She doesn't leave a message.

Does this mean he's already on his way?

She could phone Sylvie Jeppson and find out, but the idea of contact with Blue Ant, right now, does not appeal.

Stella trusts her. Whatever weird, sad, scary, deeply Russian scenario Stella and her twin are socketed into, she desperately doesn't want to betray whatever it is she's seen rise behind the stillness of that white face.

Parkaboy would get it. But who else would? Not, she's now certain, Boone. Bigend, probably, but in that way of his, in which he seems to somehow understand emotions without ever having partaken of them.

She opens a bottle of Russian mineral water.

Dorotea had been hired by a Russian from Cyprus, the one listed as the registrant ofarmaz.ru, a domain that Boone says has something to do with the Russian oil industry.

Were those Russians, she wonders, who somehow got their hands on Katherine McNally's notes from Cayce's sessions? Not necessarily, she decides, as the men Dorotea had used in Tokyo had been Italian. It's an equal-opportunity conspiracy, maybe.

But Baranov, come to think of it, is Russian too, or anyway Anglo-Russian. Though that doesn't seem to click with the linkage she's trying to braille, here. And neither does Damien, off in the boonies shooting his punk archaeology project, even though his girlfriend's father sounds like another candidate for mafia czar.

There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained.

When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there.

Russia. Something else…

She remembers, in mid-swallow, and lapses into a fit of coughing.

That old post of hers, the one that had turned up when she'd searched Russia on the F:F:F CD-ROM.

She slots the CD-ROM. Repeats the search.

Why couldn't it, say, be some Russian mafia kingpin, with a bent for self-expression, a previously undiscovered talent, and the wherewithal to generate and disseminate the footage?

January. She'd still been seeing Katherine. She'd had no idea she'd be working for Blue Ant, or coming to London, or getting involved with Bigend.

Mafia.

Wherewithal.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Not a bent for self-expression: orphaned nieces.

If Baranov could still have even one favor-owing friend, somewhere in the bowels of Langley or Falls Church, willing and able to somehow pluck the stellanor address from traffic on the Net, or from wherever it was found, what might a very rich, very important Russian be afforded in his own country, or even, perhaps, in hers?

And what might "very rich, very important" not fee a ettpüernisinrfor, today, when it came to Russians?

She feels a knot of tension beginning to complicate, between her shoulders.

When the on-line Moscow Yellow Pages refuses to produce a Pilates studio, she puts on her workout clothes and goes up, one floor, to the hotel gym. Deserted save for an older, overweight Russian wearing an expression of near-religious sorrow as he plods heavily along on a treadmill.

The machines here look to Cayce like domestic product, though new, and Damien would definitely want to document them. She finds what might be a boxing mat in a far corner of the room and tries to remember the mat exercises she'd been taught at the very beginning.

She senses the Russian's sad gaze as she works through what she recalls of the mat program, but realizes, to her surprise, that she's actually glad he's here.

It's that kind of morning.

SHE desperately wants to go out, walk to the nearest Metro station, pay the famously tiny fare, and descend into a world of ornate mineral marvels. The only true palaces of the proletariat, those stations. And doing that, have some temporary release from waiting

But she can't, and doesn't.

She's waiting for a message from Stella.

Shortly after noon, her cell rings.

"Hello?"

"Where are you?" Bigend.

"Poole," she lies reflexively, not exactly thinking on her feet.

"Swimming?"

"Silent 'e.' The city. Where are you?"

"Paris. Sylvie tells me you will be here soon?"

"I'm not sure, now. I'm following something up. I hope you aren't there only for my sake. I might not come."

"Not at all. You won't share this something?"

"Not on a cell. When I see you." Enough like a Boone reason, she hopes.

"You spoke with Boone." Not a question.

"Yes."

"He seemed to feel you weren't impressed with what he's been able to learn in Ohio."

"He's too sensitive, that way."

"The chemistry, it isn't working?"

"We're not dating, Hubertus."

"You'll keep me informed, though, won't you?"

She's taking it for granted that there's no way he can know where he's reaching her phone, and she hopes that that's true, but there's really nothing she can do about it now. "Yes, of course. Have to go now, Hubertus. Bye."

She imagines him looking at his phone.

Hers rings again. "Yes?"

"Hello. It is Stella. You wish still to visit?"

"Yes. I do. Very much."

"Is not too early? You have slept?"

"Yes, thanks." Wondering what sort of hours Stella keeps.

"If you will wait beside the guard booth, a car will come. Thirty minutes, will be good?"

"Yes! Please!"

"Goodbye."

She stands up, in her underpants and a Fruit T-shirt, and starts dressing. She feels that this requires as formal an effort as she can muster, somehow, so it's the good hose from Japan, her French shoes, and Skirt Thing, rolled out to its full length and pulled up, creating a passable imitation of a dress. She goes into the bathroom and applies makeup, then returns to put on her thin black cardigan and quickly check her e-mail. Damien.

Hard day. I must've told you, probably fifty times, how deeply I believe in documentary. I know people don't believe I do, because I'm the master of artifice and nothing's ever what it seems, blah fucking blah but it's true because they say it in those little boxes in The Face. Well I'm questioning it tonight because today we got that Stuka completely dug out. Did I tell you? It's a whole plane, and for some fucking reason it wound up four feet under the muck, but this Guru character knew where it was. He claims it's dreams and visions but I think he walks around in the winter with a metal detector. So he'd said here, this plane is here, dig, and before we came back to London they'd sunk a trench, and hit it. But bribery and threats prevailed, at least till we got back with the extra cameras and crew, because I wanted this plane emerging to be the climax of the film. No idea it would be a Stuka; blew me away; it's just this most Nazi-looking aircraft, amazing. Dive-bomber, they used them on the Spanish, Guernica and that. Absolutely iconic. So there it is, finally, today, and it's sitting there, all caked in the gray stuff, like an airplane done up as New Guinea Mud Man, at the bottom of this great fucking hole they'd dug. By far the biggest excavation yet attempted here, as far as we know, and quite the feat of social engineering, to get it done without them opening the canopy and getting into the cockpit. We'd had Brian and Mick stand guard over it, the past two nights, and the diggers hadn't touched it. But come the day, we knew they would, and we'd be set to shoot, what we're here for. So a couple of the big ones with the spiderweb tattoos get boosted up, onto the wings, which are slippery with muck, but where their boots slip in it, looking down from the edge of the dig, I can see the thing's in museum condition. Just eerie, how well it was preserved. And then Brian gets boosted up to shoot handheld, close, and they're squeegeeing the gray off the canopy with the edges of their hands. And the fucking pilot's there. You can see the outline of his head, goggles it looked like. Never seen Brian pull his eye off the viewfinder when he's shooting but he did, just turned around with this WHAT THE FUCK???!!! look and I signal GO FOR IT, GET IT. So he did. All of it: them yanking the canopy open, and how they simply tore him apart, the pilot. Just came to pieces. They got a watch, a compass from the other wrist and a pistol, and they were fighting over them, falling off the wing, and he just came apart. And Brian got it all, plus Mick was second camera and he got a lot, plus the new guys. I mean coverage, lots. And at some point I look around at Marina and she's fucking laughing. Not your hysterics of horror, she's just fucking laughing at the humor of it. So I'm sitting here in the tent by myself, writing this, because with one thing and another I told her to just fuck off. And Mick and Brian are drunk, and I'm afraid to look at what they shot. I know I won't be, maybe even tomorrow, but now I think I will go and get well pissed. And how the fuck did he get under there with his airplane? So thank you, as they say, for listening, and don't forget to water the fucking goldfish. I hope you are okay with that shit you had happening. I love you.