Roy DiGenovese stood at the window of a vacant office suite on the forty-first floor of the Peabody Building, peering directly into Jett Gavallan's office seventy feet away. The banker was walking back and forth, one hand to his neck. It was clear he was either very pissed off or very worried about something. "Are you getting a good read now?"

"Yeah, wind's died down so I'm right on target. Hold on." Mills Breitenbach, a tech specialist from the San Fran field office, put a hand to his ear while fiddling with some knobs on a metal device camouflaged to look like a Sony minidisc player. At his feet rested a twelve-inch satellite dish, its cone pointed in Gavallan's direction.

"Hurry up, damn it," said DiGenovese. "Don't want to miss what he's saying."

"Give me a sec. I've got to up the amperage on the beam. Here it comes. Showtime! You're on Candid Camera."

Breitenbach punched a button, and Jett Gavallan's voice filled the office. "No, Konstantin, I don't. I want the deal to go through as badly as you. But as a licensed securities dealer, it's my duty to make sure everybody's talking from the same page, that's all."

There was silence as the party on the other end of the phone spoke. DiGenovese noted the exact time. "We'll pick up the other end of this when we get the transcripts from the tap tomorrow," he said to Breitenbach.

Again, Gavallan's voice filled the room, sounding eerily close. "I have some people on it already. With any luck, we'll have him located by tomorrow, day after at the latest."

Breitenbach raised the silver casing to his lips and gave it a kiss. "You are the best, baby!"

The device that allowed the men to listen to a conversation being held seventy feet away through two plates of glass each an inch thick was called a unidirectional lasersat. Shooting a sensitive laser at the window of Gavallan's office, the lasersat read the infinitely subtle vibrations in the glass caused by human speech, then matched the vibrations against a sonic database, or "dictionary," and translated them into distinct words. Measuring the tonal frequency of each syllable, the lasersat was able, to a degree, to re-create the speaker's voice.

"I'll see to it the Private Eye-PO's mouth is shut- permanently, if I have my way," came Gavallan's voice, tinny and emotionless, but recognizable. "In the meantime, these receipts refute his accusations nicely. I'd say we're back on track."

"You getting a load of this?" asked DiGenovese. "These guys are cozier than a pearl and an oyster. Fuckin' Clemenza and Vito Corleone."

Breitenbach smiled and patted the lasersat, a father proud of his baby. "You got what you need?"

"Oh, yeah," said DiGenovese, dark eyes blazing. "More than that. A lot more."

He came to.

The world was as he had left it, a dark, rank confessional, choked with the smoke of a hundred foul Russian cigarettes. He didn't know how long he'd been out- if after the pain had become too much he'd slept, or if it was just a period of nonexistence, where everything inside you kept ticking but your brain shut itself off. His legs burned. The rope that tied him to the chair cut into his calves, restricting circulation. He had that tingly feeling in his toes you get when your feet fall asleep, but they'd been tingling like that all night, and now the tingling had sharpened, so that even though he hadn't stood for hours, his feet screamed as if he were walking across a field of broken glass. His arms were where he'd left them, too, stretched taut in front of him, hands laid flat on a coarse plank, wrists secured by means of leather lanyards strung through the wood. His face throbbed. The right eye had swollen closed. He tried to open his eyelid, but nothing happened. Engine one, shut down and unresponsive.

Boris had left the left eye alone.

Boris from Metelitsa.

Boris, his unblinking Torquemada.

He was seated across the table, his posture rigid, his pale, soulless gaze alert, appraising, mocking, and finally condemning. The gaze never changed. It was the one constant in his swirling, unending nightmare, the hard blue eyes never leaving him even when the pain had become too much and his vision had gone blurry, and the scream had exploded inside him, and mercifully, oh God, yes, mercifully, he'd left the waking world.

Seeing him stir, Boris sat forward. He looked at him sadly and shook his head, as if saying, "One more hard case."

"You call now?"

The voice was as dead as the eyes. It was not a request, nor a plea, nor a command. Slowly he unrolled the chamois leather case containing his tools.

Pliers.

X-Acto knife.

A vial of rubbing alcohol.

A roll of gauze.

A lamp hung above the table, the bulb weak, stuttering. A relentless, pulsating backbeat seeped through the walls, causing the lamp to sway as if they were at sea rocking on an easy swell. Somewhere above him, people were dancing. He thought of his children, children no longer, then pushed their faces from his mind. They did not belong here. He would not tarnish them with this filthy place.

The cone of light swung right, and he looked at the hand splayed on the coarse plank. It was hard not to think of it as another man's hand. The thumb, raw, exposed, slick with blood, and lying next to it the thumbnail, extracted with a backstairs surgeon's precision, broken into two rough-hewn pieces.

At some point, he'd taken a clinical approach to things. An objective view. The pain was his, no mistaking that: the shaft of fire bolting up his arm, the paralyzing scream starting far down in his belly, the cry desperate to escape, discovering the mouth stuffed with a rubber ball and secured with a length of duct tape. Yes, the pain was all his. But as the pliers dug deeper beneath the nail, as the X-Acto knife sliced away layer upon layer of stubborn connecting tissue, as Boris pulled and yanked and twisted, his apathetic, unshakable gaze never wavering, he'd given up the hand.

The beat from above grew louder. The walls quivered with the thud of the bass and he could make out patches of the music. "West End Boys." Boris half sang a few words. Vest-ent boyz. He stopped and stared hard.

"You call?"

Grafton Byrnes listened to the music a moment longer, savoring it, knowing it to be the last taste of a sane universe. In the dark hours of his captivity, he had fashioned a plan, but it required patience. And patience meant more pain.

Eyes burning with defiance, he shook his head.

Boris reached for the pliers.

The invitation read:

A Midsummer Night's Dream,

A Fantasy, A Flirtation

The St. Jude Children's Hospital's 25th Annual Black and White Charity Ball

8 o'clock PM

Governor's Ballroom,

The Fairmont Hotel

Gavallan stepped from the passenger seat of the Range Rover, adjusting his dinner jacket while his date for the evening circled the car to join him. He had just enough time to admire the fairy lamps strung across the portico, the baby ficuses and swirling cypresses dressed with tinsel and crepe to look like Shakespeare's enchanted forest, before Nina Slenczka rushed to link arms with him and guide them up the maroon welcome carpet.

"Remember to smile, hon," she said, her flack's professional grin splitting her ruby red lips. "This one's for the morning papers."

Nina handled all of Black Jet's PR, and to Gavallan's mind the date was strictly business. Not to say he didn't find her attractive. Twenty-nine years old, blond, petite, and lithe, she had dressed for the evening in a skintight black sheath, spaghetti straps, and just enough fabric to cover her nipples and navel, maybe a little more. Yes, she was attractive. Stunning even. But Gavallan wasn't looking.