Thirty miles north of Cloquet his phone rang.

"Lucas… Andy Harmon."

Lucas glanced at Nadya. "Yeah," he said quietly "I'm in my car, heading north to Hibbing. Nadya's with me. She's sleeping, I think."

"Okay. First, Spivak got a call yesterday evening. I can read you what he said."

"He's tapped?"

"Well… yeah. What the caller said was, 'Is Tom White there?' And Spivak said, 'This is Spivak's Tap. We don't have no Tom White here.' I'm reading from a transcript."

"Okay, but so what?"

"So then the caller says, 'Is this two two zero, six seven nine, seven six eight zero?" And Spivak said, "Nope. You misdialed.' Then he hung up."

Lucas waited through the pregnant pause.

After a few seconds, Harmon said, "That was almost certainly a call code. There is no two-two-zero area code. What Spivak does is add or subtract some unknown number, and comes up with a callback. He makes the callback from a clean phone, probably to another public phone somewhere."

"You said, 'Yesterday evening,' " Lucas said. "What time yesterday evening?"

"Seven twenty."

"Huh. I have reason to believe that Spivak went running out of his bar at seven twenty, drove to a Wal-Mart and bought nothing special, but made a phone call from a pay phone."

"We can check that," Harmon said. "We can check all the calls made out of the place between seven fifteen and what, eight o'clock?"

"More like seven fifteen and seven forty. My guy was pretty specific. Let me know. What happened with the laptop?"

"The laptop. There were no usable fingerpints at all. Most of the files are not encrypted, but they appear to be innocent. Tour guides and maps and so on. There are a couple of dozen encrypted files and nothing that looks like a key, so that doesn't help us. We're still going through it. There's a lot of stuff."

"All right. Check on Wal-Mart. Is there any possibility of getting a couple of FBI thugs to lean on Spivak? Maybe he isn't scared enough, because the only people talking to him are locals."

"We can send somebody around. This thing about the shadow has us worried. From what Nadya told you, about the wife dying and the child, we think it's a guy named Piotr Nikitin. He was supposed to be a middle-level guy in their Commercial Affairs Section, but everybody figured he was Intelligence."

"Why worried?"

"Well, he's a nice guy, you know? Everybody knows him. His father-in-law bought him a place out in Virginia, and he'd have a big to-do out there every May Day, you know, for the community. He called it the Dirty Rotten Commie Fest."

"The community?"

"Yes. You know, the community."

"He tried to hang Spivak, for Christ's sake," Lucas said, exasperated.

"That was just part of the job," Harmon said. "You can understand that."

Lucas couldn't. He got off the phone, breathing hard for a few minutes, backed off the gas. When he got pissed, the speed tended to go up, and he got speeding tickets. Nadya stirred twenty minutes after he talked with Harmon. Stirred, then twitched, moaned softly, and pushed herself up. "What time is it?"

"Nine o'clock," Lucas said. "We're almost there."

"Really?" Her face was slack with sleep. She cranked her seat upright, said, "My mouth is terrible, I have to brush it."

"McDonald's in ten minutes," Lucas said. "You can do it there. Then we'll go see if we can find Piotr."

The name didn't faze her: "I hope to," she said. "This would be well regarded in Moscow."

Lucas talked to Chief Hopper, who was at the bus museum, and got directions through town. The museum was actually out of town a bit, and looked exactly the way a bus museum should look, a triumph of function over form: a low concrete building painted red, white, and blue, with no style whatever, except perhaps existential garage.

There were three cop cars in the parking lot, and beyond them, six men on their hands and knees, crawling up the parking lot; two more men stood chatting, watching the crawlers. Lucas rolled in next to the cars, and he and Nadya got out. One of the two standing men, a square-faced forty-year-old in a ball cap, walked over and said, "Are you Davenport?"

"Yes, and Nadya Kalin, a police officer from Russia. She's here as an observer."

"Pleased to meet you," the chief said. "I'm Roy." And then to Nadya: "You look just like Miz Wedig, a third-grade teacher here in town. You could be sisters."

"But I'm a spy," Nadya said solemnly. "Mr. Davenport will tell you so."

"Well, I'm sure every big country needs spies," Hopper said cheerfully. He turned to Lucas, his smile fading. "We may have some bad news. One of the boys was scuffing around and he found some blood over there on the other side of the car. We covered it, and the sheriff's people came over and took some samples. I put my guys to crawling the lot, inch by inch. So far…" He dug in his pocket and pulled out a transparent plastic bag and handed it to Lucas. "… this is what we found."

A nine-millimeter shell was inside the bag; it was shiny, new.

"Nine millimeter," Lucas said to Nadya.

"But not from the same group of cartridges as the one that killed Oleshev," she said. "The others were tarnished, and even had some, mmm, I don't know the English, green coloring on the brass."

"That'd be your verdigris," Hopper said.

"We can tell by the firing-pin mark whether it was the same gun," Lucas said. He handed the bag back to the sheriff: "If you could have that shipped right away down to the BCA crime lab, I'd appreciate it. They could get back to us overnight on the firing-pin mark."

"Good as done," Hopper said. "You want to see where the blood was?"

They walked over to look; there wasn't much but a clean spot on the blacktop. "How much blood, you think?" Lucas asked. "Bad wound?"

"I'd say pretty bad. I'd say the guy was down at least a quart."

"Shoot." Lucas looked around. "I'll tell you what. There'd be no reason to take the body except to delay the discovery. You might find it around pretty close. I imagine that they'd want to get rid of it."

"There are a few thousand square miles of woods and swamps around here, to say nothing of the pits," Hopper said. "I wouldn't hold your breath."

Nadya had been staring morosely at the clean spot on the blacktop; now she said, abruptly, "Is this all?"

"That's about all, ma'am," Hopper said.

"I will call," she said, and she walked away from them.

"She sure does look like Sally Wedig," Hopper marveled, looking after her.

Nadya came back. "They are very upset in Washington."

"So am I," Lucas said. "I don't mean to… get on your case when one of your countrymen has been killed, but the whole bunch of you are playing games. It's gotta stop. It's getting people killed. You need to tell me everything you know, everything they know in Moscow, and maybe I can stop it. And I don't give a shit about this spy stuff…"

"I don't make that decision," Nadya said. She stepped closer to him and looked up and said, "When Weather and I were shopping, she said you were a brilliant policeman because you made things happen. Make something happen."

"Like what?" Lucas asked; he was both irritated and flattered.

"Something. I don't know."

Lucas checked again with Andy Harmon. "I got the Duluth FBI guys going. They should be in Virginia by now. They'll lean on Spivak," Harmon said.

"Okay. I've got some news about your friend Piotr Nikitin. He's probably dead."

Silence, for five seconds. "You're positive?"

Lucas told him about the nine-millimeter shell, the blood, the car and the cell phone. "Probably too early to light a candle, but you might look around for a matchbook."

"Huh. I'll pass the word on. Keep me informed."

Lucas decided: "Look. Have one of the FBI guys call me on this phone when they're done with Spivak. I'm gonna give him an hour to think about it, assuming he doesn't crack, and then I'm going to bust his ass."