"That doesn't sound very Christian to me," he said, "nor very charitable."

"Then I ought to shoot you twice," she said.

"Let's go," Cerny said. "We're on our way to Paris."

"Not a chance!" she answered.

"You might want to change your mind," he said. "Don't you realize what the militia attack on Barranco Lajoya was about?"

"No, I don't," she answered. "Mr. Collins sent me there to troubleshoot. To find out what someone had against these people. So why don't you tell me? Then we'll both know!"

"The attack on the village had nothing to do with the village itself," he said. "But it was made to look that way. You honestly don't understand what they were after, what they were looking for?"

She could see Father Martin being thrown to the ground again. The insistent voice of his murderer as he stood above him.

Dnde, dnde, dnde? Where, where, where?

What had they been seeking?

"It hasn't occurred to you?" he asked.

It had. "They were looking for me," she said.

"You," said Cerny. "The Ukrainian Mafia sent people looking for you. They wish to kill you or kidnap you and take you back to Ukraine."

"What?"

"Don't be so surprised. The Ukrainian underworld has a million dollar contract out on your life. They followed you to Venezuela but the people in Barranco Lajoya wouldn't give you up."

Still in shock, she asked, "How could they even have known where I was, the Ukrainians?"

Cerny shrugged. "There are all sorts of theories," he said. "We can discuss them eventually." He paused. "Did you ever discover why the village was being hara.s.sed in the first place?"

"All sorts of theories," she said quietly. "Local ranchers. People who want to poach the wood from the forests. Venezuelan nationalists who don't believe the missionaries should "pollute" local culture. The government in Caracas who thinks we're all a bunch of imperialist agents. Plenty of theories and not one that will hold together. Not yet, anyway."

"We're going to New York first," Cerny said. "You'll have an evening to talk to Mr. Collins. That would probably be a good idea. Then we're headed back to Europe."

"I thought I was finished with the Ukrainians. At least for a few years," Alex muttered.

She felt a deep surge of fear inside her. That, and a lack of comprehension. What had she been, other than a bystander, one who lost something precious, her fiance, and might have lost her own life too, if things had gone any differently. "How could they possibly care about me?" she asked.

"That's what we'd like to know as well. You must have learned something, witnessed something, had access to something in Kiev. All we know is, your life is marked."

She simmered.

"Anyway, you might want to help us get them before they get you," he said. "Federov and his one remaining bodyguard. We're flying Air France to Paris, you and I. Business cla.s.s if it makes you feel any better."

"I'm not going anywhere other than back to New York," she said. "And I'm not going anywhere with you."

"Alex, don't be foolish," he said. "By this point, you don't have much choice."

This time, as it sank in, she didn't spare him the expletives.

SEVENTY-FIVE.

Gian Antonio Rizzo was planning a trip as well. He had rea.s.sembled everything he had on the two spiked murder investigations, but as far as his bosses in Rome were concerned, he was warning everyone that he was prepared to be as difficult and obtuse as possible.

"Lousy meddlesome Americans!" he complained to anyone who would listen. "They come in and steal your work time after time. When will it end?"

Rizzo's political distaste for the Americans was beyond discussion. He cursed them profanely whenever he could. He'd gone on and on about it so much that it wasn't that anyone could question it any more; no one even wanted to hear about it.

Then suddenly life's random events broke in his favor, reversing a recent trend. Sophie was back from Monte Carlo, contrite as could be, and asking her policeman to forgive her and take her back. The American actor, Billy-O, Sophie now told him, wasn't much more than a pretty face, wasn't even that much in private, and as a singer could barely hum a tune. Plus he was a financially askew hophead, she told him, traveling with a least a dozen illegal prescriptions in his medicine kit, including a small packet of cannabis and thousands of dollars sewn into the lining of his luggage. Sophie knew since she'd been in his hotel room for two days and saw everything.

"Why are you even telling me this?" Rizzo grumbled, sounding bored and hurt. "To incite me? To make me jealous?"

"I don't know," she answered. "So you know how sorry I am. So you know that I made a bad mistake and that you're a better man than he'll ever be."

"I don't want to know anything about him," Rizzo said, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. "Nothing would make me dislike Americans more than I already do."

There was no disputing that part by anyone who had listened to Rizzo over the last several years. But Sophie would not shut up. There might have been something to those rumors that he, Billy-O, danced at the other end of the ballroom, as the English would say. In fact, Sophie had been treated wretchedly in Monte Carlo and said she wouldn't mind at all if Gian Antonio could pull a few police strings and make life miserable for that Hollywood punk while he was on the continent.

"What can I do?" Rizzo scoffed. "What authority do I have? These Hollywood types have all the money and know all the right people. Who do I know? The minister of justice and he can't stand me."

In fact, Rizzo had a good idea that he might want to get out of town, lay low for a short while. He had some other things to attend to, a side business as it were. His bosses told him that he could take a week off if he wished. He wished. He had the time coming and his juice within the Roman police department was diminishing day by day, even with the recently approved sixty-day extension of his duties.

He thought about the whole situation. Sophie. The actor. The minister. What he could use, he decided, was a good reason for being out of town.

So he asked Sophie if she might want to accompany him on a business trip. He would be busy for much of the time. There was some highly confidential stuff in a neighboring European capital. She would need to let him go there for a few days, then join him. He had some work to accomplish, some people to meet. But thereafter they could get reacquainted, let bygones be bygones, and he might even be able to let the memory of that American musical nuisance fade away.

Sophie took the bait. She said yes.

So a trip to Paris for two was on, Rizzo to go ahead first, Sophie to join him in three days. They would relax and get to know each other again. Billy-O had given an entirely new meaning to the term "one hit wonder."

Rizzo's peers in the police department in Rome all envied him for so flagrantly going off to patch things up with his lady friend in the middle of the week. Some guys had all the luck, as Rod Stewart might have sung.

Meanwhile, Rizzo made a few phone calls to some people he knew. They would arrange for Billy-O to eventually draw the receipt he deserved.

SEVENTY-SIX.

Alex and Michael Cerny flew to Miami via American Airlines, then connected to New York. They stayed overnight in the city.

That evening, Alex met with Collins for an hour at his home, giving him her grave in-person account of what had transpired at Barranco Lajoya. She gave him all the photographs and notes she had taken. He listened quietly and seemed overcome by a great sadness.

Then he stood from behind a desk. They were in his study, a room that was high-ceilinged and elegantly furnished. With a stiff walk Collins crossed the room to a wide plate gla.s.s window that looked down upon Fifth Avenue. He stared downward for several seconds in silence, as if the view might give him some explanation of the craziness and brutality of the contemporary world.

There was no indication that it did.

The silence continued. There was a sag to Collins' shoulders, one she had not seen before. She wondered what he might be thinking. "Presumably the Ukrainians had no intention to harm Barranco Lajoya before I sent you there," Collins said softly. "So it seems my best of intentions have contributed to a tragedy, a catastrophe. There's blood on my hands."

"No one could have foreseen this, Mr. Collins," she said. "No one."

"Generous of you to say so, Alex," he said, turning back toward her. "But I can draw my own conclusions and I'll have to live with them." He paused. "Call me a foolish old man," he said, "but I feel I will now have a debt to those people from that village for as long as I live. I don't consider the books closed on that place."

"If it's not presumptuous," she said, "I feel much the same way."

"You do?"

"At the appropriate time," Alex said. "I'd like to return. Unfinished business."

An ironic smile crossed his face. "Unfinished business," he said. "Yes, we agree. You seem drawn to unfinished business, don't you, Alex? Venezuela. Ukraine...."

"That does seem to be the path that's before me right now," she said. "It's not where I thought I'd be right now, but it's where I am."

He nodded.

"I know how that works," he said. "Show me someone for whom that isn't the case, and I'll show you someone who sat back in life and never took chances, never tried to do the right thing. I admire you."

"Thank you, sir."

"Be careful in Ukraine," he said. "I've heard it's a G.o.dless place." "

I'll do my best," she said.

"I know that," he answered. "Just while you're doing your best, be careful also." He moved back to his desk. "I have a check for you for your work in South America. I've rounded it up to fifty thousand dollars. Don't protest. Try to find some time to enjoy it and a place to relax with it," he said.

She accepted it in an unmarked envelope, which she wouldn't open till later in the day when she would mail it to her bank in Washington.

"I'll do my best," she said again.

A few minutes later, she was out of his apartment and back down on Fifth Avenue, walking home slowly, enjoying the anonymity that a crowded New York sidewalk always afforded her.

SEVENTY-SEVEN.

The next morning, Alex and Michael Cerny were on an Air France flight from New York to Paris. Two hours into the flight, sitting side by side in business cla.s.s, Cerny took out his Palm Pilot. He applied his fingerprint to the security section and powered it up.

"I want you to read some files," Cerny said. "CIA and NSA stuff. They'll tell you more about why we're going to Paris."

"Full disclosure?" she asked with an edge.

"Call it what you want," Cerny said. "You need to know some backstory."

He handed the Palm Pilot to Alex. She began with a CIA file that was, as much as anything, a continuation of what she had read on Yuri Federov back in January. But it added to her knowledge.

Federov had been on a CIA list for several months as a foreign national in whom the Agency had taken a "special interest." At the same time, Federov had developed a long list of enemies in the underworlds of North America, South America, and Europe. So many, that fear of his enemies had impeded his movements for years. Thus from time to time, Federov had been in the habit of traveling through Europe in the guise of a priest.

But within the last eighteen months, Federov had taken the guise one step further. He had hired a double, a retired actor from the National Theater of Hungary. The double was a friend named Daniel Katzman. Katzman bore a resemblance to him. Hence Katzman traveled as Father Daniel, a Federov decoy-within-a-decoy so that Federov himself could move about the world more freely.

Daniel turned out to be in the role of a lifetime, or, more accurately, the last role of his lifetime. A pair of a.s.sa.s.sins shot him to death in a French cafe named L'etincelle during the first days of the new year. Alex noted the date. January 2. The French police were still working on the case, the file said, the one of the man in priestly garb shot dead over a cognac and a cigar at a cafe in the Marais.

From the shooting, a triple riddle posed itself: Q1: When is a dead priest not really a dead priest?

A1: When the dead Russian mobster is not a Russian mobster either.

Q2: Then when is a dead Russian mobster not really a dead Russian mobster?

A2: When he wasn't even a priest either. He was an actor and a friend of the man who was supposed to be shot.

And then the biggest question of all: Q3: When is an underworld "hit" not an underworld "hit"?

A3: When neither the victim nor the perps are members of the underworld.

The electronic file ended abruptly. Cerny guided Alex to a second one that discussed a pair of agents who worked for the CIA, and not with great efficiency. Their names were Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna. They were married to each other, or seemed to be, but didn't work at it very hard. They had picked up a trail that they felt belonged to Federov by monitoring flights from Kiev to the capitals of Western Europe, notably London, Paris, Madrid, and Geneva, places where Federov either had business interests, money stashed, or both.

They tracked their target to Paris and asked for permission from Langley to proceed with an "intervention." The request went all the way up to cabinet level. Permission was granted. They acted. Next thing anyone knew, the secure faxes and phone lines were exploding between Langley and Paris and Langley and Rome.

Edythe and Peter fled to Madrid after Paris, then Rome. Yet for people who should have been disappearing into the background, they were reckless, physically incapable of keeping a low profile. Nor were they upstanding citizens. They moved in a shadowy world of illegal gun dealers, smugglers, swindlers, s.e.xual merchants, and con artists. They frequented nightclubs in Paris and Rome where couples paired off with strangers. They lived on the social and political edge of the world.

They picked up a trail for Federov. But they picked up the wrong trail, one that was set out as a trap.

As soon as Alex saw those names, a bell rang within her. Her mind flashed back to the club in Kiev, her quasi-sober conversation with Federov, as well as the suggestive questions posed by her.

Federov, in Russian: "Have you ever heard of a pair of Americans named Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna?"

Alex: "New names on me. Should I know them?"