"Get my wife to translate it," Reasons said.

Nadya nodded: "The chemical on the sheet is made to… mmm… I don't know the English word, but it is, er, compounded to reflect light from a scanner, so that any scanner can be used to digitize the fingerprints." She used her hands when she talked, like a French woman.

"Slick," Chu said again. "Thanks."

Outside, Nadya took a breath, looked up and down the street and said, "This could be a Russian town, except for the signs. I don't mean the words on the signs, I mean the signs are everywhere. Everything is signs."

"So you want to look at the files, or what?" Reasons asked.

"No. If we could go to the hotel, I could transmit the fingerprints back to Washington, and use the toilet and maybe get clean from the trip. Then the files?"

Like Lucas, Nadya was staying at the Radisson, a cylindrical building that looked like a chubby, upright tower of Pisa; the hotel was conveniently across the street from the police station. They took her all the way to her room, where Lucas explained the TV remote and the movies channel, and they showed her how to hook the modem through the hotel's phone system. They dialed into the Russian embassy's server, got the connect tone, and left her.

"We'll wait in the restaurant. Back in half an hour," Lucas said, as they went out the door.

Going back down the hallway to the elevators, Reasons said, "She said she didn't know him."

"I don't think she did," Lucas said. "She was too careful about the fingerprints."

"You saw her jump, though."

"Yeah," Lucas said. "She's no cop."

"What do you think? She's a spy?"

"I think she's probably with one of their intelligence services, and for some reason, they sent somebody who isn't used to dealing with bodies," Lucas said. They got to the elevators and Lucas pushed the up button; Reasons pushed it again just to make sure it was pushed. "She's not a clerk. She's an executive. She's been around."

"More than me," Reasons said. "I'm not exactly a world traveler," Lucas said. "I went to Mexico a couple of years ago, on a job. I went to Europe when I was in college. That's about it."

"Europe," Reasons said. "French pussy."

"I was playing hockey," Lucas said. "All I saw was German hockey rinks and the insides of buses. I did get to see the Wall before they knocked it down."

"More'n me," Reasons said.

The elevator doors opened and they got on. Lucas pushed the button for the top floor, and Reasons pushed it again, just to make sure it was pushed. "Maybe I'll travel when I retire. The old lady would like to see Moscow."

"That's where she's from?"

"Naw. She's from some one-horse town on the Polish border. Moscow, to her… it'd be like seeing Manhattan the first time."

As they walked into the restaurant, a man sitting in a lounge chair with a New York Times looked over the paper, stood up, and asked, "Lucas Davenport?"

Lucas stopped: "Yeah?"

The man was wearing twill pants and a neat tweed jacket with a burgundy tie. He was six feet tall, military erect, sandy haired, early thirties, and pleasant, like a hopeful Xerox salesman. "I'm Andy Harmon. Barney Howard probably told you I'd look you up. I saw you going through with the lady, but couldn't catch you. I thought you'd probably come up here… Could I get a word with you?"

Lucas said to Reasons, "This guy's a fed. Get a booth, I'll be with you in a minute."

Lucas and Harmon drifted toward the windows facing the lake, away from other patrons. Harmon looked too young for a serious federal job; if he was not exactly apple-cheeked, the apples had only recently departed. "She give you anything interesting?"

"She said America has a lot more signs than Russia," Lucas said.

Harmon pulled at his lower lip for a couple of seconds, and then said, "That's true."

"Other than that…" Lucas shrugged. "We went over to the medical examiner's office and took prints off the dead guy, Oleshev. She had a fingerprint kit that makes it easy to digitize prints. She gave one of the pickup sheets to the ME and told him where he could order some more in St. Petersburg."

"Mmm."

"She's not a cop," Lucas said. "She's probably from one of the intelligence agencies that doesn't deal with bodies."

Now he was mildly interested. "How do you know that?"

Lucas explained and Harmon nodded. "We never really thought she was a cop," Harmon said. "Something happened here, and they don't know exactly what it was. She's supposed to figure it out before we do."

"Think she will?"

"She will be smart," Harmon said.

"She might be smart, but if we see everything she does, how does she plan to stay ahead of us?" Lucas asked. "There's gotta be something else."

"Mmm. She's probably got a shadow operator." He said it deferentially, as if talking to a moderately slow child.

"What's that, in English?"

"She's out here in the open, picking up everything you get. Then, even though they don't know exactly what's going on, they've probably got some ideas of their own-some conjectures, maybe some contacts who might know something. So she sends everything she gets from you back to the embassy, and her controller bounces it back to the shadow op. So he's got everything they know and everything we know… and maybe he stays a few steps ahead."

"What does he do if he figures it out?"

Harmon shrugged. "Takes care of it himself. Or maybe, if it doesn't jeopardize whatever they're doing here, Nadya feeds the information back to you and you make the bust."

"Well, Jesus." Lucas had never encountered anything like it.

"As for us… We'd like to know if they've got an organization here and what it's been doing. It could be completely commercial-tracking grain prices, that sort of thing. Then… maybe not."

"And I just ride along," Lucas said.

"Don't worry about it," Harmon said. "This dead guy, nobody will miss him much, except maybe his old man. He was an idiot. That's what people say…"

Lucas interrupted. "What people?"

Another shrug. "People. Anyway, I don't think it counts for much whether or not you get the killer. What really counts is that there might be an organization here that we should know about. The fact that she's from the SVR suggests that there is."

"The SVR is…"

"The Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, their foreign intelligence service. The FSB, the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, is the national police force. That's what she says she's from." He pronounced the Russian names with relish and a sputtering dampness. "She might be quite… immoral, I suppose you'd call it, in your terms. If she thinks you're getting somewhere, and you're not keeping her up with it, she might try to initiate a sexual relationship with you. They're very, very well trained." Harmon's thin tongue, looking a little like a Ritz cracker, flicked over his lower lip.

Lucas nearly laughed, but suppressed the impulse and said, solemnly, "I'll take care."

"So she had nothing else? Nothing relevant, other than the signs?"

"No, we were mostly setting up a schedule. We'll show her the files when she's finished transmitting prints, and gets cleaned up. She's said she's jet-lagged and she's gonna crash pretty early."

"All right." Harmon eased away. "We'll be in touch."

"I just can't figure out…"

"What?"

"I can't figure out why you guys don't seem to care. I mean… people are getting killed."

"Honestly? Catching spies for the former Soviet Union is not exactly a good career move anymore. Costs a lot of money, disturbs the relationship, and nobody cares. So, catch a spy, you get an atta-boy and transferred to Boise, where you'll be less expensive."

"That's really… fuckin' great," Lucas said.

"Call me if you need anything," Harmon said. He turned away. "Anything that we got, that doesn't cost too much."