Nothing. Harkov’s head lolled on his shoulders.

Aleks shoved the rag back into the man’s mouth, dialed again. Again the phone rang. Harkov shrieked in pain. This close, Aleks could smell the cooking flesh. He also knew that Harkov’s bowels had released.

Another ammonia capsule.

Aleks walked to the window for a moment. Harkov mumbled something into his gag. Aleks returned, tapped the man’s right hand. Harkov wrote a scribbled word on the pad. Unreadable. Aleks hit redial on his phone. Another jolt. This time the tail of Viktor Harkov’s yellowed dress shirt caught fire. Aleks let it burn for a second, then doused the flame.

The office was becoming a landfill of offensive odors. Greasy flesh, burning hair, feces, sweat. Aleks pulled Harkov’s head back. The man’s face was bathed in perspiration. Aleks pinched the fleshy part of the man’s nostrils until he came back to consciousness.

“Two little girls,” Aleks repeated.

Nothing.

Aleks reached into the bag, pulled out a small alligator clip. He detached the clip from Harkov’s genitals, and connected the wire to the smaller clip. This he attached to one of Harkov’s eyelids.

On the desk was a photograph taken perhaps sometime in the 1970s, a picture of a thin, nervous looking teenaged boy.

“This is your son?” Aleks asked.

Harkov nodded slightly.

“If I do not find the people I am looking for, I will pay this man a visit. It is far too late to save yourself – indeed, the account of this day was written years ago when you crossed my path – but you have the opportunity, right now, to give me what I want. If you do, you have my word that no harm will come to him.”

Aleks removed the gag from the old man’s mouth, but Harkov said nothing.

Once more, Moscow called Viktor Harkov. The charge burned away the entire eyelid in a flash of bright blue flame.

Two minutes later, the old man told Aleks everything.

ALEKS FOUND THE files in the bottom drawer of the steel cabinet in the corner of the outer office. Inside the cabinet he noticed the remains of a long-ago forgotten lunch, a moldy brown paper bag dotted with rodent stool. In this tableau lived the horrors of old age, Aleks thought, of its infirmities and disease and trials, in here were the whispers of these days before death, a feeling he would never know, a . . .

. . . triumph over eternity in the moment he strides up the hill, the field of corpses thick beneath his feet, the screams of the dying a dark sonata in the distance. The stone farmhouse has taken many mortar rounds, its pitted façade now a defiant intaglio. Inside he knows he will find his answers . . .

ALEKS GLANCED OUT the window, at the street. Kolya sat in the Hummer, a pair of earphones in his ears. He smoked a cigarette. The world continued to turn. The world was not going to miss this man who traded in human flesh, who brokered children in the night.

Aleks turned back to the dead man, took out his knife, and finished his work.

BEFORE OPENING THE DOOR, Aleks looked at the documents. There were two files, two families with twin girls. Both were in the right time frame from four years earlier. Both were brokered through Helsinki. There was no further detail on the children, other than their gender and their date of passage to the United States.

And, most importantly, their names and addresses.

Before he stepped into the hallway Aleks turned back to the room. He had not touched anything without his gloves on. He had worn the plastic raincoat and his ball cap nearly the entire time. Although the offices were covered in dust, the path from the door to Viktor Harkov’s desk was swept clean. Aleks had not left shoeprints in the dust. Only the most sophisticated of forensic evidence gathering would reveal that he had ever been in these rooms, and even if a man like Viktor Harkov warranted such attention, Aleks would be long gone by the time he was identified.

Still, he had now committed murder in a country not his own. He could never undo this, or take it back. Everything had changed.

In Estonia he knew where all the bolt-holes were, had several identities in several safe houses along the Narva River. He knew how the police operated, how the politicians operated, who could be trusted, who could be bought. He knew the when, the where, the how and, most importantly, the how much. This was different. This was the United States.

He walked slowly down the hallway to the stairs. He did not use the handrail. When he reached the back door he used his shoulder to open it. The alley behind the building was empty. Moments later he rounded the corner and put the plastic bag containing the bloody raincoat and latex gloves in a trashcan.

When he slipped into the vehicle, Kolya considered him, but did not say a word. Aleks nodded. The Hummer pulled slowly into the stream of traffic.

THEY IDLED IN A PARKING lot of a McDonald’s. Aleks scanned the files. He wrote an address on a piece of newspaper, showed it to Kolya, who entered the address into his GPS system. Aleks committed it to memory.

“This is not far,” Kolya said. “Maybe one hour. Maybe less, depending on traffic.”

Aleks looked at his watch. “Let’s go.”

THEY LEFT THE CITY and drove along a magnificent river. It reminded Alex of the Narva. He looked around, at the tidy houses, the manicured lawns, the shrubs, trees, flowers. He could settle here. If this was where his Anna and Marya had grown up, they would be happy in Kolossova.

At just after six PM they found the address. The house was set far back from the road, barely visible through the trees, approached by a long winding driveway that snaked through the woods, bordered by early spring flowers and low undergrowth. There was a single car in the driveway. According to Kolya, it was a late model compact. Aleks did not know anything about current American models. They all looked exactly alike to him.

Except for Kolya’s Hummer. This was a gaudy, pretentious tank of a vehicle. It stood out.

America, Aleks thought. He lowered his window, listened. Nearby someone was cutting their lawn. He also heard the sound of a little girl singing. His heart began to race.

Was this Anna or Marya?

Aleksander Savisaar glanced at the gloaming sky. The sun would soon set fully.

They would wait for darkness.

TEN

Abby watched the girls at the dining-room table. They had eaten dinner, just the girls, and done an assembly-line job of rinsing the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher.

When they were done they put two pots of water on the stove, hard-boiling two dozen eggs. The windows were soon covered in mist. Emily drew a smiley face on one of them.

Twenty minutes later the dining-room table was covered in newspaper, mixing bowls, wire dippers, decals, and egg cartons. The kitchen smelled of warm vinegar and chocolate. It brought Abby back to her childhood, she and Wallace coloring eggs, hand-weighing chocolate bunnies to see which ones were hollow, which ones solid, fighting over the Cadbury Cremes, spiriting away marshmallow peeps.

When Abby had learned, years earlier, that she could not have children, this was one of the scenes that flashed darkly through her mind, a scene that would never be, along with Christmas mornings, Halloween nights, birthday parties with too-sweet cakes bearing candles shaped in the forms of 2, 3, 4 . . .

It was one of the million blessings that were Charlotte and Emily.

AT SIX-THIRTY THE doorbell rang. Abby wasn’t expecting anyone. She crossed the kitchen, into the foyer, looked through the peephole in the front door.

It was Diane, her neighbor from across the street.