive security and diplomatic mess would confront the secretary of state.

And then another terrifying discovery presented itself.

As noted, Chávez had long been suspected of having ties to the FARC, the Marxist rebels in Colombia who finance themselves through the cocaine business. But Alex now read a short paper citing that these rebels, through major drug dealers, also had ties to the extensive Ukrainian Mafia. She thought back on how Federov had brokered a deal for a mothballed submarine to go to Colombian narcotics dealers.

She closed the file, shuddered, and wondered if her fears would keep her away from Venezuela. She hated to be intimidated by thinking a task was beyond her. And Mr. Collins was right: she did need to sink her teeth into something new.

And yet, there were two Kiev connections: a state visit and activity by the Ukrainian Mafia. In her line of work, there were no coincidences.

Were there?

She spent several moments in thought, then reached for her cell phone. She called Mr. Collins to confirm the meeting with Sam for eleven the next morning at a plush venue on New York’s Central Park South.

Then she broke a beer out of the refrigerator, kicked back with some music, and phoned Ben in Washington, just to say hi and tell him, in vague terms, what was up and to hear a friendly reassuring voice.

It was only after she hung up, knowing herself as well as she did, that she realized there was yet another reason she had made the call. She was trying to get Kiev off her mind once again.

FIFTY-SEVEN

In Rome, Mimi had been doing excellent work.

Lt. Rizzo wrangled her some extra salary. He set her loose across the universe of cyberspace for hours. She hacked into much of the known information about the Ukrainian Mafia in Italy and even discovered that some of those missing weapons from the US Navy may have been trafficked by a shadowy outfit known as The Caspian Group.

As she was using the money to further her art studies, the dough came in handy. Rizzo used the young woman’s information to focus on any of The Caspian Group’s activities in Rome, including that of its leader and his bodyguards. Rizzo worked some theories: who was in Rome when the murders were committed? Who might have a grievance against the two couples who had been murdered? Using sources of the Roman police department, and some darker sources of his own that he had on the side, he went around to the people who had known the musician and his girlfriend.

He showed surveillance pictures. He focused on one of Federov’s bodyguards, a man known only as Anatoli.

Then, with an eye toward cyberspace, he went back to Mimi. He set her to work researching Anatoli. Soon she had his cell phone number and dropped a tap on it.

One night after work, Rizzo asked Mimi if she could accompany him for a light dinner. He said the suggestion was purely professional, there was more work she could do, and it would be at a much higher salary. Rizzo also explained that he had someone he wanted her to meet, a guest from out of town.

She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Why not?”

An hour later, Mimi found herself with Lt. Rizzo at a dressy trat-toria a few blocks from the government buildings and popular among foreigners. Dressed in her usual colorful blouse and micro-miniskirt, she felt herself somewhat out of place among all the expensive suits and designer clothes. She was the youngest female in the place. But she quickly got used to the attention she drew and enjoyed it.

She and Rizzo were met there by a man to whom Rizzo showed great deference, but whom Rizzo didn’t introduce by name. He spoke Italian fluently but with a trace of an accent that she couldn’t place. And there was something ominous about him.

Mimi was nobody’s fool, so she studied the man very carefully as they engaged in conversation. She guessed that he and Rizzo underestimated her powers of everyday perception. The man’s shoes looked American and he wore one of those rings-she thought it was a high school or college thing-that Americans wore. He had a wedding band too. But Rizzo had always been so vocally anti-American. It didn’t make sense to her. So she tried something.

“You know,” she said in English, “we could speak English if you like. My mother is American. I speak English well.”

The stranger grinned. “Grazie, pero, non,” he said, remaining in Italian. Thank you but, no. We are in Rome, he explained, so we will speak as the Romans do.

She didn’t press the point. Rizzo’s friend moved quickly to a proposition he had for her, a one-time task. A special assignment for which she would be well compensated in cash. Lots of cash.

Anatoli was back in Rome, they said, and would be for another few days. They showed her a picture of him. He was a sturdy-looking Russian Ukrainian with dirty blond hair.

“Handsome, no?” Rizzo asked.

Mimi nodded. “You want me to seduce him?” she asked, more a routine inquiry than a opportunity to volunteer.

No, they said quickly, it wasn’t exactly like that. It was more like a game of pin the tail on the donkey.

“What’s that?” she asked.

The man with no name showed Mimi a small devise in a plastic case. It looked like a small needle with a flat head like a tack. They said they knew where Anatoli liked to go to party in Rome. They had a well-armed young man who would accompany her that night, but could she somehow see how close she could get to Anatoli… and maybe stick the needle into his clothing somewhere.

She laughed.

“So it’s a transmitting device, right?” She laughed with great enthusiasm.

The two men looked at each other, then back to Mimi.

“Possibly,” said Rizzo.

“How am I supposed to get close enough to pin the device on him?” she asked.

“You’re a pretty young woman, no?” Rizzo asked, stating the obvious. “I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

She thought about it. “I don’t know,” she began.

She was still thinking about it when they piled five hundred Euros on the table. “That’s just for trying,” Rizzo said. “There’s another five hundred if you’re successful.”

“This Anatoli,” she said. “He killed someone, yes?”

They didn’t say no.

“Why don’t you just arrest him?” she asked.

“Lack of evidence,” Rizzo answered swiftly. “Life is like that, Mimi. Sometimes what we know to be true is not something that we can prove to be true. Equally, sometimes what is true isn’t and what isn’t true, in reality, is.” Mimi blinked. Rizzo exited his philosophical riff almost more confused than when he had entered it, unless he wasn’t. He paused and smiled at his own verbal gymnastics as his guest looked at him strangely. “Plus,” he continued, “Anatoli and his friends are very bad men. There are other ways to take care of them other than a time-consuming and frustrating adherence to the letter of the law.”

“What sort of ‘other ways’?” she asked.

“Many other ways,” Rizzo said.

Rizzo’s friend reached into his jacket and piled another three hundred Euros on the table.

“And that’s just for listening,” he said. “Okay, Mimi?”

She smiled. “I’m all ears,” she said, picking up the money and pocketing it. “This sounds like a blast!”

FIFTY-EIGHT

Alex liked to walk in New York, watching the neighborhoods change as she moved briskly at a pace with Manhattan. She found herself at Central Park South within half an hour of leaving her apartment. Sam Deal was seated outside on a terrace at the Café de la Paix.

Alex recognized Sam from a description Mr. Collins had given. He was a tall, thick man, gray-haired, pale-faced, with a neat moustache. He wore violet-hued wraparound sunglasses that looked far too young for him. The shades were more Brad Pitt than Tom Clancy, and Sam was definitely more of the latter than the former.

Alex studied Sam as she approached. He was glancing at his watch. Then he turned toward her, and his eyes settled, wandering up and down. His glasses were low across a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. His hands were on the table, unmoving, not far from a drink and a pack of smokes. A copy of the New York Daily News was open in front of him, and Sam appeared to have been immersed in the sports section, soaking up the previous evening’s boxing at Sunnyside Garden, a card of Irish and Italians against Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.

She approached him. “I’m Alex LaDuca.”

“Ah,” he said. “Good. Great.”

Sam stood. He extended a big raw hand and shook hers. “I’m Sam Deal,” he said. “Call me Sam. That’s what my parents called me.”

Alex sat down and ordered a sparkling water. From the get-go, as she sipped her drink, she didn’t like Sam. He looked and sounded like the kind of guy who, as a kid, would have stolen other kids’ lunch money in third grade.

“So you’re going to South America, huh? For Mr. Collins?” he asked at length.

“That’s right. Venezuela. If I take the assignment.”

“What did you say your name was?”

She gave it again.

“You any relation to the former Mets catcher, Paul LoDuca?”

“That’s my husband,” she said.

“The ballplayer ain’t married,” he answered.

“That’s right. LoDuca and LaDuca. It’s spelled different. No relation at all, but I like the player. Outstanding catcher, dependable hitter.”

Sam laughed. “I’m impressed. You got some sass to you.”

“Thanks.”

“And you work for Mr. Collins?”

“That’s correct. For Mr. Collins.”

“Well, that’s a great thing too,” he said. “We both work for him. So I better be polite to you and tell you what I know. Tell me, you interested in coming back from this assignment alive?”

The question took her completely off guard. “I was hoping to,” she answered.

“Well, good start,” he said. “See, I got this attitude toward Latin America. My feeling is we should blow up Cuba and stuff it into the Panama Canal. How’s that?”

“Write to your senator and suggest it.”

“Well, no matter,” he said. “Look, let’s get out of here, and Sam will tell you everything you need to know. Shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes. Let’s walk.”

Sam downed a full gin and tonic and popped a straw hat on his head that reminded Alex of The Buena Vista Social Club. On the hat was a football booster’s pin that Sam was quick to explain without being asked.

SEC. Ole Miss.

Sam’s boy played football, he explained. “He’s a big dumb kid but he’s a great linebacker,” Sam said. “Got a shot at the pros.”

“Congratulations.”

Sam said he was planning to get down to Oxford, Mississippi, for all the home games.

They crossed the street and were about to enter Central Park. “Hey. Let’s do this.” He pointed at the stand of horse-drawn carriages. “I’ve always wanted to do this with a pretty lady. Let’s go for a ride and we’ll talk.”

He hailed the first carriage in line along the north side of Central Park South. Alex nodded. Sam addressed the driver in Spanish, and the driver was pleased to reciprocate.

Sam offered her a hand to help her. She accepted it out of courtesy, not need. She stepped up into the carriage, and she caught Sam eyeing her legs for half a second.

Okay, a carriage ride in Central Park. She had never done this. For a moment, a wave of sadness was upon her. It was a beautiful day. Joggers and strollers filled the park. She missed Robert.

Sam waited till the carriage entered the park. Then, “So,” Sam said, “I assume you’re a practicing Christian like Mr. Collins. That’s all he hires.”

“Then that would also make you one, right?” she said.

He sniffed. “ ‘Kill a Commie for Christ,’ and all that? I’ll buy that part of it.”

“That’s not exactly my direction,” she said.

“Oh yeah? Are there some other directions I should know about?”

“I could list a few. Eradicating AIDS. Hunger. Poverty.”

“Whatever,” Sam muttered. “Look. You look like a smart girl,” Sam said. “So before you get going on a lot of squishy soft do-good stuff, let me give you the template for American foreign policy in this hemisphere.” When it came to charm school, Sam was a proud dropout. “You know anything about Rafael Trujillo?” he asked.

“I know he was the dictator in la República Dominicana for, what, thirty years?”

In the background, the clop of the horse’s hooves kept beat with Sam’s voice.

“Thirty-one,” Sam said. “Lemme get you the quick backstory. In 1930 General Trujillo placed himself on the ballot for president and then used goon squads to terrorize the voters. When the elections were held, ninety-nine percent voted for Trujillo. Viva la democracia, huh? The thugs had done their job.”

Sam pulled a cigar from his inside jacket pocket. Romeo y Julieta. A fine Cuban, of all things. “You don’t mind if Sam smokes, do you?” he asked.

“I don’t care if Sam burns.”

“Good answer,” he snorted. “No one else does, either.”

Sam produced a Dunhill lighter and threw up a flame worthy of the Olympic torch. He lit his cigar as the horse turned north on the east side of the park.

“So late in 1930,” Sam continued, “Santo Domingo got knocked flat as a tortilla by a hurricane. Trujillo suspended the constitution to speed along the cleanup. Any unidentified bodies were cremated. So Trujillo decided that what his island needed was even more unidentified bodies, as long as he could decide who they would be. This coincides with the vanishing of several political enemies. Get it?”

“Got it,” she said.

“When Santo Domingo was rebuilt, it was also renamed. Ciudad Trujillo. Trujillo City. Can you imagine that? From there, Trujillo received support from Washington for three decades. His methods for suppressing dissent were torture and mass murder. Know what FDR said? He said, ‘Trujillo is an SOB, but at least he’s our SOB.’ ” Sam laughed. “I always liked that,” he said.

Behind the glasses, behind the cigar smoke, Sam was enjoying this. The clop of the horse’s hooves patterned nicely on the walkway. At this hour on a weekday, the park was closed to motor vehicles.

“Flash forward to the 1950s and ’60s” Sam said. “The press was controlled, so was the judiciary, so were the unions. Trujillo personally took over some state monopolies. Salt, insurance, milk, beef, tobacco, the lottery, newspapers, and he had a big chunk of the sugar industry. The only thing he didn’t have was bananas and tobacco, and that’s because the US companies had those. By 1958 he was personally worth about $500,000,000. Then when it started to look like Castro would take over Cuba, the US began to worry that Trujillo might inspire a similar revolution. So the CIA began plotting Trujillo’s assassination in 1958.”

“Which was before Castro took over Cuba,” she said.

“Correct,” Sam said. “And not a coincidence.”

“CIA agents made contact with once-loyal Trujillistas who were plotting an assassination. They were wealthy Dominicans who had personal grudges or who had family who had suffered. The CIA supplied several carbine rifles for the hit on Trujillo, and they promised US support for the new regime once the dictator was dead.”

They stopped at an intersection. Sam relit his cigar.

“You’ve heard of the Monroe Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Good Neighbor Policy?” Sam said. “I got to laugh at all that crap. Know what we used to call the John F. Kennedy Doctrine?”

The light changed. They continued.

“JFK once told the CIA, referring to the Dominican Republic, ‘There are three possibilities… a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can’t renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third.’ How’s that for situational ethics?”

She nodded. “Not bad. How’s the cigar?”

“It’s good. You want one? I know ladies smoke them these days.” “Not this lady.”

“Ever tried cigars?”

“Yes. I don’t mind if a man smokes a good one, but I don’t care for them, myself.”

“I think a lady with a petit corona is kinda sexy. Let me buy you one.”

“Finish your story, Sam, okay?”

“Okay, well, Trujillo got whacked in May 1961 on a deserted patch of highway. A sniper picked off his driver from a thousand meters away, the car crashed and gunmen came out of the bushes with handguns to finish him off. The coup didn’t have traction, though. The assassins were rounded up along with their families and friends. Some committed suicide. The rest were taken to Trujillo’s hacienda. They were tied to trees, shot, cut up, and fed to sharks at a nearby beach. Eventually the US Atlantic Fleet arrived in Santo Domingo’s harbor to try to keep the lid from blowing off the place.

“The 1962 elections brought a physician and writer named Juan Bosch to power. Bosch was anti-Communist, but hey, he was a reformer, which is a damned fool thing to be in Latin America ’cause you’re gonna get hit by one side or the other. Anyway, Bosch was dedicated to land reform, low-rent housing, and public works projects. He was deposed by a CIA-backed coup after seven months. When a popular countercoup tried to restore Bosch to power in 1965, the US Marines paid a visit.”

Sam moved toward conclusion and his point.

“It’s all about oil, money, international relations, and corruption in South America, same as Eastern Europe, Middle East, you name it. It’s very simple, we put them in, and we take them out. From Trujillo to Saddam Hussein.”

“You’re not telling me anything new, Sam.”

The carriage had arrived at the East Seventy-second Street Plaza. Alex was ready to depart.

“No. I’m not,” he said. “But here’s what you have to remember in Latin America. The US screws around with the politics, but the alternative is ten times worse. The world works at the behest of the banks and corporations, and policy is enforced at the point of the gun. Because of that, you and I can walk free and are privileged to pay six bucks a gallon for gas. If it ever works the other way, it means the Islamo-fascists have defeated us, and they’d rape a nice-looking educated girl like you or hide you in a burka or burn you at the stake. So think of it as the binary system for world politics. You have two choices. Where would you rather live today? Cuba or the Dominican?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s your poli sci lesson, and that’s why Chávez’s options are clear. He can be a world outlaw, or we’ll take him out.”

He let his lesson settle.

“When are you leaving for Caracas?” Sam asked.

“I haven’t even decided if I’m going,” Alex answered.

“Of course you have,” Sam said. “I’ll make sure you have a weapon and a contact when you get there. Be sure to go to the doctor and get some antimalaria meds. If the heat, the gators, and the snakes don’t kill you, malaria might.” He eyed her as she stepped down from the carriage. “That’s a nice skirt, by the way. I like it. Looks good on you. You got the legs for it.”

“Thanks.”

“Want to have dinner later?”

“So long, Sam.”

She hopped out of the parked carriage and didn’t look back as she walked toward Fifth Avenue. Before she reached her apartment, she had pulled her cell phone out of her skirt pocket and phoned Joseph Collins. She would make the trip to Venezuela. That same evening, she phoned her friend, Don Tomás, in Washington. He had been the Counselor for Political Affairs at the US Embassy in Caracas. It had been his last tour with the Foreign Service, capping a distinguished career. He had even been there during the unsuccessful coup.

From his usual skeptical perspective, he gave her a rundown on current Venezuelan politics, particularly as affected by the current-day demagogue, Chávez.

“Venezuela has turned into a very dangerous place,” he said. “Almost as bad as Colombia next door.”

“I know,” she said.

“If you must go,” he said, “avoid the many bad areas of the city. My cleaning lady asked me that her schedule ensure that she would be able to get to her home in daylight. She lived in this hillside slum named Petrare. Governmental authority and social services only reached halfway up the hill. Toward dusk and after dark, hoodlums swaggered about with their guns exposed. Of course, there was always the threat of vigilante justice. Sometimes neighbors got really fed up with it and Petrare would ‘smell of kerosene,’ the favorite lynching tool. Police intervention was nonexistent.”

“Charming,” she said.

“Aside from that, travel safely and good luck.”

“Thanks. Should I carry a gun?” she asked.

“A woman on assignment in that part of the world?” he answered with a laugh. “You’d be a fool not to carry two guns.”

FIFTY-NINE

Mimi was dressed to kill when she arrived at the Club San Remo shortly before midnight. Sailor Moon all the way. Blue and white blouse. Red shoes and knee-high red socks. She wore a blue miniskirt, which normally was eight inches above the knee but she had used pins to take it up another two inches. Two ponytails, one to each side. Blue tint in her hair. The works.

Her escort was a handsome young plainclothes member of the carabinieri, a guy named Enrico. If he was going to get paid for escorting girls to clubs like this, well, he had the best job in the world. And Mimi, she liked the looks of her escort right away. He wasn’t the smartest guy she’d ever met, much less the most sophisticated. But he sure was well put together. She had hit the daily double on this assignment, she reasoned. She would get paid and have some fun.

They had another man in the club to watch their backs, but Mimi never even knew who he was. All she knew was what her job was, how to dress so a guy couldn’t miss her, much less say no, and then how to get the job done.

Enrico worked a cell phone once they were inside the club. The contact had been shadowing Anatoli all day.

Enrico sat at a table with Mimi and they sipped scotches. Mimi kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, enjoying the growing attention from her escort. Finally, Enrico turned to her.

“That’s him,” he said, indicating to his left. “That’s Anatoli.”

Enrico closed his phone. Mimi leaned over and put an arm on Enrico’s shoulder, but her real intent was to look past him and get a better view of her mark.

Anatoli, Federov’s onetime sidekick and bodyguard, sat at a corner table with two beautiful young women. He wore a leather jacket, his hair was cut short, almost an old-style KGB cut.

“He’s nice looking,” Mimi said in Italian. She recognized him from his picture.

“What did he do?” Enrico asked. “Why are we watching him?”

“I think he killed someone.”

“Oh,” Enrico said. “After we’re finished here, want to go get some food?”

She looked at Enrico. She smiled. “Sure,” she said. The nice thing about Enrico to Mimi, aside from how good looking he was, was that he was with the national police, so if he had killed anyone it was probably legal and he wasn’t in any trouble for it. Unlike Anatoli.

“Then let’s get this done and let’s get out of here,” Enrico said.

“You don’t like the music?”

“No.”

“You don’t like the drinks?”

“They’re okay.”

“But you do like me?” she laughed.

“A lot. Let’s go somewhere.”

“Your place?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay,” she said. “Keep me covered.”

She gave him a kiss on the cheek and went to work.

She fingered the small tacklike transmitter that she had concealed at the waist of her skirt. She pulled out a change purse that was filled with small coins. She unzipped it partially and stood.

She worked her way toward the ladies room, which, by good fortune, took her past Anatoli’s table. As she passed the table, she unzipped the purse. The contents, entirely coins, spilled out. As they fell, in the erratic light of the club, she whacked them so that they’d roll under Anatoli’s table.

Mimi then let loose with a loud profanity in Italian. Now she had Anatoli’s attention. He stared at her as did the women at his table. She had everyone’s attention now.

Her hands went to her face as she surveyed the loss of her coins with feigned horror. Anatoli, checking her out, slowly started to smile.

“Oh, scusi, scusi, scusi!” she pleaded.

Anatoli laughed. He didn’t speak much Italian. He gestured with his hands that it wasn’t a problem.

More sign language. Mimi pointed to herself and then under the table. “Voi permette?” she asked. She gave him her sexiest most excited smile. Could she maybe crawl underneath and pick things up?

Anatoli nodded. Mimi went down to her hands and knees, a flurry of bare arms and legs, and disappeared headfirst under the table to retrieve the coins and conduct her larger bit of business.

She crawled around between four bare female legs and two male legs in jeans. Working quickly, she picked up coin after coin. She got Anatoli and his two female friends quickly conditioned to feeling her movements, brushing against them, reaching past their shoes and boots. Anatoli was predictably amused and fresh, giving Mimi a solid pinch on her butt. She gave his hand a playful slap, which only encouraged him more. Then his hand came to rest on her butt and gave it a squeeze.

Perfect timing, just what she wanted. It gave her the opportunity to “retaliate” by holding his foot. At exactly the same moment he was examining her backside, she withdrew the little homing device from her waist and shoved it firmly into the heel of his boot. Then she wriggled free and emerged with a laugh from beneath the table.

The two women with Anatoli glared at her. But he was all hearts and flowers.

“Va bene?” he asked. Find everything?

“Suffisamente,” she answered. Enough. “Grazie mille.”

“Prego.” He answered.

She turned and sauntered back to Enrico, feeling Anatoli’s eyes on her backside as she left. She slid into the seat next to Enrico.

“Got him,” she said. She wasn’t nervous at all. Inside, she felt remarkably cool. “We can get out of here,” she said.

“No, no,” Enrico answered. “We wait a few minutes. No reason to make him suspicious if he sees you leave right away.”

“Then I’ll have another scotch,” she said.

In fact, she had two of them. Both doubles.

Thirty minutes later, they were back out on the street. They walked a block. There they found Rizzo in a car, waiting. He was just putting down a cell phone when they approached.

“Perfect,” he said. “The signal is strong.”

“It’s in the heel of his right boot,” she said.

“I won’t ask how you did that,” Rizzo said.

“Use your imagination.”

“Mimi, you’re a genius. And I love your outfit.”

He handed her an envelope. Impetuously, she opened it. There were five hundred Euros in it in cash, ten bills of fifty Euros each.

“Anytime,” she said. This was the easiest money she’d ever made.

“I’m off duty now?” Enrico asked Rizzo.

He gave the handsome young man a nod. “Just see that Mimi gets home safely,” he said. “Eventually.”

“Eventually,” Mimi said, hanging on Enrico’s arm now.

They all laughed.

Rizzo pulled away from the curb. Enrico took Mimi under his arm, and, mission accomplished, they went their own way for the rest of the night.

SIXTY

The formal way for the US government to persuade a foreign government to do something is through a démarche, which can be made either in Washington to the foreign embassy or in its capital or in both places at once.

It can be done at any level, up to and including “calling in” the foreign country’s ambassador for a senior state official to deliver the request or having the US ambassador approach the host country foreign minister or even prime minister.

In the case of the American couple who had been shot to death on a cold evening in January, the American government needed to be coy in its handling of the case. The Italians were already fuming over American handling of several intelligence issues, and there were still warrants out for several CIA agents concerning “renditions” carried out in Italy. Worse, the Italians knew that the CIA had embedded some excellent contacts in Rome right under their noses within the various Italian police agencies.

Hence, a prickly problem it was. The CIA station chief in Rome informally approached his contacts in Italian intelligence and began to exert whatever informal influence could be brought to bear upon the Roman police. The scandals about CIA flights with disappeared persons transiting Italian airspace did not make this any easier. Similar contacts were made in Washington through the Italian ambassador.

An additional complication was that the Italian government was, as always, a delicate coalition. Such requests reaching the public, or at least certain members of parliament, could actually blow apart the ruling coalition.

Nonetheless, the matter of Lt. Rizzo’s investigation went through the usual back channels. Rizzo felt he had made highly praiseworthy progress on the case. So when he found himself summoned to the office of the minister of the interior, he should have beamed with pride, expecting to be congratulated upon his fine work. But one never knew which way these meetings with bosses would go. Nor, in any way, could he expect to know where his investigation would be headed next.

SIXTY-ONE

Monday morning. Alex stood in the security line at JFK in New York, waiting to check in for her flight.

Time for everyone to be searched. She read all the signs. Every bag to be X-rayed. Take off your jacket. Take off your socks and shoes. High risk of terrorist attack. Drop your slightly used undergarments in a one-pint ziplock and turn them over to the baggage handlers.

Hey, got a steel pin in your hip? Take it out so we can check it.

What nonsense. Okay, okay. She knew she was anxious over this new trip, and she tried to cool it. But what was her country coming to? Give me your tired, your poor, your teeming masses, your fingerprints.

Signs, signs. Everywhere there were signs, as the old pop song went. Messing up the view. Messing up everyone’s mind. No cigarette lighters on the aircraft. No scissors. No knives. No booze. How about a numchuck or a Tai Chi sword?

Yeah. Long-haired freaky people didn’t need to apply, but they were actually going though the security line just fine. A woman who looked like someone’s great grandmother was being searched, however. A security person was examining her roll of lipstick. Alex sipped from a fresh bottle of cold water that she knew she was going to have to relinquish.

The fear had taken root all over America by now, planted by excessively reckless people in the government. Having been in Ukraine on the day of the RPG attacks, having had to fire lethal weapons at other human beings and shoot her way out, she knew what real fear was. She knew what it was like to be scared, to understand what a true threat feels like, to be a moment away from a painful death or perhaps permanent disfigurement if she acted wrong or was just plain unlucky. She knew what it was like to lose someone she loved in an attack that made no sense.

But on American soil, she didn’t want to live in constant fear. She resented the signs. Who the heck was going to make a bomb out of Scope and Pepsodent, anyway?

Alex took off her shoes, belt, and jacket and put them in one bin. Her computer came out of her backpack and went into another while the backpack itself went into a third. Then she dumped her wallet, change, keys, passport, and boarding pass into a fourth. Then she graduated to the hallowed grounds of a “five binner” as she dropped the black duffel bag stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes in the fifth.

A security person watched her uneasily, and she was ready for him to say something. She preempted him. “Why don’t we all just wear transparent plastic raincoats when we travel,” she said. “It would speed things up and make things much easier, wouldn’t it?”

He looked at her and muttered something about regulations. He was about to wave her through when a TSA agent stopped the screening counter.

“We’ll need to search this backpack,” he said to Alex. “Is this yours?

“What’s the problem?” she asked.

Whatever it was, it drew a second TSA person, a supervisor. They opened the bag and pulled the rest of her things off the carrier. How she longed right then to have a Federal ID, her old Treasury Department or FBI identification. But she was as naked and vulnerable as any other American.

The first agent reached in and pulled out a half-finished bottle of Diet 7-Up. He smiled, shrugged, and tossed it into a bin that was already overflowing with other half-dead plastics of liquid.

She smiled back. “Oops. Sorry,” Alex said.

“It happens all day,” the guy said. A job well done, that capture of a 7-Up bottle.

She repacked and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder.

What was the last thought of that song? Thank you, Lord, for thinking of me, but I think I’m doing fine.

Trouble was, Alex wasn’t so sure how her country was doing. Billions spent to inconvenience travelers, and where was the real fight against the real enemies of modern civilization? Just one woman’s opinion as she grabbed her duffel and hooked her backpack onto her left shoulder. She turned toward her gate.

At a newsstand on the way, she bought another drink and a paperback novel in Spanish, one of those Nobel Prize-winning South American works where the women turn into butterflies. Might as well get into the mood.

SIXTY-TWO

A few hours into the flight to Caracas, as the aircraft passed above the Caribbean, the pilot announced that passengers on the right of the plane could see Cuba. Alex glanced out her window, and sure enough, there it was, nestled in the blue water about a hundred miles to the east.

She had never been there, wished she’d be able to visit sometime, and took a long look as her plane passed. It was hard to believe the political issues at play. She felt sorry for the Cuban people, who had been under one oppressive regime or another for more than a century. When would the world again be able to celebrate the classic poetry of José Martí or the music of the modern-day Cuban trovador Silvio Rodríguez?

Christian missionaries were not allowed to visit the island, for example, even to bring clothing or medical assistance. The Cuban people deserved better, as did all the people of Central and South America. Having had a mother from Mexico, Alex felt very close to these people. She made a note to include them in her prayers.

The island passed. The jet continued its path southward over the Caribbean. Alex slipped into headphones and dozed. She missed Robert horribly. A wave of sadness remained, but at least she felt she was moving forward, starting to get a grip again on her life. She wondered how Ben was doing as well as her pals at the gym.

Note to self. Work my way back into basketball when and if I get back to Washington. She slipped off into a light nap.

She drifted. She opened her eyes. It had seemed like only a few minutes, but she had fallen asleep for the better part of an hour.

The plane was descending now into Maiquetía, Caracas’s airport. The airport was called that after the village that once stood there, rather than “Simón Bolívar International Airport,” its real name.

The aircraft went into a sharp bank as it angled in from the sea, with mountains on one side. The aisle-seat passenger in Alex’s row was an older woman who gave a nervous glance at her seatmate. She shook her head. “Scary, no?” she asked. She looked to Alex for comfort as well.

Alex smiled.

“And you haven’t flown into La Carlota,” the man in the middle seat said. He spoke with a Spanish accent.

“Where’s La Carlota?” Alex asked.

“The old downtown airport in Caracas. It’s mostly used for general aviation now. Coming in you’re almost kissing the Ávila, the mountain range that forms the southern border of Caracas. As a young man I remember coming in there in fog. You felt the pilots were just sensing where the Ávila was.”

Alex nodded and shook her head. The aircraft eased into a further descent.

“President Chávez often still flies out of there,” the other passenger said. “Hopefully one day his pilot will get it wrong.”

Moments later, they were on the ground, taxiing to the terminal.

Maiquetía airport was astonishingly modern. Alex retrieved her bags and cleared customs easily. Outside the gates, the steamy Venezuelan heat was waiting for her. She was struck by the contrast with Kiev, where everything had been frozen. The clothing she had worn from New York was already uncomfortably heavy.

She scanned a crowd waiting for arriving passengers. There was a well-dressed man with a sign that had her name on it.

Alex approached him in Spanish. “Buenas tardes. Soy Señorita LaDuca.”

“Mucho gusto,” he answered.

They continued in Spanish. Alex slipped into the flow of it with ease.

“I’m José Mardariaga of the Mardariaga limousine service,” he said. “I’ve been sent by Señor Collins to pick you up. Let me take your bags.”

The man took her to a new Lexus with air conditioning that worked. A blessing.

“Is it always this hot this time of year?” she asked, making conversation.

“Down here on the coast, sí, claro!” Señor Mardariaga said. “But not in Caracas, which is up high. The Spaniards usually built their colonial capitals in the mountains away from the coast for this reason. For instance in Chile, I’m a Chilean myself, the port is El Paraíso, but the capital of Santiago de Chile is inland, in the mountains.”

“Nice airport.”

“There’s even a TGI Friday’s,” the driver said, as if that was the height of current civilization. Perhaps it was, Alex reflected.

“Chávez’s doing?” she asked.

“Not a bit of it! The project of replacing the old airport terminal predates him.”

Hearing him, Alex thought back to her phone conversation with her friend Don Tomás, just before leaving. He had discussed attitudes toward Hugo Chávez based on social class.

Venezuelan sociologists traditionally divided society into five classes. A, B, C, D, and E. A were the rich, B were those who could have an American middle-class lifestyle, C were people what the Venezuelans called “middle class” but had an American lower-middle-class lifestyle at best. D’s were working class people with very modest income but steady work, and E’s were the people on the bottom.

Seventy percent of Venezuelans were D’s and E’s. They were Chávez’s unconditional supporters. The C’s were torn, but many were anti-Chávez, if for no other reason than the classic desire of their class to seek to distinguish itself from the classes below. The A’s and B’s loathed Chávez. The B’s were in the toughest position, because this was the country they were stuck with. The A’s, the truly wealthy, already had their bolt-holes in Miami and their assets stashed in American and Swiss banks.

Clearly, Alex thought, her driver with his own limousine service was an anti-Chávez C.

The ride to the city went quickly. Alex came out of her daydream as they went through a tunnel, and then on the other side they were on the expressway that ran the length of the long, narrow city. Before her, Alex saw high-rise office buildings and, on some of the hills, obvious condos. But on other hills there were cinderblock shacks piled one on top of the other.

“Estoy curiosa. ¿Dondé está Petrare?” Alex asked, remembering Don Tomás’s description of the city. Where’s Petrare?

“That hill right in front, in the distance. You won’t want to go there,” the driver said.

“I know,” she said. “A friend warned me.”

The car turned off the elevated freeway onto the parallel street running under it. The driver executed a hair-raising U-turn in the middle of traffic, then turned right up a well-manicured driveway with palms in the center strip.

The Lexus came to a plaza with a white, low-lying building and stopped at the door. “El Tamanaco.” the driver announced. “Su hotel, Señorita.”

Alex checked in. She found a suitcase waiting for her in her room, courtesy of Sam and his operatives. Jungle clothing and a weapon. Shirts, hiking boots, shorts, a rain slicker, and a Beretta. She tried things on. She checked the weapon. She also found a small digital camera and three extra memory cards. A thoughtful addition.

She showered, ordered a light meal from room service, and realized she was exhausted. Toward ten in the evening, she collapsed into bed and slept.

SIXTY-THREE

The meeting at the Justice Ministry in Rome had not gone exactly the way Rizzo had planned. He had excluded his assistant DiPetri, the worthless one, because why should the worthless one be allowed to show up when the laurels were being awarded? The worthless one hadn’t done anything helpful, for example, except possibly just keeping his foolish hands out of the way. So why should he get any credit?

But twenty minutes into the meeting with the minister, Rizzo wished he had brought DiPetri along to take some of the heat. In response to the minister’s questions, Rizzo found himself giving a step-by-step recapitulation of his two investigations, from the commission of the crime, through their linkage, through trips to the obitorio, through the official meddling by the Americans in the custody of the bodies, through his Sailor Moon linkage of the crimes to Ukrainian Mafia.

Unimpressed, the minister sat at a wide desk with his eyes downcast, a secretary recording Rizzo’s explanation.

After several minutes, despite his years of professionalism, Rizzo got as jittery as a dozen scared cats. There had been much in the press recently about CIA agents embedded within the Roman police. The minister had no reason to suspect Rizzo of such collusion, of serving two masters like that, but Rizzo didn’t know whether he might come under accusation, anyway. Things like that happened sometimes.

Rizzo finally came to his conclusion. “And that is where we are today,” he finally said.

The minister looked up.

“Do you feel that any arrests are imminent?”

“Arrests, Signore?”

“Arrests,” the minister said in a tired voice. “Surely you know what arrests are because I’m certain you’ve made a few in your long career.”

“Arrests in Rome are unlikely,” Rizzo said, “as I strongly suspect that the gunmen have fled the country by now. As to identifying them and asking one of the other police agencies in Europe to effect the arrests, well, that-”

“Let’s save the wishful thinking for later, shall we?” the minister said, cutting him off. “Are there any Ukrainian or Russian gangsters in Rome now whom you feel that we could pin this upon?”

Rizzo’s eyes widened, clearly ill at ease with the notion.

“Pin?” he asked. “As in ‘frame’?”

He became conscious of a slow tapping on the table by the minister’s right hand.

“I believe that’s what you would call it.”

Rizzo stared at the political appointee in front of him. His eyes were fixed and steady. In a flash, he put much of the reasoning together and didn’t like this one bit. After spending twenty-two years with the homicide brigades in Rome, he was going to be asked to fudge evidence, to squander the case, to perjure himself before a magistrate, just to ease a politician out of some sort of squeeze. And if the whole thing backfired, well, his own career would crash down, he could go to prison, there would go his pension, and Sophie would end up in bed with some young musician punk like the ones he was in the habit of arresting.

He thought quickly. “No, signore,” he answered. “I know of no such criminal who would fit our needs so conveniently,” he said.

The minister looked at him with thinly veiled dismay. “Very well,” he finally said. “We will take another approach. How many detectives do you have working with you on this case?”

“Four of the best in Rome,” he said.

“And I assume each of them has an assistant?”

“That would be true, signore.”

“So that makes nine of you. What is your individual caseload?”

Rizzo did some quick math. “I would guess, each of us might have twenty, give or take. So somewhere between one hundred fifty and two hundred among all the detectives involved.”

“Bene,” said the minister. “Put them all back to work on their other cases.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think you heard me, Rizzo. And I think you understood me. Reassign everyone and make no further efforts on this case yourself.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I’m afraid you don’t either, Gian Antonio. This case will most likely conclude itself. Remain available. You will need to liaison with an American agent sometime within the very near future.”

The minister motioned to the newspaper. There was a copy of Il Messaggero on the table, the headlines blaring about Kiev.

“Do you speak English?” the minister asked. “Well enough to liaise with an American?”

“Not very well, sir. I understand a little, but-”

“Strange,” the minister said. “Your file says that your father was in an American POW camp after the war. Your father spoke it quite well.”

“The memory of spoken English was not pleasant to my father,” Rizzo said. “We spoke Italian in our home.”

“Yes. Of course. What else would Italians speak, correct?”

“Latin, maybe,” Rizzo answered.

“Your sense of humor is not appreciated right now,” the minister said.

“I do have someone in my department, an intern, who could be of service with English,” Rizzo said.

“What about French, Rizzo? Do you speak French?”

“French?”

“Yes. It’s what they speak in France.”

“Si, signore,” Rizzo answered.

“Good. That’s all. Remain ready.”

Rizzo opened his mouth to ask for more details, more of an explanation. But the minister cut him off.

“Do you like art, Gian Antonio?” the minister asked, changing the subject.

Rizzo was perplexed. “Art?”

“Italian art! The works of Bernardo Cavallino, for example. Guido Reni. Seventeenth century. Ever heard of them?”

Rizzo had never heard of either. Nor did he care to. “Of course I have,” he said.

“If so, you’re the first policeman I’ve ever met who has. Do you think the works should be in Italy?”

“If they’re Italian, of course.”

“I agree. That is all, Rizzo. Grazie mille.”

The double doors opened. The minister’s guards barged in to escort Rizzo out. He left without a protest.

SIXTY-FOUR

Alex had not been to the Venezuelan capital for six years. She found it much as she had remembered it, hemmed in by green forested hills that rose to each side of the city. Caracas squeezed the tremendously wealthy and the desperately poor into a single chaotic metropolis. The fascinating disorder was reflected in the gravity-defying skyscrapers at the center of the city, which were a short walk from the teetering shantytowns that covered the surrounding hills.

In the evening, a Señor Calderón presented himself at the hotel. He was a lanky Venezuelan in his twenties. He was an emissary of Mr. Collins and worked for Collins’s foundations in South America.

They spoke Spanish. He asked her to call him by his first name, Manuel.

Manuel Calderón would be her guide to the village of Barranco Lajoya. He would pick her up the next morning at 9:00 a.m. and take her to a small private airport east of Caracas. A private helicopter would take her and Calderón to Santa Yniez, which was a small clearing in the jungle. Calderón explained that the airfield had been built by smugglers who brought cocaine into Venezuela from Colombia and Brazil. But it had then been seized by the government in the 1980s following the collapse of Pablo Escobar’s empire and had been sold to pro-Western business interests. President Chávez kept threatening to nationalize it, but so far, he hadn’t.

“Pack your jungle gear in the backpack and have your weapon accessible just in case,” Manuel said. “Dress accordingly. Temperatures will probably be a hundred, at least.”

“Will the gun be a problem at the airfield?” she asked.

Calderón laughed. “You’re in Venezuela,” he said. “Everyone has a gun.”

The next morning, Calderón led her to the airfield, which was on the edge of the city. They found their way to a rickety old helicopter, a thirty-year old Soviet SU-456. They buckled in for a flight to Canaimo. Two members of the national police joined them, needing a lift to Santa Yniez. One of them was in his forties, the younger one in his twenties.

The early morning heat was already stifling. Alex needed only a tan T-shirt and cargo shorts. She wore new hiking shoes and heavy socks. Before leaving the hotel, she had applied DEET to her neck, arms, and legs and packed her digital camera in a convenient pocket.

The two national police officers seemed perplexed, even amused, that a good-looking woman was to be on the flight. She could tell they were trying to figure her out. She engaged them in a conversation in Spanish and kept deflecting their questions about her nationality, as they waited to take off.

“As police, we could ask to see your passport,” one of them said, quite amiably.

“Mi madre fue mexicana,” she said, trying to deflect it further. “En realidad, chilanga.”

“Así, ¿usted es mexicana?” one asked.

She took a chance and showed them her American passport. She told them that she was on her way to visit friends who were among the missionaries at Barranco Lajoya. This, plus her excellent command of Spanish, seemed to appease them. They didn’t bat an eyelash when she pulled her Beretta out of her bag and strapped the holster to her waist. If anything, they were amused.

Then they began to ask more questions. They asked her why she was carrying a gun. She answered, why not carry a gun? They laughed and accepted the answer.

“The last time we were in this aircraft, we took seven bullets from rebels,” the younger one said, making conversation. “But we were flying over near Colombia that day. Today we go southeast toward Brazil.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

The older cop added that once they had sufficient altitude, small arms fire couldn’t touch them. And if it did, it wouldn’t penetrate. And if it did penetrate, it would be spent. And if it were spent, they could pick it up and throw it out the door.

“And if it did wound someone, the wound wouldn’t be too bad, sí?” Alex asked, picking up their facetious tone. “And if the wound was bad, we’d fly to a hospital.”

They laughed again. “¡Claro, claro!” they said.

She swatted at a pair of mosquitoes that had somehow followed them into the aircraft. The policemen watched her as she reapplied some DEET lotion to her legs, even though she was already breaking a sweat. She caught them looking at her and gave them a smile. She felt she had won them over.

The helicopter lifted off into the low mist that covered the city, then broke through the clouds and hovered near the mountains, the aircraft listing to its port side dramatically. She held tightly to her seatbelt with one hand and her seat with the other. At one point, she reckoned, they were no more than two hundred feet above the treetops, and her heart gave a huge surge when a downdraft brought them half that distance lower.

The pilot righted the craft with a sudden jerky motion. They listed starboard violently, as if swinging in a gondola on a cable. Then the mountaintops became distant and they were well above them. The chopper banked and headed south. Alex kept track of directions by their relation to the sun.

The interior of the helicopter was stuffy and hot. Twenty minutes into the flight, Manuel pushed open the side door to the helicopter. “You’ll get a better view this way,” he said. “Plus, we’ll get more air.”

He was right. The open door cooled the helicopter. She and Manuel sat strapped into seats at the open door. There was a gun turret there also, but no weapon. The policemen retreated to a corner, broke out a deck of cards and started to play, having no interest in what lay below. Alex guessed they had seen it a thousand times. That, or they didn’t want their uniforms to serve as airborne target practice.

They flew low between gaps in the mountains over breathlessly rugged undisturbed scenery. They crossed a long, wide savanna and then a blue river; then the jungle below thickened, though it was crisscrossed with rivers and lakes. The journey was hot, and the motor of the helicopter was thunderous.

Below, green stretched in every direction beneath a low haze. At one point they came to a clearing where there were modern houses and communities. Alex scanned carefully. She saw few vehicles and no people.

“Who lives out here?” she said.

She took out the digital camera and began taking random pictures.

Manuel answered. “Nadie. No one any more. There were merchants here. Rubber merchants. But it’s no longer safe.”

“Rebels?” she asked.

“Bandidos.”

Alex nodded.

After ninety minutes, the chopper flew over one of the most beautiful areas of the country, the Canaima lagoon and its surroundings. The lagoon was fed by several small waterfalls. Mist hung above the falls. She was surprised by the changing color of the water and sand. In several places, both took on a reddish hue. In some paces the sand was a light pink because of the presence of quartz. She took out the digital camera and recorded what she saw.

Beyond that, they passed over several flattop mountains. Several mining settlements had dug in. She could see machinery and movement on the ground, plus big gouges in the forests and earth. She took more photographs.

They arrived in La Paragua after a two-hour flight. A Jeep was there for them, along with a driver named José. He was a young man, maybe eighteen, with a handsome smile and an Argentine accent. A lunch of chicken, beans, and rice waited in the car, along with chilled bottled water in a crate with ice. Alex quickly won José’s approval by talking about the ins and outs of Argentine soccer.

The police departed in their own direction, giving Alex a final glance as they departed, admiration mixed with approval and a hint of subdued lechery.

Manuel, Alex, and José then began a three-hour trek over bumpy roads as they drew closer to Barranco Lajoya. The men rode in the front. Alex preferred to have more room to herself by sitting in the rear, but she continued to chat up both her driver and guide.

In some areas, mud on the road was so deep that it sucked at the tires of the vehicle. In one area, one entire lane of the road had been washed away by a mudslide. The road hadn’t been repaired, but the line in the middle had been redrawn. At another area, there was a one-lane “bridge” that was nothing more than a sheet of metal dragged across a fifteen-foot crater. Manuel and Alex got out of the Jeep and crossed the bridge on foot in advance of the Jeep in case the vehicle tumbled.

The roads weren’t bad, they were hideous. To make it worse, Manuel kept looking at the side rearview mirror. Alex asked twice if for any reason he thought they were being followed. Both times, Manuel answered only with a shrug.

“These days in Venezuela,” Manuel finally grumbled, “anything is possible.”

SIXTY-FIVE

The Jeep halted at the side of a clearing. Beyond, a narrow path wound up the mountain between trees and rocks. The path was deeply rutted, the ruts flooded with water.

José stopped the vehicle and they all stepped out.

The late afternoon was so hot that steam rose from the mud. Low swarms of flies and gnats settled into little clouds above the mud. Alex fixed her hair into a ponytail, put on a cap to protect her head, and plastered herself with DEET for the third time.

“Barranco Lajoya is about a mile up the mountain,” Manuel said. “From here we go on foot. When God made this place, he must have been in a bad mood.”

She might have hiked up the mountain in long pants, despite the constant risk of insect or snake bits, but the heat ruled that out. Malaria was also rampant, so was rabies, and anything that flew or crawled had a good chance of being poisonous. She hoisted her pack onto her back and adjusted the weapon in her holster. The sheath with the knife was arranged on her left hip.

“The climb is steep,” Manuel said. “Take plenty of water.”

She put two one-liter bottles in her backpack and tied a fresh canteen at her waist.

“Los machetes,” José reminded them. “Tigritos, ¿ustedes saben?”

She frowned. José explained. There were occasionally jaguars on the mountain, he said. They tended not to attack during the day, but one never knew. If the big cats were hungry enough, they would go after anything. Manuel took a machete with him, for protection as much as slashing through the underbrush. Alex at first declined, then took one.

Both Alex and Manuel checked the ammunition in their sidearms. If they needed the pistols, they might need them in a hurry. With a final gesture, José produced a pair of bracelets, suitable for ankle or wrist. They were made out of light wood, slatted with thin but strong wires running through connecting the beads. He proposed that they each wear one. Within one of the slats on each was a variation on a SIM card, a small directional chip.

“In case someone needs to go looking for a body?” Alex said.

“We try to think of everything,” he said in Spanish.

Then they were ready and began their ascent.

They crossed a barbed wire fence that belonged to a local rancher. Then they trudged several hundred yards through a half-shaded path through the jungle. The DEET worked and kept the biting flies at bay. Above them was a canopy of leaves, which provided some shade but also held the humidity across the floor of the jungle.

The hike was steep, like a march through a giant terrarium. Sweat rolled off her. They stopped for water after a quarter mile and had all the water they wanted when they came to a wide stream with a hard rushing current.

They picked up sturdy fallen branches from the zimba trees and fashioned walking sticks out of them. The path across the first stream was across a series of rocks that some Good Samaritan had put in place but which the force of the current had loosened.

Some of the rocks were submerged. Manuel crossed first and offered a hand back to Alex. There were fifteen steps, then they were at a soggy little island in the middle of the stream. The ground below their feet was soft like quicksand, so they kept moving.

The other side was a deeper ford. There was no choice but to wade through it. Manuel led the way. The water was past her ankles, then up to her knees, then almost touching the hem of her hiking shorts. Then they came up to the other side. They dried off as much as they could, re-applied the insecticides and continued. Alex felt as if her boots would be wet for days, but forged ahead. Fortunately, she had two pairs.

This was like a different planet.

Twenty minutes later, before her was another makeshift bridge of stepping stones, twice as wide and perilous as the first set. The stick was useless now, the water was too deep and the stream swelled into a small unfriendly river right before her eyes.

Manuel, becoming unsteady, crossed ten feet ahead of her. She was on her own. She kept the stick and used it as a balance, as a tightrope walker might.

An insect hit her in the throat and she slapped at it, hitting herself hard on the neck. The rocks below her left foot wobbled and she fought wildly to retain her balance, waving her arms, trying to keep the stick centered. She managed.

Manuel arrived on the other side. She stayed focused. Nine more stones. Then eight. She counted them down. The river narrowed and became shallower. Her confidence swelled. She had made it. Two more steps. Then one.

Manuel extended a hand. “¡Aquí, señorita, aquí!” he said, above the rustle of the current. She grasped his hand and he pulled. She took the final step with a neat jump and landed on the soft riverbank.

“That was the toughest part,” he said.

They stopped to drink, catch their breath, and gather themselves. They found some shade and stopped again where the path was halfway up the mountain. At one point, Manuel took out a pair of binoculars and scanned downward to an area where they could see part of the path they had taken. “What are you watching?” she asked.

“¡Mira! Three men with rifles,” he said.

Her heart jumped. She said nothing. Manuel handed her the field glasses and showed her.

She trained the glasses on them and felt her heart leap a second time. There were indeed three strong dark-skinned men in jungle pants and T-shirts. All three were armed with rifles. The guns were old but could kill nonetheless. One of them also had a sidearm. She scanned all parts of the path to see if there were any more than three, but those were the only ones she saw.

They were following them up the same path about half a mile below. Startled and fearful, she handed the glasses back to Manuel. Obviously, he read the anxiety on her face because he laughed.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “About two miles from here there’s a rancher. His livestock escapes sometimes, and he sends out his hombres to bring back what is his.”

“They need all that artillery to track down goats?” she asked.

“The region is peaceful these days,” Manuel said, “but it is still too dangerous to wander around by oneself or unarmed. About a year ago, a man named Luis was upset because his wife had fled his village. He sat around drinking all day, then attacked some friends for no reason with his machete. He killed a child. The people in his village had to take things into their own hands.”

“What did they do?”

Manuel wouldn’t say.

“Please tell me,” she pressed.

“It was not pleasant. And it is not good to speak of it to outsiders,” he said.

“I want to know,” she said. “There is no one else here. You can say it aloud to the mountain, as if I’m not listening.”

He paused, then spoke slowly.

“They attacked him with heavy hammers and clubs,” he said. “They broke his legs. Then they the tied him to a tree and left him for three days. By the time they returned, he was dead. Wild animals had feasted on the body, perhaps when he was still alive.”

At length, she said, “I see.”

“There is no justice out here other than what people make for themselves,” he said. Luis’s remains had received a proper burial under four feet of dirt, a pile of stones, and a primitive wooden cross on a remote part of the mountain.

“God will be his judge, as he will judge all of us,” the guide said.

Alex nodded and asked nothing further about the incident. Her gaze drifted back down the mountain. Manuel’s eyes followed her gaze.

“Anyway, there is no reason to be alarmed right now,” he said, looking back down the mountain. “Those men down there are looking for the pigs and goats that belong to su jefe. I know those men. They are friends. Let’s continue.”

“Good idea,” she said.

They rose and continued their hike. The path narrowed again and headed into heavy brush under a stand of trees. It continued that way for another few hundred yards, then came to a clearing and began to wind steeply through a rocky area that required climbing.

She was thankful she’d worn good footwear, solid mountain hiking stuff. The gun and the machete hung heavily at her side and reminded her constantly of the extra danger from wildlife.

Then she was out of breath. They stopped. She found a rock and she sat, panting to get her wind back. Manuel seemed midway between concerned and amused.

The time passed slowly and heavily. There was a rustle in the underbrush. Alex’s hand went for her weapon as she thought of the jaguars. But when a beast emerged it was only a wild pig, a descendant of an escapee from a nearby ranch. Future prey for los tigritos. The animal gave them a curiously indignant look and scooted off into the heavy brush.

“¿Está bien?

” Manuel asked.

“Estoy bien,” she answered. “I’m okay.”

“One more push to Barranco Lajoya,” he said.

She nodded and stood. He led the way after a final warning to look out for snakes, which could be up to six feet long. “The rattlers are the worst,” he said. “And you don’t always hear the rattle before they strike.”

The last part was free of rocks. From somewhere there was even a breeze. A hot breeze, but a breeze nonetheless. She became short of breath again, but Manuel urged her on, promising that the rest of the way was short and if she stopped at this altitude it could sometimes prove impossible to get back into gear.

Then, up ahead, she heard an incongruous sound.

Chickens.

When you heard the chickens you were close to the village, Manuel said. A final few hundred feet and she came to a clearing. The contours of a wood and plaster roof came into view, and then there was the sound of children shouting. Manuel walked ahead of her a few more strides, and a minute later a clearing opened before them. When they stepped out of it, there was the village of Barranco Lajoya.

The path didn’t end so much as it disappeared into a rambling battered mishmash of rundown huts and shacks. Walls were made of scrap metal, as were roofs. Some roofs were thatched, others had gaping holes in them. There were hammocks for sleeping on small overhangs to some of the huts, attempts at porches, and a few primitive colorful murals that attempted to make things look better. Some of the better homes had mosquito netting on the windows. The majority didn’t. The windows were just open. Alex saw one car, an old blue Citroen with an ornate grill. It must have been forty years old and have spent part of its early life in the old French colony of Guyana, to the east. She wondered how it could have gotten there and guessed that the path must have been more passable in the past.

There seemed to be one store, which operated out of a window in someone’s hut. Barefoot children played soccer in a field cluttered with litter. A hand-painted sign on the side of one building said Iglesia Christiana. The church. The building would have been considered an eyesore and a slum in most American towns, but here it was one of the better buildings. It was white stucco, shuttered windows and large wooden doors that locked. Beside it, adjacent to a porch, was a gasoline-powered generator. Electricity had not yet come to Barranco Lajoya, nor had telephones. In Barranco Lajoya the modern world didn’t exist.

A crowd began to gather. Moments later, a small middle-aged man with slick hair, a round face, and a pleasant smile came forth from the church. He introduced himself as Father Martin. He was a Cuban American from Miami, who spoke English and Spanish.

“¡Bienvenida! Por favor, accompáñame,” he said. Welcome and come with me. I will take you to the other missionaries.

SIXTY-SIX

In London, Anatoli felt safe. Honest to God, he had never committed even the slightest crime in the United Kingdom. And he wouldn’t. He rather liked the place, the pubs, the football, the girls. Like the cute redhead with whom he had spent the previous night. The trashy blue collar fun of Oxford Street and Picadilly Circus. London was a great place to be for a young man from one of the old Soviet republics. Much better than Rome, from which he had arrived a week earlier.

He stepped out of the shiny black taxi at the foot of Edgerton Gardens in Kensington. It was a mild morning. He would walk the rest of the way home, pass by a pub for an early pint maybe, then go home and sleep off the previous evening.

He sighed to himself. He blinked against the unusual bright sunlight of London in April. He put on a pair of sunglasses.

First rain, then sun, then more rain, then more sun. He blinked. How did these English ever get used to it? It wasn’t like Ukraine where things were steadier.

He skipped the pub. He had been out late the night before and needed a long nap. He turned onto his block of red brick flats and saw nothing unusual.

He entered his building. The lift was out of order again. Well, he only lived three flights up. He took the steps two by two. He clutched an old metal key in his hand.

He looked at his door. The little splinter that he’d left above the lock was still in place. No one had entered while he was out. Either that, he mused to himself, or whoever had entered was so good that they looked for the little marks like that and fixed them.

The floor was silent. Anatoli opened the door and stepped inside.

The lunging, swinging metal baseball bat came from his blind side and was aimed straight at his kneecap. It missed slightly, but smashed the bone of his shin with a sickening crack. At the same time, doors to the apartment behind him opened and men in London police uniforms rushed toward him. They hit him hard from behind and shoved him forward into his own apartment.

Anatoli went berserk. He fought like a wild man. If there were two things he knew in life, one was fighting. The other was killing. Now he knew a third thing: if he were taken prisoner, he wouldn’t see freedom until he was a very old man, if then.

He threw his powerful elbows at the men behind him, caught one in the jaw and one in the gut. He clenched a fist, threw a backward punch at the same man and caught him in the groin. The man howled profanely and loosened his grip.

The man with the bat hammered at Anatoli’s knee again and caught it. Anatoli screamed, then cursed in Ukrainian. Those he fought cursed him in English.

Anatoli started to go down. But he managed to get a hand to the gun he carried under the left armpit of his leather jacket. He moved the gun at one of his assailants. He counted six of them now, plus one that was smaller, older, who was standing back. He pulled the trigger, once, twice.

One bullet flew wildly. But the other tore part of the left hand off one of the men who was trying to take his freedom away. The man spun away with a loud screech, blood splattering in every direction like a shattered bottle of ketchup. Anatoli saw a curled pinky finger hit the floor.

Then the bat hit Anatoli’s wrist. The gun flew away from him. Anatoli’s hand and wrist were then rendered nerveless and paralyzed from a second blow.

“Bring him down! Down!” the leader said from outside the fight.

One of the intruders had a police club and used it with remarkable efficiency. He walloped Anatoli on the left side of the temple so hard that it crushed the cartilage in his ear. Another blow to the midpoint of his face broke his nose. Then there was one to his groin that took much of the fight out of him.

Anatoli went down hard onto his face, overpowered. The fight had taken a full minute. Championship bouts one-on-one often took less.

Anatoli lay stunned but not unconscious on the old Pakistani carpet that covered the floor. Someone grabbed him by the hair, lifted his head, and slammed it down again. He felt his hands pulled behind his back and cuffed. His mouth was hot and salty, and little shards of his teeth floated on his tongue. His physical fight was gone but a rage still surged within him. If he ever got out of here, he swore to himself, he would find all these men and kill them.

He was still breathing hard, clinging to consciousness, wondering how he could have been so careless or who had betrayed him. He wondered if the redhead had been a setup to get him out of his apartment. And how had they found him?

Voices. Voices in the room. A voice talking on a cell phone: the man who had stayed back from the fight. He was obviously the leader. Even dazed and defeated, Anatoli knew how these things worked.

“Yeah, we got him,” the voice said.

There was a pause. Then it continued. Same guy.

“Are you kidding me? Of course he fought, you moron. He fought like a stuck hog. What’d you expect… that he’d come to tea with us at Fortnum’s?”

There was another pause. Then, “One of my men got clubbed in the balls. Another got a bullet wound. We need some doctors fast.”

In the background Anatoli could hear the man he had shot wailing and crying. Anatoli wished to hell he had killed him.

“Should I put him down, Mark?” Anatoli heard someone say.

“Put him down,” the commander said in response.

Anatoli hadn’t been in America often and his English wasn’t strong. But it seemed like most of these men who had attacked him were English.

They looked it. They smelled it. They sounded it.

But their leader, Mark, the one with the cell phone, the one who had stayed clear of things until the dirty work was done, was American. Anatoli could tell by the accent. If he’d known his American accents better, he would have recognized the soft strains of the Tidewater region of Virginia.

Through a broken nose, shattered teeth, and a fractured jaw, Anatoli cursed his captors. But there was no physical fight left in him now. Darkness came down on him like a collapsing brick wall.

Everything hurt. Consciousness faded. And even as darkness descended, his right eye twitched uncontrollably, even more than usual.

Then one of the assailants pressed something to the side of his head. The nose of a pistol, it felt like. A few seconds later, there was a tremendous explosion and darkness.

SIXTY-SEVEN

From the day she arrived in Barranco Lajoya, Alex kept her eyes and ears open on behalf of her employer, Joseph Collins. Her assignment had been to take a good look at things and report back. What’s being done right? What might be done better? And above all, see who might be trying to push these poor indigenous people off their land.

Identify who and report back.

To that end, Alex embedded herself in the everyday life of the village, the better to catch the pace and feel of the place. The better to observe.

Father Martin installed her in a thatched hut located behind the church. Some of the wives from the village, accompanied by their daughters, had scrubbed the concrete floor of the hut with a heavy bleach and disinfectant before Alex’s arrival. As noxious as the smell was, it kept the insects at bay, though when she lay down to sleep, she could see the insects crawling above her, through the leaves and branches of the roof. There was also a small supply of citronella candles on a wooden table and a small can of insecticide.

Bedding was a thin foam mattress spread on the floor, plus a sheet and mosquito netting. There was a ring of chili powder around the sleeping area, which kept most of the crawling spiders, lice, and red ants away. In the evening, two candles lit the room, and Alex was cautioned to leave one on at night to deter the occasional small snake that might intrude. Rattlers, she was reminded, could sense the body heat of their prey and would strike in complete darkness.

The best plumbing in town was also in the back of the church, in an attached shed, but this was in a single open room where food supplies were also kept. When Alex used it, two of the women from the town, whom she quickly befriended, “stood guard” for her so that no men would walk in. The village men were too well mannered, or intimidated, to burst in on her, but accidents could happen.

Bathing was rudimentary, too. About a hundred yards through the woods there was a mountain stream which was about twenty feet wide where it ran past the village. The women of Barranco Lajoya considered it safe in terms of pollution and wildlife. They had been using it to bathe and wash laundry for many generations.

The men tended to be away during the day, so the women would go together in the late afternoon before dusk, maybe ten to fifteen at a time, usually with many children. Alex tended to go to the river with the younger women, the wives who were sometimes barely older than sixteen, but mostly in their twenties.

They would disrobe completely, leave their clothes in neat piles on the riverbank and move quickly into a meter of rushing water. They would scrub themselves with bars of a strong Mexican soap. The water came from a great elevation and was surprisingly refreshing. A strong current kept it clean.

Alex was hesitant at the procedure at first and reluctant to undress in front of the women of the village, though the venue was really no more than an outdoor version of a women’s locker room. But she quickly got used to the procedure. In a strange primal way she felt at one with God’s nature when she waded into the cool stream and then slowly submerged herself. It occurred to her that the topography here had probably not changed much in two thousand years, since the time of Christ. People had probably been bathing in this tributary for just as long. Before many days had passed, she looked forward to the daily ritual.

She had heard that sometimes soldiers came through the area and would stand on the opposite riverbank, watch the women, and shout to them. Sometimes the soldiers would even take pictures. The men of the village tolerated this. They knew better than to challenge the soldiers. Everyone in Venezuela knew better than to challenge groups of military.

Alex kept an eye out for the soldiers. She had no inclination to put on a show for them. But she did see them once. Two of the younger soldiers were taking pictures from the opposite shore while Alex and three others were bathing in knee-deep water.

Surprisingly to Alex, the women bathing made no effort to cover themselves and actually waved to the men in uniform. One blew kisses.

Later one of the women explained. “We are safer when the soldiers come by to watch us,” she said. “Because we bathe in the river, the soldiers pass by our village. If they didn’t pass by, we would be at the complete mercy of bandits.”

To bathe, the women also needed to wear rubber sandals. The thongs protected the soles of the feet from microscopic dangers that lurked on the bed of the stream. It was through the soles of the feet that parasites, some of which could be fatal, might enter the body. A woman named Inéz who was always accompanied by three small children, gave Alex a pair of black rubber thongs made from an old tire.

Two weeks after Alex arrived, a medical mission from Maracaibo visited Barranco Lajoya. With the exception of Mr. Collins’s missionaries, foreign visits were a rarity in the little town perched three thousand feet above the valley floor. The scenery may have been Aspencaliber, but there were no ski lifts here, no businesses. There weren’t even toilets outside of the church. On one side of the town, the drop on the mountain was so steep that one could fall off. Sometimes children did.

The people of the town were endlessly grateful when the doctors and nurses arrived. If residents of Barranco Lajoya got sick, they usually had to hope they would get better on their own. Some didn’t even bother to do that. They had learned to live with pain and infection, and sometimes die with it.

“The worst thing that can happen to a human being is to lose hope,” Father Martin said one morning. “A lot of people here feel hopeless.”

On the first day of the visit, the missionaries turned the town’s church into a medical clinic in a matter of minutes. Two doctors from Maracaibo set up shop behind little-kid-style desks. Other missionaries set up stations to take blood pressure and test adults for diabetes. Bags of pills and medical supplies were stashed behind the altar of the church. Outside on the playground, the cluster of townspeople was organized into a line and missionaries registered every single person. They wrote down names, ages, and complaints, which ranged from hacking coughs and stomach aches to limbs rotting from blood poisoning.

What followed wasn’t textbook medicine. The doctors made diagnoses on the fly, seeing ten times the number of patients they would on a typical day in the US. The little pills that Americans took for granted made a huge difference in Barranco Lajoya. They could whip lingering infections and knock out the stomach parasites that could starve even a well-fed child.

Alex used her fluent Spanish to help counsel some patients. She saw one ten-year-old girl who had been suffering from a sore throat that made her wince every time she swallowed.

She asked how long the girl had been in pain.

The girl’s response: “Seis años.” Six years.

The doctor prescribed antibiotics but told the girl’s mother she would need to take her to one of the hospitals on the distant coast to have her tonsils removed. She wasn’t sure that would happen. The medical brigade like this was like a strobe flash in the dark. The stomach parasites were going to come back, blood pressure medicine would eventually run out, lice would again infest the children. Suspected cancers would go untreated. But temporarily suffering had been lessened. At least those who brought in help from the outside had done something.

“I’d like to think that we weren’t just giving a dose of an antiparasitic but also a little dose of optimism,” Father Martin said at the end of the day. “And yet there are those who would take even that away from these people.”

As the first month passed, Alex watched as the resident missionaries went about their work, which consisted mostly of trying to establish a school, or at best literacy, and a small medical clinic. These activities took place in the church, which was close to a hundred degrees during the day.

Alex rose with each lemony dawn, sometimes watching the last of the men begin their daily trek down the mountain. She then set out to explore the region, trying to figure out what could be there that would cause someone to want to drive the missionaries away. If anything.

Some days she would hike on foot. On other days, burros were available. She would never travel alone, never travel unarmed. On her journeys, the most striking thing in Alex’s eyes was the magnificent raw beauty of the countryside, rivers and waterfalls, thick jungle, and endless unspoiled vistas. Always, she took photographs. Her digital equipment had enough memory for two thousand shots. She fired away liberally, then cleared out the clinkers in the evening.

Twice, Manuel returned to Barranco Lajoya to take her on explorations by air.

Each time, he guided her back down the mountain and drove her to a nearby landing field that could accommodate helicopters but not airplanes. From there she took off and surveyed the region by air.

On the first trip, the pilot took her all around the area to the east and northeast, all the way out to the Rio Amacura delta on the coastline and the blue Caribbean. She could see Trinidad and Tobago in the hazy distance. Then on another day, a different pilot flew her westward down over the Amazon jungle to Puerto Ayacucho, which was the capital of the Venezuelan state of Amazonas.

“The army has a huge base here,” Manuel explained. “We cannot fly too close to it or they will shoot at us. For sport, if for no other reason. They conduct a continuous campaign against drug runners from Colombia, yet some of them also take payoffs from the drug runners.”

Alex nodded. Then they continued south to one of the world’s great natural wonders, the Casiquare canal, a waterway that linked South America’s two greatest river systems, the Amazon and the Orinoco. By air for the first time, it was breathtaking, much like going over Niagara Falls and the Mississippi at the same time.

“When we return,” Alex asked, “can we fly north over Barranco Lajoya? I’d like to see the summit of our mountain.”

“We can do that,” Manuel answered.

The aircraft then guided Alex over her village by air. She took more pictures. She then had the pilot trace the route of the river until they found the places where the water came out of the ground. She could see no place where pollution could have begun, as once reported.

On foot, and on the backs of donkeys, Alex learned enough about the surrounding areas to take hikes on some days through paths in the jungle, never neglecting her sidearm, always accompanied by men with rifles from Barranco Lajoya. Her daily outfit-boots, fresh socks that she’d wash each night, hiking shorts, a T-shirt, a red bandana, and cap-became her work clothes. She clipped the compass to one of the belt loops on her shorts and it remained there.

Her “school uniform,” as she thought of it. Her arms and legs tanned within a week. Her stomach flattened even more than usual, and her legs grew stronger than ever from the rugged hiking and climbing. Her local guides showed her to clearings where she could see horizons that were hundreds of miles away on a clear day. On other days they showed her lush orchards that they had planted on their own. The guides often trekked fifty pound bags of fruit by donkey down the path and sent the produce to market. On another day, she was led past the area when the women bathed to where the stream merged with a much larger body of water. There were three dugout canoes waiting, and her guides took her on a journey upstream about ten miles by paddle. They stopped at a quarry where the men picked up about twenty pounds each of smooth flat rock, a distinctive local granite with a quartz content that, like the sand in some of the river beds, gave the rock a pink hue.

“What are those for?” Alex asked.

Both men smiled. “Mi sobrina,” said one of them. “My niece. And some of the other girls.”

“What do they do with them?” Alex asked, intrigued.

“We’ll show you later,” the girl’s uncle said.

Then, when the boats were loaded, they allowed the current to bring them back. It took the better part of a day.

That same evening, Alex received the answer to her question about the stones. The granite substance was not just unique for its color, but also for its density and durability. When Alex examined the stones, she was amazed how hard they were. They were like little pieces of natural iron. As a result, the young girls in the village used hammers and chisels on them and created jewelry of all designs. The jewelry was then sent to markets in the cities to sell to tourists. For a pendant that took many hours to create, a girl would receive a few pennies. But it was better than nothing.

A sweet sixteen-year-old girl named Paulina, the niece of one of the boat guides, had accepted Christianity. She was a very plain girl with mocha skin and dark hair that she wore pulled back. She had delicate brown eyes and worked small miracles with the granite, making boldly carved crosses onto circular stones. Paulina’s designs were the best of any village girl. They sold well as far away as Ciudad Guyana, Alex learned.

The first time Alex saw one of the Paulina’s works, she gasped at how skilled the artistry was. It was akin to hearing a gifted child sit down and play Mozart on the piano.

In reaction, Alex’s hand subconsciously went to her neck where her father’s gold cross had been for many years.

Paulina giggled.

“Why did you do that? You’re not wearing anything at your neck,” she asked.

“I used to. But I lost it,” Alex said.

“Oh.”

Alex grinned and selected one of the girl’s pieces. It was a flat round stone, graying pink, slightly smaller than an old American fifty-cent piece, but twice as thick. The cross had been carefully cut into the center of the stone. The stone was heavy for a piece of jewelry but had a slight hole at the top where a fine strand of leather was threaded through.

Alex put it on right away.

“It will protect you,” the girl said engagingly.

“Of course it will,” Alex said. Impetuously, she hugged the child. The asking price was less than fifty cents American. Alex gave the girl the equivalent of five dollars. Then she bought two smaller ones for friends back home.

The stone crosses were, Alex reasoned, the perfect souvenirs of her stay at Barranco Lajoya. For some reason, it made her feel complete again, as if she had found something that had been missing. Even when bathing in the river, even when washing her hair in the river with the coarse Mexican soap, it was the one thing she never removed.

A fifth week passed. Then a sixth.

She thought of Robert many times during these days, his smile, his sense of humor, his kindness, his body, his warmth. She still was resentful for one aspect of her life, angry with God so to speak, over Robert’s abrupt departure from this world, without even a word of farewell. How could that have been in the plan of an almighty and forgiving God?

But she mentioned this to no one. Being so far away from her normal life, all her past experiences, allowed her to think, to put things in perspective, to turn new emotional corners.

Curiously, she also realized that she had no remorse about the men she had shot and presumably killed in Kiev while defending herself. She kept all of this locked up inside her, and went about her daily business in her remote venue, even while no answers were coming forth for Mr. Collins. She had been sent here to observe, to develop a theory about who would want these indigenous people off their land and want the missionaries gone. She had by now spent several weeks studying the area from the ground, from the air, and occasionally by water. And there were no suggestions of anything amiss.

She began to wonder if she had made this trip for nothing.

SIXTY-EIGHT

Then there were the events of late July.

They began when the young girl, Paulina, who had sold Alex her new pendant, had traveled halfway down the mountain path one morning with two other girls. The three girls came running back in terror around noon.

Alex was one of the first to see them. “¿De qué se trata?” Alex asked the breathless girls. “¿Quién es?” What’s this about? Who is it? A group from the village gathered, including the missionaries.

The girls explained. “Strange men,” Paulina said. “A whole band of them!”

“¿Dondé estan?” Alex asked. Where are they?

“At the clearing. Halfway down the mountain,” said a second girl, trembling with fright. The men, the girls said when they came breathlessly back to the village, were heavily armed and had threatened them. They had tried to capture the youngest and prettiest of the three girls, but the girls had run.

“¿Qúantos?” Alex asked. How many men?

Maybe a dozen of them, the girls answered. Men they had never seen before, at one of the clearings. Men who had no good business in this area.

“¿Cazadores? ¿Banditos? ¿Soldados?” Alex pressed. Hunters? Bandits? Soldiers?

“¡No sé, no sé!” Paulina said, starting to cry. The girls couldn’t tell. They only knew enough to be frightened of this band of outsiders.

“Did they follow you?” Alex asked.

“No,” Paulina said. “They looked like they were scouting. They didn’t follow.”

Alex embraced Paulina and turned to the men of Barranco Lajoya. “We should go have a look,” she said.

Several men from the village went into their homes. They emerged with rifles and an array of handguns. Alex went back to her own hut and strapped the holster with the Beretta around her waist. The pistol hung on her right side. She tucked an extra clip of bullets in her pocket. She brought a canteen of water, also, as well as a compact pair of binoculars.

A group of angry men waited for her when she emerged. They looked at her oddly.

“You are going with us?” one of them questioned. “¿Una mujer?” A woman?

“I’m going with you,” she said steadfastly in Spanish. “¡Claro! ¡Si! ¡Una mujer!”

The men looked at each other, then nodded, all in accord. There were no further questions. They brought with them every rifle in Barranco Lajoya.

In a burning sun, they went back down the mountain to take a look. Paulina went along, staying close to Alex. They tried to find the place where the strange group of intruders had been seen.

Alex expected the worst. Her heart was like a drumbeat as the group from the village descended the rugged mountain trail. She wondered whether this event would throw some light on what she had been sent here to discover. She wondered what Robert would have thought if he could have seen her here now with these people. He would have been proud of her, she thought to herself.

After a march of half an hour, they found the spot where the girls had seen the men. “They were here,” Paulina said. But no one was there now, other than the party from the village.

Alex stepped slightly off the path near the clearing. She examined the thick underbrush. It had recently been trampled, but that indicated nothing. She looked for other signs of human activity, food wrappers, cigarettes, bullet casings, but found nothing.

“There were men here. I swear,” Paulina said to Alex.

Alex placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Yo sé. Te creo,” she answered. I know. I believe you.

A moment later, there was a sudden noise in the brush about fifty feet away. Reflexively, Alex’s hand went to her pistol. She drew it and instinctively went down to one knee. The men of the village turned toward the sound with their rifles. And then a wild ram emerged slowly from a thicket. The beast looked at them in contempt, chewing on something, then turned its head and disappeared.

Alex put her gun back into its holster.

“We shouldn’t return home until we’ve had a thorough look around,” she said.

There was agreement. The group from the village split in two and followed two paths that led away from the clearing, about a dozen individuals in each group. They searched the area, found vantage points that allowed them to look across clearings up and down the mountain. At her locations, when she could, Alex used her binoculars to scan in every direction. But she saw nothing.

The two groups made a rendezvous back at the larger clearing an hour later, hot and exhausted. The blazing summer sun was starting to sink in the sky by this time. Alex glanced at her watch. It was past 5:00 p.m.

The search party returned to the village without a shot fired. Several men had the nagging suspicion that for whatever reason the teenage girls had made up a tall tale.

Alex quickly grew tired of listening to them. Quietly, she slipped away from everyone and disappeared to a secluded cove in the river with a change of clothing. She wanted to bathe and wash the day’s sweat from her body as well as rinse the shorts, T-shirt, and underwear she had worn that day. Alone and undressed, she was careful to go only knee deep in the water and keep her pistol within quick reach on the riverbank.

She washed quickly, herself and her clothes, then stepped out of the water, dried off, and dressed in a clean shirt and shorts. Her only witnesses were a flock of noisy parrots who kept her company overhead. She welcomed the presence of the birds, as they formed a primitive sentry system. She had already learned that the birds’ chatter changed when strangers approached.

In the evening, after dinner, the men from the search party grumbled loudly about the hike down the mountain. They didn’t feel the story Paulina and her friends had told was reliable. Later, many of them buried their complaints in warm beer on an outdoor patio.

Alex could hear them and understand them as she lay on her own foam mattress, reading a novel in Spanish by Isabel Allende by the light from two candles.

Alex wasn’t so sure that the girls had made up their story. Why would they? And the trampled underbrush suggested larger bodies, and several of them.

Alex had fallen into the habit of sleeping in her clothing, except for the socks and shoes. She also kept her pistol loaded and at her bedside.

Tonight was no exception. Yet the night was calm, the darkness deep in the jungle around the small enclave. The only noise, distantly, were the normal jungle sounds of the feral creatures that lived by night. And the only sounds nearby were the occasional mutterings of some of the village men, slumped on front doorsteps drunk on guarapo, the local cane-sugar liquor.

SIXTY-NINE

Many of the residents of the Barranco Lajoya left each morning before dawn to make the long trek down the mountain. A jitney, a rusting old minivan with missing windows, would pick them up at daybreak at the base where Manuel had parked his Jeep. The van would take them to either the nearby ranch or a more distant one where they would work in the fields of sugar cane. There they worked for the equivalent of three dollars a day, plus a lunch of beans and rice. This they would do seven days a week for ten hours a day in the torrential subtropical rainy seasons of the winter as well as the sweltering heat of the summer. These were the lucky ones.

The ranchers also owned some of the water rights in the area, excluding the native people from one of their few resources, except in the higher elevations. The people here were used to having nothing and expecting nothing. So when missionaries came in, they were grateful but knew the generosity could end any day and their schools and minimal clinics could disappear. It had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. The armies of Spain had come through in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had tortured and crushed everyone. Bolivar, el libertador, had lived at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and had managed to create an independence based on the ideals of the American independence. Now everything in Venezuela was still named after Bolivar. You even paid with a Bolivar if you had any money. But for three quarters of the people, nothing had really changed. There remained poverty and oppression. The people learned not to complain. Once again, the little that these people had could disappear with no warning.

“A couple of years ago,” Father Martin said one evening, “there was an incident at another village named Barranco Yopal.” Martin spoke as he shared a fish dinner by candlelight with the other resident missionaries inside the church. “President Chávez ordered a Christian missionary group working with indigenous tribes to leave the country. They were mostly American from a group based in Florida.”

“Why did Chávez want them out?” Alex asked.

Father Martin laughed ruefully and shook his head. “Chávez accused the missionaries of ‘imperialist infiltration’ and links to the CIA.”

“Was there any truth to it?” she asked.

“No, Chávez was being a demagogue,” the priest said. “The missionaries at Barranco Yopal were dedicated people. They spent several years living among the tribes in order to learn the language, creating a written form for it, and translating the Bible into it. Then they taught Christianity to the people. The missionaries brought along their families. Their kids grew among the native children and didn’t interfere with native culture. All they wanted to do was bring Christ and the Word of God to the people. They dedicated years of their lives to this. Then Chávez turned up one day with his military uniform and his red beret and held a ceremony to denounce ‘colonialism.’ He presented property titles to several indigenous groups. He gave them title to land that they had been on anyway. Title to something that they already had. He came off as a hero and, in truth, hadn’t really done anything.”

Around the table, people shook their heads.

“Chávez accused the missionaries of building luxurious camps next to poor Indian villages,” Father Martin continued. “He accused them of circumventing Venezuelan customs authorities as they freely flew in and out on private planes. The missionaries had built their own compound, but it was hardly luxurious. And they flew their own aircraft in and out so that their supplies wouldn’t be stolen. The most efficient thieves in any South American country are the customs officials, the police, and the army.”

One of the female missionaries at the table, a nurse from Toronto, chipped in. “There are people who resent us for philosophical reasons,” she said. “In primitive societies, there’s no separation of religion and the rest of the society. We are among people who for centuries have followed rituals intended to make the corn grow, bring rain, and remain healthy. The people who criticize us claim that by bringing Christianity to them, even if we leave their own rituals alone, we’ve rendered meaningless the core of the native culture.”

“But we’re here to help them,” someone said.

“All cultures are in transition,” Father Martin added. “We feel we’ve given them something new and joyous.”

“We’re accused of acting the same way the Spaniards and Catholic Church did with less remote Indians when the conquistadores came through,” the nurse said.

“Except the Spaniards and the Catholic Church didn’t try to bring them electricity and health care,” another missionary chipped in.

There was laughter.

“It’s incredible,” Father Martin said. “As soon as you try to bring these people anything, people try to stop you, to take it away. Why?”

Alex had no answer. To the obvious next question of who was undercutting the missionaries’ work there, there remained no easy answer, either.

Leaving dinner that night, Alex watched a group of men assembled on the edge of the field that was contiguous to the village. The men were watching their children, teenage boys for the most part, compete in a soccer game in the dying daylight.

Despite the efforts on the missionaries, everyone she saw was destined for a life of poverty. These men would work in the distant fields, swelter in the sunshine and the humidity, and barely get by day to day, grateful for any small crumbs from life’s table.

She went to bed fitfully that night. Very early the next morning, in the midst of a pleasant dream, she awoke to the staccato sound of gunfire.

The little village of Barranco Lajoya was under attack.

SEVENTY

Alex threw off the mosquito netting that covered her and sprang to her feet. She grabbed her gun belt, which had both her Beretta and her knife hitched to it. She strapped it over her hiking shorts. She shoved her feet into her boots without bothering with socks and went quickly to the window of her hut.

It was just past dawn. She could hear a terrible commotion but couldn’t see it. There was sporadic gunfire and people screaming.

She saw people of the village running in every direction, fleeing into the woods.

She drew her Beretta. Then she moved quickly to her door, opened it slightly, saw that it was safe to leave, and stepped out. The commotion was coming from the center of the village. She headed toward it, her weapon aloft, moving along the wall of the church.

Screaming became louder. Voices pleading. People fleeing past her. She reached the corner and looked around it.

At first she thought that a gang of bandits had invaded. When she looked closer, a greater fear coursed through her. These were soldiers of some paramilitary organization, some local militia, she guessed. Maybe they were the men the girls had seen on the mountain. There was no way of knowing.

There must have been a dozen of them, just that Alex could see. Everything was happening too fast, too chaotically. It was Kiev all over again, except this time in Spanish, in the heat, and just after dawn.

More shouts and screams. The gunmen wore masks. They fired rifles and pistols into the air. They were using clubs and huge sledgehammers to strike at houses and structures. Residents, some of them barely clad, fled into the woods around the village.

Then she saw some of the gunmen drag Father Martin and his family out of their residence. Father Martin’s hands were raised and he looked terrified. He was pleading with the invaders. They kept yelling at him.

“¿Dónde está?” their leader screamed to Father Martin. “¿Dónde? ¿Dónde? ¿Dónde?”

Where, where, where? They wanted to know where something was. Something they wanted. They threw Father Martin to the ground. He shook his head. Whatever the secret was, he wasn’t telling. They let his family flee.

They meant to kill him.

A local boy came out of a hut with a rifle to defend the priest, and the attackers shot him from two different directions. When a woman came to the door behind him, his mother, she too was dropped by gunfire.

Alex watched transfixed, her horror so deep that she could barely assimilate what was happening. But she pinpointed the gunmen who had shot the boy and his mother.

Reflexively, she knelt down low into a firing position, partially concealed by the wall. In a fury, she fired at one of the men who had shot the boy and his mother.

She saw the weapon fly from the man’s hands. The man clutched his chest and went to a knee, stunned.

Alex had hit him in the middle of his gut. She turned her pistol toward the other gunman, who had suddenly realized they were under fire. Alex fired two shots at him. The first one spun him, the second one dropped him.

Then she heard another popping sound. Then a second. Father Martin lay motionless on the ground. His killer stood over him. Then he turned toward Alex.

Alex stood and, against all logic, in a blind rage, stepped out from cover. She held her Beretta forward, steadied it and fired twice. The first shot hit Father Martin’s killer in the upper chest, the second hit him full in the face. Then she heard a bullet whistle past her and smack into the stucco of the church.

She stepped back under cover. She knew the rest of the invading party would now come for her. Some of them would circle the church and try to come up behind her.

Before they could, she fled. She ran at full speed past her cottage and into heavy foliage beyond, a sickening horror still in her gut, but an instinct for survival pushing her onward. She reached the heavy foliage beyond the back of the church. She kept herself low as she ran in a zigzag pattern, pushing and pulling her way through the brush. Brambles and small branches struck at her bare legs, scratching her badly.

She kept going. Occasional shots came after her.

She stopped behind a tree. She could see slightly through a clearing. She needed to slow down her pursuers. She saw one gunman who had a teenage girl from the village by the arm. He was about forty yards away. Then she realized it was Paulina he was threatening.

Alex raised her Beretta. It was a risky shot, almost worthy of a sniper with a pistol, but she could hold her hands steady and shoot from cover.

She took the shot. She hit him full in the chest. She watched him reel backward and go down. She saw Paulina flee. Alex put a second bullet into him for good measure.

Alex knew that she would be followed. She ran deeper into the jungle. A barrage of bullets from automatic weapons ripped through the brush on different sides of her. One shot, the closest, tore into the bark of a tree about ten feet away.

But she knew they were firing wildly now. She kept herself low, her heart pounding, her adrenaline racing, her heart in her throat.

She didn’t return fire. Her only instinct was to get as far into the jungle as possible, change directions, and escape.

She kept moving. In the distance, she could hear them coming after her.

SEVENTY-ONE

Lt. Rizzo had had a horrid week.

First, Mimi, his favorite intern and Sailor Moon girl, had changed her course of studies at the university. Because of this, her schedule at the university had changed. She had signed up for a series of art and design courses that conflicted with her internship with the city police department. Hence, she had resigned her position with the Roman police. The irony of all this was that she and her new boyfriend, Enrico, were inseparable in their off hours.

An even worse disaster had occurred with Sophie. Rizzo might have known that no long-term good could come from her working at one of those chic designer clothing places on the via Condotti. Flouncing around in there each day, modeling the chic dresses, designer jeans, sheer blouses, and snug miniskirts, it was a matter of time before the wrong pair of male eyes settled upon her.

In this case, the wrong pair of eyes belonged to an American pop singer who went by the stage name of Billy-O. He was a guy in his thirties who had limited musical range but was a first-class piece of eye candy. His music producers in Los Angeles pushed him heavily and were currently getting him into some films. They had even hired a hack Hollywood TV writer to usher in a new script for him.

Thus Billy-O’s income resembled the GNP of a small hot country, even though he personally had more fun than a small hot country. In his public life, he played the part of a white working-class rocker-rapper up against the establishment, and his music matched that image. The truth was, he was a spoiled kid from the New York suburbs. Sammy Newman was his real name. He was a young man who dragged three broken marriages behind him, dozens of affairs, and a couple of attaché cases filled with lawsuits. But he still was one of the great lotharios of his generation. The man was a known bad boy; no one ever came out of a relationship with him better off than they’d gone in. But women couldn’t resist him. Sophie was his latest. They had met in the clothing shop, and now she had taken a few vacation days to spend a long weekend with il cretino, as Rizzo thought of him, in Monte Carlo.

So much for the lot of a career policeman when some Hollywood music Adonis rolled into Rome and started to flash a limitless bankroll.

All of this left Rizzo in a thoroughly rotten mood as summer finally arrived in Rome and the month of July progressed. It also gave him more than a bit of a rotten attitude. So when his captain phoned him on a Monday in the middle of the month and requested that he assemble all the papers and documents he had on the two abandoned murder cases, he met the request with a subservient growl. Rizzo was to assemble all his information and prepare for a meeting with some law-enforcement agents of another nation.

When he learned through the grapevine that the agents he would meet with were American, he pondered the possibilities and complications before him.

He wondered, in his best passive-aggressive manner, how he could make the most of what was obviously a wonderful opportunity.

He looked at the calendar. Two weeks till retirement. Well, he would do some administrative finagling and maybe push back retirement for another sixty days. There were some strings that needed to be pulled, some contacts who needed to take care of a few things. The Roman police were understaffed right now anyway. No one would mind much if he remained on to take care of some pressing open cases.

Mimi and Enrico, he mused to himself as he assembled everything on the four murders. Sophie and Billy-O. What was the world coming to?

SEVENTY-TWO

Alex lay perfectly still in the underbrush, feeling the insects in a cloud around her face, feeling the humidity of the jungle drench her clothing. She had maintained her position for several hours.

She lay low on her right side against a small embankment of rocks, a tangle of branches and leaves pulled over her to conceal her. Her bare legs extended into the tall grass for cover. She was dripping with sweat, lying on her side, listening carefully to hear if any of the enemy assassins were near. Twice they had passed within ten feet of her. She had kept her pistol raised and even had one of the men in her sights. But they hadn’t seen her. So she hadn’t betrayed her position by firing.

She tried to separate the sounds of the jungle from the sounds of human pursuers. She listened for voices. She heard none. She had put the weapon away. Then she heard movement somewhere.

She moved her hand to her weapon and again pulled the Beretta from her holster. She positioned the weapon close to her, leaning on one elbow, keeping both hands on the gun. Her heart started to race again. Almost every sound seemed like the enemy. Who were these people and why would they have attacked peaceful missionaries and an isolated village? Yet in the forefront of her mind, all she could think of was her own survival.

At this point, it was defend yourself or be killed.

Just like Kiev.

She wished the world weren’t like this, but it was. Nervous tic time again. As she leaned on one elbow, one hand strayed from the pistol and went to her neck. Instead of finding the little gold cross that she had felt there for twenty years, she found the pendant Paulina had made for her. She messaged it. It felt cool and reassuring in her hand. Somehow it made her feel better.

She could still hear her own heart pounding. She tried to pace her breathing to let things settle. The underbrush that concealed her was settling around her. Her bare legs stung where they had picked up some scrapes and small cuts. She would soon have to clean the cuts and apply a strong disinfectant, but how?

Blood poisoning in this part of the world could be instant and horrific. It could paralyze a man or woman with a systemic infection within two or three days. It could kill a person in four. She would need water soon, too. Her mouth was parched. She knew where the streams sliced through the jungle, but it would have to be safe before she could move. No point taking a bullet in the back, even though water meant survival.

She reckoned that she was positioned about five hundred yards from the village. She had carefully noted the position of the sun as she had moved to one point of concealment after another, and she also had her compass.

She hatched out a plan. She would move at dusk, she reasoned, and try to find water. Then she would hide again overnight and try to creep back toward the village near dawn. She guessed that the raid on the village was a hit and run. But she was guessing.

Something in the tall grass shifted, underbrush she guessed, near the lower part of her body. Whatever it was, it pressed against her leg.

Look out for tarantulas, she reminded herself. She moved her legs slightly. Well, too big for a giant spider. It wasn’t small and crawly whatever was pressing against her. It felt like a branch or a vine.

Her heart settled slightly. She heard no voices pursuing, though she knew her pursuers would be quiet. Her heart settled more.

Time passed interminably. The tedium alone, combined with the building thirst, was enough to kill a woman.

Then she felt the pressure on her leg. The “vine” was moving, sliding. Then she felt it slide itself across her legs. At the same time she heard a distinctive rattle. The snake was already upon her bare skin, exploring.

Every instinct within her told her to jerk her leg away. But simultaneously, she knew she was dead if she moved. The snake had already entwined her. If she budged, it would strike. If it struck, she was dead.

The sweat rolled off her with a new fury. She heard the rattle again and felt the body of the rattlesnake coiled itself in a tightening grip around her leg. She had a knife but couldn’t reach for it.

She moved her head slowly. The serpent was firmly around her calf now and working its way up her leg. Then it was past the knee. Then it was on her thigh a few inches above her right knee.

If she fired a shot, she would draw the attention of her attackers. But at least she would be alive to fight. She would have to kill the snake within the next minute before it sank its fangs into the flesh of her bare thigh.

She couldn’t even see it yet. The tall grass hid it. She moved her gun slowly, positioning its nose in the direction of the snake. She would have one shot to try to save her life, but if the bullet from her own gun blew her foot off, that would be akin to a death sentence out here, too.

A prayer kept repeating itself in her mind.

Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord. Protect me now if you ever have before! She was in tall grass so thick that she couldn’t see past her waist. A little breeze rustled the grass. The snake was still climbing her, staking her out, claiming her.

Alex guessed it might be four feet long because it was coiled around her from her ankle till past her knee, and she couldn’t feel the head or neck of it.

Then the grass moved slightly, and like a small dark ghost emerging from a pale green cloud, the head of the snake poked through, skin glimmering with scales, its small black eyes alive with menace, small black bifurcated tongue flickering in and out.

The rattler was a creature of horror and beauty at the same time. The head was silvery gray, and a row of diamond shaped markings with brown centers outlined in yellow spanned downward from the head to the body. Beyond it, as the grass moved and the snake advanced toward her upper body, its head lifted, Alex could see the tail, lightly striped with brown and yellow.

She gazed at its eyes, elliptical pupils centered by black irises. For a moment it opened its mouth slightly, showing the venomous fangs that could kill her as easily as a jungle fighter’s bullet.

The head was now about eighteen inches away from the nose of her pistol. It seemed to be looking her right in the eye, almost freezing her. The head continued forward. In the back of her mind, she suspected that it was instinctively going for her throat.

Closer.

It was now about a foot from the nose of her gun.

She figured she had one shot. Maybe two if the first one wasn’t a clean hit.

She steadied her wrists as best she could. There would be a kickback to the pistol, enough so that a second shot would be questionable.

The snake moved forward another inch or two, exploring. Then it stopped.

The tongue continued to flick.

She knew. It was ready to strike at her flesh, either her arm or her neck.

Now or never.

The heat pounded her, and the sweat rolled off her so furiously that she felt as if a fat person were lying on top of her.

A final prayer and…

Now! She pulled the trigger.

The weapon erupted with a powerful bang.

The impact upon the snake’s head was instantaneous. The bullet took the snake’s head off with precision, smashing it into oblivion, leaving a writhing decapitated creature spasming and unraveling on her, spilling its reddish yellow guts onto her clothing. The rest of the snake’s upper body, the part that wasn’t coiled around her, flew backward toward the grass, the neck oozing with blood and intestines.

Alex felt the snake’s body go limp around her leg.

She felt a deep sickness in her stomach and wanted to vomit. But she fought back. She reached through the grass and grabbed the remains of the carcass where it was wrapped around her leg. She pulled it off her and flung it away.

She slid forward.

Cautiously, she got to her feet. Both her legs were red and cross hatched from scrapes. She gasped for her breath, breathing hard, the gun still in her hand at her side. She looked in every direction and saw no enemy. Maybe they had departed already. Many people had fled into the jungle, perhaps the attackers had given up and departed. She prayed that was the case.

She guessed the direction of one of the streams. She went five minutes through some heavy foliage, then heard the water. She reasoned that she was about three hundred yards downstream from where the women of Barranco Latoya were used to bathing.

The water there would be safe, she reasoned. And it might be a terrain she knew better than the attackers.

She found the stream. She holstered her gun. She picked a secluded place and removed her shoes and socks. She waded in and drank. Never had water felt so good, satisfied so deeply. She washed the cuts and scrapes on her legs. The abrasions stung but the water soothed. She caught her breath. Then she washed her arms and her face.

She kept up her vigil. She saw no one else. No raiders, no survivors from the village. She wondered if she should creep closer to the village but reasoned that if any gunmen had been left behind, that’s what they would be looking for her to do. So she didn’t. She would maintain her plan to return at the next dawn.

She found some wild roots and berries that she knew to be edible. She had enough nourishment to sustain her. She was still in shock over what had happened, what she had seen, at having been under fire. But she was alive, rallying her spirit and still ready to fight back.

Her hand went to the stone at her neck again, then left.

She moved another hundred yards downstream, measuring the distance with paces, using the position of the sun to verify her direction. She then tailed off into the woods. She found a vantage point and settled in again. She covered herself with leaves and branches and kept her back to a rocky slope.

More time went by. An intense exhaustion began to grip her, then possessed her completely. She closed her eyes, unable to keep them open. Her pistol was in her hand, on her lap. It must have been four in the afternoon when she drifted off.

She opened her eyes again a few hours later. There was still some daylight and some of her camouflage had been pulled away.

She blinked awake, startled, as someone grabbed the pistol from her. The dying sunlight of the day cast severe shadows among the trees. But she did see the large heavy silhouettes of three men, all in military green and brown camouflage-style uniforms, with beige coiled braids on the right side. All three had automatic rifles.

One of the rifles was pointed straight at her face, inches away. A second man poked her in the shoulder with the nose of his rifle. The third one held her Beretta. He tucked it into his belt. The leader appeared to be about thirty. The two younger men were barely out of their teens. They stared at her as if she had arrived from outer space.

“¡Levántese!” the rifleman ordered. Get up.

Slowly, raising her hands in the air in surrender, she stood.

SEVENTY-THREE

¿Quién es?” one of them asked. Who are you?

She assessed quickly. On their chests they wore nameplates, on their lapels and shoulders, they wore ranks. Militias didn’t do that. On their heads, they wore the floppy hats of regular army units assigned to the mountains.

They were soldiers of the Venezuelan army. The leader was a trim comandante named Ramírez, equivalent to a major. His two men appeared to be privates.

The leader held her at gunpoint and one of the others took her knife away. Then they started patting her down, a frisk and a grope at the same time. Across her body, across her breasts, between her legs. She cringed and pushed back. In return, the groper held her arm tightly, shook her and threatened her with worse if she didn’t cooperate.

She refused to answer them.

The indignities continued. One of the men pushed his hand within her T-shirt and continued to explore. She pulled back angrily, throwing an elbow.

“¡Párense!” she snapped. Stop! “Soy norteamericana,” she said. “I was in the village when it was raided. I fled.”

Ramírez looked her in the eye. The other two studied her up and down.

“¿Cuál pueblito?” the comandante asked. What village?

“Barranco Lajoya.”

They looked at each other.

“Barranco Lajoya was destroyed,” he said in Spanish. “There was a massacre.”

She felt her spirits plummet, her heart going with them. Her friends. The missionaries. More than ever she was conscious of the pendant she wore around her neck. But was it doing anything, protecting anyone? Where was God when she needed God?

“How bad was it? The massacre?” she asked.

“If you’re an American, why is your Spanish so good?” Ramírez asked, ignoring the question. “Americans don’t speak Spanish without an accent.”

“My mother was mexicana. What happened to the village? I was with the missionaries. How bad was the attack?”

The soldiers relaxed very slightly. “Prove that you’re American,” the leader said.

She reached slowly to the side pocket of her shorts. She pulled out her passport and handed it to them.

One of the younger soldiers took it and gave it to the major. They kept their guns trained on her. She had no chance to run, she knew. She would have been cut down within a few feet if they chose to kill her.

Major Ramírez looked at the passport and looked at her. Then he examined the passport again and stared at Alex’s face. He closed the passport and handed it back to her. He told his private to return her weapons.

“Venga con nostros,” the captain said. Come with us. We’re very sorry.

They led her through several thickets, the young soldiers hacking their way with machetes. They came to a path and fell in with other soldiers. Other people from the village had been rounded up too. The sad tragic trek through the forest took half an hour. Then they came to a clearing and then what remained of Barranco Lajoya.

Nothing in her experience could have prepared Alex for what she saw, not even the violence and obscenities from her experience in Ukraine.

There were bodies still lying on the ground, men and women and children, awaiting body bags. The straw roofs of several buildings had been torn off, cement and concrete buildings had been smashed. The raiding party had shown no mercy. Walls were down on almost all buildings, the generator had been smashed into oblivion, and the muddy unpaved streets of the town were strewn with the shattered remnants of the buildings. The village looked as if it had been bombed.

The soldiers led Alex into a small littered clearing behind another hut, and there on the floor were several sheets and canvas coverings. It was a makeshift morgue. There were so many bodies that Alex didn’t think to count them.

Major Ramírez removed his hat and led Alex to a viewing area, which was no different from any other area except it was a small cleared patch of ground.

The comandante looked at her with sorrow in his eyes. Then he reached down to one of the sheets.

She braced herself. Ramírez lifted the first of several gray blankets so that she could see. Against her will, against all the training she had received at the FBI Academy, against even the horror of what she had witnessed in Kiev, she gasped and retched.

On the ground were the bullet smashed corpses of the six missionaries who had served in this village, four men and two women. These were the people she had known personally and worked with. Their bodies were caked in blood, their limbs and heads twisted at impossible angles and folded back together.

Some of their faces had been hammered into pulp by the force of the bullets. One woman’s head, the one closest to Alex, had star fractures in both eyes and a lower jaw blown off. One man’s upper torso had been hit by so many bullets that the soldiers had had to tie it closed with rope and canvas.

The executions, she could tell, had taken place at close range and without the slightest sign of mercy. This was the earthly reward that these kind people had received for trying to bring some good to this small tough patch of the world.

Alex stared at the obscenity before her. She wondered: had the invaders come for the missionaries? Or could she have been the ultimate target? But if the raiders had known she was among them, why had she been the only foreigner to defend herself and to have escaped?

Plenty of questions. No answers.

“Ya está bien,” she said softly to Ramírez. “Más que suficiente.” More than enough. Enough for the moment. Enough for a lifetime.

Ramírez gave a terse signal to his soldiers. They covered the bodies again. Alex turned away and left the room. A few feet away, she sat down on the ground, too shocked to even cry. Insects buzzed around her and the heat was relentless. She no longer cared.

On the morning of the next day, she oversaw the simple funerals of the people of the village. A military chaplain presided. The dead were interred beneath wooden crosses on a mountainside that overlooked the valley. The missionaries who had lived with them were buried with them and, presumably, would remain with them for eternity. How long, Alex wondered, would the ghosts of those slain haunt this place?

That afternoon, Alex watched as Venezuelan Red Cross workers came in and led a long march of survivors down the mountainside to waiting vans. The village was no more. The survivors were to be relocated.

That same evening, Major Ramírez appeared and spoke to her. “I have my further orders,” he said. “You are to leave the country immediately.”

“It’s not like I was planning to stay after what happened,” she said sullenly.

“Your contact will find you in Caracas,” he said.

“What contact?” she demanded.

“I only know my instructions,” he said, “and I’ve just related them to you.” He paused. “And if I were you,” he said, “I would leave quickly, before the government of Venezuela changes its mind.”

That evening before sunset, she returned to La Paragua and flew back to Caracas by army helicopter. Three soldiers accompanied her, obviously under orders, saying nothing, only staring. The personal items she had left at the hotel had been safely stored for her. She retrieved them easily upon her return to Caracas.

The horrors of Barranco Lajoya hung heavily on her. She phoned Joseph Collins in New York with the intention of relating what had happened. But word had already reached him. He inquired only about her safety. She assured him that the Venezuelan army had treated her properly.

They agreed to meet in New York as soon as possible. Then, that evening, she found a Methodist church not far from her hotel and spent time in prayer and meditation-seeking answers and guidance and not finding much of either-until an elderly pastor appeared and closed the doors to the church at midnight.

SEVENTY-FOUR

Alex walked the few blocks back to her hotel from the church.

The blocks were quiet and shadowy, South American cities being lit at night nowhere as well as North American ones. She had her Beretta with her and examined every shadow as she approached it.

She returned safely to her hotel. But in her room, there was a man waiting, a visitor. She was not altogether shocked to see him. She had almost been expecting his reappearance. In the darkest corners of her mind, things were starting to fall into place, no matter how much she wished to reject the meaning of recent events.

“I wouldn’t get too comfortable here,” the visitor said, standing as she entered her own room. “We have a long trip ahead of us.”

“Go to hell, Michael!” She glared at him and suppressed an even more violent and profane run of obscenities.

“No, really,” Michael Cerny said evenly. “I know what you’ve been through. I know what you’re thinking. But we’re going to iron everything out by the end of the day.”

“What I’m thinking is that there’s a black cloud following me around. And you’re it. I ought to shoot you.”

“That doesn’t sound very Christian to me,” he said, “nor very charitable.”

“Then I ought to shoot you twice,” she said.

“Let’s go,” Cerny said. “We’re on our way to Paris.”

“Not a chance!” she answered.

“You might want to change your mind,” he said. “Don’t you realize what the militia attack on Barranco Lajoya was about?”

“No, I don’t,” she answered. “Mr. Collins sent me there to troubleshoot. To find out what someone had against these people. So why don’t you tell me? Then we’ll both know!”

“The attack on the village had nothing to do with the village itself,” he said. “But it was made to look that way. You honestly don’t understand what they were after, what they were looking for?”

She could see Father Martin being thrown to the ground again. The insistent voice of his murderer as he stood above him.

¿Dónde, dónde, dónde? Where, where, where?

What had they been seeking?

“It hasn’t occurred to you?” he asked.

It had. “They were looking for me,” she said.

“You,” said Cerny. “The Ukrainian Mafia sent people looking for you. They wish to kill you or kidnap you and take you back to Ukraine.”

“What?”

“Don’t be so surprised. The Ukrainian underworld has a million dollar contract out on your life. They followed you to Venezuela but the people in Barranco Lajoya wouldn’t give you up.”

Still in shock, she asked, “How could they even have known where I was, the Ukrainians?”

Cerny shrugged. “There are all sorts of theories,” he said. “We can discuss them eventually.” He paused. “Did you ever discover why the village was being harassed in the first place?”

“All sorts of theories,” she said quietly. “Local ranchers. People who want to poach the wood from the forests. Venezuelan nationalists who don’t believe the missionaries should “pollute” local culture. The government in Caracas who thinks we’re all a bunch of imperialist agents. Plenty of theories and not one that will hold together. Not yet, anyway.”

“We’re going to New York first,” Cerny said. “You’ll have an evening to talk to Mr. Collins. That would probably be a good idea. Then we’re headed back to Europe.”

“I thought I was finished with the Ukrainians. At least for a few years,” Alex muttered.

She felt a deep surge of fear inside her. That, and a lack of comprehension. What had she been, other than a bystander, one who lost something precious, her fiancé, and might have lost her own life too, if things had gone any differently. “How could they possibly care about me?” she asked.

“That’s what we’d like to know as well. You must have learned something, witnessed something, had access to something in Kiev. All we know is, your life is marked.”

She simmered.

“Anyway, you might want to help us get them before they get you,” he said. “Federov and his one remaining bodyguard. We’re flying Air France to Paris, you and I. Business class if it makes you feel any better.”

“I’m not going anywhere other than back to New York,” she said. “And I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Alex, don’t be foolish,” he said. “By this point, you don’t have much choice.”

This time, as it sank in, she didn’t spare him the expletives.

SEVENTY-FIVE

Gian Antonio Rizzo was planning a trip as well. He had reassembled everything he had on the two spiked murder investigations, but as far as his bosses in Rome were concerned, he was warning everyone that he was prepared to be as difficult and obtuse as possible.

“Lousy meddlesome Americans!” he complained to anyone who would listen. “They come in and steal your work time after time. When will it end?”

Rizzo’s political distaste for the Americans was beyond discussion. He cursed them profanely whenever he could. He’d gone on and on about it so much that it wasn’t that anyone could question it any more; no one even wanted to hear about it.

Then suddenly life’s random events broke in his favor, reversing a recent trend. Sophie was back from Monte Carlo, contrite as could be, and asking her policeman to forgive her and take her back. The American actor, Billy-O, Sophie now told him, wasn’t much more than a pretty face, wasn’t even that much in private, and as a singer could barely hum a tune. Plus he was a financially askew hophead, she told him, traveling with a least a dozen illegal prescriptions in his medicine kit, including a small packet of cannabis and thousands of dollars sewn into the lining of his luggage. Sophie knew since she’d been in his hotel room for two days and saw everything.

“Why are you even telling me this?” Rizzo grumbled, sounding bored and hurt. “To incite me? To make me jealous?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “So you know how sorry I am. So you know that I made a bad mistake and that you’re a better man than he’ll ever be.”

“I don’t want to know anything about him,” Rizzo said, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. “Nothing would make me dislike Americans more than I already do.”

There was no disputing that part by anyone who had listened to Rizzo over the last several years. But Sophie would not shut up. There might have been something to those rumors that he, Billy-O, danced at the other end of the ballroom, as the English would say. In fact, Sophie had been treated wretchedly in Monte Carlo and said she wouldn’t mind at all if Gian Antonio could pull a few police strings and make life miserable for that Hollywood punk while he was on the continent.

“What can I do?” Rizzo scoffed. “What authority do I have? These Hollywood types have all the money and know all the right people. Who do I know? The minister of justice and he can’t stand me.”

In fact, Rizzo had a good idea that he might want to get out of town, lay low for a short while. He had some other things to attend to, a side business as it were. His bosses told him that he could take a week off if he wished. He wished. He had the time coming and his juice within the Roman police department was diminishing day by day, even with the recently approved sixty-day extension of his duties.

He thought about the whole situation. Sophie. The actor. The minister. What he could use, he decided, was a good reason for being out of town.

So he asked Sophie if she might want to accompany him on a business trip. He would be busy for much of the time. There was some highly confidential stuff in a neighboring European capital. She would need to let him go there for a few days, then join him. He had some work to accomplish, some people to meet. But thereafter they could get reacquainted, let bygones be bygones, and he might even be able to let the memory of that American musical nuisance fade away.

Sophie took the bait. She said yes.

So a trip to Paris for two was on, Rizzo to go ahead first, Sophie to join him in three days. They would relax and get to know each other again. Billy-O had given an entirely new meaning to the term “one hit wonder.”

Rizzo’s peers in the police department in Rome all envied him for so flagrantly going off to patch things up with his lady friend in the middle of the week. Some guys had all the luck, as Rod Stewart might have sung.

Meanwhile, Rizzo made a few phone calls to some people he knew. They would arrange for Billy-O to eventually draw the receipt he deserved.

SEVENTY-SIX

Alex and Michael Cerny flew to Miami via American Airlines, then connected to New York. They stayed overnight in the city.

That evening, Alex met with Collins for an hour at his home, giving him her grave in-person account of what had transpired at Barranco Lajoya. She gave him all the photographs and notes she had taken. He listened quietly and seemed overcome by a great sadness.

Then he stood from behind a desk. They were in his study, a room that was high-ceilinged and elegantly furnished. With a stiff walk Collins crossed the room to a wide plate glass window that looked down upon Fifth Avenue. He stared downward for several seconds in silence, as if the view might give him some explanation of the craziness and brutality of the contemporary world.

There was no indication that it did.

The silence continued. There was a sag to Collins’ shoulders, one she had not seen before. She wondered what he might be thinking. “Presumably the Ukrainians had no intention to harm Barranco Lajoya before I sent you there,” Collins said softly. “So it seems my best of intentions have contributed to a tragedy, a catastrophe. There’s blood on my hands.”

“No one could have foreseen this, Mr. Collins,” she said. “No one.”

“Generous of you to say so, Alex,” he said, turning back toward her. “But I can draw my own conclusions and I’ll have to live with them.” He paused. “Call me a foolish old man,” he said, “but I feel I will now have a debt to those people from that village for as long as I live. I don’t consider the books closed on that place.”

“If it’s not presumptuous,” she said, “I feel much the same way.”

“You do?”

“At the appropriate time,” Alex said. “I’d like to return. Unfinished business.”

An ironic smile crossed his face. “Unfinished business,” he said. “Yes, we agree. You seem drawn to unfinished business, don’t you, Alex? Venezuela. Ukraine…”

“That does seem to be the path that’s before me right now,” she said. “It’s not where I thought I’d be right now, but it’s where I am.”

He nodded.

“I know how that works,” he said. “Show me someone for whom that isn’t the case, and I’ll show you someone who sat back in life and never took chances, never tried to do the right thing. I admire you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Be careful in Ukraine,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s a godless place.” “

I’ll do my best,” she said.

“I know that,” he answered. “Just while you’re doing your best, be careful also.” He moved back to his desk. “I have a check for you for your work in South America. I’ve rounded it up to fifty thousand dollars. Don’t protest. Try to find some time to enjoy it and a place to relax with it,” he said.

She accepted it in an unmarked envelope, which she wouldn’t open till later in the day when she would mail it to her bank in Washington.

“I’ll do my best,” she said again.

A few minutes later, she was out of his apartment and back down on Fifth Avenue, walking home slowly, enjoying the anonymity that a crowded New York sidewalk always afforded her.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

The next morning, Alex and Michael Cerny were on an Air France flight from New York to Paris. Two hours into the flight, sitting side by side in business class, Cerny took out his Palm Pilot. He applied his fingerprint to the security section and powered it up.

“I want you to read some files,” Cerny said. “CIA and NSA stuff. They’ll tell you more about why we’re going to Paris.”

“Full disclosure?” she asked with an edge.

“Call it what you want,” Cerny said. “You need to know some backstory.”

He handed the Palm Pilot to Alex. She began with a CIA file that was, as much as anything, a continuation of what she had read on Yuri Federov back in January. But it added to her knowledge.

Federov had been on a CIA list for several months as a foreign national in whom the Agency had taken a “special interest.” At the same time, Federov had developed a long list of enemies in the underworlds of North America, South America, and Europe. So many, that fear of his enemies had impeded his movements for years. Thus from time to time, Federov had been in the habit of traveling through Europe in the guise of a priest.

But within the last eighteen months, Federov had taken the guise one step further. He had hired a double, a retired actor from the National Theater of Hungary. The double was a friend named Daniel Katzman. Katzman bore a resemblance to him. Hence Katzman traveled as Father Daniel, a Federov decoy-within-a-decoy so that Federov himself could move about the world more freely.

Daniel turned out to be in the role of a lifetime, or, more accurately, the last role of his lifetime. A pair of assassins shot him to death in a French café named L’etincelle during the first days of the new year. Alex noted the date. January 2. The French police were still working on the case, the file said, the one of the man in priestly garb shot dead over a cognac and a cigar at a café in the Marais.

From the shooting, a triple riddle posed itself:

Q1: When is a dead priest not really a dead priest?

A1: When the dead Russian mobster is not a Russian mobster either.

Q2: Then when is a dead Russian mobster not really a dead Russian mobster?

A2: When he wasn’t even a priest either. He was an actor and a friend of the man who was supposed to be shot.

And then the biggest question of all:

Q3: When is an underworld “hit” not an underworld “hit”?

A3: When neither the victim nor the perps are members of the underworld.

The electronic file ended abruptly. Cerny guided Alex to a second one that discussed a pair of agents who worked for the CIA, and not with great efficiency. Their names were Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna. They were married to each other, or seemed to be, but didn’t work at it very hard. They had picked up a trail that they felt belonged to Federov by monitoring flights from Kiev to the capitals of Western Europe, notably London, Paris, Madrid, and Geneva, places where Federov either had business interests, money stashed, or both.

They tracked their target to Paris and asked for permission from Langley to proceed with an “intervention.” The request went all the way up to cabinet level. Permission was granted. They acted. Next thing anyone knew, the secure faxes and phone lines were exploding between Langley and Paris and Langley and Rome.

Edythe and Peter fled to Madrid after Paris, then Rome. Yet for people who should have been disappearing into the background, they were reckless, physically incapable of keeping a low profile. Nor were they upstanding citizens. They moved in a shadowy world of illegal gun dealers, smugglers, swindlers, sexual merchants, and con artists. They frequented nightclubs in Paris and Rome where couples paired off with strangers. They lived on the social and political edge of the world.

They picked up a trail for Federov. But they picked up the wrong trail, one that was set out as a trap.

As soon as Alex saw those names, a bell rang within her. Her mind flashed back to the club in Kiev, her quasi-sober conversation with Federov, as well as the suggestive questions posed by her.

Federov, in Russian: “Have you ever heard of a pair of Americans named Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna?”

Alex: “New names on me. Should I know them?”

Federov: Maybe. They are involved in this visit by your president.”

Alex: “Part of the delegation?”

Her favorite gangster: “No. They’re a pair of American spies. They were recently retired.”

So the tale that followed made sense. Edythe and Peter established a procedure for a hit on Federov in Paris. They quickly wired Washington and Langley for approval. No one ever asked them if they were sure their target was who they thought it was. Accuracy of that sort was the least of the details attended to. Like much CIA intelligence over the last decade, it wasn’t just faulty, it had so many holes in it that a truck could have driven through it with its doors open.

Peter and Edythe were known in security circles in Europe and known by the underworld also. They were recognized to be Western operatives, most likely American.

After the mistaken killing in Paris, they were ripe for a setup.

Alex continued to read.

The setup came when Federov wanted to strike back. First, he had set up his old friend Katzman possibly to be whacked in his place. Then he took it as a personal insult that Katzman had been so victimized.

From his own experiences in European nightlife, Federov knew a young woman for the job. One night in Rome, Peter and Edythe met a young woman named Lana Bassoni who lived in Rome. She was very pretty, a sometime model and sometime artist’s model. But she was married to a musician who wasn’t going anywhere. There was also another detail about Lana that Peter and Edythe would never had guessed until it was too late. She had once worked for Federov at one of the after-hours mob joints he ran in New York. She had been a hostess-plus-a-bit-more, depending how much a client had to spend and what a client wanted. It all made sense.

The meeting at the club in Rome-Lana, Peter, and Edythe-was made to look like a coincidence. But it was anything but. About an hour after meeting, Peter and Edythe disappeared for a while. The next morning, Lana did too.

Alex looked up from the Palm Pilot. “I assume there’s more,” she said to Cerny.

“Of course,” he said. “Short and sweet. Do you want to read it in English or Italian?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Give me both in case I sense something wrong with the translations.”

“Smart girl,” he said. “That’s why you’re here.”

She took back the Palm Pilot. “If I were really smart, I wouldn’t be here.”

She opened the final files. There were a pair of homicide reports from the Roman newspapers from January, including that of a musician and his girlfriend found dead in their flat in Rome. Then some follow-ups from several weeks later. The final entry had to do with a pair of bodies found in the sandy bogs near Villa di Plinio. Two bodies had been found, not yet identified.

The file ended, as did the information Cerny accessed in his Pilot. He took the device back and tucked it away.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Show me that lightning intellect,” he said. “What do you make of all that?”

“Tie it together, you mean?”

“If you can.”

“But you know the correct answers already?” she said.

“I know answers that I believe to be correct,” he said. “There’s a difference. So put your thesis to me, and I’ll let you know if you’re in the right line of work or not.”

“I’ll give you a scenario that works,” she said. “Just as it came to me as I was reading.”

“Please do,” Cerny answered above the drone of the aircraft’s engines.

“First off, someone in Washington was dumb enough to order a hit on Federov. Someone wanted him killed, for whatever reason.”

“I could argue that by saying we don’t do things like that.”

“And I’d argue back that I know that you do, same as we never used to employ torture until we got caught doing it.”

“Keep going.”

“Peter and Edythe had the assignment to hit Federov. But they blew it and whacked his double, his imposter, instead. Since his double was his pal, Federov was pretty angry. He hit back. He had his moll Lena set up Peter and Edythe in Rome. My guess is they got hit by some Ukrainian gunmen that night on the via Trafficante. Do I know the principals?” Alex asked. “I’m guessing I do.”

“Twitchy Eye, that’s Anatoli,” Cerny said. “Then there’s Nontwitchy Eye, which is Kaspar.”

“And they killed Lana, why?” Alex asked. “To eradicate any links back to them? Keep her from ever talking?”

“It appears that way,” Cerny said.

“Federov ordered it?”

“The Ukrainians are not always so well disciplined. Anatoli and Kaspar could have been acting on their own when they took Lena out.

“Lena’s boyfriend? Collateral damage?” she asked.

“Apparently. Tough for him,” Cerny said. “But that completed the cycle of four deaths in twelve hours.”

Alex hit the end of her files. She looked up. Cerny was looking at her.

“So,” she said. “If I mentioned something called ‘Operation Chuck and Susan’ to you, presumably you’d know what I was talking about.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I already know,” she said. “Operation Chuck and Susan. My computer crashed when I tried to access that file. And it was related to Kiev. My guess is that Chuck and Susan were Peter and Edythe. And you were trying to keep it from me for as long as possible that you wanted to kill Federov. Who knows? Maybe he didn’t lift a finger to stop the attack on the president because he felt the United States kept trying to kill him.”

“We need to take him out,” Cerny said. “For all the reasons you know, plus the ones that I know, plus probably several more that neither of us know. Is that sufficient?”

“If we know all this, why are we going to Europe?”

“To put the final pieces in place,” he said, “and to finally eliminate Federov. As long as he’s alive, he’s a threat to you and to the United States.”

“What sort of threat to me?” she asked.

“For starters, he wants you dead.”

She thought about it. “I’m not sure I believe that,” she said.

“What are you saying? You didn’t see what happened in Venezuela?”

“I saw what happened,” she answered angrily. “For God’s sake, I was there, remember? I’m just not sure I’m buying that Federov was behind it.”

Cerny rolled his eyes. “You’re telling me that you know more than we do?”

“Maybe I do.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“I know how to judge a man. One of those first RPGs in Kiev hit right where I had been standing. Federov moved me away from that place.”

“Proof that he knew there was going to be an attack.”

“Everyone in the city knew of the possibility of an attack!” she snapped back. “If anyone in authority had had any common sense, the president would have skipped the memorial, citing security considerations. And then the president would have gotten out of the country as fast as possible. But I’m just an underling. I don’t plan these things. I had no opinion worth hearing at the time, right?”

“Sounds like I’m hearing one now,” he said.

“Yeah. You are.”

She handed the Palm Pilot back to him. He pressed his finger to its security patch, let it read his fingerprint, and shut it down.

“When we get to Paris,” he said an hour later, “we’ll deal with this. We have a meeting the day after arrival. One of our local people who’s familiar with the case.”

“What sort of ‘local people’?” she asked, fatigue in her voice. “Who is he?”

“You’ll like him,” Cerny answered, without giving a name. “He’s embedded with one of the European police agencies.”

“CIA?” she asked.

“Naturally.”

“French?”

“No,” Cerny said. “As a matter of fact, he’s Italian.”

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Lt. Rizzo was the first to arrive, dressed sharply in a new suit, his hardcopy files under his arm.

The meeting was in the United States embassy in Paris just off the Place de la Concorde, in a secure room on the third floor. Cerny arrived with Alex. They took seats at a small conference table. A third man there was Mark McKinnon, who was the CIA station chief in Rome. He had made the trip separately from Rizzo so they would not be seen together. They had, in fact, not seen each other in person since talking over a glass of wine at the dark San Christoforo bar in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome.

Cerny handled the introductions. An embassy observer was present also, a young man fluent in English, French, and Italian.

“Signor Rizzo has been with the Roman police for twenty-two years,” Michael Cerny said to Alex. They spoke English. “Seventeen on the brigata omicidia.”

“Rough work,” Alex allowed.

“Gian Antonio has been a CIA asset for at last the last fifteen of those years,” McKinnon added. “High quality material, almost always accurate.”

“Thank you, Michael,” Rizzo said in perfect English. “Almost?” he laughed.

“No one’s perfect,” Mark McKinnon said. “Not in our line of work.”

Cerny looked to Alex. “I brought Ms. LaDuca up to speed on the flight over, vis-à-vis the two murder investigations in Rome,” Cerny said. “In terms of Federov and his bodyguards, where are we now?”

McKinnon opened a file and slid a photograph across the table to Alex. “Recognize this guy?” he asked.

She glanced at it. “That’s one of the men who came to the embassy in Ukraine with Federov,” she said.

“He’s one of Federov’s bodyguards,” McKinnon said. “He’s actually the remaining one.”

“Remaining?” she asked.

“The other one is currently deceased,” McKinnon said. “He had an accident in his home in London. Fell and hit his head.”

She shuddered.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Careless of him.” She returned the photo. “That’s definitely the man, right? In the photo?” McKinnon asked. “From Kiev.”

“That’s him.”

McKinnon placed the photograph back in the file. “He’s in Paris right now,” he said. “His name is Kaspar Rodzienko. Ukrainian-born Russian. It’s our feeling that he and his boss were instrumental in the attacks on the president in Kiev. We’d like to wrap him up as quickly as possible. For that, we need bait for him to come forward.”

“And that would be me,” she assumed evenly. “The target for Comrade Kaspar.”

“That would be you,” McKinnon said.

“We’d rather get him here in Europe than have him find his way into the US and come after you there,” Cerny said.

Alex looked at the three men at the table, plus the observer, and gave them an ironic shake of the head. “What are you asking me to do now?” she asked.

McKinnon looked to Rizzo.

“We have some informers among the Ukrainians in the local underworld,” he said. “We have the ability to let Kaspar know you’re in Paris. We’ve already done that. The information he received indicated that you’re on a trade mission for the Treasury Department. We have a safe apartment for you to stay in. Near rue Mazarine. Fine neighborhood, about a two-minute walk to the river. We’d set a security ring around you. When he comes looking for you, we hit him.”

“So you’ve made me a target,” she said. “Again.”

Silence around the room. “Not much we can do about it at this point, LaDuca,” McKinnon said. “You’ll be compensated well for this.”

“Well or posthumously?” she asked, her displeasure growing.

“Better to get him on our terms rather than his own,” Cerny said. “We think he’s here for maybe two more days. If he knows you’re here and where you might be found, he’ll come into our view. Then we strike.”

“What about Federov?” she asked.

“We have no idea where he is now. He’s kept a low profile since Kiev. We can’t account for how many passports he might have.”

“Or what names they’re under,” McKinnon added.

In her mind, she was putting it together. “The date of the ‘hit’ in Paris, when someone was killed by our people under a false identity. Wasn’t that January second?”

Cerny answered. “Yes, it was.”

“And the file came to me four days later in Washington,” she said. “So that was the start of your next attempt to get Federov?”

Cerny again. “You could call it that.”

“Then six weeks later, the president is in Kiev, I’m supposed to keep tabs on Federov, and we’re trying to look like we’re negotiating a peace with him. And you guys are looking for new ways to hit him, but he beats you and takes a shot at the president instead. Lucky for you he missed.”

“Well,” Cerny said, “you know what they say. If the shoe fits, wear it.”

Alex considered her part in the near endgame, that of the bait in a trap. “And my alternative is?” Alex asked.

“As we said, wait for months, years. You never know where he’ll turn up.”

Cerny, McKinnon, and Rizzo escorted Alex to her lodging, which was a small two-room apartment on the rue Guénégaud in the sixth arrondissement. The apartment was toward the middle of the block in an old building with two huge blue doors at street level. The River Seine was a hundred yards to the north and the intersection with the rue Mazarine a hundred feet to the south.

They went there in the late afternoon. Alex studied the logistics, not a bad idea since her life depended on them. Two flights to walk up, one key to open the door. The door was reinforced from the inside, steel slabs that would bolt all the way across, a steel frame reinforcing the security from within.

There were shutters that would close on the two windows that overlooked the street. No point to be a target from across the street or a rooftop. When Alex inspected them, she saw that they too were reinforced with metal.

She put her foot to the ragged carpet in the apartment to test the floorboards. The wooden floor and steps in the hallway outside had creaked and sung like a choir with every footfall. The floor under the carpet was stable. She could have jumped on it and it wouldn’t have given a vibration.

“Concrete?” she asked.

“Above and below.”

That didn’t protect her from a bomb, but it definitely made one impractical. She checked the rear window. It was barred, though the bars could be unbolted from inside in case of fire. Cerny also explained that there was no access to the building from the roof. No exit from that direction either.

McKinnon gave her a new cell phone, specially designed. Someone on her surveillance team would be on it twenty-four seven. She didn’t even have to dial. Just open it and talk. It had a camera and a tracking device. She may have been a target, but she was a high-tech one.

“I’ll warn you,” Cerny said. “We’d put you in body armor, but then any shooter who detected it would sense the trap and aim for the head. So what good would that do?”

“We think he’ll come after you right away, LaDuca,” McKinnon said. “Probably tomorrow, maybe even during the day. For whatever reason, there seems to be some urgency in getting you killed.”

“I’m flattered,” she said with irony. “What in God’s name is it they think I know that even I don’t know?”

“We have no idea,” McKinnon said.

“What if he comes after me tonight?”

“We’re ready,” Cerny said. “We have backup teams all over the city. Stay in touch by phone and we’ll lead you to the nearest help if you need it.”

“It doesn’t take more than a second or two to fire a bullet,” she said.

“But it takes a while to set up a shot on a moving target in a city,” McKinnon said. “Kaspar is not on a suicide mission. He wants to hit you and get away. That makes him vulnerable. Even more vulnerable than you since he’s not watching for us.”

She was to go out to dinner with Lt. Rizzo that evening in Montparnasse at La Coupole, the atmospheric old haunt of Hemingway and the expatriate American writers of the 1920s. He would pick her up by car and drop her off after dinner. Rizzo would be her escort and act as her bodyguard also.

In the evening Cerny introduced her to a Frenchman named Maurice, a lanky Parisian cop who did extracurricular stuff the same way Rizzo did. Maurice was unshaven in a leather jacket and jeans. He didn’t seem to be the brightest man she’d ever met.

In any case, Maurice would be posted in the entrance foyer of her building, keeping an eye on whoever went in and out, while another local guy named Jean, whom she met at the same time, would watch the entrance at the restaurant. At the end of their twelve-hour shifts, others would rotate on and off.

“Do I get a weapon to defend myself in case you guys screw up again?” she asked.

Cerny reached to his attaché case. He pulled out a box and handed it to Alex.

She opened it and found a Glock 9 with twenty-one rounds of ammunition, enough for a full clip plus a half dozen for good luck. She hefted it in her hand and looked around the table.

“Looks exactly like mine,” she said suspiciously. “The one I own back in Washington.” She continued to examine it. “Even has the same little nicks as mine. Imagine that.”

“What could make you feel more secure than having your own weapon?”

She looked at them angrily, not surprised. “If I knew you were going to burglarize me, I could have used some clothing changes too.”

They weren’t sure whether she was joking or not.

“You guys better know what you’re doing this time,” she said. “I can only be shot at so many times before I get hit.”

She clipped the holster to her waist of her skirt on the right side. There seemed no end to what had been put in motion in January.

SEVENTY-NINE

At La Coupole, Alex sat across the table from Lt. Rizzo. The restaurant, which dated from the twenties, was pure art deco, with characteristic light fixtures on the many square pillars that held up the ceiling of the large, not-very-intimate room. Above the light fixtures were paintings that had been done by local artists in exchange for food and, more probably, drink all those decades ago. Alex wondered which, if any, of them had lived full, happy lives pursuing their muse.

She wore a black skirt, cut well above the knee, comfortable and flexible in case she needed to run for her life later. A light rain fell outside and added a gloss to the Boulevard Montparnasse. Against the rain she wore a pair of chic leather boots, which she had bought late that afternoon in a shop across the street from her lodgings. The boots were supple and flexible while still looking sharp.

They spoke Italian. “LaDuca” meant “the duchess” in Italian, Rizzo noted, a quirk he liked. He asked about the origin of her name. She explained about her father. She shied away from other personal information, however, and he did too; one never knew when a listening device had been dropped. But he did speak of his boyhood, growing up in the slums of Rome, learning English from his father who had been in a POW camp and how he had done his own stint in the Italian army. He amused her with a tale of blowing up a bridge in Spain in the 1970s, part of a prearranged NATO training exercise, but no one had warned the Spanish police.

“It all got blamed on the Basques,” he said with a snort, following an account of how his brigade of Italians had to hightail it to France in their socks.

In return, she told him about Venezuela and the slaughter in Barranco Lajoya. He listened seriously and offered condolences. They did not discuss Kiev. He knew the details of her loss and stayed away from the subject.

Things were playing out in her mind in three dimensions now. The first was the present, in a nostalgia-laden restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank where the relics of eighty years ago-in addition to the painting on the pillars, portraits of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray, and Foujita-haunted the walls. Amidst this, Jean sat near the door, poised and intent, his eyes fixed on comings and goings.

The second dimension was one step beyond the immediate present, the notion that at any given moment a bullet could find her, putting her into the same earthly blackness that had consumed Robert. For the first time, she really considered what death would be like. It occurred to her that she might have just days, hours, or minutes to live.

But beyond that, even as she conversed with Rizzo in the forefront of her mind, her mind played out its own recent memories. This evening had taken on its own madness and it gripped her. She thought of Robert and his funeral, of the chaos in Kiev, and the massacre in Barranco Lajoya, and she thought of the six slain missionaries, Father Martin, and her friends back in Washington who would probably be playing basketball that night.

Then dinner was finished. She was conscious of the Glock she wore on her hip, concealed carefully under a light jacket.

She reminded herself that she had loaded the weapon and even chambered the first round. The Glock had a concealed hammer, but it was there, back and ready to fall and fire the round. All that prevented it doing so was the safety catch, which she could snap to “fire” with her thumb as she drew the weapon. This practice was dangerous, but the second or two needed for the operation of the slide to chamber the first round might make all the difference between-it was best not to think about what came after “between.” In her mind she went through the reflexive motions of using it.

She ordered a Caesar salad, while he had a blanquette de veau, thus confirming her suspicion that Italians largely lived on veal. He matched her stereotype for stereotype, and neither was completely wrong.

“Voi americane sempre mangiano delle insalate, perché non vogliono ingrassare,” he said with a smile. You American women always eat salads because you don’t want to get fat. “Ma è chiarissimo que per Lei non c’è pericolo a proposito di quello”-but it is clear that you’re in no danger of that.

“That’s because we do eat salads,” she answered with a laugh.

For a moment Alex wondered if he was hitting on her, but from his expression it was simply a compliment, and she felt flattered. Of course, she realized that any compliment of a young woman by an Italian male was at least a potential hit.

It didn’t bother her. In some ways, it made her felt normal again. And shortly after, Rizzo began to speak affectionately of his own lady friend, Sophie, who would be joining him in three days.

Coffee, the check, and then they were out the door, leaving. Jean had her back and Rizzo found a taxi.

The driver took them back to the apartment building on the rue Guénéguad.

Rizzo stepped out first and scanned the quiet block.

“Check your telephone,” he said to her. “I’ll check mine.”

They both checked. The devices worked. Then, as they stood there, a shadow moved in a sturdy black Peugeot that was jammed into a parking spot twenty feet from her front door.

In a light rain, a window on the driver’s side descended.

Startled, Alex’s hand went to her gun.

“Va bene,” Rizzo said in Italian. It’s okay.

From the driver’s seat in the car, Michael Cerny gave Alex a small and almost playful salute. “The block is clear,” he said. “You’re fine.”

“Maurice is inside the building?” she asked.

“Talked to him ten minutes ago,” he said.

“And he was alive when he was talking to you?” she needled.

“He sounded like he was,” trying to make light of it. “I didn’t specifically ask, though.”

“Very funny,” she said. But she relaxed slightly.

Rizzo gave her an embrace. She walked the rest of the way down the street to her door, tuned into the sound of her own footsteps on the sidewalk.

She stopped, tried to take a sense of the situation, and arrived at the big blue double doors that led into her building.

A nagging instinct told her that all hell was about to break loose. She looked back and saw Cerny give her another wave.

To enter she punched a numeric code on one of those keypads that all Paris apartments now had-the days of the concièrge who lived next to the door and let people in who rang were long gone-and pushed the door open.

Quiet as the grave, she thought as she stepped inside, and if I’m not careful, only once removed from one.

EIGHTY

She pushed her way in and the light clicked on. The doors closed behind her. There was coolness to the stairway. She waited a moment and then realized why. Someone had left the window open on the first floor landing, one flight up.

Probably Maurice. But where was Maurice?

She paused for a moment, her senses alert to possible danger. Then she continued to the steps. An open window had allowed some rain to fall inside and the effect was soothing. It had been stuffy earlier in the stairwell.

She started up the steps. The sound of her footsteps echoed on the plaster walls and the wooden stairs. Lord, she was tired. Her brain buzzed with the events of the day.

She arrived on the first floor landing.

The floor was damp from the rain and she made a note to speak to Maurice. She could give him some friendly advice on home maintenance.

Well, no matter. The building was quiet.

Too quiet?

On the landing one flight up, she pushed the window shut and locked it. There was water on the floor. Someone was going to slip. She had been told that Maurice kept towels and mops in the closets on the landing. She decided to do her good deed for the day. She would drop a towel and quickly glide it over the floor with her foot, lest the next resident slip on this mess.

She stepped to the closet.

The door was stuck.

Her gaze gravitated downward. She caught the faint outline of crimson that was flowing from under the closet door.

She yanked the door open. Maurice, or what remained of him, slumped forward from a crouched lying position to a sprawling one. Her eyes riveted on the hole in his head just between the eyes. Then, she quickly took in the two bullet wounds to the chest. The gunshot wounds to the body were probably the first ones, followed by the head wound, which was the coup de grâce.

The bullet had passed through his skull and exited from the rear and into the wall, bringing some inevitable blood, fragments of bone, and brain splatter with it. His face was smashed in from the force of the bullet, which was probably point blank. From the size of the hole, it was clear that the bullet had been high powered.

Suddenly, the lights went off. Her first impression was that she had taken too long to climb the stairs and that the lights, as they did in European hallways, had turned off automatically. But then she realized someone had manually cut the power.

Meaning, someone was waiting for her. She had walked into a trap. Her left hand went fast for her gun, snapping the safety catch to “fire.”

In the darkness, the door to her own apartment opened one flight above. She heard the heavy footsteps of a man rush outward. Simultaneously, the blue doors down below opened and she heard someone else rush in.

Cerny? Rizzo?

She was in the middle, trapped in the darkness. Was the intruder below her savior or assassin? From above there was a flash and a brutally loud retort. A bullet crashed into the woodwork of the steps a few feet from her. Then there was a second shot at her and then a third.

Her hand whipped upward as she ducked away from where she had stood. She went into a low crouch, pointed her weapon upwards, and pulled the trigger. Either God guided her hand or just plain dumb luck prevailed.

Or maybe it was her years of training, because the agonized profane scream from the top of the stairs, followed by a torrent of obscenity in Russian-not Ukrainian but Russian!-told her that she had hit her target.

Alex heard the man’s body slump toward the wall. Then in the darkness she saw the erratic wavering flash of his pistol and heard the ear-splitting “bang” as he fired twice rapidly again and still tried to kill her.

The bullets shattered against the wall above her. One hit several feet above her head. The other passed so close to her right ear that she felt it go by. The impact sprayed powdered wood and concrete from the wall.

She steadied her own weapon. She could see a silhouette in the darkness and fired twice at the midpoint of it. She hit the target, heard the impact of the bullets and then heard the tumbling crashing sound of the man’s body on the stairs. All this rose above the sound of other heavy footsteps rushing upward from below.

She shifted her position, standing now. She leaned flat, her back to the wall.

“Rizzo? Cerny?” she asked.

Mistake. The response was the repetitive flash and loud bang of an automatic weapon and more shots impacting against the wall behind her.

She lowered her own weapon, fired toward her second assailant, and scored another hit. She heard a howl of pain and the clunk of his weapon hitting the floor, followed by the heavier thud of his body, followed by groans and cursing.

She heard the weapon rattle across the wooden floor and drop down two or three steps. She moved toward her only possible escape. She raced down the stairs and tried to step past the fallen body. The man who had tried to kill her cursed profanely and grabbed at her. Clearly she had not hit him in a vital spot.

He slashed at her body. With a powerful arm, he brought her down.

She fell hard to a knee. He cursed her in Russian. He had one strong hand on the shoulder of her jacket. His other hand, wet with blood, pushed at her throat. She threw an elbow at him and made contact. But he still fought, cursing in Russian that he would kill her. She could tell that the other hand was grasping for his gun.

She swung downward again with an elbow and smashed at him with the hand that held her gun. Both blows landed hard, catching him on the side of the face, then on the side of the skull. She felt his grip on her weaken. She swung hard again with the hand that held her weapon. It cracked across his forehead.

His grip on her shoulder weakened. She followed with the same elbow crashing downward, pile-driver style, onto the top of his skull.

She fought and pulled away. She struggled to her feet. In the dim light from the outside, she then saw him access his gun. Alex had no choice. She pushed her Glock to the man’s chest and pulled the trigger. The bang was enormous, and she could feel the spray of blood as his body tumbled away and sprawled backward.

She felt sickened but kept moving.

She found her way to the door, swung it open, and found the street blocked by another huge man. For an inexplicable second they glared each other in the eye.

“Kaspar,” she said, recognizing him from Kiev.

“Alex LaDuca,” he said calmly.

Once again, Alex was faster. She brought her knee up and caught him hard between the legs. He bellowed and reached for his weapon. She hit him again, chopped at his hand to freeze it. She knew he had a huge advantage in physical force. If she gave him the slightest chance to overpower her, she was dead. In turn, she knew she had the advantage of speed and surprise: he hadn’t expected her to survive the trap inside the building. She kicked him in the shins, then the kneecap. Somehow she thought of Robert and the carnage in Kiev as she was fighting.

Where was Rizzo? Where was Cerny?

Kaspar staggered. He slumped slightly.

She smashed him across the back of the neck, and with all the strength that remained in her, she shoved at him. He staggered backward into a car but rebounded like a tiger. He kicked at her and got lucky, catching her in the wrist, sending her Glock flying from her hand. Her wrist was hit so hard that it felt frozen. Her fingers wouldn’t move. Kaspar lunged at her gun. She chopped him hard behind the neck then followed with a kick to the ribs. Momentarily he blocked her access to her own gun.

Then she turned and ran like the devil himself was chasing her.

She dashed toward Cerny’s car. And then she saw what had happened. The front windshield had been riddled with bullets, probably from a silencer-equipped automatic. She saw Cerny’s body in the front seat, slumped on the wheel, blood all over his skull.

She would have been sick. But there wasn’t time. She ran past his car, ran faster than she had run in years. She heard the profane shouting of Kaspar struggling up from the sidewalk behind her.

Something hit a parked car nearby as she fled. She knew it was a bullet, fired by a pistol equipped with a silencer, probably the same one that had dispatched Cerny.

She ducked and wove between parked cars.

In front of her, the rear window exploded on another parked car. It was a good thing that even in trained hands the best handgun was only accurate-in terms of hitting a human sized target-to about seventy yards. Obviously she had inflicted some pain on her assailant; his aim was wildly inaccurate.

She kept low, zigzagged, and wove. At one point she slipped and was thankful that she was wearing boots, otherwise she could have torn up an ankle.

Another silent round smashed into the bricks above her head. She heard yet another one smash into a plate-glass shop window.

The police judiciaire were going to have a ball with this one, she thought for no good reason.

Then she turned the corner.

She was on the Quai Conti by the river. Some isolated traffic passed.

Then there was a shout from a doorway, a crash of some heavy glass shattering a few feet away. A human form. A man. Rising to his feet, moving toward her.

Alex nearly expired from heart failure and figured this was the end of her life. She was about to be killed unless she somehow eluded him.

She stepped up her pace. No traffic, the skyline of nighttime Paris across the river, Notre Dame Cathedral illuminated like a giant wedding cake.

Her legs felt strong. She ran on the wet pavement and turned the next corner. She breathed heavily and leaned against the wall.

Good. No one had seemed to follow. Yet she knew from long experience that there was no substitute for getting as far away as quickly as possible from any place of trouble. She reached into her coat pocket, gripped the cell phone and opened it. She waited. And waited. No answer.

She turned left and ran into the dark Paris night, not yet knowing where to run, just wanting to escape.

Come on, Rizzo! Answer, answer, answer!

Please pick up, please pick up, please pick up.

Then Rizzo did answer.

Her mind scrambled. It rejected Italian. They spoke French.

“C’est moi! Alex!” she blurted out. It’s me, Alex, she said, breathlessly.

“Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas?

” Rizzo asked. What’s wrong?

“Tout!” Everything, she said, continuing to run.

She turned slightly as she moved and saw Kaspar in pursuit.

She turned westward. She stepped out into the busy traffic. Her ankle caught on something, twisted, and she went down. A taxi blared its horn, swerved, and sped by, barely missing her. She pulled herself back up, her ankle throbbing, a knee bleeding. She gathered up her cell phone and stumbled back onto the sidewalk.

She ran hard. She turned toward him and saw he was limping badly too. But Kaspar must have packed another clip into his weapon. The sidewalks and asphalt around her exploded with the pattern of bullets that just missed her on each side.

Her heart was pounding in her throat and she ran for her life as the Ukrainian assassin followed.

EIGHTY-ONE

She flipped open the cell phone. Rizzo was still there.

“Find your way to the Métro,” Rizzo said, referring to the Parisian subway. “Then get to the Odéon station. That was the closest stop to your apartment. We have a team of people there,” he said.

She knew her way around Paris but in her haste to escape had run in exactly the wrong direction to get to the Odéon stop. She now would have to take a circuitous route.

“Or do you want them to abandon their positions and come find you?” Rizzo asked.

“No. They’ll never find me,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll get there.”

She tried to assimilate everything that had happened, but the horror of it acted as a block. She wondered about the men she had shot.

Had she left them dead? Dying?

Who knew, though she was sure she’d be reading about it in the newspapers, if not watching it on the news. A wave of disgust overcame her, quickly followed by an urge to survive.

Her thoughts were punctuated by police sirens. The distinctive European ones, like the ones in the open car of police going to round up “the usual suspects” at the beginning of Casablanca.

The traffic was heavy on the quai. But she darted into it, barely missing a car, then another. She was on the bank of the paved promenade above the river. The floodlit Cathedral of Notre Dame was behind her. One of the great views in the Western world, and she was scared out of her mind. No time to be a tourist.

Heavy drops of rain were falling. A gift from heaven maybe. If Kaspar was trailing her, it would make her more difficult to see. She kept her head down. She couldn’t see the rain but she could feel it on her face. What she could see was her breath against the humid mist of the night, that and the recurring image of Maurice’s body tumbling out of the closet.

She moved as fast as she could on a bad ankle, urging herself to run and resisting the urge at the same time. She broke into a fierce sweat and crossed the river on the Pont du Carrousel. The massive Musée du Louvre loomed on the other side. She came off the bridge and was on the right bank.

Alex looked over her shoulder and thought she saw Kaspar’s dark figure still crossing the bridge, limping badly also, following her.

Suddenly a police car approached, its siren wailing, its blue light flashing, heading in the way she had come. She tried to flag it down, but in the rain the gendarmes didn’t see her. They kept going. So did she.

She limped two blocks eastward, keeping Rizzo on the phone. She could see the lights of the Place de la Concorde up ahead. She knew there was a Métro station there and she figured it would be crowded. From Concorde, there would be a short ride to safety. It was too risky to cross a bridge again on foot. A perfect route? No, but she prayed it would work.

Alex picked up her pace. The rain intensified as she passed the gardens of the Tuileries. She cursed her original decision to run north, not south, when she fled the scene of the shooting.

Her body trembled. Within minutes, she arrived at the busy Place de la Concorde and, looking over her shoulder, still saw Kaspar in pursuit. She darted through the maniacal traffic and accessed an entrance to the Métro.

Alex ran down the old concrete steps to the platform. Her footsteps echoed noisily. She slipped badly on the wet stairs. She skinned her other knee and her ankle wailed in pain. But she struggled up to her feet and continued.

She found the Number 12 line southbound. She had thrown Kaspar, at least for a few moments. Without seeing her, he would have no idea which line and which platform she had fled to. Where was he? She was torn between leading him to the Odéon stop and losing him completely. She wished now she had worn a bulletproof vest. What would protect her if he tried to pick her off?

She went to the far end of the platform. She kept her head down, her eyes on the steps. Then, amidst the crowd on the other side of the platform, waiting for a train in the opposite direction, there stood Kaspar.

From a distance of about fifty feet, directly across the tracks, their eyes met. He had a clear shot now, across the tracks. In the distance, she heard the sound of a train approaching the station.

Kaspar glared at her, reached for his weapon but then realized the train rumbling into the station would take his shot away. So he turned and ran. He was trying to cross over.

A train roared into the station. A crowd flowed off the train and another crowd surged on. It was almost midnight but the subway was moderately busy.

She stepped onto the last car. Just before she boarded, she saw Kaspar descend the distant steps in pursuit. She couldn’t see whether he had gotten on or not. She assumed he had. She turned against the wall of the subway car. She wished she had recovered her gun. The empty holster made her feel naked.

The train rumbled along. Why did these Parisian subways have to zigzag like snakes beneath the city? Stations were often only two hundred yards apart.

One stop. Two. She got off and switched cars, trying to throw her pursuer. The train arrived at the Sèvres Babylone station.

She stepped off, stayed in the crowd, and transferred to the Number 10 line going east to the Gare d’Austerlitz, the ancient train station. The 10 would take her to Odéon within two minutes.

She finally started to catch her breath. Under her clothing, her body was soaked. Sweat rolled off her. This train was crowded too. She kept waiting to see if Kaspar would come through looking for her. The doors between the cars were only for emergency use but were unlocked in case emergency use was required.

She took out her phone again. She found Rizzo on the other end.

“Where are you?” he asked.

She told him.

“Still got Kaspar after you?” he asked.

“Probably. I haven’t seen him for several minutes.”

“We’re ready for you,” he said. “When you arrive at Odéon, get off as quickly as possible. You’ll see some musicians playing. Walk toward them as quickly as possible.”

“Where will you be?” she asked.

“Watching,” he said.

In ninety seconds, the train arrived at Odéon.

She stepped out at the south end of the platform. Her ankle continued to kill her.

This station too was busy. But she could hear some street musicians, a small band playing for change in the subways. Accordion, violin, and sax until 1:30 in the morning. Only in Paris. They were at the other end of the platform, about a hundred feet away. It was strange they were playing so late.

She looked in every direction.

She saw no help. She spoke into her phone.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said.

“We’ve got you,” came the answer from Rizzo.

“What do you mean you’ve ‘got’ me?”

“We see you. We’re watching.”

“Who’s watching?”

“Get past the musicians,” Rizzo said.

“I don’t see Kaspar,” she said.

“You must have lost him.”

“I don’t think-”

“He’s behind you!” Rizzo said. “Get moving!”

She turned. Eye contact immediately. His gaze again ran smack into hers simultaneously. She saw him reach for something under his jacket. He was about fifty feet behind her.

“Get moving!” Rizzo repeated. “Get away from him!” barked Rizzo’s voice on the phone.

She had never felt slower in her life. Her ankle wouldn’t obey. She cursed the boots and wished she’d had sneakers. She bumped into a couple that was kissing and the contact nearly knocked her over. Kaspar was gaining.

“I can’t move fast! My ankle!”

“Get past the musicians!”

“I can’t. He’ll catch me first.” The words in her phone barked at her. “Move! Move!” they demanded. “You’ll be safe!”

“Why don’t you shoot him?” she demanded. “Just shoot him!”

“We can’t! Not yet!”

“He’s going to kill me!”

“Keep moving!” Rizzo barked. “Now! Move!”

It was the endgame and she knew it. She zigzagged through the crowd. She had never felt slower in her life. She heard excited voices and she heard the assassin steps behind her. And she heard the music, which got louder and louder as she lurched toward it. How was she going to get out of here? She eyed the sortie, the exit, on the other side of the players.

Kaspar must have drawn his gun because she heard a woman yell and scream. Then there was chaos behind her.

She broke into a final attempt at a run. She edged past people and Kaspar was on the run behind her.

Then her earphone thundered again. “Get down! He’s got a gun!”

She tried to move, but her ankle turned again. She fell and went down hard. She knew she was a goner. She got up and stumbled past the musicians, fell hard again. The musicians stopped playing.

She got past them. The accordion player reached into his pocket. So did the violin player. She saw from the corner of her eye. She tried to stand.

Then she saw what the trap was, what this was all about. Like Anatoli in London, Kaspar had stepped into his own hell on earth.

The violin player raised a black pistol at the same time. The accordion player pulled one out also. Kaspar raised his own weapon and the Métro platform was a flurry of bullets.

The violinist aimed right at Kaspar’s gut and put two shots into him. The assassin staggered for a moment, and his eyes went wide in pain and in the realization that death was at hand. He flailed and fired two shots wildly. Kaspar staggered, his hand snapped back, and he fired his own gun upward instead of downward.

There was a flurry on the Métro platform and bullets rang in every direction.

Alex felt something wallop her hard in the midpoint of the chest, just above the breast bone, at the center where her stone medallion hung.

She saw the accordion player reach forward and put a bullet into Kaspar’s head. Then a second. But she barely saw that, because she felt something wet and sticky on her chest. Blood. She had been hit by a bullet in the midpoint of the chest. The feeling first was numbness, then the pain radiated, as did the shock.

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” was all she could say.

Alex had a bullet wound in the center of her chest. She was bleeding.

Unreal. But she knew how quickly it could be fatal.

She clutched the area. She lay on the ground in shock, wondering how everything since January had led to this time, this place. The pain was spreading now and so was the blood. From the corner of her eye, she could see Kaspar lying on the ground, his skull torn open by a team of assassins.

One of them stayed over her and cradled her head.

“I’m dying,” she said. “I’m dying.” The pain was radiating out from a center point in her chest. Shivers turned to convulsions. She put an unsteady hand to the area where she had been hit. She felt warm wetness, the blood, and the broken pieces of the stone pendant from Barranco Lajoya.

It was surreal. The accordion player-gunman ripped off the sleeve of his shirt and pressed it to her chest. She drifted. Consciousness departed, then returned halfway.

Then there were the sounds of police over her. Her eyes flickered and she didn’t know how much time had passed. She only knew that the musician had disappeared.

Strange faces, noisy men and women in Parisian police uniforms, hovered over her. They barked orders and tried to help. She could no longer understand the language. They worked on her with bandages, tubes, and breathing devices. She felt herself tumbling deeper into shock. Or into something or some place she didn’t understand.

Then everything went from white to black then back to white again, and she was thinking, “If this is dying, it’s easier than I ever thought. Much easier…”

A cloudy painless whiteness enveloped her.

Two minutes later, her heart stopped.

EIGHTY-TWO

The heavyset woman came down the stairs of her apartment building in a hurry. She carried one large suitcase and struggled with it. Three flights down the back stairs and she was sweating beneath her tan raincoat. But she had been sweating since before she had finished backing.

Short notice, long trip. But a big payoff. It would all be worth it. She was going to get a new passport, a new identity. And a free trip out of the country. She would get more money in cash in the next few hours than she would by keeping her lousy government job for another twenty years. So it hadn’t been much of a decision when she had made it several years ago.

Still she was nervous. She had heard horror stories about people who got involved in this type of thing. But there was no turning back now.

It was nearly midnight.

She stepped out from the front door of her middle class building in Alexandria, Virginia. A few parking spaces down, in front of a hydrant, a car engine started up. The car slid forward a few parking spots and gently came to a halt.

She recognized two of the men in the front seat. The front window rolled down.

Handsome men. Smiling faces. The faces of her homeland.

“Hello, Olga,” the man in the shotgun seat said.

She answered in Ukrainian. “Do you have the money? Do you have my passport?” she demanded.

The man opened an envelope that sat on his lap. There were some huge bricks of money and some banking information where the rest could be found. He handed her a Brazilian passport.

“See if you like your picture,” the man answered. “But I wouldn’t advise you to stay too much longer. FBI. They’re probably on their way.”

The mere mention of American police was enough to make her heart jump. She had known of other CIA employees who had sold out over the years. Most of them went to federal prisons and didn’t emerge until they were very old or until some other more patriotic prisoner stuck a shiv in their backs.

Olga glanced at the passport. Her picture. A new name. She was now Helen Tamshenko and she was a resident of São Paolo.

Good enough. She reached for the back door and slid into the car. She slumped low. No one would spot her as a passenger.

The driver pulled away from the curb. An oncoming pair of headlights swept the street. Then a second. Two big unmarked Buicks, traveling fast.

“Just in time,” the driver said softly. “That’s the FBI now.”

Olga stayed low. She preferred not to see. Her car proceeded without incident. They went to the intersection and turned. She watched the driver as he glanced in his rear view mirror. He moved quickly and deftly into traffic so it would be difficult to follow.

“We’re okay,” he said, continuing in Ukrainian.

The man on the shotgun side turned his head halfway around to talk to his passenger. “You’re a lucky lady tonight, Olga. Real lucky.”

Both men laughed.

They drove across the Key Bridge back into Washington. They navigated carefully through traffic. Olga sat up a little to watch where they were going. Within another few minutes, they entered Rock Creek Park. Its roads were dark and quiet at this late hour, which was what everyone there wanted.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Olga. We’re going to move you to another car. You’re going to drive through the night. Your next driver will take you to Montreal and you’ll fly to Mexico. From there to Cuba. The Americans will lose track of you in Havana. But you’ll connect there for Brazil.”

The driver glanced at him and smiled.

Olga remained nervous.

“Where’s the money?” she asked.

From the front seat came the rest of her package. The nice plump packs of money. Enough to get her started. She was breathing a little easier, but not by much.

Olga’s vehicle pulled off the road. She looked around. Sure enough, there was another car waiting, its lights off.

The driver of Olga’s car flashed its lights. The driver from the other car gave a slight wave of recognition. A passenger side guard stepped out to cover the situation. Olga assumed everyone was armed. Well, that was fine because she was, too.

“There you go,” said the driver. “Don’t say we didn’t do anything for you. You’re on your way.”

“I’m on my way,” she nodded.

She checked her new passport again and stuffed the money in her purse. She stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her.

“Bye, Olga,” the man in front said pleasantly. “Good luck.”

She was too tense to answer. She gave a nod to the car that had brought her here as it pulled away. She started toward the other car.

The rear door opened and the driver beckoned to her again.

EIGHTY-THREE

One of the grand boulevards of Paris that leads to and from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is the Avenue de la Grande Armée, directly opposite the Champs Elysées. It travels eastward from Place de l’Etoile, where the arc stands, and rolls through expensive neighborhoods till it arrives in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

If a traveler stays on the boulevard, he or she passes majestic apartment buildings and mansions that smell of the money of all nations. One will also come to the American Hospital of Paris, which was where Alex arrived thirty minutes after the shooting incident in the Parisian Métro. Not only was there a wound in her chest from a bullet, but she had gone into cardiac arrest.

An intensive care unit in a hospital outside one’s native country is never a cheerful place. But the American Hospital of Paris has been an institution for a century. In a country of exemplary medical care, it remains one of the leading hospitals.

Hit in the center of the chest by a bullet, Alex’s body was moved there from the Métro’s Odéon station by ambulance. Her body was motionless beneath a sheet and a blanket, covered to the shoulders. Medics on the scene looked at the wound and tried to close off the blood, but given the force of the hit, they shook their heads.

The ambulance technicians who transported Alex to the American Hospital saw that her vital signs were almost nonexistent. When her heart stopped, electrical cardioversion was applied. Electrode paddles were applied to her chest and a single shock was administered.

She was unconscious at the time, somewhere between life and death, prepared to go either way. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, her heart flickered again. If she had been gone-wherever souls go to-she was back.

Or trying to get back.

She was admitted to an emergency room, where the bizarre nature of her injury was properly assessed for the first time. The bullet that had hit her had ricocheted off the Métro wall. Its impact had been greatly defused. And somehow, in the center of her chest, right above her breastbone, the bullet had scored a direct hit on the stone pendant that she had bought in Barranco Lajoya.

The stone had broken under the impact of the bullet, but it had defused the damage from the fired round. While there was a flesh wound and severe trauma to the breastbone, including a hairline fracture, the bullet had not broken through beyond the flesh at the surface. Contrary to how it appeared in the Métro, it had not entered her body.

Detectives who inspected the crime scene in the hours after the shooting found the spent bullet in the center of the tracks, in the spot to which it had been deflected.

The stone had saved her life.

On her first day in the hospital, she lay by herself in a private room under heavy sedation. She was groggy. She was on heavy pain-relief medication and an IV fed into her arm. Her chest throbbed. Under the bandages, the skin of her chest had turned the color of an eggplant. Every breath hurt. She was afraid to look at her wound. And above all, she was surprised to be alive.

On the second day she felt better. It was only then that she wondered whether anyone knew where she was, much less who she was. She inquired of one of her nurses.

The nurse informed her that people from the American embassy had arranged for her care, including the private room. Nonetheless, the pain and discomfort persisted. She was too distracted mentally and zonked out on medication even to read. She left the television on 24/7, the remote control at her bedside. All she had the energy to do was flick stations back and forth, the usual French fare-NYPD Blue reruns dubbed in French and a cheesy Gallic clone of The Jerry Springer Show were her grudging favorites-plus odd channels from CNN to Al Jazeera.

Her third day in the hospital was the first day when visitors were allowed. Mark McKinnon, the CIA station chief from Rome, was the first to see her.

McKinnon pulled a chair toward her bed and sat down.

“How are you feeling, LaDuca?” he asked.

“Surprised to be here.”

“You got very lucky,” he said. “Somebody sure is watching over you.”

“You could conclude that,” she said. Her chest still hurt. There were small burns where the electrode paddles had been applied. “Sometimes I wonder.”

She was also still groggy. The medication remained at its original strength.

“A bullet on a ricochet can kill someone,” McKinnon said. “Apparently you had some sort of pendant there on your chest? That’s what the doctors told me.”

“A pendant that I got in South America,” she said. “Very hard stone. It took the brunt of the impact. So they tell me.”

McKinnon was shaking his head.

“Lucky,” he said.

“Lucky,” she answered.

“What are the odds of that happening?” he asked.

“You tell me. I don’t have any answers anymore.”

He smiled and gave her shoulder a pat.

“I understand you’ll be here for a little while more,” he said. “Just rest, get your strength back. Eventually, the police are going to want to ask you questions. But we’re taking care of everything. Back channels.”

“Back channels,” she said. “Wonderful way to do things.”

He didn’t miss her irony.

“Banner year you’re having, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said.

He paused. “There’s still some outstanding business,” he said. “Yuri Federov may be dead. We don’t know. We have to assume that he’s still out there somewhere. You’re not completely safe until he’s completely out of business.”

“Killed, you mean.”

“That’s another word for it.”

“And that all ties into Kiev, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Which in turn ties in how and why my fiancé got killed.”

He nodded.

“Someone betrayed me, didn’t they?” she said. “That’s why Maurice got killed. And Cerny. There’s a traitor somewhere on our side, and he’s got allegiances to the Ukrainian mob.”

“That’s a subject for future discussion,” McKinnon said.

“So the answer is yes?” she said.

McKinnon nodded.

“We had a leak in Washington,” McKinnon said. “Poor Mike Cerny. Cynical chap that he was, he hadn’t vetted all his assistants as well as he should have. Everything was getting to Federov almost before it happened.”

“Olga?” Alex asked.

“You said it. I didn’t.”

Alex shook her head in disgust.

“Anyway. Olga is someone you won’t be seeing again.”

“Arrested?”

“The opposition got to her first.” McKinnon said. “But we’ll discuss this later.”

“When I’m healthy enough,” she said, “we’ll go back at Federov, assuming he’s alive. And we’ll find any other traitor too. How’s that?”

“Federov is out of business, at least,” McKinnon said.

“How do you mean that?”

“He was deposed from his own businesses by his own peers,” McKinnon said. “That’s how it always works in the underworld. He drew too much attention to himself. If he’s not dead, he’s in deep cover. Like back into one of his priest outfits or something.”

“I’m sure,” she said, not really meaning it.

“One thing’s certain. You’ll never see him again.”

“I’m grateful,” she said.

“Federov’s still on our lists, though. Retired or not, if he’s alive we’ll go after him. But as I said, it’s no longer your problem, Alex.”

There was a pause while she remained silent. McKinnon stood.

“The French have posted an extra pair of their police in the lobby,” he explained. “Policiers en civil. Plainclothes. They look like a pair of bouncers. Then we’ve posted two of our own as guards on this floor also. Don’t know whether you’ve seen them.”

“I haven’t been out of this room since they wheeled me in,” she said.

“Of course.”

She gave everything some thought.

“I have some unfinished business in Venezuela too,” she said. “Barranco Lajoya. Those people. I’d like to do something.”

“Tough to accomplish much in that part of the world, isn’t it?” he commiserated.

She shook her head, the images of the carnage relentlessly replaying themselves in her mind’s eye. “Before I die, I want to go back and do what I can for those people. They deserve better.”

“You know what your boss, Mr. Collins, would say,” McKinnon said out of nowhere. “He’d say that’s where Jesus would be. Comforting the downtrodden and the desperate.”

She nodded. It suddenly hurt too much to speak.

“We’ve had discussions with Mr. Collins about Barranco Lajoya, by the way. Something may already be in the works. He’s willing to chip in heavily on an international relief effort.”

“God bless him,” she said.

“I know he’s going to phone you in the next few days.”

“That’s good,” she said. “We can talk.”

A nurse appeared. She looked at McKinnon, shook her head and tapped her wristwatch.

“I guess that’s my five minutes,” McKinnon said.

“And I guess I have a lot of work to do when I get out of here,” she said.

McKinnon left a calling card, a nondescript CIA thing with a fake name, a fake title, and a real phone number. The card cited him as a cultural attaché to the embassy in Paris, with an office in Rome. His cover job was overseeing the exchange of French and Italian filmmakers and American filmmakers.

She was left with a lot of time to think. Too much time, really, but no one ever remarked that time went quickly in a hospital. Federov played over and over in her mind, as did Barranco Lajoya.

Here she was alive again. Why?

What was she to do with the extra years she had been given?

EIGHTY-FOUR

In a private search chamber at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, Sammy Newman-better known to the world as the singer Billy-O-stood with his hands in his inside-out emptied pockets and wondered how things could have gone so terribly wrong.

In front of him, two US customs agents, with their mulish dedication to their job, went through every bit of his luggage, examining the linings, his dirty socks, and underwear. One was a no-nonsense guy with a trim moustache and glasses. The other was an even-less-nonsense female with a big midsection and pinned-back hair. They said nothing as they methodically disassembled his luggage. A Beatles tune, “Yellow Submarine,” mutilated into Muzak, played softly over the sound system.

Meanwhile, Sammy could have used a yellow submarine to get out of there. The flight from Nice, première classe all the way on Air France, had been a sweetheart. Hardly a bump, great food, and there had been two flight attendants who had caught his eye, beautiful Gallic girls with dark eyes, slender builds, and sultry legs. They had pushed their phone numbers into his hands. Sammy had booked a week at the Carlyle in New York and was thinking of inviting both girls over and extending the stay to two weeks. He had some fun planned before having to return to Los Angeles and finding out what his agent had lined up as his next film.

But now, this!

He was breaking a major sweat.

The agents had gone through the lining of his leather suitcase and had found the extra twenty-thousand dollars that he always carried, a violation of currency transfer regulations. He met that with a shrug. He knew his lawyer could get him out of that one.

“Hey. It’s dangerous to show a lot of cash these days,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

“Currency transfer violation, sir,” the male agent said. “Sorry.”

“Aren’t you from this area?” the woman asked. “New Jersey or something?”

“Westbury, Long Island.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Knew it was something.”

She then returned to her business of putting Sammy in jail.

The money was just the small stuff. Now, as the perspiration moved from his brow to the side of his face, and as it flooded from his palms, these lousy agents were invading his medicine kit.

He watched. They opened his pill containers and examined the contents. They showed the contents to each other. They glanced at him and didn’t say anything.

“I got a prescription somewhere for everything,” Sammy said, “even if some of the pills got messed up. You know, wrong bottles.”

The agents didn’t say anything.

Sammy was already wondering which of his lawyers he would call, or maybe his manager Adam Winters in Santa Monica, when and if they gave him his phone back. Actually, he pondered, thinking it through further, he might need someone in New York. And fast.

Then Sammy’s spirits hit the floor and shattered. The female agent found what would be the grand prize for her today.

She opened a small vial that was within a larger prescription vial. In the smaller container, there were two little tightly folded packets of aluminum foil, thick and plump, and double wrapped.

“Hey. Gimme a break, could you?” Sammy asked. “Please?”

The agents unwrapped the foil. The contents of the first packet looked like oregano. Or catnip. The agents sniffed. It didn’t appear to be catnip or oregano and it wasn’t basil, either. Well, a pot bust was a pot bust. Worse things could happen.

Then a worst thing did. The second agent unwrapped a smaller packet that had escaped notice at first. The contents this time was a single small cube.

“I don’t know how that got there,” Sammy tried meekly.

“Right,” the male agent said.

The female reached for a pair of handcuffs. All three of them knew what hashish looked like when they saw it. And they saw it right now.

“Sorry, Billy,” she said. “And you know what? This is a real shame. I always liked your music.”

EIGHTY-FIVE

Woman’s body found in Rock Creek Park

POSTED: 4:55 p.m. EST August 21

UPDATED: 7:33 p.m. EST August 21

WASHINGTON (The Washington Post)-A woman was found dead in Rock Creek Park near Walter Reed Hospital on Thursday. Police familiar to the case confirm that it was a homicide from gunshot wounds.

The body was found by a jogger at 9:12 a.m. It was about 30 yards off Sherill Drive near 16th and Aspen streets in Northwest.

Police said the woman appeared to be in her late 50s and was of European descent. She was wearing a tan raincoat and appeared to have a valid passport from a South American country.

“A possibility is that the individual came into the woods to walk and was met by a robber. There were no other signs of trauma other than the gunshot. Her purse was open and there was no money or identification in it, other than her passport,” DC Police Inspector Jerome Myles said. “We just don’t know any more at this time.”

Police said they are awaiting further results from the medical examiner and are attempting to locate any relatives of the woman. Her name has not yet been publicly disclosed.

EIGHTY-SIX

On the morning of the next day, the doctors at the American hospital moved Alex out of critical care into a private room on a regular ward. Late that same afternoon, a nurse came in with a name on a piece of paper to see if she would recognize, to see if a prospective visitor would be allowed.

She recognized the name and was very pleasantly surprised. “Oui, bien sûr,” Alex answered.

“Cinq minutes seulement,” the nurse said, limiting the visit to five minutes.

“Oh, mais pour lui, dix?” she asked. For him, ten? “S’il vous plait?”

The nurse rolled her eyes, gave a slight smile, and shrugged, which meant, yes, okay.

The nurse left. A moment later the door eased open. A large man with a slight limp entered the room, carrying a huge bouquet of fresh flowers and a small shopping bag. He wore a dark suit and a dress shirt open at the collar and was a day or two unshaven. More importantly, he was walking very well on one real leg and one fake one.

Alex sat up in the bed and thought of pickup games of basketball back in Washington for the first time in several days, not to mention the dark in March when this same man had deterred her suicide.

“Oh my,” she said. “You sure show up at the strangest times.”

“Hope you don’t mind,” Ben answered.

“Not at all.”

Impetuously, he leaned down and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She accepted it. They exchanged as much of a hug as IV tubes would allow. He stepped back and placed the flowers at her bedside table.

“You sure know how to find trouble, no matter where you go,” he said.

“It finds me. What are you doing here?”

“Right now,” he said, “I’m visiting you in the hospital.”

She laughed for the first time in days. It hurt.

“I can see that much,” she said, “but why are you in Paris?”

“I’m visiting you in the hospital,” he repeated.

“I don’t follow,” she said.

It was very simple, he explained. The group that she played basketball with back in Washington, the family at the gym, had heard that Alex had been hospitalized in Paris.

Critical condition, but improving.

“Who did you here that from?” she asked.

“Laura. Laura Chapman.”

“Ah. Of course.” It made sense. Laura would know through government channels.

“Did Laura mention what happened?” she asked.

“No,” he answered hesitantly. “What did happen? Some sort of accident in the subway?”

“You could call it that,” Alex said. Then she shook her head. “Long story, actually. For another time, okay?” She motioned to a chair.

“Okay,” he answered.

“Well, anyway,” he continued, sitting down. “There are about fifteen of us regulars who you play with. Dave. Matt. Eric. Laura. A couple of guys whose names you don’t know but who you’d recognize. We all sat around talking a couple of nights ago after a game. I said someone should go visit. So we each dropped a hundred bucks into someone’s sweaty gym bag.”

Alex could feel herself smiling.

“We called it our ‘Alex fund,’ ” he said. “We put everyone’s name in another bag. Whoever’s name got drawn would make the visit, the ‘fund’ covering the expense of the trip, time lost from work, and so on. Since it had been my idea, I was selected to make the draw.”

She laughed. “And you drew your own name?”

Hesitantly, he said, “Yeah. I drew my own name.”

“The hand of God?” she asked.

He smiled. “Nope. I cheated. I palmed the slip of paper with my own name. I wanted to make the trip.”

She laughed. “Good of you,” she said.

“Look at this,” he said, reaching into the bag.

He pulled out a miniature basketball hoop and a foam ball. The hoop was about six inches across, the ball about four inches in diameter. It was one of those $4.98 toys that one sees in offices or children’s rooms.

She laughed again when she saw it, and laughed harder when he stuck it up to the wall and flipped her the ball.

“Should I pass to you so you can dunk it or should I shoot?” she asked.

“Oh, by all means,” he said, “go for the three pointer.”

Her arm hurt too much to raise it. So she threw a random underhand shot up against the wall, about six feet away. It hit the front of the hoop, flew upward, then dropped straight down.

It swished.

“Whoa!” he said. “The hand of God?”

“I’m sure God is too busy to busy to worry about three-point shots in hospital rooms,” she said.

She looked across the room. “See that window over there?” she asked.

“I see it.”

“I’d like to get to it. Will you help me?”

“I’d be honored.”

She slid her legs around so she could slide off the side of the bed. Ben helped her stand, steadying her as she stood. She ached all over. She was again conscious of how she must have fallen because there were bad bruises on her legs and elbows. In a hospital gown she could still see the scratches on her legs from the brambles in the Venezuelan mountains, as well as the hard fall in the French subway.

She looked as if she had been beaten up.

“I don’t know how many individual injuries I have,” she said, “but you know all about stuff like that, right?”

“We’re all wounded in some way. We’re all mutilated. You know that old Paul Simon song, ‘An American Tune’? Goes something like, ‘Don’t know a soul who ain’t been battered, ain’t got a friend who feels at ease…’”

“I know it,” she said.

“One step at a time,” he said, helping her walk. “This is great. You’re doing fine.” He helped the IV-pole trail her.

She nodded and continued the faint tune as he acted as her support. “Don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered,” she sang softly. “Or driven to its knees.”

They sang together. “But it’s all right, it’s all right.”

She hung on his arm, got stronger with each pace, and traveled the dozen steps to the window. She gazed out on the courtyard. Over the roof of the hospital, in the distance, she could see part of the Parisian skyline.

“Well, I’m alive,” she said.

“You’re alive,” he answered. “Against the odds, we both are.”

She nodded. He helped her back to the bed. She sat down, then lay down. Her energy was already gone.

He sat in the chair by the bed for the remaining minutes of his visit. She felt weak but inside she started to feel good. He looked at a small object in a dish by the bedside.

He reached to it. “May I?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He picked up the remains of the stone pendant that had saved her life. It was in three pieces. The center of it had been smashed into dust by the ricocheting bullet so that, if the pieces were pushed back together, one could see, right where the engraved cross came together, a deep gouge. Aside from that, the three pieces fit together perfectly, as if designed by a master carver.

“What’s this?” he asked.

She smiled.

“Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you,” she said.

He put the pendant back into the dish and then back onto the table. The pieces fit themselves back together. She admired the small cross that Paulina had carved in the stone, thousands of miles away-the small carving that had saved her life.

Distantly, she thought of Paulina.

“It’s a deal,” Ben said. “I’ll come back tomorrow. And you can tell me.”

A few minutes after Ben left, Alex’s strength again ebbed. She settled again into a comfortable sleep.

EIGHTY-SEVEN

The following morning, for the first time since her arrival at the hospital, Alex felt good enough to sit up and read. Her physician passed by at about 8:00 a.m. There were newspapers in French and a few books at her bedside. Ben’s bouquet sat at her bedside, and now a second one did too, from her former coworkers at Treasury in Washington. Word either traveled fast or not at all these days.

She reached for the papers and began to glance through them. A nurse came by shortly after ten.

“Il y a encore un visiteur,” the nurse announced. Another visitor.

“C’est qui?

” Alex asked.

“Un médecin étranger, je crois,” the nurse answered. A foreign doctor.

Alex shrugged. “Bien. Pourquoi pas?” she said. Well, why not? The more medical advice, the better. Or, she wondered, was the opposite true? Well, she would listen.

She set aside her newspapers and leaned back in her bed. She drew a deep breath as the nurse left the room.

She reached to the side table and pulled out a hand mirror. She glanced into it. To her mind, she looked tired. But, she now realized, she would survive.

Ben’s visit the previous day and the gifts he had brought from America had done more to rally her spirits than she could have imagined. For the first time since arriving there, she began to entertain a restless spirit. How long would she be in the hospital? How long before she could be discharged and go home? How long before she could resume a normal life?

She brushed at her hair with her fingers, instinctively sprucing up for her visitor, even if it was a doctor. Plus, Ben would come by later. The pain in her chest had subsided. Maybe, she wondered, if Ben were staying a few days, he could help her pack her things and return to Washington.

The door opened and a man in a white lab coat entered, his physician’s ID clipped to his lapel. Alex saw him first out of the corner of her eye.

The visitor was tall, strikingly tall, maybe six foot three. He was sturdy with a slight beard, about a week’s worth, and wore a tie. He almost looked like an old priest and he had a faint smell of cigarettes about him. And what type of doctor smells of cigarettes?

She put down the mirror, looked at him, and smiled.

He spoke softly in Russian. “Zdrastvuyeeti. Dobraye utro.” Hello. Good morning.

“Dobraye utro,” she answered instinctively. Good morning in return.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better today, doctor,” she began. “I-”

She looked into his eyes. With a surge of horror, she pegged the face.

“That’s very good, hey,” he said. “Glad to hear it.”

She sputtered in Russian. “What are you doing here? How did you-?”

She reached for the alarm button to call the nurse. “Please don’t make a sound,” Yuri Federov said. He reached under his lab coat and pulled a gun from his hip. She eyed it. It was a small compact piece, snub nosed and sleek. Chinese.

Fear shot through her. Her hand froze.

“Your security people need to do a better job,” he continued. “Both the Americans and the French. I showed the French police a fraudulent physician’s ID badge,” he said, motioning to the one he wore. “And I walked right past them. And your American guards are down at the nurse’s station, flirting with the pretty French girls, trying to get home phone numbers. What kind of security is that?”

“So you’re here to kill me?” she asked.

“It’s not that simple,” he said.

“No? Then why is your hand still on your gun?”

“Because it’s not that simple.”

He went back to the door and locked it. Then he walked slowly to the window and peered out, downward to the courtyard, as if he were looking for someone or trying to determine if he had been followed.

“Your two bodyguards are dead,” she said. “Anatoli and Kaspar. I’m sure you know that.”

“At the time of their deaths,” Federov said, “they no longer worked for me. They betrayed me.”

“Could have fooled me,” she said.

He scoffed, turning back to her. “I wouldn’t have given the order to kill you, hey? You should know that,” he said. “My competitors in the underworld purchased the loyalty of those around me,” he said. “Anatoli and Kaspar were hired away by those who wanted me out of a position of influence. I was not upset with their deaths.”

“Americans?”

“Maybe. Who knows?”

He turned back from the window.

“Who attacked me in Venezuela?” she asked.

“My competitors,” he said. “To keep the heat on me. So that your government would continue to hunt me, as they do to this day. They don’t know where I am. They don’t know what I do. They are endlessly stupid. It will take them five years to figure out I’ve withdrawn from my businesses.”

“No, they already know that,” she said.

“They tell you that,” Federov said, “but they think otherwise.”

She pondered it. “Why should I believe you?”

“I don’t know. Why should you? Maybe because I’m here. Maybe because I saved your life at least once.”

“What about the attack in Kiev?” she asked. “The attack on the president.”

“I told you at the time. Not my people. Filorusski, but not my people.”

“But you knew?”

“Everyone knew. Even your president knew. But your leader was a camera-whore who persisted with the visit.” He paused. “Don’t you realize that you were part of a conspiracy to get me killed?” he asked. He coughed. “That’s where the conspiracy began. You were to be next to me. If they knew where you were, they had a sniper ready to get me. So I moved. Can you blame me? They wouldn’t have cared much if they had killed you too!”

“Prove it,” she said.

“Why should I? You already know I’m telling you the truth.”

“You sure you’re not crazy?”

“I’m not crazy like that! I’m Russian. Now I’ll prove both. Insanity, plus a flair for the grand dramatic gesture.”

He raised the gun with startling speed and spun it in his right hand. He removed the loaded clip, checked it, and slammed it back into the magazine again.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said.

He reversed his grip on the pistol and held it by the barrel. Then he handed it to her.

“Take it,” he said. “With guards like yours, you’ll need it.”

“What?”

“Take it! This is your opportunity,” he said. She reached out and took the pistol from him. She aimed it at the midpoint of his chest.

“Very good,” he said, stepping back half a pace to not crowd her. “If you feel you need to kill me,” he said, “do it now. If you feel I’m responsible for your fiancé’s death, avenge yourself. I’m in here illegally. Your story would be that I threatened you. No one would question further. This is my gift to you, a chance to set everything even.”

For what seemed like a long, long while, she held the gun on him.

“But if you do not pull the trigger, I will be out of France by nightfall. I am going somewhere to keep my money warm.”

“Switzerland?”

“Somewhere,” he said. “Hey.” On a piece of notepaper, he wrote down the names of a hotel and a restaurant in Geneva. He handed it to her. “If I can ever do you a favor,” he said, “come visit. Go to the restaurant and ask for me. But come alone.”

She held the weapon steady. She set the notepaper aside.

“I should be going,” he said.

“You should be going,” she agreed.

Yuri Federov, onetime kingpin of crime in Ukraine, turned and walked to the door. At that moment, as if on cue, someone tried the door from the other side and, finding it locked, rapped sharply. A male voice from the other side called out in English.

“Alex? You in there? You okay in there?”

A beat and she answered.

“I’m okay, Ben,” she said.

She pushed the weapon under her top sheet.

“Go,” she said to Federov. “Now.”

Federov unlocked the door. The door opened. Ben stepped in. Federov gave him a nod. Ben gave him a nod in return.

“Sorry,” Ben said with a shrug. He labored in an alien tongue. “Je ne parle pas français.

” I don’t speak French.

“And I don’t speak English,” Federov lied quickly in English. He turned back to Alex. He smiled. “Dasvidania,” he said. Good-bye.

“Uvidimsia, ” she answered. See you.

He gave her a final grin and a nod. “Da. Uvidimsia,” he agreed. See you.

Federov clasped Ben on the shoulder for a moment and gave him a nod. Then Federov left the chamber.

Ben came in and sat down. He looked at the door, then back to Alex.

“So?” he finally asked. “Who was that?”

A moment passed.

Then, “A friend,” she finally said. “An unlikely friend, but a friend.”