"But I'm tired of sitting here, waiting."

"Well, I have an idea."

"I'm willing to try anything.

"Unfortunately, it will take time."

"How much time?"

"Probably a lot. Probably too much. It's a complete gamble, anyway, an outside shot with a million things that can go wrong."

She stared up at the ceiling. "A million things can go wrong here. Tell me about it."

They whispered back and forth, while the men in the van, tired of the monotony of love and lust in the Konevitch place, squelched the volume and napped. One block away, the lady and two men stayed hunched inside the car and, through a pair of powerful binoculars, kept a close eye on the front entrance of the Watergate. The year of hunting for Alex in Chicago had not agreed with Katya.

Nicky had a modest, not overly prosperous operation in Chicago run by a half-crazy, doped-out boss who put up the hunter-killer team, along with five of his own people, in a cramped, run-down rowhouse in one of the most crime-infested sections of the South Side. He called it a safehouse. It was barely a house, and anything but safe. Black and Hispanic gangs roamed the surrounding streets at will. They did not particularly cater to these Russians who were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to muscle into the local action.

The rowhouse quickly became a prison, a quite miserable one. The gangs were large, mean, and tough. A tiny bodega was positioned on a corner across the street. They hung there, blacks and spics in variously colored bandanas, mixing freely together, never less than fifteen of them. They sipped from canned beers, rapped back and forth, shared menthols, and glowered at the rowhouse across the street. They seemed to be honoring a local cease-fire among themselves, a temporary alliance against a common foe. For decades, they had battled and scrapped with one another for these streets-every inch of concrete, every crackhouse and whore's corner was a victory, paid in blood. No way were they going to let these Ivan-come-latelys have a piece of the action. At night they sometimes sprayed the rowhouse with bullets. They scattered when the cops arrived, only to reappear the instant the last blue suit departed. Once, a pair of Molotov cocktails sailed through the windows.

The Russians slept on the floors, and crawled on their bellies every time they passed a window. A stack of portable fire extinguishers was stored in the kitchen. First aid kits were in every room in the house.

Katya and her crew ventured outside as infrequently as possible. Two left on a grocery run one night and never returned. They may have fled. Nobody blamed them.

A few weeks later, a box with four ears was left on the doorstep. They studied the shriveled things and debated at length, but nobody could be entirely certain they belonged to Dmitri and Josef. Dmitri did in fact have two earrings. And okay, yes, Josef's ears were sort of large and floppy; but no one knew for sure.

It constipated the search for the Konevitches terribly. The first few months, Katya and her comrades snuck out only in the wee hours of the morning, trying to elude the gangs. Their car had been shot at more than they could count as they sped down the street. Nicky's locals had a firm fix on the Russian immigrant pockets of the city; naturally, this was where the bulk of effort was placed. At some point, inevitably, the Konevitches would turn up.

Occasionally, they got word that Alex Konevitch had been seen cruising a few local Russian clubs, flashing a wad of bills and bragging about the flourishing real estate empire he was establishing in the city. It sounded like Mr. Big Shot. And after flashing photos at various witnesses, they were sure it was him. Queries to the local phone companies had revealed a cell service account, though the number was unlisted and the phone service stubbornly refused to provide the billing address. That was it. No matter how hard they dug, no matter how many cops they paid for information, this was all they had.

Additional pictures of the couple were plastered everywhere. Hundreds more were pressed into the hands of Russian expats with vile threats about what would happen should they fail to snitch on first sight.

After those first few months, the hunters became dispirited-and worse, seriously frightened. The party outside the bodega seemed to grow bigger by the day. The Russians took to cowering in the rowhouse, contriving false reports back to Moscow, manufacturing hopeful leads that never existed. The lies would never be caught, they were confident of this. Nobody would dare run the gauntlet and pay them a visit.

Massive quantities of food and beer and vodka were stockpiled. They watched the same tired porn flicks, ate and drank heavily, and bickered among themselves. The men outnumbered Katya, and they cruelly exploited this advantage against her. They pressed her into service as their cook, their laundry lady, their maid.

Even the long year of killing in the Congo, her previous record for unadulterated wretchedness, paled in comparison.

Oh, how she hated the Konevitches. The last iota of icy detachment had melted months before. Her pouched eyes now burned with a scary intensity. It was all their fault, that awful couple. Why couldn't they just let themselves be killed? It would've been so much easier for everybody. How could they be so selfish?

When the call came from Moscow that the Konevitches had been found, living in Washington-and in a luxury co-op, of all places-she nearly cried. At four that morning, she and the rest of her team eased out of the bullet-pocked rowhouse, hauling their bags, and dodging a few farewell bullets.

The first day in Washington, she made six furtive passes around the Watergate and the busy streets surrounding the huge complex. To her trained eyes, the competition stood out like sore thumbs. The unmarked white van with too many antennas. The dark FBI cars splayed around like a drive-in movie theater, everybody watching, everybody waiting for the Konevitches to make a move.

They were all going to be sorely disappointed. They couldn't have them, not even a piece of them: the Konevitches were hers.

She sat, gazing hatefully through the binos, dreaming up unpleasant ways to kill them. Mrs. Edna Clarke was ninety-two and still sprightly. She had lived in the Watergate from the day it was built. Her husband, Arthur, had been a managing partner of a large, prestigious law firm, before he passed, God bless him, at the youthful age of eighty-two. The past decade, she had stayed in her apartment, alone but for the kindred company of her three precious cats. She read and knitted and waited patiently for the good Lord to call her. Her children had pleaded with her to consider a nursing home. She wouldn't hear of it. This was her home, a place filled with wonderful memories of Arthur and the family they had bred and raised, through good times and bad, but mostly good. She would leave in a hearse, she vowed.

She just adored that lovely young Russian couple across the hall. The day they moved in, she had promptly rapped on their door, gripping a bottle of good red wine wrapped in a bright red bow. A housewarming gift. Not that young people practiced such things these days: they knew nothing about good manners. The Konevitches, though, were certainly different. They uncorked the bottle on the spot and insisted she come in and share a glass. And afterward, on weekends, they frequently invited her over for quiet dinners.

She and Arthur had led interesting lives. They had met in Europe during the war, where Arthur had been a legal star at the Nuremberg trials. They had dined with presidents and senators, as Arthur went on to work in civil rights and dozens of other things that were important and fascinating. At least fascinating at that time. Now they were just rotten old memories to most people. A pathetic old attic nobody cared to peek into. Not that Alex, though. He was so bright, so curious, such an accommodating listener. He sat on the edge of his chair and peppered her with questions until her brain grew tired and she creaked back across the hall to her bed.