"Alex made it sound better than that," Arkady said.

"Alex has the run of the place. He's been here awhile. He knows everyone, and he's in and out of everywhere."

"Ten dollars an hour?" Arkady figured this was about five times what a senior investigator made. "That covers a lot of sins. Were you on duty the day Pasha Ivanov died?"

"No."

"But Alex was, wasn't he?"

"Yeah. Who did you say you were?"

Arkady hung up. The game was getting interesting. With a minute to go, Chelsea was a man down but pressing for a tie and getting corner kick after corner kick to try for a header. The goalie tugged on his gloves and stationed himself one long diagonal step in front of the goalmouth. Campbell had come out of the bathroom to watch. Red and white uniforms elbowed for position as the ball rose from the corner and curled toward the goal. Players milled, thrust themselves up by their elbows and achingly stretched. The goalie committed, diving into the mass, hands high to intercept. Moving swiftly for a drunk, the professor crossed to the videotape and pressed Stop. The players hung in midair.

"I can't see it. I won't watch it one more time. It's agony aforesaid, the turning of the thumbscrews, the inevitable lop. They can freeze for fookin' eternity for all I care. Who cares? Do y'know what happens? Do y'know?" Exhausted, Campbell dropped on his bed and passed out.

No, Arkady thought, he didn't know. By now Bobby Hoffman could be halfway to Cyprus or Malta. Anton was either menacing someone or buying matching luggage with Galina. It was even getting dark enough for Arkady to stir.

Arkady's mobile phone rang. Eva. He was about to answer when an image of her and Alex came flooding back. The sight of Eva pressed against the bureau. The sound of perfume bottles rolling to the floor. Arkady remembered her eyes, the look of a drowning woman who embraces the whirlpool. He still couldn't answer.

Another call. From Bela. Arkady took this one because he could use good news, but Bela said, "We're at the power station, at the sarcophagus. We were headed to the checkpoint when the fat one changed his mind."

"Why did you go to the power station? Why did you agree?"

Bela's voice got small. "He offered so much money."

Arkady covered the first few kilometers on dirt roads through black villages to see whether anyone was following him before taking the motorcycle onto the highway. Ozhogin would focus on the route south to Kiev, not to the center of the Zone. There was no avoiding the checkpoint outside the power station, but Arkady was waved through. He had become a familiar figure, the eccentric investigator who haunted Pripyat. Usually he rode by the station entrance. This time, he killed his headlight and swung in. In the twilight were faint indications of towers and high-tension wires. The power station's main office was a four-story building as white as a ghost. Arkady remembered that the complex had been designed for a total of eight reactors, the largest in the world. A digital clock over the main door read 20:48.

A Uralmoto motorcycle was not a quiet machine, and Arkady half expected to see a flashlight's beam or hear the challenge of a guard. Buses he saw, but no cars or vans. He crossed the parking lot to a row of what might have been laboratories and saw enough radiation posters and advisory signs to persuade him to turn on his headlight again. He U-turned at a dead end of dump bins overflowing with bags marked toxic waste, ignored a sign that said authorized personnel ONLY, as any Russian would anywhere, and followed a wire fence crowned with razor wire. More fences and wire led him right and left up to a sign that said do not enter-report TO GUARD BEFORE PROCEEDING-ARE YOU WEARING YOUR RADIATION pin? Arkady coasted through and found a service road where Bela's van was parked at a gate, not a simple counterweighted pole but a steel gate that was rolled shut. A sign in English said stop. Bela was in the van. Bobby Hoffman and Yakov stood in the middle of the road facing a security wall decked with shiny coils of wire. Each man wore a yarmulke and a tasseled shawl. Arkady couldn't make out what they were saying, though they rocked back and forth to its rhythm.

Beyond the wall was another wire-draped wall and, fifty meters farther on, the sarcophagus, as stained and massive as a windowless cathedral. Dim security lamps glowed here and there. A crane and a chimney stack towered over the sarcophagus, but compared to it, they were insignificant. Connected to the sarcophagus was the more presentable Reactor Two, which was invisible. The sarcophagus was apart, alone, alive.

Bela crept out of the van. "This is as close as we could get."

Arkady didn't need to use his dosimeter; he felt his hair rise.

"It's close enough. Why are you here?"

"The fat one insisted."

"The old guy didn't try to talk him out of it?"

"Yakov? He seemed to expect it. They just waited until dark so it was safer. They seem to have a lot of names. You didn't tell me they were on the run."

"Does it matter?"

"It drives up the price."

Arkady looked around. "Where are the guards?"

Bela pointed to a pair of legs sticking out from the shadow of the gate. "Just a watchman. I gave him some vodka."

"You're always prepared."

"I am."

It was the night shift, Arkady thought. There were no office or construction workers. A skeleton crew could maintain the three reactors that were shut down, and no one entered the sarcophagus. On the power grid, the Chernobyl station was a black hole, a repository of spent fuel in a bankrupt country. How many guards would there be?

The chanting wasn't loud enough to carry far. Bobby's voice was whispery. Yakov's was deep and worn, and Arkady recognized the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Their voices overlapped, separated, joined again.

"How long have they been doing this?"

"Half an hour, at least. When I called you."

"The rest of the time, what did you do all day?"

"Drove into the woods. I found them a hill with nice mobile-phone reception. The fat one called and arranged things."

"What things?"

"Belarus is just a few kilometers north. Your friends have got visas and a car waiting. They've got every move figured out."

"Like a game of chess."

"Exactly like chess."

Except if they were doing it for Pasha, it was too late, Arkady thought. Arkady was aware of having been manipulated by Bobby and Yakov, but he didn't feel angry. They were escape artists, what else would they do?

"But they let you call me?"

"Yakov suggested it."

So they should have been on the run to Minsk, gateway to the world, instead of standing outside the corrupted shell of a nuclear disaster, rocking back and forth like human metronomes and intoning the same verses over and over, "Ose sholom himromov hu yaase sholom." When they finished the prayer, they simply began again. Arkady told himself he should have known this was coming. Would Bobby have come all this way to repeat his failure? Wasn't this the logical, inevitable outcome, whether Bobby knew it consciously or not? Or was Yakov, like a black angel, forcibly keeping Bobby out of hell?

Arkady moved into their line of vision. Each step brought the sarcophagus closer, too, as if it had been waiting for the right hour to leap the wall, a hard sight to face without a prayer. Yakov acknowledged Arkady with the briefest nod, to say not to worry, that he and Bobby were fine. Bobby clutched a list of names that Arkady could see because of a rising moon that spilled over the station yard. Maybe Bobby and Yakov had planned well and had some luck, but every minute spent at the power plant was a chance taken, and the list looked long. Arkady remembered Eva saying that a complete list would reach the moon. The thought of his cold-blooded rejection of her made him wince. It occurred to him that when she needed him most he had abandoned her, and that he had made an irretrievable mistake.