The meeting was in the United States embassy in Paris just off the Place de la Concorde, in a secure room on the third floor. Cerny arrived with Alex. They took seats at a small conference table. A third man there was Mark McKinnon, who was the CIA station chief in Rome. He had made the trip separately from Rizzo so they would not be seen together. They had, in fact, not seen each other in person since talking over a glass of wine at the dark San Christoforo bar in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome.

Cerny handled the introductions. An embassy observer was present also, a young man fluent in English, French, and Italian.

“Signor Rizzo has been with the Roman police for twenty-two years,” Michael Cerny said to Alex. They spoke English. “Seventeen on the brigata omicidia.”

“Rough work,” Alex allowed.

“Gian Antonio has been a CIA asset for at last the last fifteen of those years,” McKinnon added. “High quality material, almost always accurate.”

“Thank you, Michael,” Rizzo said in perfect English. “Almost?” he laughed.

“No one’s perfect,” Mark McKinnon said. “Not in our line of work.”

Cerny looked to Alex. “I brought Ms. LaDuca up to speed on the flight over, vis-à-vis the two murder investigations in Rome,” Cerny said. “In terms of Federov and his bodyguards, where are we now?”

McKinnon opened a file and slid a photograph across the table to Alex. “Recognize this guy?” he asked.

She glanced at it. “That’s one of the men who came to the embassy in Ukraine with Federov,” she said.

“He’s one of Federov’s bodyguards,” McKinnon said. “He’s actually the remaining one.”

“Remaining?” she asked.

“The other one is currently deceased,” McKinnon said. “He had an accident in his home in London. Fell and hit his head.”

She shuddered.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Careless of him.” She returned the photo. “That’s definitely the man, right? In the photo?” McKinnon asked. “From Kiev.”

“That’s him.”

McKinnon placed the photograph back in the file. “He’s in Paris right now,” he said. “His name is Kaspar Rodzienko. Ukrainian-born Russian. It’s our feeling that he and his boss were instrumental in the attacks on the president in Kiev. We’d like to wrap him up as quickly as possible. For that, we need bait for him to come forward.”

“And that would be me,” she assumed evenly. “The target for Comrade Kaspar.”

“That would be you,” McKinnon said.

“We’d rather get him here in Europe than have him find his way into the US and come after you there,” Cerny said.

Alex looked at the three men at the table, plus the observer, and gave them an ironic shake of the head. “What are you asking me to do now?” she asked.

McKinnon looked to Rizzo.

“We have some informers among the Ukrainians in the local underworld,” he said. “We have the ability to let Kaspar know you’re in Paris. We’ve already done that. The information he received indicated that you’re on a trade mission for the Treasury Department. We have a safe apartment for you to stay in. Near rue Mazarine. Fine neighborhood, about a two-minute walk to the river. We’d set a security ring around you. When he comes looking for you, we hit him.”

“So you’ve made me a target,” she said. “Again.”

Silence around the room. “Not much we can do about it at this point, LaDuca,” McKinnon said. “You’ll be compensated well for this.”

“Well or posthumously?” she asked, her displeasure growing.

“Better to get him on our terms rather than his own,” Cerny said. “We think he’s here for maybe two more days. If he knows you’re here and where you might be found, he’ll come into our view. Then we strike.”

“What about Federov?” she asked.

“We have no idea where he is now. He’s kept a low profile since Kiev. We can’t account for how many passports he might have.”

“Or what names they’re under,” McKinnon added.

In her mind, she was putting it together. “The date of the ‘hit’ in Paris, when someone was killed by our people under a false identity. Wasn’t that January second?”

Cerny answered. “Yes, it was.”

“And the file came to me four days later in Washington,” she said. “So that was the start of your next attempt to get Federov?”

Cerny again. “You could call it that.”

“Then six weeks later, the president is in Kiev, I’m supposed to keep tabs on Federov, and we’re trying to look like we’re negotiating a peace with him. And you guys are looking for new ways to hit him, but he beats you and takes a shot at the president instead. Lucky for you he missed.”

“Well,” Cerny said, “you know what they say. If the shoe fits, wear it.”

Alex considered her part in the near endgame, that of the bait in a trap. “And my alternative is?” Alex asked.

“As we said, wait for months, years. You never know where he’ll turn up.”

Cerny, McKinnon, and Rizzo escorted Alex to her lodging, which was a small two-room apartment on the rue Guénégaud in the sixth arrondissement. The apartment was toward the middle of the block in an old building with two huge blue doors at street level. The River Seine was a hundred yards to the north and the intersection with the rue Mazarine a hundred feet to the south.

They went there in the late afternoon. Alex studied the logistics, not a bad idea since her life depended on them. Two flights to walk up, one key to open the door. The door was reinforced from the inside, steel slabs that would bolt all the way across, a steel frame reinforcing the security from within.

There were shutters that would close on the two windows that overlooked the street. No point to be a target from across the street or a rooftop. When Alex inspected them, she saw that they too were reinforced with metal.

She put her foot to the ragged carpet in the apartment to test the floorboards. The wooden floor and steps in the hallway outside had creaked and sung like a choir with every footfall. The floor under the carpet was stable. She could have jumped on it and it wouldn’t have given a vibration.

“Concrete?” she asked.

“Above and below.”

That didn’t protect her from a bomb, but it definitely made one impractical. She checked the rear window. It was barred, though the bars could be unbolted from inside in case of fire. Cerny also explained that there was no access to the building from the roof. No exit from that direction either.

McKinnon gave her a new cell phone, specially designed. Someone on her surveillance team would be on it twenty-four seven. She didn’t even have to dial. Just open it and talk. It had a camera and a tracking device. She may have been a target, but she was a high-tech one.

“I’ll warn you,” Cerny said. “We’d put you in body armor, but then any shooter who detected it would sense the trap and aim for the head. So what good would that do?”

“We think he’ll come after you right away, LaDuca,” McKinnon said. “Probably tomorrow, maybe even during the day. For whatever reason, there seems to be some urgency in getting you killed.”

“I’m flattered,” she said with irony. “What in God’s name is it they think I know that even I don’t know?”

“We have no idea,” McKinnon said.

“What if he comes after me tonight?”

“We’re ready,” Cerny said. “We have backup teams all over the city. Stay in touch by phone and we’ll lead you to the nearest help if you need it.”

“It doesn’t take more than a second or two to fire a bullet,” she said.

“But it takes a while to set up a shot on a moving target in a city,” McKinnon said. “Kaspar is not on a suicide mission. He wants to hit you and get away. That makes him vulnerable. Even more vulnerable than you since he’s not watching for us.”

She was to go out to dinner with Lt. Rizzo that evening in Montparnasse at La Coupole, the atmospheric old haunt of Hemingway and the expatriate American writers of the 1920s. He would pick her up by car and drop her off after dinner. Rizzo would be her escort and act as her bodyguard also.