I was more conscious than ever of how much I disliked Rachel and this whole mess she had pulled us into. Also, she had yet to express one ounce of gratitude, but before I could pounce on her, Harvey took care of it.

“Rachel, please. You are not the only one involved in this.” There was an edge in Harvey’s tone. I loved the new Harvey. I just wondered where he’d been and why I had never seen him. Perhaps sensing that she was pushing her luck with the one person who could still stomach her, Rachel closed her mouth.

“First of all,” I said, “Thorne told me a lot of things I’m not sure I believe. I’m not sure whether to believe Kraft. But I believe this: it is Thorne’s intention to kill Kraft. I won’t turn anyone over to be killed.”

“Of course not,” Harvey agreed.

“Second, we now have a new billion-dollar variable in the equation. Now we have to wonder if Drazen is looking for Roger because he wants revenge, or because he wants his money, or both. Something tells me he wants his money back.”

“But we do not have it.”

“That’s true. At the moment, we don’t have anything to give Drazen to make him happy-except the name of Vladi’s real killer.” I resisted the urge to wink at Rachel. “But maybe if we can find him his money, it will turn out he’s not that concerned about revenge, and then we can all go back to our lives of quiet desperation.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who will get your ovaries ripped out if you’re wrong. How are we supposed to find the money?”

“If anyone has it, it’s Kraft. He has the computers from Zormat.”

“Can you call him?”

“He’s a little hard to find.” I tried to think of what I would say to him if I did. Then I remembered our conversation at the hotel just before the bullets started flying. “But I still have something he wants.” The only question was whether or not I had it in me to betray Lyle Burquart.

I OPENED MY EYES THE NEXT MORNING AND DECIDED THE world wouldn’t end while I went for a run. I hadn’t been out in days, and the muscles in my back and shoulders felt as if they’d baked in a kiln. I got up and dressed and spent a good fifteen seconds stretching my hamstrings. When I got outside, I was pleased to find one of the first warm mornings of spring. I was not pleased to find that I had the lung capacity of a small bird. That’s what happened when I slacked off.

Just past the turn to Memorial Drive, I noticed a car lingering off my left shoulder. It was easy to spot, keeping pace with me and not the rest of the vehicle traffic. No one trying to be stealthy would be caught dead following at that range. When the driver pulled up alongside and I saw who it was, I was annoyed more than anything. I couldn’t even go running in peace. I was also on the verge of fainting, so I stopped and went over to lean in the window and see what Special Agent Eric Ling wanted.

“Hi there,” he said. “How’s it going?” He offered a steaming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

“Never touch the stuff. Thanks anyway.”

He shrugged and fit the cup into a holder in the console between the seats. Government vehicles had all the snazzy features. He dropped his cool surfer shades and looked at me over the rims. “Get in. I’ll drive you back.”

“That kind of defeats the purpose.”

“Maybe, but you weren’t exactly burning up the course. I just wanted to ask you about this.”

He pulled a photo from an envelope and held it up. It was a picture of Bo, ever the gentleman, holding the door for me at Grigorii’s, the morning we had gone to meet Drazen Tishchenko.

He pointed at Bo. “Who’s your friend?”

“Who says he’s my friend?”

“We’ve been trying to identify him. We ran his plates, but that was a dead end.”

That helped me feel marginally better. There was no end to the tricks Bo knew. It also explained why he was feeling so much heat.

Ling put the picture back into the envelope, then reached over and popped the door open. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

I looked down the path I wouldn’t be running that morning and felt…relief. I opened the door and climbed in. He waited until I was buckled in, checked his side mirror, and pulled away from the curb. He turned at the next side street. There was no place to park, so he pulled up to a hydrant and killed the engine.

“Government plates,” he said, not seeming all that bashful about it.

“I knew you had a team on me,” I said.

“Sure.” He twisted around in his seat so he was more or less facing me. “The Bureau has unlimited funds and manpower to spend following around a private investigator. That would be an easy sell.”

He didn’t actually say “two-bit private investigator,” but it was implied. I knew they weren’t up on Bo, and there had been only three people in the meeting. “Are you set up on Tishchenko?”

“We’re up on Grigorii’s. We have been for months. I got a call that an unknown female had wandered into the picture, which is pretty unusual for that place. I thought it must be Rachel, but it was you, and I asked myself, ‘What would she be doing there?’ I thought about it. Want to know what I came up with?”

“I’m all ears.”

“It all comes back to Betelco. Everyone is connected through Betelco, including your partner. Harvey is connected through his ex-wife. His ex-wife is connected personally through Roger and professionally as the company’s auditor. Tishchenko is connected because he was running dirty money through there. Right?”

“If you say so.” I didn’t see anything to argue with in there but didn’t want to just agree with him. He could be tricky.

“Four years ago, Roger Fratello disappeared. He took Drazen’s money with him. There’s some indication he also killed Drazen’s brother Vladi, but that’s mostly rumor coming from his people. Drazen’s been looking for Roger ever since. Are you with me?”

“I’m following along nicely, thank you.”

“Good, because here’s where you come in. Cut to right now. Traces of Roger start to show up again. Drazen Tishchenko ends up in Boston, and your partner gets grabbed.”

“Didn’t he say he was out shopping for a new wheelchair?”

He smiled, indulging me. “Then I saw this.” He tapped the envelope with the picture in it. “Lew and I started tossing around a few ideas for why you, a person with no prior connections to ROC, would be meeting with a high-priority ROC target.”

“ROC?”

“Russian organized crime. That’s what I do. I’m with a special unit.”

I wanted to mention that Drazen was Ukrainian, but if he chased Russians for a living, it was a good bet he already knew.

“Anyway, even after all this time, Drazen is looking for Roger. If he thinks, for some reason, that Harvey can tell him where to find him, that’s a good reason to snatch him up. If you want Harvey back, that’s a good reason for you to visit with Drazen.”

“That’s a theory,” I said. A pretty darn close theory.

“As you know, new information came up leading us to believe Roger had resurfaced, so we’ve also been looking for him.”

“Right,” I said. “He popped out of a terrorist’s closet in Zormat.”

“Well, I see that you have been following along nicely.” Ling didn’t look exactly impressed, more that I might not have been as two-bit as he’d thought. “We got a call from State. They had some items they couldn’t identify. We started running prints for them and came up with a wallet belonging to fugitive Roger Fratello. We were pretty psyched about that development. Then we tracked a key from inside the wallet to the safety deposit box in Brussels, which is where we found your partner’s prints. You see how that all works together?”

“I do.”

“We came to see Harvey. We almost killed you. We left. We got the call from Harvey to come back. That’s the part where the two of you lied to federal agents.”