"Nadya."

"What'd you get?" Harmon asked. "Did you get something out of the files? What?"

Lucas told him, and Harmon said he could have the information on Spivak's wife's family in an hour.

So they sat and waited; and Lucas found that he was a little pissed. He was ninety-seven percent sure that Nadya and Reasons had been rolling around in her bed, and though it was none of his business, it seemed to push the investigation off balance. On the other hand, he'd not only slept with witnesses in the past; he'd on occasion been in bed with the principal of an investigation…

He had, he thought reasonably, no stance from which to complain; but it still pissed him off. Maybe because he was married now, and the opportunities were suddenly out of reach? Would he have been sniffing after Nadya if he'd been free?

He considered her, sitting on the single easy chair, reading a copy of Golf amp; Travel. She was attractive, she was his age, she smelled good, she was safe and from out of town…

"Silly fuckers," he mumbled at the ceiling over the bed.

"What?" Nadya asked.

"Nothing. Thinking."

"I am surprised you have such a small room," she said, tossing the magazine back on the coffee table. "They didn't have a suite when you arrived?"

"Didn't ask. Never thought about it," Lucas said.

"You never heard of the Internet hotel sites?"

She started rambling on about Price. com and the deal she got while she was still in Moscow, and for a few seconds Lucas thought he was losing his mind. Then the phone rang, and Harmon said, "I've got news." For the first time, he sounded as if he might be interested in what was going on.

"Give."

"Marsha Spivak is the daughter of Benjamin and Maud Svoboda. Her brother, Rick Svoboda, runs a bakery in Hibbing. And there's another brother named David. Are you getting this?"

"Yeah, I'm putting it on a scratch pad," Lucas said. "So that's the family?"

"Not quite. Janet and Rick have three daughters, Cheryl, Karen, and Julie. David, we haven't been able to locate. And then in the Spivak line, Marsha had Bob and Carol, and Bob has two children, Robert Jr. and Heather."

"All right, all right. I'll see if we can fit this-"

"That's not all. Your man from Virginia called and asked us to check that telephone call that Bob Spivak made from Wal-Mart. The phone call lasted seven seconds-seven-and there's not a single fuckin' thing you can say in seven seconds that isn't some sort of callback code. The call went to Svoboda's Bakery in Hibbing."

"You gotta be shitting me."

"That's still not all. At this point, we were getting seriously interested, so we went into the vital records to see where everybody was born. Benjamin and Maud Svoboda were both born in Mahnomen County, Benjamin in nineteen sixteen and Maud in nineteen twenty." Harmon was talking so fast now that he was spitting into the phone. "Their birth certificates came from Mercy Hospital, which burned down in nineteen twenty-eight, so there's no independent confirmation…"

"Wait a minute…"

"That's right, dude," Harmon said, a little overebullient for a fed. "Same hospital where Spivak's parents were supposedly born. Dutch and Sarah Spivak, nineteen twelve and nineteen fourteen. Dutch and Sarah went abroad twice, once in nineteen sixty-two and again in nineteen sixty-seven, both times to visit Germany and Czechoslovakia, supposedly where their parents came from. But we can't find any record of their parents."

"So it's all bullshit," Lucas said. "The birth records. The parents-"

"Were probably born in Russia. That hospital probably existed, and probably burned down, and there are probably people around whose records were destroyed. You'd never see the connection here, unless you saw these four families involved in some other way," Harmon said. "We're bustin' a Soviet-era spy ring right here in River City. They can't believe it back in Washington. Uh, is Nadya still around?"

"Yeah."

"Don't tell her all of this. We don't want anybody breaking for the door."

"I'll lead her on," Lucas said. Across the room, Nadya's eyebrows went up.

"Do that. And listen, we're out trying to find a copy of that Inspiration program. Where'd you get yours?"

"Apple store. But it was a while ago."

"Okay. We're gonna start putting this thing together here, too."

"We need to meet. I need to see you and your FBI guys. And I want to bring Nadya. And probably Jerry Reasons, because the Duluth cops have got a piece of this thing, and they're gonna be around. Reasons is coming here at five o'clock."

"We can be there. At least me and one other guy."

When Lucas got off, Nadya said, "What did he say?"

"He said we're busting a Soviet-era spy ring." He told her the rest of it, and added, "If we meet with Harmon, don't tell him I told you all this shit."

"Good. Now, does this new family fit in the chart?"

The new family fit, but only through three generations. Both the Spivaks and the Svobodas had fourth-generation children, but if the charts represented the families-and Lucas was now convinced that they did-the youngest generation wasn't on it.

"That makes sense if they are Communist-era leftovers," Nadya pointed out. "The last contact may have been in the nineteen eighties, when these children were not yet born."

"Huh."

"Which still leaves us stranded. What do we do now? Go see these Svobodas?"

"I think we've got to wait until we talk to the feds, and get Duluth up to speed. There are a couple of different ways to go…"

They talked it over for a while, then Nadya went back to her room and Lucas started going through every piece of paper he had.

In ten minutes, he gave it up as pointless. He didn't think he was missing anything in the material-he just didn't have enough material. With time to kill, he tried the TV came up dry, looked at his collection of newspapers and magazines, gave up on them, and finally went shopping. He bought a pair of walking shoes and a $400 Barbour oilcloth jacket that the salesman said was an excellent counterpoint to his blue eyes and his stonewashed Levi's. Lucas couldn't help but agree.

"When you're right, you're right," he told the salesman, looking at himself in the triple mirror.

Harmon called at four forty-five and said that he had rented a conference room on the first floor; he didn't want to meet in the FBI offices, which were across the street from the hotel, because he didn't ever want to have to explain Nadya.

Lucas called Nadya and Reasons, gave them the location, and at five o'clock, met Nadya in the elevator on the way down. Reasons was already there, with Harmon and a local Duluth FBI man named Amery. Harmon shook hands with Nadya, said, "I hope everything's okay with Piotr Nikitin."

"It does not look so good," she said.

"We need to put more pressure on Spivak," Lucas said, when they were settled around the conference table. "Is there anything in the antiterrorism stuff that you could use to lean on him with?"

Harmon glanced at Amery, then looked back at Lucas and nodded. "There are some provisions under the Patriot Act that would allow us to hold him for a while, without charging him, and without access to the outside, except for an attorney. Or, we could simply bust him under federal statutes on suspicion of espionage. We can also offer him a deal: give us the rest of the ring, and the killer, and he walks. His family walks. So we have some weapons."

"I don't think we should isolate him so much," Nadya said. "Threaten, threaten, threaten, but always allow him to talk to the outside. Always with surveillance on his family and this new family, the Svobodas."

"Is everybody tapped?" Reasons asked.

"We have warrants in the process of being issued," Harmon said. "We will have taps on the whole damn group of them by tonight-and we're looking at ways to tap the Wal-Mart there in Virginia, since that seems to be their regular outside call spot. The problem there is, we'd pick up more than the target, but our lawyers are figuring a way to work it out with the court."