Golitsin ran in the wrong circles. He had no clue that photos of him with a million and a half bucks painted on his backside were circulating throughout the city's heavily populated underworld. Later, the city coroner would find it impossible to discern exactly which of nearly a hundred bullets fired in the willy-nilly hailstorm was the precise cause of death. The five through the heart were certainly candidates, though the ten in the brain had the odds in their favor.

Six of those ten, however, were fired from different guns, different ranges, and different angles. Unfortunately the shattered brain gave up no clues as to which bullet struck first, or indeed, which produced the most lethal damage. Frankly there was too little brain left to consider. So much of it was scattered on the concrete, bits and pieces too small to scrape up.

The logjam was settled after an intense three-day bombardment of whispered threats and intense pleadings, when one of the shooters secretly offered to split the reward fifty-fifty-of the many other offers that poured in, nothing was over a third.

Three-quarters of a million dollars!

The coroner's last troubling doubt instantly vanished in a cloud of certainty.

The third day in his self-imposed bunker was the one that got to Nicky. Three days and two nights of sitting in the same pitch-dark room, cradling his gun in his lap, counting down the hours and wondering when it would end. Three days of waiting for the inevitable. His own bodyguards made an occasional foray. Day and night, Nicky could hear them out there, exhorting one another, loading up on booze and dope, trying to stoke up the nerve.

Early on the second day there had been a chaotic rush at the door-a stupid, clumsy attempt with bodies bashing against the reinforced wood. Nicky emptied his pistol and smiled blissfully at all the satisfying howls and screams.

Later that same night, a second attempt. Smarter this time. Well, slightly more sneaky, anyway. One of the idiots crawled up to the door, planted a hand grenade against the wood, pulled the pin, then scuttled away for his life. Nicky became dismayed and depressed by the stupidity of his own handpicked bodyguards. It was a miracle he had survived this long. Anticipating them was child's play. Everything in the room-the furniture, the mattress-everything was piled up against the door. The pile of junk absorbed the blast and shrapnel nicely. When the boys showed up, Nicky emptied his pistol again. Another lovely chorus of screams and howls, and Nicky laughed long after they had retreated back to their refuge.

They were through being careless and stupid. No more suicidal rushes, no more dragging bullet-riddled corpses down the hall and trying to figure out how to dispose of them. Now they were trying to wait him out: if he snoozed, he was dead. They took shifts and listened for his snores. There was no food in his room. The bathroom was across the hall so water was a problem, too. But there was heroin and cocaine in abundance. Nicky pulled a fresh snort every hour. Every fourth hour, the needle slid back into a vein. He sat on the floor, pumped up on dope, erupting with delirious chuckles that echoed down the hall.

His best friend's corpse was three feet away, bloated like an overinflated balloon. The smell was intolerable, but Nicky's nostrils were so crusted and blocked up with white powder he had no idea.

Late on the third day the idea took root in his exhausted, drug-addled brain. He thought about it more, and liked it more. No, he loved it. In a lifetime of great ideas, it would be such a grand finishing touch. Long after he was gone, they would still be admiring his final masterstroke. His last finger at all of them.

He reached over to his friend's dead hand and pried the flash-light out of the rigor-mortised fist. He found a piece of paper and pencil and scribbled a brief, perfunctory note.

Holding the note in one hand, he put the pistol in his mouth and without a moment of hesitation blew out the back of his head.

His bodyguards waited an hour before they drew straws. They dispatched the losers first, frightened scouts who scuttled past the door and prayed Nicky didn't blast them to pieces. Everybody had heard that last shot an hour before. The debates and quarrels were noisy and fierce, but they just weren't sure.

Nicky was so clever, so diabolical. It wouldn't be beneath him to fake his own suicide just to lure a few more of them into his sights.

Finally, they tiptoed down the hall, broke the door down, and crashed inside. Somebody flipped on the lights. Between the rotting corpse and the fact that Nicky had used the floor as a toilet, the stench was like a dropkick in the nostrils. They pinched their noses and eased over to Nicky's body against the wall.

The note was gripped tightly in his dead hand: "I, Nicky Kozyrev, claim the five million dollars for my own death. You pricks figure out which of my many bastard kids are first in line. Send it to him. Or her. I don't care."

The trial opened on time. By 9:15, John Tromble was seated in the witness chair, duly sworn to honesty, waiting impatiently for this snotty, pretty-boy, headline-robbing prosecutor to kick it in gear.

The moment was historic, unprecedented, actually. No FBI director had ever sat in a witness chair-or, more accurately, none not accused of crimes themselves. One more groundbreaking achievement to tack on to the growing legend.

The evening news the night before had been an Alex fest. Every morning paper on the East Coast led off with the story about the Russian runaway millionaire who had been dragged out of the Watergate-a national landmark of sorts, after all-and was fighting deportation and a long-overdue appointment with justice in his own land. Legal experts held sway on the evening and late-night talk shows, and were still there, sipping coffee and yammering away, for the morning shows as well. Maybe they slept at the networks.

The general consensus was that Alex's legal team was getting its tail kicked and the result appeared inevitable. The only objection came from a big-time radical, highly esteemed member of the Harvard Law faculty, who posed the perverse theory that if Alex Konevitch was a foreign citizen, American courts had no purview over him. After getting laughed off two shows he disappeared back to his classroom.

Alex himself was back at the defense table, looking, if anything, more tragically decrepit and miserably ill-kempt than the day before. His beard was thicker, darker, more pronounced. Heavy circles under his eyes betrayed another long, sleepless night.

From the stand, Tromble stole a quick look at him, then quietly suppressed another smile. A few of the morning articles had mentioned his instinctive reaction as he entered the court the day before and first saw Alex; the mentions weren't overly flattering.

The pretty boy ambled up to the witness stand. "Could you please tell the court your name and title?"

It was a stupid, fatuous question, but Tromble played along. "Judge John Tromble, director of the FBI."

"And that would make you the nation's top law enforcement officer?"

"Technically, that honor belongs to the attorney general," he said with a condescending smile as if everybody should know this.

"Do you believe Alex Konevitch committed crimes in Russia that merit deportation?"

"I wouldn't know about the crimes. Russia's courts will decide that."

"But you reviewed the evidence against him?"

"My people reviewed it. I've seen summaries." Another fatuous question-Tromble obviously had more important things on his hands than sifting through piles of evidence.