With no small amount of pleasure, Alex said, "I don't think so."

"Think harder."

"The people who forced me to sign those letters know nothing about banking. To move even a dollar they need my account numbers and the security codes."

"Oh."

"And those are all locked away in a safe in my office, guarded around the clock. They didn't know enough to ask about the numbers and I wasn't in the mood to educate them."

Elena reached over and patted her husband on the leg. "You're a genius."

His nose was stuffed back inside the passports. Sergei Golitsin sat behind Alex Konevitch's massive hand-carved desk and stared across it at the ten hungry faces around the long conference table. The irony of using Alex's own office as a command post to track him down and kill him was too delicious.

A phone was positioned directly in front of each man. A yellow notepad and a slew of satphones were poised within arm's reach. Empty coffee mugs littered the table. Ashtrays overflowed with snuffed-out butts. A large, 10,000-to-1 map of Hungary was taped to a wall, with dozens of little yellow and red pins stuck here and there. Another map, even larger, displaying the entire European continent and punctured with a similar mixture of multicolored pins, was fastened to the adjoining wall.

The men inside the room knew the address of Konevitch's unpretentious but nicely located Parisian apartment. They knew what hotels he preferred when he traveled, as well as the address of each and every office and subsidiary of Konevitch Associates outside the Russian border. A pin for each one, with a man or two now lurking at each destination. A mushroom of cigarette smoke rose from the table and swirled in cancerous eddies just below the ceiling.

Below them, the six floors of Konevitch Associates were nearly deserted. A handpicked crew of security guards ambled around the building; otherwise, the employees were home, cleaning up after dinner, mixing it up with their lovers, or snoring loudly in their beds. A few hyperambitious souls had tried to work late, but the guards had chased them out and shut down their phones and computers.

A sign was posted on the front door downstairs announcing a two-day holiday. A squad of burly guards would be placed there in the morning to make sure everybody got the message.

At that second, for the first time in two frantic hours, only one noise interrupted the sound of breathing-a buzzing that emanated from a specialist and his assistant employing a noisy instrument of some sort to crack a wall safe. The specialist had twice reassured everybody it was going "super splendidly." No hitches. No surprises, and Golitsin had good reason not to doubt him.

Six months before, when Alex Konevitch had ordered a personal safe to be installed in his office, the job naturally landed on the desk of his corporate security chief. Golitsin promptly handed it off to a black job specialist who once worked under him at the KGB, a master thief with an encyclopedic knowledge of safes and locks. Golitsin's instructions were precise and contradictory.

Nothing but the best brand on the market for the boss. Something sturdy, something imposing in appearance, something with a tidy reputation for quality, he'd emphasized; in other words, something that would duly impress its owner.

Just be damn sure the model was one he was sure he could crack; within two hours or less would do the trick nicely.

Golitsin's top deputy, Felix Glebov, eventually broke the awkward silence. "It's been three hours. Where is he?"

"Still running," Golitsin said, eyes blazing down the table with a look that could curdle bowels. "A scared rabbit, fleeing for his life." He paused briefly to scratch his chin. "Successfully, apparently, because he's up against a bunch of incompetent twits."

One of the twits, large, with a neck that moved like a tank turret, spoke up, a nervous attempt to deflect blame from his overgrown shoulders. "I have ten good people at the Budapest train station. Twenty more at the airport, a man at each ticket counter. All former KGB or Hungarian secret police. Another squad is hanging out at the arrival gate at Sheremetyevo Airport in the event they make it this far." Eager to impress everybody with his efficiency, he added, "They all have color pictures."

"Good for you," replied the next twit in line, a man with a skinny, pockmarked face and puffy eyes who lost no time launching his own accomplishments. "Only two minutes ago I got off the phone with the deputy minister of Hungarian Security. He has two children in private school and is cracking heads to collect the hundred thousand bounty I promised if he catches them. An hour ago, a red alert went out to all customs offices. They and the police have been notified a murderer and his accomplices are trying to flee."

He paused to be sure everybody heard the next point. "Katya and one her people gave statements to the police. Said they witnessed Konevitch stick a knife in a man's back at the airport. Said they thought they recognized his face from photos in a Russian magazine, but couldn't remember if he was a movie star or what. Took them a while to figure it out, so now they're reporting it."

That last clever move was Katya's brainchild. Of course he felt no obligation to mention it now.

The next man, introduced by Golitsin to the others earlier that evening as Nicky-no last name, no formal introduction, just plain Nicky-sat for a moment, sucking deeply from a black che-root, bored out of his mind, trying to entertain himself watching the safecrackers at work. Dressed head to toe in shiny black leather, down to his dapper biker boots, he was the only man present who did not get the executive-suite dress code. He was also the only non-employee of Konevitch Associates, the only one not hired by Golitsin over the past year for what they brought to this table.

Lacking a KGB background, he was also happily clueless about the reporting procedures.

Eventually the silence grabbed his attention and he noticed everybody staring at him. He crushed his cigarette on the tabletop, flashed an amused sneer, then held it long enough for everybody to get the message. Nicky came from a different world, one without silly protocols, a world with but one simple rule: rules are meant to be broken.

But even without the last name-despite never having seen him face-to-face-half the men around the table were sure they knew who he was. A photo of his face had hung in a place of honor on KGB walls long enough to grow mold. A much younger face, certainly. A little thinner, maybe, without the cute ponytail laced with gray that bounced when he strutted. One with considerably less scars, absent the gallery of tattoos on the neck, and certainly before the huge nose had been rearranged into a bent banana.

Nicky, aka Igor, aka Leon, or a half dozen other transient aliases he had used and thrown away in his illustrious career, was in fact one Nickolas Kozyrev, head of the largest crime syndicate in Russia.

How ironic that they were all now sharing the same table, smoking and sipping coffee like old pals. In their previous lives, they had spent countless hours chasing Nicky around the shadows. Typical gruntwork for the police ordinarily, except Nicky's kingdom had tentacles in every Russian city, webs that stretched across Europe and Asia, and bustling branch offices in Brighton Beach and Miami. Nicky was known and wanted by police forces from New York to Timbuktu. Three different American presidents and an army of other world leaders had bombarded two different general secretaries with strong requests to get Nicky off the street.

Among assorted other enterprises, Nicky wholesaled kidnapped girls to whorehouses, owned a string of porn studios, blackmarketed, smuggled arms, traded in stolen cars, gems, artwork, pushed heroin and an assortment of other illegal pharmaceuticals, and most recently, was making a loud splash in Russia's burgeoning executive kidnapping market. Wherever there was illicit profit to be made, Nicky pushed his sticky fingers in. Contract murder had long been a mainstay of his repertoire. The sheer breadth, expanse, and outright violence of his operation proved too considerable for the police to handle; not to mention wildly exaggerated suspicions that Nicky owned half the senior police officers in the country.