The orange Trabant came to a screeching halt under the hotel's grand entryway, less than an inch from the steep curb. Alex, Elena, and Eugene scrambled through the rotating glass doors, looked both ways, then made a mad bolt for the car. Alex stuffed another hundred in the waiter's outstretched hand, mumbled quick words of thanks, and they squeezed and fought their way inside the car. The keys were in the ignition, the engine running. Elena climbed behind the wheel and punched the gas with gusto.

With an angry sputter the car lurched and coughed away from the curb, every bit as unsightly and underpowered as advertised. Only two years off the production line, it didn't look a day over a hundred. From bumper to bumper, nothing but peeling paint, dents, and vast patches of oxidation.

Alex couldn't have cared less. The car was perfect. Every rattle, every belch and spit from the perforated muffler was just perfect. Nobody would expect a man of his means to be seen in such a creaky monstrosity.

For five minutes they drove without anybody saying a word. The rain battered the roof. Alex hunched down in his seat to disguise his height; Elena inched up in hers, straining to disguise her lack of it.

Thirty minutes of sitting under the watchful gaze of wicked people who intended to kill them left them moody and edgy. They peeked through the rear window incessantly. They thought they saw cars on their tail and breathed with relief when the cars turned off. Elena zigzagged through narrow streets, going nowhere in particular. Just away from the hotel. Just as far as they could get from Katya and Vladimir and the other killers. At a red light at a large intersection, she finally asked Alex, "Where to?"

Without hesitation, he said, "Out of Hungary."

"Not so fast," Eugene offered in a newly concerned tone from the backseat. "Alex, you need to see a doctor before we go anywhere." Now that they were out of danger, his good manners were kicking back in. "You should see how you look. A concussion, broken bones, internal bleeding, who knows how serious the damage is."

"Not a good idea, Eugene. I told you, these people are connected everywhere. They're former KGB, for godsakes. You're American, you don't understand what that means."

"So tell me what it means."

"They used to rule these countries. They can pull strings you can't imagine. The moment they recover their senses, they might even put out an alert to the Hungarian border police. Our names, our descriptions, and probably some trumped-up charges to warrant our arrests. Getting out will be impossible."

Eugene and Elena sat quietly and stewed on Alex's warning. "In fact," Alex said after thinking about his own words, "it's safe to assume the alert's already out."

Another moment of silence, longer than the last one. A nationwide manhunt suddenly seemed like a possibility. Only a few years earlier this was a police state; they didn't have a prayer.

"Then the train station and airport are out of the question," Elena observed sensibly. "They'll alert those places first."

Alex nodded. "But I think they'll check hospitals and doctor's offices before they do anything else." He squeezed Elena's leg. "The nearest land border is our best chance." He twisted around in the seat and peered at Eugene. "You still have your cell phone?"

Eugene patted himself down. "It's gone. It was still sitting on the table when you pulled me down. I'll bet it's still there."

"Of course."

"Our passports, Alex, they have them," Elena remembered with a jolt. "Maybe it would be better just to stay here. Find a safe place and hide."

"I don't think so." Alex held up a clutch of small red booklets and waved them in front of her. "These were packed in a hidden compartment of my overnight bag."

Elena shook her head. Her husband's cleverness had long since ceased to surprise her, but to insist on bringing the overnight bags for the restaurant meeting with Eugene was an amazing stroke of clear thinking. She didn't need to ask about the fistful of little booklets.

But Eugene did. "Are those legal?"

Elena caught his eye in the rearview mirror. "Whenever Alex accompanied Yeltsin on overseas trips he submitted his passport for the required visa. Now that Russians are free to travel overseas, seventy years of curiosity about the outside world demands to be instantly vented. The visa office of the Foreign Ministry is choked with requests. Mountains of paper everywhere. And more often than not, requests with the accompanying passports get lost or misplaced in the logjam. These are former Soviet bureaucrats we're talking about. It's a miracle they find their way home at night."

Alex continued, "Two or three days out, my office would call to complain, and liberally mention Yeltsin's name. Rather than hunt for a pin in a haystack, a clerk would just issue a new passport with the appropriate visa and send it by courier. That's the right expression, right? Pin in a haystack? Anyway, a month or two later, when the original turned up, it was returned by mail."

"Exactly how many do you have?" Eugene asked, enjoying his little peek into Russian inefficiency. A died-in-the-wool capitalist, he loved hearing about the sins of former commies.

"I honestly don't know."

"Guess."

"Ten. A dozen. Perhaps more."

Elena had twice gone along on Yeltsin's trips; she had three passports, one, of course, now inconveniently tucked in the back pocket of Vladimir's corpse. But Alex always shoved a few extras in his baggage, in the event the ones he or she were using got lost or stolen.

"There are two borders we can head for," Alex was saying, sharing the possibilities as he tried to think this through. "Austria to the south. Or due east, to Czechoslovakia."

"Okay, which?"

"I think Austria makes the most sense. It's closer. Also, I have part ownership of an advertising company in the capital. Illya Mechoukov is the president. A good man. I trust him. Better yet, the KGB had little influence there." He opened the window and took a deep breath. The night had turned cold. A frigid blast of air hit him in the face, but he felt dizzy. He briefly pondered the possibility that the exhaust was spewing carbon monoxide into the cabin. "Unfortunately, that border takes a visa. The Czechs and Slovaks, though, as former Bloc members, still have open borders for Russian passports."

"Where do you want to cross?" Elena asked, now that Austria was ruled out. She searched the rearview mirror. Nothing.

"Avoid the major arteries. Our best chance is a secondary or backcountry road. The guards at the smaller checkpoints will be the last ones alerted."

Eugene decided to join the discussion and leaned forward from the backseat. "Then what?"

"Then… directly to the nearest international airport. That would be Slovakia," Alex answered.

"Then Russia, right?"

"Maybe."

"I don't see that you have a choice, pal. You better get back there fast," Eugene advised.

"Do you think?"

"You better rescind those letters before anybody can act on them."

"I have other worries right now," Alex replied almost absently. He reached up and switched on the overhead light, which thankfully seemed to be the one thing in the car that functioned properly. He began flipping through passports and thumbing the pages.

"You know what?" Eugene announced, lurching forward in his seat.

"I think you're about to tell me what."

"Damn right I am. I think you got conked on the head harder than you realize. You're not thinking clearly. They could empty out your bank accounts in hours and, in a day or so, swipe all the investors' money in your banks."

"Don't you think that's a lot of cash to haul away?" Alex replied, curiously indifferent.

"You know damn well what I'm talking about. Come on, pal. They'll wire it all to a bank in the Azores or Switzerland. Then it'll shuttle around to a hundred banks and fall off the radar."