"Clever, huh?" he asked. "Tina, that's my daughter, is going to love this."

"It's a matryoshka doll," Alex said.

"Yeah!" Jimmy Neutron said. "That's what the girl in the store called it. How do you say it?"

"Matryoshka," Alex repeated. "It's a traditional Russian doll. The symbol is that of all Russian women. They make them with the Russian leaders now too. The big outer doll looks like Gorbachev. You unscrew the interior ones and you work your way down through Khrushchev and Stalin to Lenin."

"Right," Martin said, catching on. "They should make an American one. It could start off with Madonna and Brittney Spears and work down to Michael Jackson."

He was already putting the doll back together and into its wrapping. And something else had taken Martin's attention. He was scanning the area and not with approval. "This square is a logistical nightmare," he said. "I have bad dreams about places like this."

"Who doesn't?" Robert asked.

"Tomorrow we have to get the president from St. Sophia's Cathedral to the wreath laying and then to the airport. Just look around," Martin said. "If there's an incident, here's where the problem will come. The advance team, the Secret Service, the amba.s.sador, everybody's sweating bricks over this place."

He nodded to the buildings and structures in every direction, a rambling collection of windows, rooftops, and alleys. "See what I mean?"

She saw and understood. Where others saw quaint and architecturally fascinating old buildings, a professional bodyguard saw only the potential for trouble. Every angle for attack had to be blocked, every window closed, every rooftop covered, every manhole bolted down.

As they stood in the square together, savoring their few moments, Robert put an arm around Alex and held her tightly.

Martin was still looking around at the buildings again.

"With modern weaponry," he said slowly, "the official Secret Service Red Zone is four fifths of a mile. That's fourteen hundred yards, fourteen football fields lined up back to back. Sounds like a long way, but it isn't. A bullet from a modern high-velocity rifle can travel that distance in less than a second. That means, if the target is stationery, with a head bowed in prayer. Giving a speech, shaking a hand ..."

His voice trailed off.

"G.o.d protect us," he said. "We need all the help we can get."

"We're going to need to have our own people on every rooftop," Robert said. "Helicopters overhead, security checkpoints, not a single window open anywhere that you can see from here."

"Almost impossible," said Martin.

"Think the president will cancel the appearance?" Alex asked.

Martin and Robert shook their heads.

"Einstein, that's the president," Martin said, "hasn't come this far just to have a couple of lousy pictures taken with a bunch of Bulgarian farmers and washerwomen. No way there's a cancellation now."

"We're not in Bulgaria. We're in Ukraine," Robert said, holding back his amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Yeah, right. You can tell the difference?" he asked.

"Not from the inside of a hotel," Robert allowed.

"We've tried to talk Einstein into wearing a bulletproof vest," Martin said, "but the boss won't listen. Like Kennedy ordering that the bulletproof bubble not be used on his limousine. Stubborn and egotistical. They all are, but I knew that already."

"And Reagan, Truman, and Ford," Robert continued. "The joker in the deck is always the president's desire, any politician's desire, to be in the center of all the attention."

Alex stifled a shiver. Martin caught it.

"The weather helps," Martin said. "Frigid weather makes a gun stock more rigid. The cold changes the vibratory patterns of the wood, the stock, the metal, and the finger on the trigger. Makes it more difficult."

"But who wants to even risk a lucky shot with a subsonic round?" Robert mused. "Two thousand feet per second at a weight of maybe 175 grains. Location, time, distance, temperature, weapon, mental stability of the shooter. Everything factors in."

"Someone could use a .50-caliber sniping rifle," Martin said. "Those are coin of the realm around here. Same type of weaponry the Soviets used in Afghanistan and the Americans used in Iraq."

"Actually, this country isn't as bad as a lot of them," Robert allowed.

Martin lit a cigarette and shivered.

"Did I ever tell you?" Martin asked, looking at both of them. "Two years ago I was on a special a.s.signment with the Bureau of ATF. We were tracking some Serbs from New York City who were shipping rifles from the United States to the Balkans," he said. "They were buying the weapons in Ohio. I was undercover, and I went with one of their guys named Milo to a gun show in suburban Cincinnati. Milo had this Ford Explorer with a Sportsmen for Bush b.u.mper sticker, and he could barely speak English. Of course I worked for Bush, and Bush couldn't speak English either," Martin said.

Robert grinned. He had worked for the last three presidents too but was always too politic to criticize any of them, even when they deserved it.

"Anyway, inside this auditorium in Covington, Kentucky, jeez, they had everything. AK-47s, M-16 a.s.sault rifles, sniper rifles, handguns, flat and round bullets, silencers, night scopes, knives, j.a.panese swords, muskets. Totally illegal but right out there in the open. Daggers, even a couple of antiaircraft guns, and some old junk from World War II. The most impressive gun, however, was the .50-caliber high-powered Barrett sniper rifle. That's the one the Serbs wanted."

"Did they get them?" Alex asked.

"The Barretts were going for six grand each," Martin said, "and Milo said this was just what his pals needed to take potshots at the Croatians and Albanians in Kosovo. But there's this other stand where a guy in a wheelchair and Cincinnati Bengals jersey was selling Chinese-made Barrett knock-offs for just $2,200. Milo asks how many he could get. The guys says, 'As long as you don't have a criminal record or live in the People's Republic of New York City, I can sell you as many as you can carry away.' Well, Milo did have a criminal record. Double homicide. But it was in Spain. So he was 'clean' in the US. He takes out thirty thousand dollars in cash and buys twenty rifles. He drives away and ships them out from Detroit by private courier the next day."

"You couldn't arrest him?" Alex asked.

"For what? It was all legal. We were just keeping an eye on it, figuring out their routes, who their players were. With those knock-off Barrettsan amateur could probably hit a target from a mile away. He said he had armor-piercing, tracer, and incendiary .50-caliber bullets available too. So Milo buys a few boxes of those as well."

"That stuff could bring down a helicopter," Robert said.

"The weapons got shipped to Macedonia," Martin said. "But here's the wicked part. Know where three of those rifles eventually turned up? At an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. Those rag-head terrorists are going to shoot at our marines, and it was a guy with a Carson Palmer jersey who helped get the firepower to them. What a world!"

Robert shook his head.

"Shows you what we got to look out for in this square tomorrow," Martin said. "Everything coming from everywhere. There's no way to handle an exposure like this perfectly; there's always something that can go wrong."

"We just try to get in and out fast," Robert said. "We can't be perfect but we can be speedy."

"Good luck," Alex said with a sigh.

She embraced Robert. They exchanged a long meaningful kiss, one she would remember for a long time.

Robert and his partner returned to the Sebastopol a few minutes later. His schedule called for him to remain on duty throughout the visit.

She had dinner with a few new friends from the emba.s.sy that night. Federov joined them but was remarkably tight lipped, unlike the previous evening, almost jittery. He did, however, renew his promise to attend the cathedral ceremony with Alex. She requested that he arrive at the emba.s.sy at 10:00 a.m., and they would proceed in an American vehicle. He agreed.

Back at her hotel at the end of the evening, for some reason, she slept better than she had in weeks.

FORTY-ONE.

Rome, Friday morning, the sixteenth. Gian Antonio Rizzo was sizzling.

"Nessuna cosa," said Gina Adriotti, the fourth of Lt. Rizzo's expert homicide investigators. Nothing.

She closed the file she had been allowed to read. She raised her eyes to her superior and waited for the explosion. His three colleagues had done the same. But the explosion, for whatever reason, was not forthcoming. Not yet.

Instead, Lt. Rizzo walked to the window. He stood with his back to the room, surveying the morning traffic that connected onto the via Condotti and which would lead past the plush shopping distracts and the Italian parliament.

Rizzo felt like death warmed over. He was losing sleep and felt as if he was coming down with the flu. He was of two minds. On one hand, the four detectives in this room were the best that his department had to offer. On the other hand, they were overpaid thumb-sucking idiots who couldn't find the ocean from the end of the pier.

He managed to control himself. He had established the ident.i.ty of the dead woman and the musician who had been murdered in the apartment above deaf old Signora Masiella. He had now linked the bodies in the marsh at Castel Fusano to the disappearance of an American couple from a Ritz hotel in Rome. But he, and those who worked for him, were now drawing a double blank.

Who were the Americans who had been murdered on the street?

And what was their link, if any, to the musician and his live-in girlfriend?

He turned. "All right then," he said, controlling himself. "We've done what we can and it has not been successful. But we need to do more. We need a link. A connection. Somewhere in this city someone knows something. What is the feeling in this room? Do we need more investigators? More shoe leather on the street? More money from the 'reptile fund' to buy an informer? Tell me. What is it we want?"

Again, no answers. Now Lt. Rizzo was about to explode. A moment later, however, there was a soft knock on the door.

One of the technicians from the lab, a girl named Mimi, a university student, had something interesting.

The sight of Mimi settled Rizzo down. She was a criminology student at the American University in Rome. Fluent in English and Italian, she was one of the four young interns to whom he had thrown some tidbits of information from Bernardo Santangelo.

Mimi had caught Rizzo's eye more than once in the past. Mimi sailed through life in the orbit of the magical girls of Sailor Moon. She had Technicolor hair, chopped short in a trendy fashion and streaked with red, blue, green, and yellow, like her favorite j.a.panese manga characters. Under her lab coat, she favored boldly colored miniskirts, school girl white socks, and low cut sneakers, also in keeping with the anime motif.

She didn't look like the type who would come bearing news that could kick a homicide investigation in a new direction. But then again, Rizzo knew, the Case Breakers never do, which is why he'd included her with such important information.

He always prized the people who could think outside the normal channels. On a day like this, he prized anyone who could think at all, and if Mimi had come up with something, well, it just proved that he was a genius and totally justified in flirting with all those younger females.

Magical girls, indeed.

"Yes, Mimi?" he asked.

She looked at the detectives at the table, two of which had been on the force longer than she had been alive, as had Lt. Rizzo. Ten professional eyes stared back at her in silence. Eight of them were hostile. Rizzo's were adoring.

"May I mention something?" she asked.

"Of course you may, Mimi," Rizzo said. "These officers are under my command. Anything you say to me I would relate to them immediately, and as you can probably tell, they are in dire need of all the help they can get. So please tell us what you have."

"Maybe it's nothing," she said, "but maybe it's something."

Mimi sat down at the table and Rizzo closed the door.

Mimi had been doing some research and some digging, she explained, trying to relate the ballistics tests that Rizzo had shown her to anything else going on in Europe. So, helpful young chick that Mimi was, she hacked into some English-language military sites just to check out some pictures of real sailors and see what else was there.

Penetrating fifty million dollars of US Defense Department software took Mimi six and a half minutes. The United States Naval Station at Rota, Spain, she discovered, had recently finished its part of an annual weapon and ammunition moving and tracking exercise called CAWDS.

Under the CAWDS, or Containerized Ammunition Weapons & Distribution System, several boatloads of small arms and ammunition had been moved in standard shipping containers by air and sea.

The exercise had started in September 2007 and had run through June 2008. Under the system, computerized, numerical micro-imprints had been placed on all equipment to further facilitate their tracking.

"It's a very complex process," Mimi said. "But as we all know," she said, "firearms examiners use a comparison microscope to determine whether or not a bullet was fired from a particular firearm. The comparison is based on the individual marking left on fired ammunition components that are unique to a particular firearm. That's how we have the linkage of the weapons used in these two cases that Lieutenant Rizzo is discussing."

"Good so far," Rizzo said. His instincts told him to trust her.

"But the CAWDS system suggests something further," she said. "Apparently one of the boxes of containerized ammunition disappeared from a United States Navy warehouse in Sardinia. Stolen, in other words. It was, or so it was believed, hijacked by members of the Sicilian Mafia who sold the contents on the black market."

Rizzo blinked rapidly several times. This was all taking on a bizarre geometry.

"The pistols involved had been inventoried at Rota, Spain," she said. "The guns were unique among their manufacture because the others of the same series have never been removed from their shipping containers. I ran an Internet check. They are all in the hands of the US Navy except this one crate that was stolen. One of these pistols was used in these two crimes."

Mimi pushed a printout in front of the detectives at the table. They leaned forward to see it.

"So?" Rizzo pressed. "Anything else?"

"Si, Tenente," Mimi said. "The rest of the pistols turned up in southeastern Europe," Mimi said, "in the hands of underworld people there. We know this from recent arrests. The stolen naval cargo seems to have been trafficked by an agency called The Caspian Group."

"Caspian?" Rizzo asked. "As in, the 'Caspian Sea'?"

"Mafia ucraina," Mimi said. "It's a supposition and I might be wrong. But you could link all four of these a.s.sa.s.sinations to gangsters from Kiev."

FORTY-TWO.

At 11:00 a.m. on the dot, the gates of the US Emba.s.sy in Kiev swung open. The police escort emerged first, Ukrainian vehicles first, sirens blaring. A phalanx of police poured onto Kotsyubynskoho. Ukrainian flags flew on the front and rear of the cars. A few moments later, the president's limousine pulled out of the gates of the emba.s.sy compound. It moved onto Kotsyubynskoho, then followed the streets of Kiev, closely guarded by American vehicles.

Alex rode in the eighth car, an armour-enforced van. She had a window. Federov, who had arrived punctually at the emba.s.sy at 10:00, sat beside her in a middle seat.

"Still expecting trouble?" she asked him in Russian.

He didn't directly address the question. "I've told you everything I can," he said.

She turned away and watched history unfurl before her through bulletproof gla.s.s.

The streets again were lined with spectators. Again snow flurries swept across the city. Most spectators were cheering, craning their necks for a view of the lead car of the motorcade. There were many old people who had lived through the very hard times. They remembered Stalin and the war and never thought they would lay eyes on the leader of America, much less live in a more open society. There were younger people who remembered the Orange Revolution and still held dearly to its principles. There were middle-aged people who had lived through Ukrainian Communism and had accepted it as their fate or even believed in it. They mostly just remembered, all of them, huddled together against the frigid weather.