Puppet Master

Flash forward

Massina stared at the FBI agent for a good sixty seconds, not believing at all what he had just been told.

“Mr. Jenkins,” he said finally. “You’re telling me, in so many words, that after all this work, you’re not going to prosecute these bastards?”

The word bastards stuck in his mouth; it was very unlike Louis Massina to curse, even mildly, even in private. But there was no other word to describe them.

“These men are responsible for crippling your agent, your friend,” added Massina when Jenkins didn’t answer. “You’re going to let them go.”

“It wasn’t actually them, as far as we know. The thieves — it’s different people, we think.”

“You’re still letting these people go.”

“That’s not — that’s not exactly what’s happening here,” said Jenkins. He had the face of a man who’d been punched in the stomach without warning and for no good reason. And yet Massina felt sure he must have expected some reaction from Massina along these lines. How could he not?

“Maybe you should explain what is happening, then,” said Massina. He rose from his desk chair, needing to exercise the adrenaline that was suddenly surging through his body.

“I’m afraid I can’t go into the details,” said Jenkins. His voice was shaking. “I — there is another agency involved and, it’s — I know it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, make it make sense then. You want them to go without any justice?”

“No,” said Jenkins quickly. “No — I have to go. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

13 Real time

Convinced by Chelsea to help save the FBI agent’s life, Louis Massina approached the problem the way he approached any problem: all-out. All of his resources were devoted to the young man. Not only did that mean all of Smart Metal’s technical expertise and devices; it also meant all of Massina’s considerable contacts. Grace Sisters’ Hospital and its experimental operating suite were put at Johnny Givens’s disposal, as were its doctors. Drugs that would speed his recovery as well as sustain him through the heart operations — drugs that couldn’t be bought at any price — were rushed to the hospital, with the FDA’s blessing. Sister Rose Marie saw personally to the young man’s care, and even Father O’Gorman, one of the hospital’s crusty chaplains, took an interest in the case.

The latter was doubly unusual, in that Johnny Givens was a confirmed Baptist.

It was O’Gorman whom Chelsea met outside the ICU when she came to check on the man she’d helped so much to save. O’Gorman sighed and shook his head when he saw her. Chelsea was Catholic, but to O’Gorman she represented the grievous future versus the blessed past. For despite working in one of the world’s most advanced medical centers, O’Gorman regarded technology as something close to the Devil’s plaything.

If not worse.

“Hello, Father,” said Chelsea.

O’Gorman shook his head and pointed at Chelsea’s iPhone, which she was just turning off.

“I hope you’re not thinking of taking a selfie,” grumbled the priest.

“I’m just turning the ringer off.” Chelsea slipped the phone into her pocket. “I’m surprised, Father.”

“What?”

“That you actually know what a selfie is.”

“Vanity, young lady, is one of the seven deadly sins. That I know. Book of Proverbs 6:16–19. King Solomon. The phrase is a ‘proud look.’ And as—”

“How is that vanity?” interrupted Chelsea.

“Just when I thought there was hope,” grumbled the priest, stalking away.

“It’s vanity because it means to be too proud, which is when God trips us up,” said Sister Rose, turning the corner. “But I don’t think it’s a sin you have to worry about, dear,” she added kindly. “It’s not wrong to be aware of the gifts God has bestowed on us. As long as we put them to their best use.”

“I try.”

“You’re here for our patient.” The nun was practically the only adult Chelsea knew in Boston whom she could regard eye to eye without raising her head. “Come.”

Chelsea followed her down the hall to an intensive-care room. Johnny lay sandwiched in the high-tech bed, only his arms visible on the side. His body floated on a mattress of air currents, which bathed him top and bottom with medicated vapor designed to quickly heal his burned skin as well as lessen the pain. Tubes and wires ran from the top of this metal sandwich to an array of machines on both sides of the room.

“We’ll have him up by the end of the week,” said Sister Rose.

“That soon?”

“He’s responded well to the new heart. And we’re using an experimental therapy — it is very promising, though it does rely on some nanocompounds. If he hadn’t been close to death…”

Chelsea did not work on the medical side of the company, and she knew very little about its prosthetics, let alone the more exotic and experimental devices like the artificial heart. But she was well aware of how important those devices were, as well as the huge advances they represented. The heart machine was a perfect example. Made of a proprietary carbon-strand-fiber and microlattice nickel phosphorus, it weighed just under a pound. That was still a little heavier than Johnny’s actual heart had weighed, but it was less than half what the leading fully artificial heart weighed.

His new heart was only the headline. Some of his nerve damage had already been repaired by grafts that used a synthetic growth system — the doctor who had pioneered it described it as something like a cancer bath, a miniature tube inside which actual nerve cells were propagated to replace the damaged ones. And Johnny had already been measured for two artificial legs, which were being fashioned to his exact specifications.

Sister Rose stopped Chelsea as she stepped closer to the bed.

“This is as close as we should get,” said the Sister. Despite her diminutive size, her grip on Chelsea’s arm was remarkably tight. A doctor had warned Chelsea never to arm-wrestle the nun. “You never know what germs we carry.”

Chelsea glanced to the floor. Their toes were edging a red line.

“I’m sorry, Sister. I just wanted to see his face.”

“Still intact,” said Sister Rose. “Barely a blemish. Tell me — is this interest more than professional?”

“No, professional only.”

“A white lie is still a lie,” said the Sister tartly. “Especially if you tell it to a nun.”

Two hours later, Chelsea stood in front of a large glass screen in Smart Metal’s Number 3 conference room, summarizing the situation for the group Massina had put together to help the FBI on the bank card fraud case. Jenkins, the FBI agent, sat at the far end of the table. Massina was next to him.

“It wasn’t a software problem at all that caused the computer in the FBI surveillance van to freeze,” she told them. “The operator hit a succession of keys as he tried to clean up the coffee he’d spilled. Two of the keys were shorted, and to the program, this looked like a series of command inputs that overflowed the error buffer. In layman’s terms,” she added, noticing the perplexed look on Jenkins’s face, “the coffee fried the keyboard, so the computer hung. The program did not trap for that kind of error.”

“No spilled coffee algorithm?” asked Terrence Sharpe.

Sharpe was the head of the company’s programming unit. He was trying to make a joke. As usual, his timing and tact were out of whack.

“I feel terrible about it,” said Chelsea.

“We all do,” said Sharpe. “But the freeze had nothing to do with what happened to Agent Givens.”

“No,” agreed Jenkins. “Not at all.”

“So, getting back to your situation here, your case,” said Sharpe. “Maybe it’s not a skimmer.”

“How else do they get the data off the ATMs?” asked Jenkins.

“Maybe the ATMs are a red herring. It’s just a coincidence that there are transactions being made there with those accounts.”

“I think it’s way too much coincidence to rule them out.”

Chelsea had spent much of the night studying ATM systems and bank security. Even before she started, she knew security on the terminals was a joke. The machines’ security features, with four-digit passwords and early DES encryption might have been state of the art when first introduced in the late 1960s, but they were now child’s play to crack. Card skimmers could be built and programmed by preteens handy with a screwdriver and willing to spend a few hours searching on the Internet.

“Track the code from the banks,” suggested Massina. “There must be a clue there.”

“We’ve been working on that,” said Jenkins, “but we’ve run into a number of technical problems and, frankly, a lack of cooperation from the banks and the processing houses in between.”

“Mr. Sharpe and his people will help you,” said Massina. “In the meantime, we’ll give you hardened laptops. No more worries about spilled anything. You’ll use our equipment for your surveillance.”

“Nobody is spilling coffee again,” said Jenkins. “There will be no coffee in the van. Period.”

“I just don’t see this as a skimmer operation,” said Sharpe. “None have been found at any of the banks. And nobody takes cash from them. You should look in a different direction.”

“I have a theory,” said Chelsea. “I can’t prove it yet, but maybe the coding is on the card.”

She suggested — this time solely in layman’s terms — that the automated teller machines were being infected by a virus. There wasn’t enough “room” on the card’s magnetic strip for an actual virus, though; what she proposed was a little more clever. The card directed the machine to go to a bank account where the virus was actually stored; it downloaded instructions to the ATM, then erased itself after a certain period of time.

“Clever, but in that case, all of the machines would have accessed the same account before they were attacked,” suggested Jenkins. “And that sort of pattern would have jumped out at us.”

“Not if they kept switching those accounts,” said Chelsea. “Or if they did use the same account, they could set it up so that it would only activate after a certain period of time or transactions.”

“We’ll have to look deeper at the pattern,” conceded Jenkins.

“Then let’s get it done,” said Massina, standing to signal that the meeting was over.

14

Johnny Givens ran for all he was worth. He ran and he ran and he ran. His lungs banged at the side of his chest, but still he ran.

The night was deep black, so dark that the landscape had no features. He was in a field or a city or even the woods, it was impossible to tell; he saw only blackness.

Then ahead, on the horizon, a bar of light.

He ran toward it. It gradually grew as he approached, rising up at a slow pace. It was as if a curtain were being lifted, black giving way to pure white.

Run! Run!

15

Chelsea stared out the window as her Uber driver pulled up across the street from a small, one-story mall on Arsenal Street. It was the address Jenkins had given her for the FBI task force’s technical crew; it looked like the back side of a 1950s gas station; she’d been expecting something a little more governmental.

“We’re here?”

“This is the place,” said the driver, reaching for the screen on the iPhone perched on the dashboard holder.

“Thanks,” said Chelsea. She got out of the car and rechecked the address against her phone’s GPS. It wouldn’t have been the first time Uber delivered her to the wrong address.

But the address was right.

She was fifteen minutes early, and rather than going into the building, she began walking down the block, deciding to stretch her legs before going in.

A small wave of paranoia hit her after a block. The neighborhood looked fine, working class but not particularly sketchy.

And yet…

She pushed her large bag tight against her ribs, lengthening her stride. Her father began talking to her, warning her to be careful.

More specifically: Keep your eyes about you, ballerina girl.

Ballerina girl. He was the only one in the world who could say that to her and get away with it.

Ballerina. Few people would call her that, since even fewer knew that side of her, that ancient ambition. Perhaps another dancer might spot the graceful way she moved, or catch a glimpse of her as she stretched. But there was no chance of a relevé or a saut de basque in the street, let alone something more interesting and taxing.

The street, her father’s voice told her. Concentrate on the street, ballerina girl. Watch yourself! Eyes about you!

Chelsea crossed the street to a residential section, passing a row of older houses separated from each other by narrow yards and driveways that looked as if they’d been shoehorned into place. Most of the houses had been divided into two and three apartments; every second one seemed to have something associated with young children — carriages or toys, a bicycle propped haphazardly against a fence.

Crossing to Beacon Street, she realized her decision to take a walk was silly. Yes, she was early, but what if this was the wrong place? How long would it take to find the right one?

Meanwhile, she couldn’t shake the paranoia. Apprehension felt like a foggy cloud of steam, clinging to her clothes, accumulating with every step. She suddenly became very aware of her skin color and guessed it was out of place here.

It was absurd paranoia, she knew. And yet, there it was, like a snake slithering up the side of her collar.

Chelsea circled around, heading back toward the building. Though it was already midmorning, traffic was light. Drivers sped along the street. The rush of wind as they passed gave another prod to her paranoia, but this time more understandable.

Chelsea stopped directly across from the building, watching both ways and waiting until there were no cars in sight. Then she sprinted across, careful to lift her toes when she reached the curb on the other side.

Her legs stiffened with the exertion.

God, I’m so out of shape. I have to get back to running at least.

Not even the glass door to the building indicated it was leased by the government, let alone belonged to the FBI. The press-on letters, slightly askew, announced “BI Labs.”

Well maybe that means Bureau of Investigation.

Clever.

Chelsea took hold of the large metal door handle and pulled. The door moved an inch or so, then clanged loudly as the dead bolt hit its stop. Chelsea belatedly noticed a placard near the handle.

Oh.

Feeling a little sheepish, Chelsea walked around the side and made her way down a dilapidated driveway. Two strips of concrete flanked a center island of mud, gravel, and weeds punctuated by the occasional sparkle of broken glass. The back lot was hardly more hospitable; discarded wooden pallets were piled on one end, opposite a row of chained garbage cans and some very rusted metal drums. A solid metal door stood almost in the exact center of the structure, flanked by two barred windows whose glass had been replaced by plywood. The wood was so old the outer layer had peeled and warped. A few graffiti scrawls on the gray blocks looked nearly as old.

A doorbell jutted from the concrete blocks next to the door, protruding on a pair of red wires. Chelsea pressed it.

Nothing seemed to happen. She knocked on the door, but that seemed even more futile. She rang the bell again, then took a step back, scanning the yard. Convinced that she had gotten the address wrong, she was taking out her phone to call Jenkins when the back door popped open.

A short man with a walrus moustache stuck his hand out to her.

“Ms. Goodman, right?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Dryfus. Chief, tech section. Agent Jenkins is inside.”

“I wasn’t sure I had the right place.”

“We like to fly under the radar,” said Dryfus. “That, and the government is cheap.”

He laughed, then led the way through a hallway that connected to the front, where another steel door had been erected just inside the vestibule, in effect cutting off the FBI suite from the front. A computer station showed video covering both exterior doors and the sides of the building; Dryfus had checked the feed before letting her in. Opposite the station was the entrance to an empty room about twenty by thirty; they walked through it to a second room a little bigger than the first. This was the team room, populated with metal desks and stiff-backed chairs. It had the feel of a start-up company — pizza boxes and half-full paper coffee cups were the main decorations — but the computers, all Dells, were primitive, and not just by Chelsea’s standards. Equipment cases and bags were piled against the wall, along with coils of wire.

Dryfus introduced Jorge Flores, the tech working at one of the stations. Flores showed Chelsea the list of accounts that had been hit over the course of the past six weeks. It was an impressively long list, filling several computer screens. But it was also incomplete — a number of banks were balking at cooperating with the investigation.

“But you’re the FBI,” said Chelsea. “Can’t you just order them to help?”

“If we could do that, we might have solved the case by now,” said Dryfus. “But they seem to think we’re part of the problem.”

“As long as the case is limited to ATM machines,” interrupted Jenkins, who’d come into the room while Chelsea was looking at the computer, “they’ll treat it more as a nuisance than a major problem. It’s a cost of doing business for them. Besides, they blame it on the customers or the processing houses. Anyone else but themselves.”

“A hacker with this kind of access,” said Chelsea, “could break into the entire bank, couldn’t they?”

“Maybe yes, maybe not,” said Dryfus. “They may not be able to do more than issue commands for transfers on accounts they have credentials for.”

“They’re smart,” interrupted Jenkins. “Go too big, and they’ll be hard to ignore. This way, they keep getting dribs and drabs, and over the long haul it all adds up.”

“Or maybe this is just the first phase,” said Dryfus. “Maybe they’re planning to do more.”

“We’ve studied the ATM machines and the way traffic is sent,” she told them, reaching into her bag for a small USB flash drive, neatly packaged in a clear plastic case. “We have written a small app that will monitor the system and tell you when the data stream is larger than should be expected. It will pinpoint the location of the machine in the network. You can then follow the suspect.”

“You’re assuming there’s no delay mechanism,” said Dryfus. “They may insert it, and then nothing happens.”

“Possibly. But the simplest way would be to send the commands immediately, and then delay. The information has to be kept somewhere, and the machines don’t have enough memory. So if we do this and it doesn’t work, then you’ll know it’s the processing agents in the middle who are compromised.”

“We don’t think that’s true,” said Jenkins.

“Then, good. It needs to be installed in the network.”

“We can work on that,” said Jenkins. “But it’s going to take a while. Not everybody is going to cooperate.”

Dryfus shook his head. “I can tell you right now, most won’t. They don’t want us messing with their networks, screwed up as they are.”

“We thought of that,” said Chelsea. She reached into the bag and took out another case, this one blue. Inside was a flash drive with a different program. “This program can do the same thing if it’s inserted into an ATM machine. Even better, it can examine all the coding instantly. So you’ll be able to see if a program is being parked inside the ATM.”

“Hmmm,” said Jenkins.

“Again, getting them to cooperate is going to be tough,” said Dryfus.

“That’s why we did this.” Chelsea removed the last item from her bag. It looked like a paper-thin tongue depressor made of copper, with a gummy black plastic lip.

“What is this?” asked Jenkins, holding it between his fingers.

“Wow, a high-tech card skimmer, right?” said Dryfus.

“That’s right.” Chelsea was pleased that the tech expert could figure it out, even if it was only an educated guess. Maybe there was hope for the FBI yet. “All the electronics are imprinted in the tongue and the chip that’s molded into the faceplate. It goes right inside the card reader. You’ll never know it’s there. We made a tool to insert it as well.”

“I’m not sure I’m understanding,” said Jenkins. “This is a skimmer?”

“It’s more a monitor,” said Chelsea. “It will communicate with another program and just send an alert. The network itself is never broken into.”

“Still—”

“We’d need permission from the ATM owners, even if it’s just a monitor,” said Flores.

“I’m going to have to think about it,” said Jenkins. “I may have to run it by the top floor.”

“That’ll be a ‘no’ real quick,” said Flores. “Even before you go to the banks.”

Jenkins glanced at his watch. “I have a conference in a few minutes. Please excuse me.”

Jenkins knew it was a lame excuse, but he needed to think.

Boy, did he want a cigarette. It had been two years since he’d smoked — the night of the operation that saved his daughter’s life, as a matter of fact — but he still felt the urge at moments like this.

Too often, lately.

He entered his office and shut the door behind him. The space was barely the size of an entry-level worker’s cubicle, yet somehow it managed to look massive to him. The bare walls, the empty bookcase, and, most important, the clean desktop.

Who ever heard of a clear desktop during an open investigation?

Jenkins wheeled the desk chair out against the wall and sat down. The sole window in the room was a casement job, the sort installed in a basement, as if the builders really didn’t want to let light in here.

The banks that owned the ATM machines would cooperate, but only after each was harangued personally. And by that time, these guys would be on to a different city. Or maybe even a different country.

What if the device was inserted by Chelsea? How would something like that play in court?

It wouldn’t. No way. The defense would argue that it was akin to a search without a warrant.

Assuming they found out.

Even if she did it? And then did the monitoring and alerted the FBI to a crime?

Maybe she’d be guilty of trespassing — but who would prosecute her?

Not the bank whose money was saved. And not the FBI.

“You could make some good money with this,” said Dryfus, turning the skimmer over in his hand. “The right place in Russia will pay over a million. And in Bitcoin. You won’t have to worry about carrying it around.”

“Is that where you think these guys are from?” Chelsea asked.

“Hard to say. They could be from anywhere. Czech Republic, Romania, Bosnia’s pretty big with banking scams like this. Most of them are more primitive.”

“You’ve worked on a lot of cases like this?”

“A few. This is the most interesting, though. Most are just tracking down people with skimmers. That’s what we thought this was at first.”

“It makes it more interesting,” said Flores. “But frustrating at the same time.”

“So you think you’ll get permission to use this?” asked Chelsea, taking back the skimmer she’d invented.

“Oh, it’s not about permission,” said Dryfus. He glanced over his shoulder. “Jenks is deciding how far to push the envelope.”

“What do you mean?”

“We go through channels, it’ll be years before we get the OK. Getting permission from the Bureau is hard enough. The banks…”

“So what then?”

“Jenks will think of something.”

“Let me ask you a question,” said Flores, standing up and stretching his legs. “How cooperative was the bank with your boss? Did they give him his money back?”

“No,” said Chelsea. “They said they would and then they welched.”

“I’m going to guess what actually happened,” said Flores. “The local branch was very cooperative. Then somebody above them reversed it. Because there’s no obvious sign of fraud. That’s why he got involved. And it’s not about money, right? It’s justice. Or revenge, however you want to slice it.”

“The same way it is for Jenks,” said Dryfus.

“He was ripped off, too?” asked Chelsea.

“No. His brother,” said Flores. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“His brother was killed while investigating a similar case a year ago,” said Dryfus. “He’s convinced it’s related.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t think it was,” added Dryfus. “The pattern is different. And there we found skimmers. But he’s in it until the end now. Once he’s on to something, he doesn’t quit.”

Jenkins was still feeling the urge to smoke as he walked back into the team room. He decided that was OK, though; get through the afternoon without smoking, and he wouldn’t be bothered like this for several weeks at least. It was like being vaccinated.

“I have an idea,” he told Chelsea. “Your personnel will have to install the devices and then do the monitoring. Then tip us off. We can be all together, but you’d be the one at the monitor. You or whoever. So we’d be getting the information from you. As a concerned citizen.”

The young woman’s face blanked. She was a pretty girl, he realized for the first time, very pretty. The glare of the overhead fluorescents shaded her skin so that it looked like the shade of a pale rose, accentuating her eyes. Those eyes narrowed slightly as he stared.

She nodded. “Good,” said Chelsea. “When do we start?”

“Tonight.”

16

Gabor Tolevi was not a big fan of Grozny Avia, a Russian-owned airline best known for its harrowing flights in and out of places like Chechnya. But Armenia — even Tolevi wouldn’t try Chechnya — was the only way to get into Crimea from the West without going to Russia, and Grozny Avia was the only airline, at the moment, connecting it to the recently annexed “free state” of Russian-occupied Crimea.

Getting to Armenia itself wasn’t easy; flights from Turkey had recently been canceled, and Tolevi had to fly all the way to Dubai before connecting.

Despite the labyrinthine route, both flights had been way overbooked. In danger of being bumped from the Grozny flight, Tolevi had contemplated bribing the gate clerk, a not-uncommon tactic. He’d ultimately decided against it, deciding it would demonstrate beyond doubt that he was either a spy or a smuggler, and it was always best to leave such issues in doubt. As it turned out, he had kept his seat; he received two large kinks in his neck and shoulder as a reward.

Tolevi exchanged scowls with the steward and left the aircraft, eyes straight ahead as he walked up the jetway. Even before the takeover, flights were routinely monitored by the Russian intelligence agency known by its initials as SVR RF, and Tolevi had no doubt that his arrival was noted by several other intelligence agencies as well. Hiding in plain sight was his only option, and one he was supremely good at; while he had access to phony passports and other IDs, he had left them home for this trip. It was generally safer to do so.

Besides, one could find things of that nature in any country of the world.

Tolevi made his way through the terminal to the taxi stand, where a chaotic jumble of private cars and a few older vans crowded out the two licensed taxis that were trying to reach the queue. Tolevi cut to the back of the mélange, knowing from experience that the easiest way to leave the airport was to find a private car that was just arriving; using Ukrainian, he told the driver in a small, slightly battered Fiat that he was going to Perov, a suburb a few miles south of the airport. The man suggested a price in rubles.

“Fifty euro,” answered Tolevi, switching to English and not only bumping the price in the man’s favor but offering a currency far surer and more valuable.

It was also a test of sorts, which the driver passed, agreeing in broken English to provide “best service quick trip.”

“I don’t care about the speed,” said Tolevi in Russian.

“Da,” said the man. “Yes. We go.” He didn’t pronounce the words well; clearly it was a second language.

Another test passed.

Tolevi settled back in his seat, observing the man and the car. When they were outside the confines of the airport, Tolevi leaned forward and told the man, in Ukrainian, that he had changed his mind and wanted to go instead to Yalta, on the southern coast.

“Yalta,” said the man, feigning surprise, but not very well.

“For two hundred euro,” said Tolevi.

The driver considered the offer, then began a long harangue about how difficult it would be for him to find gasoline for the trip back. Tolevi let him talk, uninterrupted.

“What do you think?” asked the man finally. “Three?”

“Two hundred,” said Tolevi. Two hundred euro was an excellent price, and the man should have no problem finding fuel in Yalta.

“Yes, OK, good price,” said the driver.

Yalta was roughly an hour and a half away. The first half of the drive was a slog through the mountains. Tolevi’s fatigue was no match for the driver’s recklessness, the small car spending so much time on the left-hand side of the road that Tolevi began to think the man had learned to drive in England. The second half of the journey paralleled the coast and was considerably calmer, but by then Tolevi was not only wide awake but also brooding on what he would do in Yalta.

He had the driver take him directly to the Embankment, Yalta’s fashionable tourist strip on the harbor. After paying the man off, Tolevi went directly into Tak, a popular restaurant that had catered to wealthy Ukrainians from the west and north before “liberation.”

The hostess looked first at the bag he was wheeling behind him, then at his jeans, which were fairly new, his sport coat, which was not, and lastly at his face. The puzzled frown she’d worn exploded into a smile; with a burst of laughter she came out from behind the small podium and embraced him.

“Cousin, cousin, what are you doing here?” she said, practically shouting.

“I needed a rest.” He hugged her for a long moment, then gently pushed her back. “Anna, you are gaining weight.”

“What? What?” She twirled around, as if looking in a mirror.

“No, I’m teasing.” It was an old joke between them. Anna weighed ninety pounds, if that. Standing at five-eight without heels, she looked like a toothpick.

“Where is Drovok?” he asked.

“Where is he ever? In the back, as always. Did he know you were coming and didn’t tell?”

“No. It’s a surprise for him as well. Sshh now, don’t ruin it.”

Tolevi left his suitcase near the register and went through the restaurant to the kitchen, wending his way past the prep station and the stoves to the alcove at the back, where Jorge Drovok was hunched over a small table. He had two laptops open, and a Microsoft Surface; he clutched a satellite phone to his ear. Tolevi started to tiptoe, but Drovok looked up at the last moment, ruining the surprise.

“Gabe!”

Drovok jumped up to embrace his cousin, then went off to fetch a bottle of vodka. They spent a few minutes catching up on various acquaintances. Then, two drinks down, they got around to business, discussing how and when they would import several shipments of this same liquor. They always spoke of vodka, though most of the shipments included other items. Smuggled caviar and pickled fish were especially lucrative when going west, but the real money came the other way — the European embargo made smuggling food into Russia and its patsy state, Crimea, a very profitable activity. Drovok got a percentage for his work arranging the boats that brought the goods ashore; lately his share had been whittled down because the payoffs were increasing. Where once every fifth or sixth official had a hand out, now it was every other.

“I can talk to my partners, but there are limits,” said Tolevi. “They keep talking about Sevastopol, going in through there.”

“The bribes there are worse. And there would be no one for you to trust.”

“I don’t take their side. I’m just saying.”

“Another vodka?”

“Just. Then I go.”

“How’s your daughter?” asked his cousin when Tolevi finished his drink.

“Good, very good.”

“I see the photos on Facebook. She looks more like her mother every day.”

“Yes.” Tolevi felt a sudden wave of emotion. He clasped his hands around his cousin quickly, then went back out into the kitchen, turning down the hall and grabbing a dark workman’s coat before exiting into the alley at the back of the building. Walking quickly, he stepped out to the street, then crossed the road and went down a block before going toward the water.

Tolevi might or might not have been followed from the restaurant; it was simply safer to assume that he was. And he didn’t want to be followed now.

The Russians and the locals were well aware of the smuggling operations, or at least that part of it involving his cousin; if they weren’t, there would have been no need for bribes. But there were other things he needed to do, and those required some measure of privacy. He achieved this in the following manner: After going down the block, he swung into an alley and doffed the workman’s coat. He hopped over a fence onto the main street and, two blocks away, entered the Embankment Hotel through the front door.

He slowed as he approached the registration desk, then veered quickly toward the restrooms in the side hall. Tolevi put his hand up to the door, but instead of pushing in, he continued to walk, as if deciding to go somewhere else. At the end of the hall he turned right into another hallway. The pool was here, as was a small gym. There were bathrooms between these two; he went into the men’s, where in the last stall he removed his clothes and put on the swimming trunks that he had taken from the work coat. He bundled his clothes, carrying them with him as he went out to the pool and then the boardwalk outside, crossing the cement to a row of lockers. He put the clothes in and carried the key in his hand to the sea on the other side of the boardwalk.

With a dash, he jumped in. Two quick strokes and he dropped the key; two more strokes and he ducked beneath the surface, holding his breath until he was behind one of the boats tied to the nearby wharf.

It would not have been impossible to follow Tolevi from that point on, but it would not have been easy, and when he emerged from the water a half hour later in the backyard of a Russian pensioner, he was reasonably sure no one had followed him. A half hour on, driving the pensioner’s car — the man had known his father — he set out for Kerch, another port town on the northeast coast.

Some hours later, he arrived in Kerch. After parking near the town center, he walked across the cement cobblestones in front of the Cathedral of Prophet St. John the Baptist, head bowed slightly as he passed, until he reached the nearby beach. There he found a bench in view of the sea and sat, waiting as the sun set behind him.

Shadows danced across him, extending to the sand as the last few tourists walked to the inns and hotels farther up the street. Tolevi remained, staring at the dark line of the jetty on his left, more park than wharf. A single ship was tied up there: a Russian corvette.

“A warm night,” said a voice behind him in Russian.

The heavy Ukrainian accent made it difficult to understand, and it took Tolevi a moment to respond.

“Warm is good,” he replied.

“Can I sit?”

Though he had not yet seen the other man, Tolevi raised his hand, gesturing that he had no problem. The man slipped around the other side of the bench, squatting on the edge of the slats. He was much younger than Tolevi, barely out of his teens, and though his voice was even, he was obviously nervous — he jangled his feet around, kicking up a tiny vortex of sand and dust.

“You’re Russian?” asked the newcomer.

“My mother was. My father Ukrainian.”

“Your Russian is very good.”

“My Ukrainian is better,” said Tolevi, demonstrating. “I was looking for a good place to eat.”

“There are many. You have the numbers?”

They were barely out of the authentication — the switch to Ukrainian had been meant to seal it — and here the boy wanted to be gone. Tolevi considered — was he merely scared, or was he part of a double cross? Tolevi was particularly vulnerable here, without a weapon or backup. It would be nothing for a group of thugs to appear, drag him a few hundred yards, and throw him in the water.

But if it was a trap, why not just shoot him directly and be done with it? Why play games.

To get the account numbers, of course.

“You have the numbers?” asked the boy again.

“I’m hungry,” said Tolevi impulsively.

He got to his feet and began walking. His contact hesitated before trotting after him.

Tolevi stayed near the water, working out how he might proceed. He was sure that he hadn’t been followed, but that was all he could be sure of. It was very possible the young man had been, even if he wasn’t working for the Russians.

So hard to know. In the end, all Tolevi could do was gamble on trust.

But not yet.

He veered right, walking up toward YugNiro, the solid-looking building on Sverdlov Street that housed the oceanography and fisheries institute. Two blocks farther, he found a small café and went inside; the young man followed.

Tolevi had only been to Kerch two or three times over the past few years, and he couldn’t remember being in this particular café. It was nearly deserted — odd, given the hour, though possibly not so strange since the Russian takeover. He asked for a table on the porch. The kid followed.

“I think — do you think this is safe, to spend so much time together?” asked the young man when he sat.

“I wonder if they have beer,” said Tolevi.

They did, and while the choices were limited to Russian, Tolevi managed to find a Knightberg Shisha, a good stout.

The kid said he wasn’t thirsty.

“Nothing then?” Tolevi asked.

He shook his head.

“How are things in the new republic?”

The boy frowned and shook his head.

Fair enough. The less I know about you the better.

“How do you go back?” Tolevi asked. He had only been to the annexed parts of Ukraine twice since the takeover and was genuinely curious.

“Through Russia; it’s easier. I take the ferry. I have an hour.”

“Mmmm…”

The beer came. The rest of the place remained empty.

I don’t trust him, thought Tolevi. But realistically, this does not look like a trap. And I cannot stay here all night.

Still, he hesitated, sipping the beer.

“How old are you?” Tolevi finally asked.

“Old?”

“Your age.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“You go to school?”

“I do many things. I’m not here to play around.”

“Mmmmm.…”

The brief flash of anger reassured Tolevi. He took a long sip of the beer, then slid back in the chair.

“Here are the numbers. You’re ready?”

“Ready.”

“I will not repeat them.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

The numbers were accounts in two banks to be used by the resistance fighting the Russians and traitors near Donetsk. This was the only way they were transferred — person to person, with nothing in writing. The equivalent of a half million dollars was in one bank, three times that amount in the other.

How much of that would reach the resistance, Tolevi could not know. Nor did he want to. He was somewhat ambiguous about the conflict — he had relatives on both sides, after all. His prime interest was in the money he would receive from the CIA for delivering the information.

The young man closed his eyes, memorizing the numbers. Then he rose.

“You’ll pay?” he asked Tolevi.

“Always. One way or the other.”

17

Borya pedaled slowly toward the bank, watching the traffic with one eye and the curb with the other. It had been cloudy when she left home, threatening rain, but now the sun was out full blast, warming the air with a promise of spring. Buds were starting to peek out of the dead wood of the trees, and already the morning was warm enough that she didn’t need the sweatshirt she’d bundled herself in. It was so warm, in fact, that she decided to stop and take it off a block from the bank; she rode up onto the sidewalk, hopping off the bike with a quick, practiced motion. The seat and pedals on the Shimano mountain bike were adjusted so her legs were at full extension, and a careless dismount could hurt. She pulled off her sweatshirt and tied it around her waist, smoothing it against her baggy khaki pants.

She’d decided to skip school at the last minute and in fact was still not entirely comfortable with the decision. Her father was away, which made skipping school more problematic, not less. Any call home about her absence would go to voice mail, where she would intercept it and return it, pretending to be her au pair — a college student who was a serious pain before leaving the family employ two years before. The woman who looked in on her in the evenings — never use the term babysitter—was a kindly old dolt who was easy to dodge. But her father had an unfortunate habit of calling the school when he was out of the country, ostensibly checking to see how she was doing; this made skipping more problematic, if not downright dangerous.

Even though he wasn’t Roman Catholic, her father had an unworldly and to Borya’s thinking inexplicable respect for the nuns who ran the school; a cross word from them always brought swift retribution.

Not that he would hit her — she couldn’t remember that he had ever done so, even when she was five or six years old. But his lectures. These were old-school tirades, marathon sessions that varied in volume from hour to hour — and they did last hours. Guilt was a heavy component, as was the sainted memory of her beloved mother, God rest her soul, who would be invoked a minimum of twelve times. Borya hated this mother — not her real mother, whom she had only the vaguest memory of, but the sainted, beloved mother her father presented during these speeches.

It was a joke, really. He’d indulged in a series of ho’s for as long as she could remember — his various attempts at being discreet had grown pathetic over the years — and Borya was fairly certain that such a practice would have originated before her mom’s death. How could you cheat on a person and venerate them at the same time? But he definitely venerated her now. The house was practically a shrine to her, with photos everywhere.

There was a certain resemblance between mother and daughter, as visitors often remarked. Borya focused on the differences — her own raven hair cut short and brushed back, tattoos on both her arms, baggy boy clothes in sharp contrast to the gowns and long skirts her mom wore in most of the photos.

Borya chained her bike against the railing of the Starbucks where she’d stopped, then walked around the side to go into the store. She ordered a venti cappuccino — a two-week-old habit — and gave the clerk a rewards card.

He looked at it suspiciously. Borya’s breath caught. The card was bogus, bought online for a fraction of its supposed value.

Did he know it? Was he going to call the cops?

She could get out of the shop easily enough, but it would mean leaving her bicycle behind.

“Your strip’s peeling off,” said the clerk. “You should get another one.”

“I, um.” Borya’s mouth was dry. “There’s still money on it and, uh, it’s really my dad’s. So—”

“I can transfer it if you want.”

“Uh… sure.”

The clerk tapped his fingers across the cash register, whizzing the card and a new one through the reader on the register. Borya felt frozen, worried that it was a trap.

“Fifty-five dollars and twenty-five cents left,” said the clerk, handing her the new card. “Your dad likes his coffee, huh?”

“Lattes,” said Borya weakly. Then she had an inspiration. “Can I have the old card?”

“It’s worthless now.” He had it in his hand, flexing it.

“Yeah, but, my dad — I have to show it to him…”

“Control freak, huh?”

“Anal.”

He handed it back to her. “Nothing on it now. It’s voided out.”

“Thanks.”

Borya’s chest didn’t unclench until she was outside the store. Loading cards up with bogus money was a silly game, easily discovered if the chain’s security people put their minds to it. Disposing of the evidence was the best strategy.

Transferring balances from card to card — that was something she’d never considered. Did that make it more or less likely she’d be caught?

Borya hung the bike chain around her neck and walked the bike away, coffee in hand. The possibility of getting caught, the rush of having escaped — it was better than any drug, certainly better than the vodka she snuck from the liquor cabinet.

She passed the bank. There was someone at the ATM just outside the lobby door.

Good, thought Borya, spying a bench a short distance away. I’ll drink the cappuccino while I’m waiting.

It was only after chaining the bike and sitting down that she realized she had forgotten to put any sugar in. She decided she would drink it anyway, as a matter of discipline.

I have to work on keeping my head straight, Borya told herself, taking a bitter sip. Panicking is the easiest way to get caught.

18

Chelsea dug into the suitcase and pulled out a case about the size of a cigar box.

“These are small UAVs or drones that can stay aloft for eight hours,” she said. “We can use them to trail a suspect.”

“They look like birds,” offered Jenkins from his spot by the truck. They were in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse, a spot chosen not so much for its seclusion but for its almost perfect location, equidistant between four of the five ATMs they were going to watch.

“That’s the idea. We call them Hums. It’s short for hummingbirds—not my idea,” Chelsea added quickly.

“These can fly?”

“Uh-huh. Once I assemble them.”

Chelsea snapped a pair of wings onto the small mech, secured them, then walked a short distance from the van.

“If it comes toward you, duck,” she told them.

It was a joke, but they had no way of knowing. Which made it even funnier — to her, at least.

Chelsea tossed the UAV upward. Suddenly the wings flapped to life, and the small robot began to fly in a circle around the lot. It was programmed to move in an ever-widening upward spiral until it reached three thousand feet; there it would await commands from a transmitter Chelsea had also brought along.

About half again as big as a hummingbird, the Hums were propelled by their wings, which moved up and down at a rate that could approach sixty beats a second, depending on wind conditions. That was slower than a hummingbird, but not by much; the flying mech glided more than a bird would, reading the wind current and adjusting as necessary. It wasn’t particularly fast — the theoretical limit was twenty knots, though in real-world tests the fastest it had achieved was sixteen.

“It’s not quick, so I don’t think we can follow a car once it’s out of the city,” she told the two FBI agents as she walked over to them. “But we can get a good picture of the license plate.”

“That’ll be enough,” said Jenkins.

Chelsea took another from the case. “We only need four to cover the entire area. They’ll stay aloft for about eight hours, depending on the wind. I do have to recover them. They’re expensive.”

“Can I touch it?” Flores asked.

“Of course.”

He extended his hand gingerly, as if the Hum had been a real bird.

“It’s made out of a carbon fiber compound and a kind of glass,” explained Chelsea. “It’s stronger than it seems.”

Flores held it at arm’s length while Chelsea explained some of its features. There was an infrared camera attached in the forward area, about where a bird’s chin would be; this supplemented the guidance sensors located in the upper portion of the head. Unlike an autonomous robot like Peter, the Hum relied on a remote control station to direct it; it couldn’t make decisions on its own. The control unit had a preprogrammed mode for general maneuvers and unguided transport. In other words, it could be told to fly the Hum to a specific point at a specific time, hover there for x minutes, then fly to another point; it would cover that on its own. It could also be told to look for certain events and sound an alert, a function of particular value here.

Smart Metal had far more capable robots, but Chelsea had chosen these because they were readily available and she was very familiar with the control unit. They were also commercial models; losing one would not be a big deal, aside from the cost.

Chelsea launched the others in quick succession, then took the control unit into the van and plugged it into the power strip that ran along the bench at the side. While it booted up, she went back to the company pickup truck and took out the antenna assembly, a pair of inside-out umbrellas and whip array that looked a little like the business end of an anorexic devil’s pitchfork. Once they were attached to the roof of the van with the help of suction cups and clamps, Chelsea connected a thick cable to their mounts and ran it into the control unit.

“I divided up the watch area into quadrants,” she told Jenkins and Flores. “It covers the whole area under surveillance.”

“How do we fly them?” Flores asked, pointing at the controller. It looked like a bad marriage between a joystick and a laptop. The seventeen-inch-screen was ultra-high def, in sleek glass, and pretty much looked like something you’d see on any high-end laptop.

The keyboard, though, had four rows of unmarked rectangles running above the joystick, which was flanked by a set of keys arranged in number-pad style. But these had symbols rather than numbers. And aside from an upside-down triangle and an infinity character, the markings bore no relation to anything found on a computer available at Best Buy.

“They fly themselves. But you can give them verbal commands,” explained Chelsea.

Flores reached for the keyboard.

“Don’t touch,” she said quickly. “It’s active during the boot up. Once this part of the screen goes green, then we’re good. It will take voice commands. I have to get the headset,” Chelsea added. “Can I trust you to keep your hands off?”

“We’re good,” said Jenkins. “No touching the entire time. This is all you.”

Jenkins settled onto the little bench at the front of the van while Flores checked in with the surveillance teams.

All this whiz-bang high-tech stuff — his head felt like it was spinning. He had trouble working the cable remote.

But this was the way of the future. If it didn’t involve a computer screen, it wasn’t real.

As kids, Jenkins and his brother solved crimes every day — usually several times. Their obsession began with a board game — Clue — their mom had bought from a garage sale. At the precocious age of seven and eight, respectively, the Jenkins brothers had become the Starsky and Hutch of Danbury, Connecticut. They solved the mystery of the missing cat, the misdelivered newspaper, and countless other crimes, big and small.

And then, both promptly forgot their obsession midway through high school. James found girls; Trevor found football. It was only after college that the younger Jenkins returned to the idea of becoming a detective, and it was in the most roundabout way: joining the Army after a failed collegiate career, he was recruited to CID by a friend from basic who was now a sergeant. CID — the Army Criminal Investigation Command — was the Army’s investigative corps. The vast bulk of the unit’s work, and certainly everything that Sgt. Trevor Jenkins was involved in, was extremely routine; his most exciting “case” was assisting an investigation into a string of barracks robberies. But the taste excited him, and he soon worked his way to police work, and from there to the FBI, with a brief stint in the Marshals Service in between.

His brother, James, was a bored industrial psychologist when Trevor joined the Bureau. It didn’t take long to rekindle his interest; when there was an opening in the Behavioral Science Unit, James took all of thirty seconds to decide to apply. Making the switch to a field agent was more difficult, but a foregone conclusion.

Now he was dead. Trevor Jenkins blamed himself, inevitably.

“We’re good to go,” Flores told him. “You want me to drop Ms. Goodman off?”

“She has to go alone,” said Jenkins, snapping from his reverie. “We watch, and move in if there’s trouble.”

“Got it.”

Luddite he might be, but the video from the Hums fascinated Jenkins. He’d expected that it would be moving. According to Chelsea and from what he could see on the control screen, the tiny aircraft circled over a set point in what she called an orbit with a five-hundred-meter radius. They were flying slowly, at about five miles an hour, but still, they were moving. So why didn’t the image?

Chelsea explained that the computer compensated, adjusting the data from the IR sensor in the nose so that the view was always fixed. This was easier for an operator to understand, she explained; more importantly, it provided a set of data quicker for the computer to manipulate.

“Manipulate, how?” asked Jenkins.

“Scan it for significant objects,” said Chelsea. “Movement, intensity — it’s all a matter of math. Let’s say we were using the sensor system to monitor an area for forest fires. We want to be able to discriminate between certain heat sources easily. It’s a matrix, really; you want to be able to quickly convert the values, and you want to do everything as efficiently as possible. That’s where we get into the architecture of the processing chip—”

“You lost me,” said Jenkins.

“It’s an arbitrary image,” said Chelsea. “A representation of what the computer is actually seeing.”

That didn’t really help, but Jenkins nodded as if it did. He glanced at Robinson, who was sitting at the side of the van, arms folded, quietly staring at Chelsea, as if he was trying to figure out how to ask her for a date.

An hour passed. Customers came and went, sometimes in bunches, most often in ones and twos. Nothing suspicious occurred. Robinson began talking about baseball and advanced statistics; Chelsea seemed to know at least as much as he did about them, certainly more than Jenkins.

“I’m going to stretch my legs,” said Jenkins. “Anybody want anything?”

“Is there a Starbucks near here?” asked Chelsea.

“On every block,” said Jenkins.

“I’ll come with you.”

“You have to watch the monitor.”

She took out her cell phone. “It’ll beep if there’s something up. I can pull up the image.”

Jenkins held the door open for her, feeling a little paternal, though he was a good ten years too young to be her father.

“They have a lot of Starbucks in San Diego?” he asked as they waited.

“Every corner.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“It’s a good place to visit. The weather’s always nice.”

“So I hear.”

They got her coffee — a blonde latte — and one for Robinson, then started back for the van.

“I’m sorry about Johnny,” said Chelsea. “But there’s hope at least.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know who was in that truck?”

“They have a few leads — it’s a local matter.” Jenkins tried to hide his frustration — while he didn’t think the locals would do a bad job, he wanted to be on the case himself. But then he always felt that way.

“I heard the truck was stolen,” said Chelsea.

“Yup.”

“It didn’t seem to be connected to this.”

“I don’t think so.”

They walked a half block more without saying anything. Chelsea broke the silence. “Your daughter has one of our prosthetics.”

“That’s right,” said Jenkins.

“Your wife mentioned it. Mr. Massina will really help Johnny.”

“I’m sure he will.”

“Can he go back to work with you?”

“Probably not.”

In fact, it would be almost impossible for Johnny to return to the Bureau, at least in the sort of job he’d had. But that was something to worry about in the future. Right now, he just had to live.

Jenkins stopped. They were a few feet from the van. He took a long sip from his coffee, thinking of the night when his daughter had been brought into the hospital. It had been a desperate night; he was sure they’d lost her. And then when she’d recovered — seeing her without the leg the first time nearly undid him completely — he’d struggled to try and smile for her even as tears had flowed down the sides of his face.

His wife had been so much stronger.

“Your daughter’s away at college?” asked Chelsea.

“Yeah. USC. She wants to go into film. Be a director.”

“Nice.”

“I think she picked the school because it’s on the other side of the country,” chuckled Jenkins.

“It’s a really good school for film.”

“I think it’s a tough business,” he said, giving the answer he always gave. “But if it makes her happy.”

Chelsea’s phone beeped.

“I think we got something,” she said, reaching for the van door.

The figure in the infrared was five-eight and thin, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He’d taken something out of his backpack at the ATM, a walkup on the outside of a bank building three miles away. The Hum didn’t have a good enough angle to see what he did with it, but his hands were free as he left the machine.

“Can you get a picture of his face?” Jenkins asked.

“I’m trying.” Chelsea slid her fingers around the glass pad at the center of the control panel. She tapped twice, then pinched her fingers. The image changed; they were now looking from a feed focused ahead of the Hum, as if seeing through its eyes.

The figure was about fifty yards ahead of the Hum, walking quickly. Chelsea directed the drone to circle forward, banking so that it would come around from the front. But before it reached him, the suspect ducked into an alley. As Chelsea urged the drone on, he emerged on a bicycle and began riding back in the direction of the ATM.

He was fast, very fast — the little UAV couldn’t keep up. The suspect turned left at the end of the block, then rode down a long hill. He was soon out of sight.

“It’s all right,” said Jenkins finally.

“I didn’t think he’d use a bike,” admitted Chelsea. “Or be so quick. I could have directed the others to help.”

“It’s fine. Let’s go check the ATM. Robinson, you stay with the van.”

Chelsea ordered the Hum to orbit the area, watching in case the suspect came back.

“I want you to stay in the car while I check the place out,” he told her as they drove. “Just in case.”

“In case what?”

“If they’re still around.”

“The profile on these kinds of criminals is overwhelmingly nonviolent,” said Chelsea.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I did my homework.”

“Even so.”

“I can take care of myself,” insisted Chelsea.

Jenkins laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she said, more a challenge than a question.

He glanced sideways as he drove. Her face was taut with anger far out of proportion with the situation, or so he thought.

“I didn’t mean it as an insult. I just, you know, it’s a question of common sense. Even I’m cautious.”

“I was back in the car when Johnny got hit. If I’d been with him, he wouldn’t have been.”

“I doubt that. You would have been run over, too.”

“I have to go to the bank machine,” said Chelsea. “You said that’s the way we’d work.”

“Once we check it out, fine.”

Chelsea waited anxiously while Jenkins walked around the ATM. Finally he waved her over.

She hopped out of the car, anxious to see what the suspect had planted. Her heart was pounding.

“It’s clean,” said Jenkins as she approached. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope. Nada.”

“Damn.”

“Can you tell if the ATM was used?” he asked.

“It didn’t trip the monitoring software,” she said. “So, if it was used, there was nothing strange about it.”

“We’ll keep it under surveillance,” said Jenkins. “But it doesn’t look good.”

He sounded as if he’d just lost a million-dollar bet.

19

After delivering the information to the resistance messenger in Kerch, Tolevi headed back south, this time to a village in the center of the peninsula. He was visiting his mother-in-law.

It wasn’t a visit in the conventional sense — he wouldn’t see her while he was there. This was best for both; neither could stand to be in the other’s presence for very long. The old lady blamed him for her daughter’s death with a mother’s logic: if he hadn’t kept her in America, her baby would still be alive.

Forgiveness was impossible. Tolevi naturally resented this and found it impossible not to berate her for the venomous stares she threw his way when they were together.

Still, he felt the obligation, and he left pictures of her grandchild, along with several hundred dollars’ worth of Russian rubles, in an envelope just inside the door. He spent the night in the ramshackle barn behind the old woman’s tiny house and left in the morning, traveling to Yalta at first light. There he returned the old man’s car and spent the day in taverns and bars, picking up gossip; at night he rented a car and drove back to Simferopol, near the airport. He would have liked to check the northern border areas, just to get a firsthand look at what was going on there, but that would have been asking for trouble, or at least complications. He had one more job to do.

Despite the fact that he was helping the Ukrainian side, Tolevi was, in his mind at least, neutral on the matter of the civil war. He recognized the injustice of the Russian interference, despite their lies, but he also knew the rebels who had broken away had real grievances against Kiev and its government. Kiev’s corruption and greed could not be easily dismissed — even if he himself benefited from such proclivities. The irony did not make it just, especially as he himself sought no justification.

He spent the day before his evening flight wandering the city, once more listening and gathering light gossip. Immediately after the Russian invasion, a plebiscite had been held in Crimea; over ninety percent of the voters were in favor of their new “status” as a sham independent state under Russian “protection.” The results, of course, were phony, but Tolevi had no doubt the result was in line with what the majority felt, if not quite so strongly or unanimously as the announced results suggested.

Russia had a strong pull, historically, culturally. And business, always business. He himself was a businessman.

He got to the airport two hours before his flight. Security had been increased since the Syrian incident, and he stood in line to have his briefcase hand-examined. It was more thorough than the checks at American and European airports, where an X-ray sufficed; here each item was removed and inspected. But it was easier as well; if there was any trouble, Tolevi had no doubt he could buy his way out of it.

The newspapers he’d purchased just before coming to the airport were of no interest to the inspectors, and as they were the only thing in his briefcase, he was passed through without comment. On his way to the gate, he stopped for a coffee; he bought it and sat at a table, stirring it slowly, waiting for his contact and the final task of his trip. He fussed with his briefcase — he’d checked his overnight bag to his final destination in the States — making sure the lock was set properly before leaning it against his leg on the floor.

It was then that he spotted the man watching him several tables away. He was young, no more than twenty-five, wearing jeans and dress shoes. But it was the bad haircut and quick glances away that were easy tip-offs.

Tolevi played with his coffee. If one man was watching him, there were surely others — where the Americans used tech gimmicks, the Russian spy services obsessed with human resources; it was not unusual for the SVR to use upward of a hundred agents when tracking a subject of interest.

There could not be nearly that number here; the terminal halls were fairly empty, and he would surely have spotted someone earlier. But he was sure he had attracted the man’s attention.

He’s a baby, Tolevi thought, fresh out of training.

Tolevi felt a little insulted — surely he was worthy of being tracked by someone with more experience.

Even if the surveillance team amounted to only one — unlikely — it would be difficult to lose the man in the airport; it simply wasn’t that big a place, and in any event he had to eventually go to a gate. The SVR had access to the passenger lists and would know where he was headed. A last-minute change could be easily detected.

Am I being paranoid? Surely if they wanted me, they would just pick me up; they’ve done it before. I am, after all, on their payroll.

But if they were following him here — Tolevi started to have some doubts, seeing how inept the young man was with his glances — then they might be waiting for him to make his pickup. This way they would have the incriminating evidence they wanted, as well as his contact.

Tolevi got up and walked in the man’s direction. He stared at him, daring him to meet his glare. But the man feigned interest in a woman a few seats away, never turning in Tolevi’s direction even as he passed directly in front of him.

Tolevi went into a souvenir shop, then continued down the hall to a small restaurant. He studied the menu, then went in, taking a seat at a table in the back. When the server came over, he ordered in Russian.

The young man did not follow. Tolevi’s seat could not be seen from the hall; he scanned the small room, looking for others on the surveillance team, but there were no likely candidates.

The safest thing to do — the smart thing — would have been to call off the pickup. He could go directly to the gate, board his plane when it was ready, and leave. The SVR might not let him leave, but when they searched him, there would be nothing incriminating.

Not that the Russians ever needed evidence.

Tolevi eyed the kitchen, fantasizing a dramatic escape. It would work for James Bond, but not for him, unless he lucked into an Aston Martin on the apron.

The young man with the bad haircut was nowhere to be seen when Tolevi exited the restaurant, but that only stoked Tolevi’s paranoia. Now everyone he passed could be an agent.

Anyone or no one. You’re letting your imagination run wild.

Tolevi found the bookshop and went in. Casually lingering near the magazine rack, he checked his watch. Forty-five minutes to boarding, which was when the exchange was supposed to take place.

He bought two magazines. A man, obviously Russian, watched him as he paid. The man was well built, in his thirties — the profile of an SVR supervisor, Tolevi thought.

No. Most supervisors are older, with potbellies and poor grooming.

Still…

Magazines in one hand, briefcase in another, Tolevi made his way down the terminal hallway to a gate where a plane was just boarding for Moscow. Glancing over the crowd, he picked out a middle-aged man who did look, in fact, like an SVR supervisor — a dark jacket over black jeans, with a badly wrinkled white shirt. Tolevi slipped through the line, then brushed against him.

The magazines fell from his hand.

“Excuse me,” said Tolevi loudly. He handed him the magazines. “I’m sorry.”

“These are not mine,” protested the man.

Tolevi was already walking briskly away. The man said something else, but Tolevi couldn’t hear. He saw a woman darting toward the gate.

An agent? Or someone who had just heard the call to board?

Tolevi’s heart was pounding. He crossed to the men’s room, found the urinal at the far end, and put down his briefcase as he unzipped his pants. There were three other people in the restroom, all at the urinals.

Four — an Asian-looking gentleman dressed in a business suit came in, pulling a wheeled carry-on and a briefcase identical to Tolevi’s. He chose the urinal next to his.

Tolevi fixed his pants, then left, quickly grabbing the briefcase from the floor.

The other man’s.

Outside, his plane was being called. Tolevi walked to the gate.

The man with the bad haircut was near the gate, waiting. Tolevi took out his ticket.

He smiled at the man. The man frowned.

Safe. I was just paranoid.

He held the ticket for the gate attendant, who checked off his name on her clipboard, then waved him up the jetway.

Tolevi glanced at his ticket to check where his seat was.

His hand was shaking.

Relax. We’re done here.

“Gabor Tolevi!”

His name boomed in the tunnel. Tolevi turned. The woman he had seen earlier was behind him, leading two tall, much younger men.

SVR, all of them.

“Yes?” he said.

“Let me see your briefcase.” The woman’s voice was just like a man’s.

Tolevi hesitated. “Why?”

“Open it.”

“Here,” he told her, handing the briefcase over.

She grabbed it and clicked open the clasp. The two men stopped behind her, stationing themselves to block off escape.

Stuck here. Better to talk yourself out of it. Call Keisha, the Hound, get him to help.

The handler would never take his call. He was on his own.

The woman pulled out a newspaper, then passed her hand all around the interior of the briefcase. Except for the paper, it was empty.

“You may go,” she said, handing it back. “A mistake.”

“No need to apologize,” said Tolevi. “Have a good day.”

20

The false alarm dampened everyone’s spirits but not their appetites.

“I could smell that pizza two blocks away,” said Jenkins as they returned to the van.

“I figured you’d all be hungry,” said Flores, who’d brought two pies. “Mushrooms and plain.”

Chelsea shook off the offer.

“You gotta be hungry,” said Jenkins. “Come on.”

“Not for pizza,” she told them.

“Perfectly balanced food,” said Robinson. “Fat, carbs, protein, tomato sauce. Doesn’t get any better than this.”

She rolled her eyes. Jenkins was right — she really should eat — but not pizza.

She looked at the video console, which showed the ATM they had under surveillance. It was all on the FBI now.

“Nothing going on,” said Flores. “Only two people have used it all night.”

“We’ll keep surveillance on all night,” said Jenkins, “but it doesn’t look good.”

At precisely five minutes to six, Jenkins’s second in command knocked on the door of the van, ready to begin the day shift. With him were two other FBI agents and a young Smart Metal employee, Jason Chi, who worked in the UAV division but had a strong background in AI. It took less than three minutes to brief them; Jenkins checked in with the surveillance teams, who were also being replaced, then walked Chelsea out to her pickup truck.

“See you tomorrow night?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

Riding back to the task force headquarters, he checked his messages. His brother’s wife had called twice during the night; both times she’d tried to say something but couldn’t get it out. Too tired to call her back, he told himself she’d probably be sleeping. He checked his official e-mail quickly, then left for home.

Two hours after he arrived, Dryfus woke him with a phone call.

“They struck overnight,” said the tech supervisor. “I just got a call from Bank of America.”

“Son of a bitch. Was it the machine we were watching?”

“No. And none of the ones we staked out,” said Dryfus. “But…”

“Yeah?”

“It was in the next batch on the list. We just missed it.”

Jenkins collapsed back on the pillow, completely defeated.

21

“So as we know, the graph of a hyperbola gets nearly flat as you move from its center. This part is called the asymptote of the hyperbola. And we use these equations to graph…”

Borya watched the teacher slash his chalk across the blackboard, dust flying. She liked that — all of the other teachers used smart boards; Mr. Grayson was old school.

She saw the graph before he drew it, two slight curves across the x axis, one kissing the y axis, the other, a mirror image, off to the right.

You could flip it:

Mr. Grayson continued spewing chalk, almost frenetic as he explained the math behind the graphs and calculations. There was something about calculus that made even boring people, like Mr. Grayson, excited.

Borya loved math — it was the only class she felt any emotion for, good or bad — but she had other things on her mind today. Like collecting the money from last night’s haul: the primary reason she’d come to school.

The bell rang. Borya glanced at the board, quickly memorizing the homework assignment, then began filing out.

“Borya, please,” said Mr. Grayson, calling her just as she reached the door.

She turned and walked back to the desk. Grayson was a tall, middle-aged man. He had a slight stoop and perpetually smelled of peppermint, which some students thought came from schnapps but Borya knew came from the candies he chain-sucked between classes. Though not handsome like her father, he was not an ugly man, if one disregarded his overgrown nose hair.

“Mint?” asked the teacher, reaching into his drawer for a bag of the candies.

“No, thank you.”

“So — asymptotes. Interesting equations, no?”

“Uh-huh.” Borya wondered why he had called her back.

“You know, you didn’t show your work on your last quiz,” he told her, still smiling.

She shrugged. “It was too easy.”

He frowned. They’d had this discussion several times. To Mr. Grayson, the steps were always more important than the actual result. Inevitably, he explained, you will reach a point where there will be a mistake, and solving it requires a precise review of steps, and your memory, no matter how good it may be, will fail.

She didn’t disagree; there certainly were situations where reviewing steps was absolutely necessary. That just didn’t include the questions on most of his quizzes. Or even the tests, for that matter.

“I’ll try to remember,” she said, taking a step to leave.

“There was something else.” Grayson had a habit of bunching his lips together when he explained a difficult concept in class. He did that now. “Some of the teachers and the principal — it’s been noted that you’re not doing that well in some of your classes. English, for example.”

“ELA? We read stupid stuff.”

“What are you reading?”

“Catcher in the Rye.”

“Hmmm.”

“I really don’t give a shit about Holden. He’s kind of a jerk. You know what I mean?”

Grayson frowned, but clearly he did know. She could tell.

“Well, be that as it may,” he admitted. “But still, you have not been in that class.”

“I have this autoimmune issue,” she said. “Sometimes it kicks up.”

“Yes, I’ve seen. Well… is there something else, something up at home? I only ask because the principal, Sister Josephine, is concerned.”

Sister Josephine was always “concerned” about something. Unfortunately, her concern generally expressed itself in the form of detention.

“We’re good,” said Borya.

“I know your mother isn’t, isn’t with us anymore,” said Grayson quickly. “Very unfortunate.”

Borya smiled, nodded, then quickly left, knowing from experience that Grayson would have nothing else to say. Men especially were sweet when they thought about her being dead and all.

A few minutes later, Borya entered study hall, where she got a pass to go to the library. After a few minutes pretending to work on a paper about the odious Catcher in the Rye, she opened another window in Microsoft Explorer, tapped a few keys to get past the school’s rather pathetic nanny program, then entered the URL of a site that allowed her to roam the so-called black Internet without being traced. Within moments she was looking at a bank account in the Czech Republic.

Eighteen thousand dollars, exactly. Not bad for a night’s haul.

The zeroes intrigued her. Theoretically, there was nothing special in the fact that the digits aligned so perfectly, but they appealed to her sense of beauty nonetheless.

She heard the footsteps just in time, completing a small transfer to the account she used for withdrawals before closing the screen.

“Not copying, I hope,” said the librarian, peering over her shoulder.

“I don’t see why we have to read a book fifty years old,” complained Borya, not even bothering to counter the implicit accusation of plagiarism. “Do you?”

“Cite your sources,” said the woman, her voice not entirely pleasant.

“I know that.”

“J. D. Salinger is a classic,” said the librarian as she moved on. “And it’s seventy years old. Nearly. Check your sources carefully.”

School over, Borya walked down the steps and turned the corner slowly, careful not to betray any sense of urgency to the teachers she knew would be monitoring her from inside. Three blocks later, she continued to resist the urge to break into a trot, walking deliberately in the direction of her home. Mr. Grayson’s talk was fresh in her mind; she knew the nuns were “worried” about her, which inevitably meant they would be talking to her father when he got back, even if he didn’t call himself.

That could mean many things, including a possible grounding; she’d have to prepare for the worst.

Three hundred dollars in cash, rather than the usual two. The machine dispensed the money gladly. She smiled for the camera as the money came out.

Her dad was due back for the weekend. Maybe one more sweep, tomorrow night. Then lay low for a while. She was getting bored of ATMs anyway.

22

By the time he reached Henri Coandă International Airport in Romania, Tolevi was exhausted. The adventure at the Crimea airport was the least of it.

The flight to Armenia had been late, and his connection missed. That left him to fly on TAROM airlines, whose idea of first-class luxury was a worn leather seat in a forty-year-old Ilyushin II-18D. The four-engine Russian airliner was powered by noisy turboprops, and even though he sat toward the front of the aircraft, their drone bulldozed past his Bose noise-canceling headphones until his head felt like splitting apart. Released from the plane, he went straight to the restroom, where he soaked his face in the sink.

He caught a glimpse of himself as he swallowed four Tylenol for his headache. Tolevi looked like a Russian businessman, or maybe a member of the mafya—gray suit jacket over a plaid shirt, new leather briefcase hanging from a strap.

His black hair had a few strands of gray. Had those been there before he left the States?

He slicked them down before heading to the food court.

Tolevi’s CIA contact was milling around near the popsicle-shaped pop art sculpture by the escalator. Tolevi was surprised — ordinarily a low-level officer, usually fresh from the farm, met him. Instead, it was Yuri Johansen himself.

That couldn’t be good.

Tolevi went to the Burger King kiosk and bought a Whopper, along with fries and a shake, then found an empty table. Ordinarily, his contact would wait, confirm his identity, then follow him to the restroom, where they would make the exchange. But Johansen came straight over and asked if he could sit.

Another very bad sign.

Tolevi gestured for him to sit. He played it as if he didn’t know the man, not sure what to expect.

“We heard what happened at the airport,” said the CIA officer. “We’re glad you made it.”

I’ll bet.

“Did you get it?” added Johansen.

Tolevi glanced up at him. “When exactly have I failed?” he said in Russian.

Johansen smiled. His Russian was very good, but he stuck to English.

“We’re very appreciative. There’ll be a bonus.”

“The man I met in Kerch,” said Tolevi. “Very young. The movement — I don’t know how long they can last.”

He’d debated whether to mention it, deciding he better, in case something went wrong.

“The loyalists are clearly losing ground if they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he explained. “And that is bad for my business as well. Bad all around.”

“I see.” Johansen seemed neither concerned nor surprised. But then he never did.

So how had he heard about the problem at the airport? Perhaps the man with the bad haircut worked for him, rather than the Russians.

Tolevi bit into the hamburger. It didn’t quite taste like a burger he’d have back in the States. Then again, he rarely if ever ate at a fast-food restaurant; that was only something he did as part of the recognition routine.

Maybe a way for the CIA to torture him, he thought.

“We have something critical coming up we were wondering if you could handle,” said Johansen. “We need to get somebody out.”

“That’s not my usual line,” said Tolevi.

“You’ve done it before.”

“That was a onetime deal,” said Tolevi, picking up a French fry. “I’ve been thinking about getting out of the business completely.”

“Can you afford that? The rent on your town house is very high. Your car lease, the summer house in Maine? And you owe quite a bit of money to your friends, I understand.”

“Easily paid,” lied Tolevi. He was, in fact, quite a bit in the hole of late; several deals had not worked out, costing him his principal.

“And then there’s college tuition soon.”

The reference to his daughter was subtle, but not subtle enough. It was more like something the Russian FGB would say.

“That’s not a threat,” said Johansen quickly. “I’m just saying compensation will be very good for this. And then maybe that will be the time for a sabbatical. When it’s done.”

“What exactly are we talking about?”

“In a few days.” Johansen rose, then reached across and took the briefcase Tolevi had put on the seat. “Go home and rest. Have a good flight.”

23

I’m in a room with an aquarium.

I’m in an aquarium.

Who are these people talking?

Why are the lights on?

Johnny Givens opened his eyes. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was.

No, he knew he was in a hospital. How he knew that, though, he couldn’t say.

A woman was standing over him. She was smiling.

A nurse. She wore a paisley blue top and white pants.

A man stood next to her. Older. Gray hair. He was frowning.

“Doc?” he muttered.

“I’m not your doctor. My name is Louis Massina. I’m responsible for your being here.”

“You found me?”

The nurse choked back a laugh.

“No. I had you moved here. You needed a new heart.”

“What?”

“Dr. Gleason will be in soon to explain,” said the nurse.

“Can I have some water?” Johnny asked.

The nurse left to fetch it. Massina stared at him, his face stone.

“You’ve lost your legs. Both of them,” Massina told him. “We’re preparing prosthetics.”

“What? My legs? They’re here. I feel them.” Johnny started to push himself up, but a black wave hit him and slammed his head back to the pillow.

“They’re not,” said Massina coldly. “It’s phantom pain. They’ve done a lot of work on you. They’re going to do more. The sooner you can start rehabilitation, the better.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Johnny.

“The heart is designed to last ten years. By then, either you’ll be a candidate for a human one, or we’ll have a better model. I suspect both. It’ll be your choice.”

“What?”

“We’ve given you drugs to speed your recovery. Normally it takes weeks to get stumps. In my day, it was months. Many months. The drugs will make it happen overnight. Literally. Without them you would have died. There are side effects,” Massina added, “but we’ll get into that when you’re well.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m sorry you were hurt,” said Massina. He turned to leave.

“Wait,” demanded Johnny. “My legs—”

“You won’t miss them.”

“What the hell are you saying? How would you know?”

Massina removed his sport jacket, then slowly rolled up the right-hand sleeve of his sweater. He reached his left hand up to his shoulder below the shirt. Then he removed the arm and held it toward Johnny.

The black wave returned. Johnny felt as if he was going to faint. Massina left without saying another word.

24

Borya threw herself back on the bed, rolling against the twenty-dollar bills she’d sorted into neat piles perpendicular to her pillows. Her home “stash” amounted to just over a thousand dollars, including money from her birthday, her godmother’s semi-monthly presents, and her dad’s allowance. It was literally more cash than she knew what to do with; it didn’t count her “secret” money, or even the bills hidden in an envelope taped to the back of the dresser: two hundred and fifty-seven dollars she had saved from her last enterprise, helping Gordon Heller dispose of two stolen TVs last year.

She shouldn’t have done that. Three years older than her, Gordon had practically hypnotized her at the time, though now she couldn’t begin to imagine why. He was smelly and not very bright, though obviously smart enough to find someone else to deflect blame when doing something illegal. Two days after she told him she wasn’t going to give him a bj — as he called it — he started going out with Cynthia Greiss, and that was that.

Jerk.

But what was she going to do with all this money?

A new computer. Her MSI was starting to seem a little slow, even though it was only six months old. TromboneHackerD had been bragging on Asus lately; maybe she’d check it out.

She didn’t have enough for that. She wasn’t going to touch the money she’d already hidden in the Austrian bank — the vast bulk of her gleanings from the ATMs. There was a reason to do one more round, then close down.

OK. A goal.

Borya rolled back off the bed, gathered the money back into four separate piles, and hid it away in various places in her room. Then she grabbed a sweatshirt, checked her hair, and went down to get her bike.

When she’d started, the ATM enterprise had been a challenge and a lark, a goof, a little bit of fun and excitement. It didn’t hurt anyone, not like Gordon’s thefts; the banks made good, from what she heard. She had started by looking into skimmers, then realized that the card machine her father had locked in his office safe gave her possibilities far beyond what a skimmer gang might have. Figuring out how to get the safe open was harder than the coding.

Not really. But the coding wasn’t all that hard to do, with the help of a little research on the Internet.

But the excitement had worn off. It was time to try something else.

What exactly?

Borya pondered the possibilities as she unchained her bike from beneath the back porch.

Tolevi leaned forward in the backseat as the sedan pulled up the street near his house. As always, he felt a slight touch of nostalgia, remembering how his wife would always be waiting when he returned. That was more than a decade ago, several lifetimes, and a different continent.

As he reached for the door, a figure darted from the driveway of the neighbor’s house, one door down. It mounted a bicycle, smoothly gliding down the street.

Was that his daughter, Borya?

It certainly looked like her: slim build, pressing down toward the handlebars exactly the way she rode. The rider passed under a lamppost near the corner; he or she was wearing a gray hoodie.

None of this was exactly verification, but he was sure it was Borya. And he was also sure it was past 8:00 p.m., which was her absolute curfew when he was out of town.

What the hell was she up to?

“Indulge me,” Tolevi told the driver. “See if you can follow that girl on the bike. The one who just turned. I want to see where she’s going.”

“But—”

“It’s my daughter,” said Tolevi sharply. “I want to see where she’s going. She’s breaking curfew.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Tolevi leaned forward and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the front seat of the limo.

“I have boys myself,” said the driver, putting the car in gear. “Much safer.”

25

“The problem with the Sox is that they can’t get consistent pitching,” said Flores. “And they traded away Trey Ball. He was a phenom. Believe me.”

“Would have been a phenom. Maybe,” said Jenkins.

Chelsea tuned the men out as they continued to argue, gently, about baseball. She checked the gear; they were tapped into twelve teller machines tonight, and would be able to cover another two dozen by the end of the week.

If they hacked into the ATM clearinghouses — something like bus depots for bank transactions — they could cover them all. But even Massina thought that was a bit too far.

For now, anyway.

Jenkins would definitely veto it. Chelsea could tell that he was having second thoughts about what they were doing, even though it had been his idea. He had a line in his head that he wasn’t going to cross, though he wasn’t very good at explaining exactly where it was.

They had eight UAVs in the air tonight, each doing what the flight engineers called an orbit around their designated air space. The orbits — slightly elliptical patterns — were designed by the computer for maximum coverage.

Chelsea toggled from Hum to Hum, looking at the infrared feeds. The people walking each starred in a movie she’d come in halfway through, and would leave before it ended. She was a strange kind of voyeur, watching them as if she were sailing above them, an angel from heaven looking for the soul she’d been sent to find.

Or the devil, maybe.

The system blurted an alert.

The UAV in that area tucked its wing and sped in the direction of the machine, a mere three blocks away.

“I have something,” said Chelsea.

26

By the time his daughter turned onto Warren Street in Watertown, Tolevi had decided that he had seen quite enough. He couldn’t imagine why she was riding so far from home.

Or to be more precise, he didn’t want to imagine. He shut out all possibilities — boyfriends, drugs, worse — and did his best to clamp down on his simmering anger. As they neared Boston Children’s Hospital, Tolevi wondered if perhaps Borya was visiting a young friend. While that wouldn’t be completely acceptable — she was still out of the house past her assigned curfew — it would still be far better than any of the other possibilities. But she rode past, stopping at a bank machine down the street.

To buy drugs?

“Let me out,” Tolevi told the driver. “And wait. Come on, come on!”

The driver pulled across a driveway. Tolevi leapt from the car and ran to the ATM. His daughter was just grabbing her bike.

“Borya! Borya!” he yelled.

“Daddy?” Startled, the girl dropped her bike on the ground.

“What are you doing here?” Tolevi demanded. He felt his hands trembling; the idea of his daughter as a drug addict or worse was unnerving.

“Daddy — what are you doing here?”

“I just came home. Why are you out? What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I was…”

Her voice trailed off.

“What’s in your hand?”

“Nothing.”

Tolevi leaned forward and snatched his daughter’s hand. She tried to jerk it away. Though he was surprised at her strength, in the end the young teenager was no match for him. A bank card fluttered from her hand to the pavement.

“What money did you take?” he demanded.

“You hurt me, Daddy.”

“No tears, girl. That won’t work with me.” He was lying — already his daughter’s distress was having its effect. His anger weakened. Borya was too precious for Tolevi to be completely unaffected. But this was for her own good. “Where’s the money?”

“I didn’t take money.”

“Empty your pockets!”

He expected defiance, but instead Borya put her hands into her front pockets and turned them inside out. Her cell phone was in her back pocket; she showed it to him, slipping her hand in the other to show it was empty.

“Whose card is this?” he shouted. He glanced at it. “It’s not mine.” No answer, just averted eyes. “What’s the PIN number?” he demanded, holding up the card.

“I’m going home.”

“Get in the car,” he demanded.

“I’m going home.” She picked up her bike and hopped on.

Tolevi started to grab her, then decided to let her go. He turned back to the machine and put the card in.

He hesitated for a moment, his mind blanking as he tried to recall her birthdate. It was the most logical pin.

September 10. 9–10. 09–10

He hit the keys. That didn’t work.

Maybe 9–0–1–0? Or was it just the year she was born?

As he started to punch the numbers, a car sped down the street. Hit the brakes hard; the screech filled Tolevi with a dread he hadn’t felt since the doctor walked toward him in the hospital the night his wife died.

Borya! Oh no!

Two men jumped from the car. All he could think of was that they had hit her.

It took a few seconds for him to realize that wasn’t the case at all. By then, each man was on a knee, aiming a Glock 40 pistol at his chest.

“What is this?”

“Hands up,” shouted one of the men.

Tolevi slowly spread his hands. The men were between five and seven meters away, too far for him to try knocking away the weapons.

Had his daughter set him up? Impossible.

Who was behind this? Medved? Sergi?

One of the men was black, and the Russian mob never used blacks.

“Keep your hands up,” said the closer man.

“Are you robbing me? I have no money,” said Tolevi. “I’ll give you this bank card. That’s all I have.”

“Toss it down.”

Tolevi’s mind jumped to a calmer place. He would talk himself out of this, get close enough to grab one of the guns and then kill them both.

Or just give them his wallet. A cost of doing business. And of seeing his daughter again.

Borya! I didn’t meant to yell at you, baby. It’s just, you frustrate me sometimes. What were you doing out past curfew?

“Step back to the machine,” said the man closest to him.

“It’s just business,” said Tolevi. “No need for excitement.”

“Turn around and face the wall,” said the man. His partner rose and scooped up the ATM card.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You get the money, I get away and forget who you are. I’m sure that’s a great deal for all of us.”

“We’re not robbing you, asshole,” growled the man who had retrieved the bank card. “We’re with the FBI, and you’re under arrest.”

27

Borya fought back tears as she raced the last block to the house. She was angry with her father, and angry with herself. Why had he come back early? Didn’t he trust her?

Why had she insisted on going out one more time? Where was the sense in that?

What was she going to tell him? He had the card. Of course, accessing the account wouldn’t tell him anything, certainly not what she was up to.

There was thirty-seven dollars and change in the account. He’d ask where she got it.

That wouldn’t be the only question he’d ask. Or the hardest.

How did you set this account up? You’re not eighteen.

A friend.

Which friend?

James.

James who?

God, she would never be able to bluff her way through. The account had been set up entirely online.

She could tell him that. Just leave out the details.

I set the account up myself online.

Why?

Why… why? Because… I wanted to see if I could do it.

Dumb answer. That was practically admitting that she had hacked in.

But she didn’t hack in, and she had set up the account online. And lied in doing so, of course, but still, the original setup was legit.

What followed wasn’t. Everything that followed.

Should she tell him everything?

Oh, God, no. He’ll have a conniption.

Conniption. One of her teachers used that word. It was a good word. It fit.

Borya let her bike drop on the back walkway and ran up the stairs. She’d beaten her father home. Maybe she could pretend she was sleeping.

28

They took the suspect to the FBI Field Office at One Central Plaza, walking him in through the back and up to a suite of interrogation rooms.

The Bureau had assigned an interrogator, Jill Hightower, to the task force. She met Jenkins as they walked in, standing back against the wall as the agents and suspect passed. Letting the others go ahead, Jenkins led her to the small office down the hall.

“He’s the guy?” asked Hightower.

“Looks like it.”

“He talk?”

“Said nothing.”

“Ask for a lawyer?”

“No.”

Hightower seemed skeptical but let it pass. “A little older than I expected. Better dressed.”

“Yeah.” Jenkins thought that, too — he’d expected someone in their twenties, a gofer. This guy looked much farther up the food chain. And he was smart enough to keep quiet.

“Did he have ID?”

“Passport and driver’s license.” Jenkins showed her the passport. “We’re checking it out. There are no local warrants, for what that’s worth.”

“I hate it when they don’t fit the profile,” said Hightower. “We going in together, or do you want to hang back?”

“Let’s do it together.”

“You better get some coffee first. Your eyes are slits.”

Back at the van in Cambridge, Chelsea watched as the Hum circled above the black Lexus it had followed from the bank ATM. The driver had gone inside the nearby convenience market.

“Surveillance team is about five minutes away,” said Flores. “Any change?”

“Still inside. Oh wait — here he comes.”

The driver came out with a large coffee in one hand and a six-pack of something in the other. He went to the rear of the car and popped the trunk.

“Coffee for now, beer later,” said Chelsea. “He’d be in the same place if he skipped both.”

“He’s not drinking the coffee,” said Flores, looking over her shoulder. “Watch.”

The driver dumped the coffee out onto the pavement. He had put two cups together, one inside the other; he switched them, so that he had a clean cup on top, then he opened one of the beers and poured it in.

“At least it’s a light beer,” said Flores.

“Can you get him for DWI?” Chelsea asked.

“Have to call the locals. Not worth it — here are our guys. They’ll handle it.”

Chelsea watched as two FBI agents walked over to the Uber car. They had already run the plate and found out who the driver was, an Iranian Christian who had come to the U.S. a decade and a half before.

They didn’t expect trouble, and they didn’t get it. The man got out of the car without resisting and, after a few moments of conversation, walked meekly back to the agents’ vehicle. By then, four other FBI agents had moved in to secure his car; it would be searched and possibly impounded, depending on how cooperative the driver was.

With the driver in custody, Flores visibly relaxed, joking with the surveillance agents and checking baseball scores on his phone. Chelsea flipped back through the Hum video screens, first checking on the two FBI agents watching the ATM, who were waiting for a technical crew and the bank manager to arrive so they could remove it. After that, she flipped over to the other UAV feeds. Their placid scenes were almost shocking to her; how could things anywhere else be calm when there was so much excitement elsewhere?

It was exciting, even just sitting here in the van. More exciting than watching a robot she’d programmed run through its paces.

Or rescuing someone?

That had been different somehow, more immediate, or more dire, or more… that was different because it happened so quickly, and she was inside it. This was quick, too, or had been, but she was more distanced, more able to make decisions.

But both experiences were more like dancing than math, more like a sport, adrenaline racing.

And she liked that. It was a part of her that hadn’t been used in several years.

“You gonna join us when we wrap up?” Flores asked.

“Don’t we have to keep watching?” Chelsea asked.

“Nah. They have it under control now. We’ll just wrap it all up. What are you going to do?”

“Go home, I guess.”

“Hell, no. We have to celebrate. Ike’s.”

“Where’s that?”

“Downtown. It’s great.”

“Is it open this late?”

“For us.”

Tolevi sat ramrod straight in the chair in the FBI interview room, staring at the two-way mirror across from him.

Did they really think he didn’t know he was being watched? Did anyone not know?

The door swung open. The man the others had been deferring to walked in, followed by a short, slightly overweight woman. Neither was dressed particularly well; the man’s suit was crumpled at the shoulders, a clear sign that he had bought it at JCPenney or some similar outlet. The woman’s slacks were a size too big; her jacket the opposite.

“So, Mr. Tolevi.” The man pulled out the chair opposite him. The woman sat down next to him. “You live in Boston?”

Who was going to play good cop? Tolevi wondered. Probably the woman.

“You have my passport,” said Tolevi.

“Were you planning to go somewhere?” asked the man, who hadn’t introduced himself.

“I just got back.”

“And you went to the cash machine rather than going home?”

“I wanted to make sure I still had money in the account.”

“No withdrawal?” asked the woman.

They hadn’t told her they’d looked in his wallet. Or maybe she was just playing dumb.

“I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” he told her.

“Jill Hightower. I’m a senior agent.”

Tolevi turned to Jenkins. “And you?”

“Jenkins. Agent in Charge.”

“Well, Jenkins, Agent in Charge, why am I here?”

“I think you know.”

“No, really I don’t. And I believe you’re under some sort of obligation to tell me.”

“Do you understand your Miranda rights?” asked the woman. “Let’s go over them again.”

Jenkins studied the suspect as Hightower went through the pro forma warnings. She was right about him; he was very much more polished than what they had expected.

But his background fit. American of Ukrainian and Russian descent.

Russian mob. Had to be.

“You want a lawyer?” Hightower asked when she was done.

“Not unless I need one,” said Tolevi.

“Oh, you definitely need one,” said Jenkins. “And a good one.”

“Why is that?”

“What were you doing on Warren Street?”

“I think you already know I was at the ATM.”

“How did you get there?”

The question took Tolevi by surprise. Why were they asking about the ATM? Surely they were here for something else.

Did they know he had dealings with the SVR? Were they upset about that? But if that was the case, why hadn’t Johansen mentioned it — or simply taken him in Bucharest? It could have been easily arranged.

The key now was to stay calm until he figured out what the game was.

“I had a car drive me to the ATM,” said Tolevi. “What’s the big deal?”

“Who drove you?” asked Jenkins.

He said it so quickly that Tolevi suspected he already knew the answer. There was no sense lying, anyway.

The one thing he wanted to do, however, was leave his daughter out of it. He didn’t need the FBI — if these guys were really FBI, not CIA pretenders — scaring the crap out of her.

Though that was tempting, in a way. Whatever the hell she was up to — maybe a little tough love would straighten her out.

No, foolish. They would harm her. Best to leave her out. And yet he wasn’t sure exactly how he could do that — lie, and they’d use that to pressure him somehow.

“An Uber car picked me up at the airport. They just started doing that,” he added. “I find it useful. Usually a little cheaper than a service.”

“And you went straight to the bank machine?”

“No, I was going home and then decided to go there.”

“Why?”

“Why do we do anything?” He turned and looked at the woman. She had a sympathetic smile, but of course that was an act.

You have to watch the sweet ones.

“You stopped at home, then went to get money?” she asked.

“We almost stopped. Then, you know — I changed my mind.”

“Aren’t there more convenient ATMs?” asked Hightower.

“Why are you so interested in my banking?” A strategy started to crystalize. Tolevi would push them a bit.

If they were FBI, they would be looking for a payoff — that would be proof he was working with the Russian spy agency.

They could look for that all they wanted. And ultimately, if — or rather when — he went back to the CIA, he would easily explain that: the only way to get access in Crimea was to deal with them. It was impossible not to.

Surely Johansen knew that, even if he didn’t know the extent.

“Tell us about how you skim the ATM machines,” said Jenkins.

“Excuse me?” asked Tolevi, taken off guard by the question. It seemed a non sequitur, out of left field.

“Your scam on the ATM machines.” Jenkins smirked. “Tell us about it.”

Tolevi glanced at Hightower. She had a slightly distressed look on her face; he guessed that meant that the other agent had gone off script.

But what the hell did that question mean?

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Tolevi told them. “Skim? How?”

“Don’t bullshit me,” said Jenkins. “Who do you work for? Or do they work for you?”

“You’ve lost me,” said Tolevi. “Explain what you’re talking about.”

Jenkins reached into his jacket pocket and took out a baggie. Inside was the bank card Tolevi had taken from his daughter. “What’s this?”

“An ATM card.”

“What about the coding on it?”

Did they think he was passing information with a bank card?

No. This was some sort of ruse or plan to get into his house and unlock his safe, where he had the machine he used to make false IDs, including the credit and bank cards.

Keeping it there hadn’t seemed like that big a risk; he wanted to be able to move quickly in case there was trouble, and the CIA knew he used phony identities, so the machine wasn’t particularly incriminating.

But they were obviously going to use it as if it were.

Time to call their bluff.

“I know nothing about coding,” said Tolevi. “I believe I’m entitled to a phone call, am I not?”

29

Flores and the others had to secure the van and check in back at the task force headquarters, so Chelsea went alone to the bar, a place on Tremont Street. She’d never been there before — not unusual, since she was hardly a partier.

She’d expected a fairly rowdy place, given the way Flores and the others had talked about it — a sports bar maybe, or a place the Dropkick Murphys would call a second home. But Ike’s was far more upscale than that, loungelike, the sort of place you might find on the roof of an upscale hotel, except it was in the basement, and the images that were being projected on the fake windows at the side were just that, images piped directly from video cameras on the roof. The music was cool jazz, late 1950s-early ’60s vintage, a very sophisticated vibe that Chelsea never would have associated with the Bureau guys she’d met, and certainly not with Flores.

But they were all here, a dozen of them, all in their late twenties to early thirties. Two were women, which she hadn’t realized from the radio transmissions. Only one was black, a tall, football-player type who said he came from Nebraska when they were introduced, then shyly moved away, talking first to the man he’d partnered with, then to the bartender and waitress at the far end.

Most of the agents were not from the Boston area. They had volunteered from different offices across the country, expressing a variety of reasons — boredom, said one outright; the others laughed, though Chelsea guessed they were only surprised at his candor.

Dryfus, the head of the tech team, came in about forty-five minutes after the others. Chelsea was just finishing her beer and was thinking of leaving. He convinced her to stay, asking about where she’d gone to school, what her majors had been.

“And how did you end up in the FBI?” she asked him.

“Ah — I was in the Army, as an E5, which is a sergeant, and I was repairing combat networks. A lot of wires,” he laughed. “I left a year after the Gulf War, got my BS at RIT, and… here I am. In Miami.”

“This doesn’t look like Miami,” said Chelsea.

“Ssshh, don’t tell him,” said Flores. “Let him figure it out on his own.”

“I’m assigned to Miami. Although I don’t think I’ve spent more than a week there in the last two years.” He took a long sip of his drink, a Dewar’s on the rocks, then pushed it toward the bartender for a refill. “I got out of Rochester because of the snow. They assigned me to Tulsa first. Took me almost four years to get to Miami, and now look where I am.”

“Where the action is, baby,” said Flores. He slid his empty beer bottle onto the bar.

He was a little tipsy, but then, so was Chelsea. Not used to drinking, the beer had started to go to her head. It didn’t help that she had not eaten dinner.

They ordered some wings. Chelsea had another beer. Somehow she found herself talking to Flores about baseball.

Mostly, she listened, watching his eyes. They were very blue.

“I always thought blue eyes went with blond hair,” she blurted.

“Huh?”

“Your eyes. They’re blue.”

“All my life.”

They moved to a table. Another beer appeared in front of her, then another. She felt warm and a little sleepy, as if there were a fire at the far end of the room.

“What do you think?” Flores asked, putting his hand on hers. “Time to go?”

“Where’s your apartment?” she asked, surprising herself.

30

Boston — roughly the same time

“This is his bag,” said Jenkins, pointing to the suitcase that had been recovered from the Uber driver.

“Can we look inside?” asked Hightower.

“Not according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Not without a warrant. Or his permission.”

“But you’ve already looked, right?”

Jenkins didn’t answer. He was starting to like Hightower. A lot.

The office he had borrowed was small, used by two lower-echelon agents. He would have to give it up in a few hours when they came in for work. After that, he’d have to camp out upstairs in one of the empty interrogation rooms.

Or maybe a closet. He didn’t want to bring Tolevi to his own headquarters. If the guy was a master hacker, he’d learn too much about the operation just seeing it.

If.

Doubt had started to creep in. Tolevi had some sort of sketchy connection to the Russian mob, but it wasn’t at all clear. The phone call he had made was not to an attorney, or a known mafya connection for that matter, but to a Virginia-area cell phone. The message he had left — Jenkins had been close enough to “inadvertently” hear — gave nothing away:

I’m being questioned by the FBI in Boston. I have no idea why.

The number belonged to a prepaid cell phone apparently purchased for cash; that certainly fit with a mafya or underground connection, but it didn’t give Jenkins any real information to work with.

The U.S. attorney wasn’t sure they had enough to go on yet for a warrant. And because she was so cautious — anal might be a better word — Jenkins couldn’t even examine the ATM without a warrant. They might be able to get one, but only by laying out a lot of their theory of the case in court, which would give Tolevi or anyone else involved a map on how to clean up the evidence. Not to mention that he would be opening himself up to potential Fourth Amendment complications, which would throw out everything they’d found.

So he wanted, needed really, Tolevi to voluntarily let them examine it. And once he did that, then by extension they could look at all of its transactions, because what else did looking at the card mean? He’d win without a warrant, and without any worries about using the information in court, let alone tipping their hand or telling the world where they got their information.

Always a dance.

“Did you check on Amsterdam?” Hightower asked. “The hotel he claimed he stayed in?”

“They said he checked out yesterday, which matches his story. They wouldn’t give out any other information.”

In fact, Jenkins had only gotten that much through subterfuge, claiming to be a friend trying to track him down. The hotel’s night manager had rebuffed the FBI’s formal request, telling Jenkins’s assistant that the request would have to come through channels and be made during the day.

“Just an overnight bag to do business in Europe?” asked Hightower. “I don’t know… I think I’d take more luggage than that.”

“Thin,” said Jenkins.

“You have anything else?”

Jenkins shrugged. “Let’s play that angle. And ask if we can examine the card. Then Dryfus can analyze it.”

Tolevi focused his attention on his hands, staring at his fingers as if he had never seen them before. It was a technique he had learned in college, from an alleged “mind master,” a sort of discipline guru who claimed to have wormed eternal wisdom from a Zen master in Tibet. The man was later unmasked as a fraud, something Tolevi had suspected from the speed at which he bedded female devotees, but the technique itself was a good one. Focus your thoughts so they do not stray — a good strategy in many situations.

His knuckles seemed particularly large and wrinkled. That was where age showed, in the hands. Even the hands of a man such as Tolevi, whose last stint of heavy physical labor dated to a construction job in his early twenties, bore the marks of time.

Breaks as well as wrinkles. A torn ligament. Even now, stiffness that would surely grow as time moved on.

The door to the interrogation room opened and Tolevi’s interrogators reentered. Tolevi thought of the airport in Crimea and what might have happened if the SRV agents had understood what to look for — the flash drive embedded in the handle. But these two were even more clueless.

Perhaps. It could easily be an act.

Don’t underestimate your enemy.

“So, Mr. Tolevi. You’re Russian?” asked Jenkins.

“I’m an American, as you can see from my passport.”

“But you’re of Russian extraction.”

“And Ukrainian,” added Tolevi. “What’s your background?”

Hightower ignored the question. “Did you visit Russia?”

“Did you visit Russia?” asked Hightower.

“I told you my entire itinerary,” answered Tolevi, trying to puzzle out where they were going with their questions.

“A week in the Netherlands,” said Hightower. “Nice.”

“You’ve been?” Tolevi asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I rode my bike there.”

Tolevi remained silent. She didn’t look like the bike-riding type, or a person who exercised fairly regularly at all.

“There are a lot of things to see in the Netherlands,” continued the female agent. “And places to go.”

“You smoke pot?” asked Jenkins.

“Do I look like someone who smokes pot?”

“What does that look like these days?” said Hightower. “I think just about everyone does.”

“I do not.”

Tolevi wondered if they were going to set him up — plant marijuana in his bag and hold him on a bogus charge. But wouldn’t they have done that at Customs?

Nothing about this was making sense. What exactly were they up to? And where the hell was Johansen?

Maybe behind the glass, gauging his responses.

Tolevi lowered his gaze, looking at his hands again.

“You didn’t take much clothes for a week’s stay,” said Hightower.

“You’re detaining me because I didn’t pack an extra pair of underwear?”

“Why did you stop at that ATM?” Jenkins’s voice was sharp; he was back to playing bad cop.

“Why does anyone stop at an ATM?” asked Tolevi.

“Tell me about that card,” said Jenkins.

“It’s a bank card.”

“What’s special about your card?”

“Nothing.”

“Would you mind if I had it analyzed?”

“Go ahead.”

“Thank you.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Hightower.

One of the agents poked his head inside the room.

“Mr. Jenkins, you’re wanted on the phone.”

Jenkins paused inside the observation room to watch Tolevi before picking up the phone. He was a cool one, unshakeable. But it figured that a mafya member would be like that. They had no conscience, which made it easy for them to lie.

Still staring at Tolevi through the two-way mirror, he picked up the handset. “Jenkins.”

“Agent Jenkins? This is Yuri Johansen. I’m with the Agency.”

“What agency?” asked Jenkins. He’d thought it was a call from one of his people back at the Watertown site.

“Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Jenkins. I understand you’re questioning a Gabor Tolevi.”

“That’s right,” said Jenkins.

“What exactly has he done?”

Jenkins hesitated. Was this really a CIA agent on the line? He thought of tracing the call, but there was no one else in the room he could ask to initiate it. And the phone set didn’t include a caller ID screen.

“I’m not understanding why it would be your business,” said Jenkins.

“The Agency is very interested in everything Mr. Tolevi does,” said Johansen matter-of-factly. “So what has he done?”

“We’re — he’s part of an investigation.”

“I gathered that. Into what, exactly?”

Surely this must be a member of Tolevi’s mafya clan, posing as a spy to try and get him off. That was a good thing — he could get this asshole, too. Surely he’d be easier to break than Tolevi, who right now was staring blankly at the mirror.

“I’m not going to discuss this over the phone,” said Jenkins. “If you want to come down and talk about it in person, I’d be happy to share what I can.”

“I’m afraid it would be difficult for me to do that. I’m in Europe at the moment.”

“Well, I guess that’s that, then.” Jenkins hung up.

31

Borya woke with a start, disoriented. The sheet and blankets had tied themselves around her so tightly that her right arm was numb.

She stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom, trying to regain her sense of where she was. The tiny LED on the power button of her laptop was blinking next to her, half obscured by the edge of the covers.

Her father must not be home if the laptop was still here. He always turned it off and put it on the desk, generally with a murmured lecture about how expensive it would be to fix when it fell off the bed as she slept.

Not home yet?

Borya raised her head to look at the clock. It was a little past three.

What was he doing?

Whatever it was, it represented only a temporary reprieve, the calm before the storm as her ELA teacher said when discussing Moby Dick.

That made her father the whale. But he was more like Captain Ahab, relentless.

Not cruel, though he would definitely yell when he got home.

The account. She had to kill the account.

Borya unraveled the covers. Was her father home already? No lights were on in the hallway — he habitually turned them off — but hadn’t she done that when she got home, part of the ruse to pretend she was sleeping?

“Daddy?” she heard herself say. “Papa?”

No answer. Don’t push it.

Borya retrieved her laptop and typed in the password. She hated to kill the account, but there was no other choice. Besides, it was time to move on to the next thing. Maybe she’d write her own video game, something she’d never tried. Or maybe hack an airplane control system. She’d read that it could be done.

Borya typed furiously, her fingers pounding the plastic keys of the laptop. Finally she stopped and stared at the screen, where a cursor blinked in the open program box. There was a long delay between when a command was given and when it was acknowledged as executed, due to the need to traffic the commands through a set of anonymous servers.

A sudden shiver ran through her. It was cold in the house.

Where was her father?

“Daddy?” she said again, this time louder, though she sensed there would be no answer. “Daddy, where are you?”

32

“…backward and forward, every which way you can think of and a few I’m sure you can’t. There is no special coding on that ATM card. Zilch. It is no different than any other bank card. Including mine.”

Jenkins pushed the receiver closer to his ear. “What are you saying, Dryfus? We got the wrong guy?”

“I’m saying there’s nothing on this bank card that makes it different than any other bank card.”

“But Chelsea Goodman showed you the string of extra commands.”

“There’s nothing special on the card.”

“How can that be?”

“Well… maybe the theory was wrong.”

“Can you access the account?” asked Jenkins.

“Well… Technically, I need a warrant.”

“Forget about that. Just access it.”

“Boss.”

“We have a card used in the commission of a crime. We’re investigating the crime.”

“The ATM owner hasn’t reported any unusual activity. There is no complaint. There’s no crime — I can’t.”

“Just take a look at the account.”

“Boss, really. I need a warrant. Otherwise I’m hacking into an account. Even if I find something, until there’s a complaint—”

“Where are you now?” asked Jenkins.

“Our lab.”

“Wait there for me. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

“But, Trev—”

“You want coffee? I’ll stop at Dunkin’ on the way over.” Jenkins hung up without even bothering to hear the answer. He looked through the mirror into the interview room. Tolevi was still sitting there, staring at the table. Every so often he flexed his fingers, but otherwise he was a stone Buddha, without emotion or movement.

“So what are we doing?” asked Hightower. She was leaning against the wall next to the door, eyes drooping.

“I’m going to try to figure out a way to access his account,” said Jenkins.

“How?”

“Maybe he’ll do it for us. He’s cooperating. Kind of.”

“Maybe because he knows there’s nothing there.”

He was so close. It was just a matter of time before he came up with something he could use as leverage to break him. If they could only get the god damn search warrant.

“He told me I could examine the card,” said Jenkins. “That means I can see if it works.”

“You didn’t ask specifically if you could look at the account.”

“I don’t think I have to.”

More importantly, thought Jenkins, he hadn’t been told he couldn’t.

I’ll look at the account, then go from there.

“I’ll be back in a half hour or so,” he told Hightower. “You want something?”

“We can’t keep him forever.”

“We’re not going to.”

“He has a kid.”

“I realize that. But he left her here in the country, right? She’s what? Seventeen?”

“I think fifteen.” They’d used a commercial credit-rating database to look up Tolevi’s personal details, and they’d filled out more of the information with a simple Google search. The information was not definitive, but a girl with the same last name had been pictured in the newspaper the year before, after being elected to the Honor Society as a freshman.

Borya Tolevi.

“We could be accused of endangering the welfare of a child,” added Hightower.

“Come on,” said Jenkins. “That’s not going to happen. I’ll be back.”

He stalked from the room, determined to break Tolevi, break this case. And when he did that, when he finally got the scumbag Buddha in there to talk, he was going to find the bastard who had killed his brother.

Jenkins was nearly to the front hall when his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and saw that the number belonged to Paul Smith, his boss in D.C.

He’d want an update. Jenkins considered putting it off — he had nothing to tell him. But maybe he could suggest a shortcut to getting the warrant. The warrant would make everything much, much easier.

“This is Jenkins,” he said, sliding the answer bar on the touch screen.

“What’s the status of your suspect?” barked Smith. He wasn’t happy.

“We’re still working on him.”

“What evidence do you have?”

“He was at the ATM when the card was used.”

“OK. And the card is definitely tied to the scam?”

“We think so, yes.”

“Think so?”

Jenkins didn’t answer. “It’s just a matter of time now.”

“Release him,” said Smith.

“What?”

“You have nothing to tie him to your case. That’s what you’re telling me. How can you hold him?”

“I’m just questioning him. He’s suspect. And he’s cooperating. Voluntarily.”

“What’s his crime? Using an ATM machine?”

“There was an unusual string of… um… there was a code in the transaction request that was unusual.”

“That ties him to the ATM scams.”

“I…”

“Did that code say ‘Give us all your money’?” Smith was even more sarcastic than usual. “Let him go.”

“But—”

“He’s a CIA asset, and an important one.”

“He’s a thief.”

“You have no proof. You just told me. You don’t even have anything to use a warrant. He could get up and walk out, and you can’t stop him.”

“Some guy calls and claims to be CIA — that’s got to be one of his people, pretending. It’s a hoax. These guys are A-1 hackers, these Russians.”

“The deputy director of the CIA called Lon personally a half hour ago to say release this guy. You think that’s a hoax?”

Lon was Lon Phillips, the executive deputy director for intelligence — two levels above Jenkins’s boss.

“That’s got to be phony,” said Jenkins.

“Believe me, it’s not.”

“You’re telling me the CIA is robbing banks?”

“I’m telling you to release him. Now.”

“I think we need to consider—”

“We don’t need to consider anything. What was this company Smart Metal’s role?”

“Smart Metal?”

“Don’t play more games with me, Trev. I know you involved a local company called Smart Metal. They make robots, right? What did they have to do with this?”

“They were robbed, and they were just trying to find their money.”

“You didn’t have them hacking into accounts, did you?”

“Hell no.” Jenkins hesitated, trying to organize his response. It was barely a moment, but it was more than enough of a hint for Smith to jump to conclusions.

Unfortunately.

“They are off, out, not to be involved,” said Smith. “You are way out of line. Way out of line.”

“I did nothing illegal. They did not hack into accounts.”

“We’re not having this conversation. Take care of things.”

The line died before Jenkins could respond. Which maybe was the best for all concerned.

33

What was the sense of sleeping with someone if you couldn’t remember it?

Chelsea slipped from the bed and tiptoed from the room, snagging her clothes along the way. Her head was pounding, her legs were stiff, and her mouth felt gummed up.

Ballerina girl! What are you doing with your life?

She waved her hand, trying to physically block her father’s voice from her head. But really, it was a hell of a good question.

Why had she gone home with Flores? If her head hadn’t been pounding already, Chelsea would have pounded it a few times against the wall just to knock some sense into it.

She wasn’t a prude, but this was absolutely not her style. Hookups with strangers were so far out of character that she was sure she wouldn’t recognize herself if she looked in a mirror.

Fortunately, there were no mirrors in the small kitchen, where she stopped to get dressed. Pots and dishes were piled in the sink, and the garbage pail, without a top, was overflowing.

Typical guy place.

How many times have I told you…?

“Ssshhhh, Daddy. Please. I know you’re right,” she whispered.

Chelsea needed to use the bathroom, but as she went to it, she heard Flores starting to stir down the hall. She decided she could hold it for a while and trotted to the front door, jamming on her shoes so quickly that she didn’t quite get the heel of her right foot all the way in. No matter. She paused at the door long enough to make sure her wallet and keys were still in her bag — they were — then made her getaway.

It was not yet light out. That was fortunate. Chelsea walked for a block, her head clearing, before she managed to get her bearings. Miraculously, she was six blocks from her apartment.

Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, she thought as she crossed the street. They were close enough that bumping into each other was inevitable.

Then again, even with the arrest, they’d probably have to clean up odds and ends on the project; Flores had alluded to that last night.

Several times. How drunk had he been?

Maybe so drunk he wouldn’t remember her being there?

Zero chance of that. And surely he’d been more sober than she was.

Oh well, she thought to herself, angling toward a Starbucks that looked open. There were worse things in life than doing an FBI agent.

Surely there were. She just couldn’t think of them at the moment.

34

Johnny Givens struggled to lift his head.

“Are you getting out of bed or what?” demanded the woman.

“Yeah. I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

He sat upright. Blood rushed from his head and he felt dizzy.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Your therapist.”

“Right.”

“The wheelchair is ready.”

“I still have an IV.”

“Take it with you.”

“How?”

The therapist reached up and unhooked the bag of fluid, then dropped it in his lap.

“My legs,” said Johnny. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t have legs. Use your arms.”

He edged toward the side of the bed.

“I have to look in on another patient,” said the therapist. “I’ll be back.”

She walked from the room. Johnny took a deep breath, then pushed himself toward the chair parked next to the bed. His arms felt stiff, foreign. It was incredibly difficult to move.

Was this for real? Did the bitch even know he hadn’t been out of bed since he got here?

Damn.

He flattened the palms of his hands against the mattress and slid a few more inches.

Why the hell am I being tortured like this?

Outside at the nurse’s station, Louis Massina stood with folded arms, watching the monitor playing the video from Johnny Givens’s room. He could see the sweat rolling down the crippled man’s temple.

“You’re really making him work,” Massina told the therapist.

“He’s going to work a lot harder than this.”

Massina nodded. “I have a meeting. I’ll look in on him tomorrow.”

35

“So we just release him?” Hightower held her palms up.

“Yeah.” Jenkins leaned back in the chair. “I guess.”

“What does he do for the CIA?”

Jenkins shook his head.

“You know…” Hightower’s voice trailed off. She put her forefinger to her right temple and rubbed in a circular motion, as if she were turning a wheel there. “I wasn’t sure about this guy when you brought him in. But now… There has to be some connection with the mob. It makes sense.”

“Yeah.”

“You have a name, you can flesh out his background, get to work on that.”

Jenkins gave her a sardonic smile but kept himself from telling her that he knew how to do his job. It had been a long night for her as well.

It wasn’t bad enough that the CIA had ordered Jenkins to let his only suspect go. His boss’s decision to forbid him to use Massina was even worse. And he wasn’t going to be able to explain it fully to Massina either.

Hey, my boss thinks I was using you to do illegal hacking. We didn’t go that far, no way. I was on the right side of the line. I think. But now we have to play by my boss’s rules.

Well, to some extent. But I can’t get you into trouble. So… hasta la vista.

Right. That would be some conversation.

“When are you going to tell him he’s free to go?” asked Hightower.

“Would you do it?”

“Me?”

“I’m not sure I can trust myself not to hit him,” Jenkins confessed. “Or pound the wall on his way out.”

Told he could go, Tolevi walked out of the interrogation room and down the hall to the lavatory, moving as deliberately as he could. He guessed that they would still be observing him. This release might even be a trick.

Standing in front of the men’s room mirror, he tried to smooth the wrinkles from his jacket. He combed his hair straight back, patting the sides. He was due for a cut.

I look like I have two black eyes.

More than likely Johansen had gotten him released. Though it was possible this whole thing was part of an elaborate plot to pressure him into doing whatever job the CIA officer was pushing.

Whatever that was. It had to be big for Johansen to meet him in person. And not even on a train.

Tolevi’s thoughts turned to his daughter. She’d be getting up soon, to go to school. He needed to get home and talk to her before then, find out what the hell she was doing.

Had she stolen an ATM card? He didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but there seemed to be no other logical explanation.

What was the punishment for that? Grounding for a year?

What if she just found the card? Or told him that. What would he say?

She’d broken curfew, so the card was irrelevant. That definitely earned her a punishment. A stricter curfew and, better, loss of computer privileges, except for homework.

That was the Achilles’ heel — homework. The teachers assigned every damn thing on the Internet. You’d think they never heard of libraries, let alone pencils and paper.

Tolevi continued to brood on what to do about Borya as he collected his suitcase and left the building. The real solution here was to hire a full-time, live-in babysitter; the “nanny” he was using to check on her was clearly ineffectual.

And what would a new babysitter do? Put her in chains?

Maybe that was the best way.

The suitcase bumped along after him as he strode toward the front hall. Tolevi stopped and examined it. One of the wheels was chipped.

I oughta send these idiots a bill.

Once, ten years before, Stephan Stratowich had blown off a speeding ticket in Florida, figuring that by the time the police caught up with him, he would be out of the state, immune to anything they could do.

And he was — until two years later, when he was stopped at a routine DWI checkpoint in Illinois. He’d passed the breathalyzer test easily — Stratowich touched alcohol only on his birthday — but then was detained on a warrant check: the Florida court where his ticket was answerable had filed a bench warrant when he failed to show.

That experience weighed on him now, pushing him to settle the speeding ticket he’d gotten the day before with a quick visit to city court. He was hoping he could plea-bargain the damn thing in person that morning. If that didn’t work, then he’d pay the damn thing and be done with it. He couldn’t afford to take any chances.

One of his “uncles” could probably get him out of it. But he was already deeply in debt, and he didn’t need to add another favor to the fifteen grand.

Stratowich quickened his pace as he neared the FBI building, which happened to be on his way. If he was paranoid about speeding tickets, he was absolutely on alert when it came to the Bureau. Yet it held a certain fascination. You had to know the enemy if you were going to conquer him.

He had just decided to cross the street when he saw the door to the building open. A man was framed in the light behind him.

Gabor Tolevi.

Tolevi?

Stratowich froze. He couldn’t imagine what Tolevi might be doing there.

Before he could decide whether to approach him or not, a black Uber car drove up and stopped a few yards from the building. Tolevi — it absolutely had to be him, pulling a suitcase and carrying a briefcase — stepped out into the street, asked the driver a question, then jumped in the back.

Stratowich stepped back into the shadows, shielding his face as the car passed. He caught a bit of the passenger’s profile, enough to confirm, at least in his mind, that it was in fact Tolevi. Though he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why Tolevi would be talking to the FBI.

His uncle might. Perhaps this might be worth shaving a little interest off the debt.