"No problem. We'll turn up the heat. Pull out the stops and ship them back."

The three men sat in the white van, swapping American girlie magazines, sucking on cigarettes, sipping stale coffee, bored out of their wits. After that initial day of heart-thumping surprises and emotional terror, things had quickly retreated to a dull grind.

During the days, surprisingly little took place in the Konevitch apartment. Long bouts of silence, broken occasionally by tedious discussions about incredibly inane things-the laundry, the latest stupid game show on TV, Oprah, and so on. On Tuesday, the wife, Elena, read to her husband, out loud, a stream of interminable passages from War and Peace. Wednesday was Anna Karenina's turn, which proved even worse. The men inside the van contemplated suicide, or rushing upstairs to drive a gag down her throat.

The Konevitches never left their building, or even their apartment, the best the men could tell. This had been a sore topic with Volevodz, who popped by occasionally to gather updates. As long as the couple stayed inside, the three listeners were trapped inside the van, crammed in with all the electronic equipment and debris from their meals. It seemed to shrink by the day; they were peeing in bottles, for God's sake. Theories and conjectures rumbled around the rear of the van. It was unnatural to stay penned up so long inside that cramped apartment. On the other hand, the Konevitches no longer had jobs. And money-actually the sudden lack of it-was undoubtedly a serious factor in their minds. Wasn't like they could afford to splurge on the theater or an expensive restaurant. Why not a movie, though? Better yet, a nice long stroll along the canal, like they used to? How much could that cost?

When it turned dark, things picked up and turned slightly more interesting. The Konevitches were like rabbits. Every night, for hours, groans and giggles, sheets rustling, and an occasional scream or "oh my God" to cap off the festivities. The first few times the volume had been kicked up full blast. The three men tried to imagine what was going on in that bed. Why hadn't Volevodz been thoughtful enough to plant a camera? It would have been so easy, they whispered among themselves. Eventually, the constant lovemaking only contributed to the enveloping air of misery.

It was almost as if the Konevitches knew all about the three listeners, that they were taunting and rubbing it in.

The phone action had turned virtually nonexistent. A few frustrated calls from their lawyer, who complained constantly about being stonewalled by his old friends in the INS.

An occasional call to order pizza and Chinese deliveries-that was it. "What are they doing out there?" asked the note Elena passed over the dining room table to Alex.

A glance at his watch-8:00 p.m.-and he scribbled a hasty response and flashed it to her. "Going nuts, I hope." After days of corresponding like this they had finally mastered the awkward art of balancing two conversations at once-inane verbal ramblings to mollify their listeners while they scrawled brief messages back and forth. It was tedious and slow, and absolutely necessary. They chatted in English and they wrote in Russian.

"Why didn't we buy a bigger place?!!!!" she scribbled back. "It's closing in on me, Alex. I can barely breathe."

Alex wrote, "At least the company's better in here than out there." Who knew how many Mafiya thugs were prowling nearby, trying their damnedest to collect the bounty? Volevodz knew their address-they had to assume he had somehow passed it along to the cabal in Moscow. So the thugs now had a firm fix on their location and Alex was sure they were huddled somewhere nearby, waiting. Going outside was out of the question. The first few days they had tried to suppress their terror, to find ways to cope with their anxiety and rearrange and repair their living conditions. Day three Elena had gone on a mad hunt for electronic bugs. She discovered six. They suspected there were more, plenty more, and they were right.

On day four, they agreed upon a strategy-they would work overtime to appear like they were going through the motions of a normal life, battling boredom, praying, and waiting for MP to whip a legal rabbit out of his hat and end this miserable nightmare.

They weren't fooling themselves, though. MP was a gnat battling giants. This was way over his head-over any lawyer's head, probably. At any moment, the people outside would become tired of this, and the next hammer would fall. And Alex, ever the clearheaded businessman, was sure things would become worse, whatever that meant.

With each succeeding day, the situation became more intolerable. Elena tried reading, watching TV, meditating-nothing worked. Nothing. Alex walked endlessly around the apartment, doing laps and searching for a solution. He thought best on his feet, and was wearing out shoe leather to find a way out of this.

They had no money. They were trapped inside this building. Unable to escape. Unable to communicate with anybody outside without the mice listening in. If there was a way out, it was up to them to find it. Alex patted Elena's knee and wrote, "Time for the bedroom."

They got up and together made the short trek down the hall. Alex loaded the tape they had produced the first night, carefully and quietly inserted it into the cassette player, then cranked the volume knob to maximum. He said to Elena, "Get your clothes off. I'm in the mood again." Neither of them had been in anything close to the mood since the visit from Agent Hanrahan with the terrifying news about all the bugs and the thugs waiting outside to kill them.

The idea that their every word was being overheard was sickening.

Elena kicked off her shoes, flung them hard against the wall, and made a point to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, with an accompanying groan from the springs. She opened the nightly banter. "You're always in the mood."

"And you're always beautiful."

"You're insatiable."

"And you're a doll." Then, "Take off your blouse."

"You first, with the shirt… that's it. Now the pants."

They went back and forth, trying their best to make the listeners gag, then Alex sat heavily on the bed, right beside her.

They stared at each other a moment. Without another word, Alex pushed start and the tape kicked in. The sounds of the two of them sexually mauling each other shot full-blast into the listening devices.

They had nearly killed each other producing that tape.

Elena leaned close to Alex and whispered, "How many more days do you think we have?"

"One… twenty. Who knows?"

"What are they waiting for?"

"For us to break. Or run out of money and start starving."

"Why? What do they hope to gain?"

"They want us desperate. They have our money, and they've made us too terrified to step outside. It's a box, and the only way out is to accept their condition. A one-way trip to Russia."

"Maybe we should try to just make a run for it."

"How?"

"Disguise ourselves. Sneak out. Early in the morning when they're tired and their senses are dull. Create a diversion of some kind." She pecked him on the cheek, then pulled back. "You pulled it off in Budapest. We'll do it again."

"And go where, Elena? They have our passports."

"Montana, Idaho, Nevada. I'm past caring, Alex. A town in the middle of nowhere. Hot, cold, dry, wet, it no longer matters. Someplace small, neglected. America has millions of illegal immigrants. We'll live in the underground economy, find a way to blend in."

"I'll open a lawn service, and you'll be a maid. Is that the idea?"

"We'll be alive, Alex. And free."

He leaned over and touched her shoulder. "Listen to me. All of those millions of illegal immigrants don't have the FBI hunting them. The FBI doesn't know their names, doesn't have their physical descriptions, and could care less about them. We'd be looking over our shoulder every day. One day we'd wake up to a bunch of men in gray suits."