“I’ll stay with the body,” Rizzo continued. “We owe it to her that she is returned to America. I want to make sure the body gets there.”

“You do not have any reason to think-,” the doctor said.

“I have every reason to think something could happen,” Rizzo retorted sharply. “I said I’d stay with the body! What language do I have to say that in so that you’ll understand?”

“Very good, ya-effendim,” the doctor said. All a big show for one piggish, corrupt cop. “If it pleases you, you may wait here in this chamber. Over there, perhaps.”

More conversation. Several more seconds.

Her face was really starting to itch now. And some sweat mixed with powder had leaked into her eye. It was stinging. Beneath her backside, the sheet was soaking with her sweat. It was turning cold and making her shiver. She started to fight off a sneeze.

“Should we wait with you?” she heard Ghalid ask.

“No.” Then Rizzo went off on Amjad. “Get him out of here before I shoot him. We’re already in the morgue and I’m starting to think it’s just too convenient to pass up.”

A few more seconds. A sneeze that was harder to put a lid on.

“I’ll be at the embassy if you need anything else,” Ghalid said to Rizzo. “Be advised, transport for the body back to the US will probably have to go to Frankfurt first, then New York or Washington.”

“Just get the paperwork done,” Rizzo said. “It’s bad enough the way it is.”

Then she heard what she most wanted to hear. Doors closing. She heard no new voices and no alert from Rizzo. So Amjad was maybe out the door. Then she heard more steps, and the door opening and closing again.

More steps. No voices.

She lost track of who was where.

Then she heard a final set of footsteps. Rizzo’s? It had to be his. She doped out the scenario. He was going to the door where Amjad and Ghalid had exited. She heard him open it. Then she heard him close it and bolt it from within.

The footsteps came back to the gurney where she lay. She felt a presence hovering over her.

It’s you, Gian Antonio, yes? It has to be you! I pray to God Almighty that it’s you!

She cheated. She opened her eyes very slightly to where she could see through narrow slits and through the gauze across her face.

It was Rizzo. She was sure. He placed a hand on the bag and gave it an affectionate touch, almost a caress. She felt it on her right shoulder. Then with both hands, he reached to the zipper and pulled it downward lengthwise again.

With a cryptic, stoic expression on his own face, he stared down at her, unaware that she could faintly see through eyelids that were so narrowly open.

“Oh, my Lord…,” Rizzo said softly. “What have we done now? Oh, my Lord.”

Then Rizzo laughed. With that, Alex fully opened her eyes.

“Extraordinary,” Rizzo said calmly.

She felt fine cracks in the wax on her face. She smiled a long smile of relief and exuded a long breath.

“It’s over?” she asked.

“It’s over,” Rizzo said.

He drew the zipper down completely. She held the sheets to her, wearing little or nothing under them but still with the Beretta in her palm.

“Welcome back from the dead,” he said.

“Nice to be back,” she said. “I can’t wait to get out of this bag.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Most people never do.”

“How did Amjad take it?” she asked.

“I’d say he bought it completely,” he said. “But who knows?”

Throughout the following days, returned to Cairo and ensconced in a new hotel under a new name, Alex sought to recover from her own death. She stayed off the streets and emerged only in a veil. She dined with Rizzo one night and with Voltaire at his home the next. She met Voltaire’s wife as well as his two young children. His wife, it turned out, was a stunningly beautiful Japanese woman named Mieko. She was his third wife, he said, and was about thirty. The family brought Alex no closer to figuring out Voltaire’s origins than she had ever been. Alex wondered if even his wife knew.

But that was neither of the questions that raged before her.

In her quiet moments, in the many hours that she spent alone, she wondered two things. First, had their gambit been successful in feigning her death, and would the man she had known as Michael Cerny now emerge from whatever cover he was under? Would he attempt to finish his deal with the Russians or the Israelis or whoever was buying these days? She waited for a signal from Bissinger at the embassy in Cairo that would alert her of such movement. Alex would need to be present for the identification and the apprehension.

But then second, there was the larger enigma. Mentally shaking the pieces of the larger puzzle, she kept trying to work Yuri Federov into the equation of all that had transpired in the last year. There was a connection somewhere between Federov and Cerny, but no matter how much she racked her brain, she couldn’t locate the proper geometry of it. No matter how much she rearranged the angle and the pieces, she couldn’t nail the logic.

She went out for lonely walks as days passed. She kept her own counsel. Rizzo returned to Rome by way of Monte Carlo, Mimi in tow, where they tried their devious hands at chemin de fer and, according to an email, apparently came up big winners.

And all this time Alex remained in Cairo, laying low. A week passed. Then part of another. On instinct, she started again through the minefield of her laptop, accessed everything, backtracked, and marched forward. She reviewed all the salient events of the last year, ranging across Kiev, Paris, Venezuela, Spain, and Switzerland.

Then, expanding the venues somewhat, she started a handwritten list of all the places that had figured into her three operations. When she included the previously overlooked, Novo-Ogaryovo, Vladimir Putin’s suburban estate outside Moscow, there was a flash of light, almost like a little flare of ignited gas.

Suddenly she had it.

Words from William Quintero, the CIA case officer she had met with most recently before embarking on this trip, came back to her.

“Notice the Christmas tree. Nice homey touch, huh?” he had said.

Homey, indeed!

She reopened her laptop and went to the internet.

Yes, indeed. Alex was certain now. She had it.

She booked a flight to Switzerland immediately to seek corroboration of her final theory.

When her flight landed in Geneva, rain was falling. She noticed the drops on the window of the aircraft when it taxied to a halt and then again on the windshield of her cab as she took it to her destination.

She didn’t go directly to Federov’s house. She knew better. She was traveling light, with only an overnight bag that was good for three days maximum. Worse, she had had to leave her gun with Fitzgerald in Cairo.

To the cab driver, a Senegalese in a camo field jacket, she gave as an address one that Federov had given her over the phone. It was a corner in one of the better residential districts of Geneva, a corner that led to a quaint cul-de-sac of lavish homes behind high walls and gates. She was tempted to think of it as a gated community, but then again the entire Swiss confederation was a gated community. She put that thought out of her head and stepped out of the cab.

The cab pulled away.

Two children on bikes glided easily past her in the mist. She hung her overnight bag over her shoulder. Across the street a sturdy young man was standing at a rare phone box, appearing to be in conversation, and down the quiet street there were two men walking.

More importantly, she had no followers.

The man at the phone box hung up and again Alex waited. She looked back and forth in each direction. Then, about a hundred feet ahead, maybe more, she saw a hulking figure all in black, standing in the road in the twilight. The man was wearing a cap and a scarf, and something about him looked very Russian, even from a distance. Then again, she decided, from three thousand miles away, the man would have looked Russian.