The heavyset woman came down the stairs of her apartment building in a hurry. She carried one large suitcase and struggled with it. Three flights down the back stairs and she was sweating beneath her tan raincoat. But she had been sweating since before she had finished backing.

Short notice, long trip. But a big payoff. It would all be worth it. She was going to get a new passport, a new identity. And a free trip out of the country. She would get more money in cash in the next few hours than she would by keeping her lousy government job for another twenty years. So it hadn’t been much of a decision when she had made it several years ago.

Still she was nervous. She had heard horror stories about people who got involved in this type of thing. But there was no turning back now.

It was nearly midnight.

She stepped out from the front door of her middle class building in Alexandria, Virginia. A few parking spaces down, in front of a hydrant, a car engine started up. The car slid forward a few parking spots and gently came to a halt.

She recognized two of the men in the front seat. The front window rolled down.

Handsome men. Smiling faces. The faces of her homeland.

“Hello, Olga,” the man in the shotgun seat said.

She answered in Ukrainian. “Do you have the money? Do you have my passport?” she demanded.

The man opened an envelope that sat on his lap. There were some huge bricks of money and some banking information where the rest could be found. He handed her a Brazilian passport.

“See if you like your picture,” the man answered. “But I wouldn’t advise you to stay too much longer. FBI. They’re probably on their way.”

The mere mention of American police was enough to make her heart jump. She had known of other CIA employees who had sold out over the years. Most of them went to federal prisons and didn’t emerge until they were very old or until some other more patriotic prisoner stuck a shiv in their backs.

Olga glanced at the passport. Her picture. A new name. She was now Helen Tamshenko and she was a resident of São Paolo.

Good enough. She reached for the back door and slid into the car. She slumped low. No one would spot her as a passenger.

The driver pulled away from the curb. An oncoming pair of headlights swept the street. Then a second. Two big unmarked Buicks, traveling fast.

“Just in time,” the driver said softly. “That’s the FBI now.”

Olga stayed low. She preferred not to see. Her car proceeded without incident. They went to the intersection and turned. She watched the driver as he glanced in his rear view mirror. He moved quickly and deftly into traffic so it would be difficult to follow.

“We’re okay,” he said, continuing in Ukrainian.

The man on the shotgun side turned his head halfway around to talk to his passenger. “You’re a lucky lady tonight, Olga. Real lucky.”

Both men laughed.

They drove across the Key Bridge back into Washington. They navigated carefully through traffic. Olga sat up a little to watch where they were going. Within another few minutes, they entered Rock Creek Park. Its roads were dark and quiet at this late hour, which was what everyone there wanted.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Olga. We’re going to move you to another car. You’re going to drive through the night. Your next driver will take you to Montreal and you’ll fly to Mexico. From there to Cuba. The Americans will lose track of you in Havana. But you’ll connect there for Brazil.”

The driver glanced at him and smiled.

Olga remained nervous.

“Where’s the money?” she asked.

From the front seat came the rest of her package. The nice plump packs of money. Enough to get her started. She was breathing a little easier, but not by much.

Olga’s vehicle pulled off the road. She looked around. Sure enough, there was another car waiting, its lights off.

The driver of Olga’s car flashed its lights. The driver from the other car gave a slight wave of recognition. A passenger side guard stepped out to cover the situation. Olga assumed everyone was armed. Well, that was fine because she was, too.

“There you go,” said the driver. “Don’t say we didn’t do anything for you. You’re on your way.”

“I’m on my way,” she nodded.

She checked her new passport again and stuffed the money in her purse. She stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her.

“Bye, Olga,” the man in front said pleasantly. “Good luck.”

She was too tense to answer. She gave a nod to the car that had brought her here as it pulled away. She started toward the other car.

The rear door opened and the driver beckoned to her again.

One of the grand boulevards of Paris that leads to and from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is the Avenue de la Grande Armée, directly opposite the Champs Elysées. It travels eastward from Place de l’Etoile, where the arc stands, and rolls through expensive neighborhoods till it arrives in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

If a traveler stays on the boulevard, he or she passes majestic apartment buildings and mansions that smell of the money of all nations. One will also come to the American Hospital of Paris, which was where Alex arrived thirty minutes after the shooting incident in the Parisian Métro. Not only was there a wound in her chest from a bullet, but she had gone into cardiac arrest.

An intensive care unit in a hospital outside one’s native country is never a cheerful place. But the American Hospital of Paris has been an institution for a century. In a country of exemplary medical care, it remains one of the leading hospitals.

Hit in the center of the chest by a bullet, Alex’s body was moved there from the Métro’s Odéon station by ambulance. Her body was motionless beneath a sheet and a blanket, covered to the shoulders. Medics on the scene looked at the wound and tried to close off the blood, but given the force of the hit, they shook their heads.

The ambulance technicians who transported Alex to the American Hospital saw that her vital signs were almost nonexistent. When her heart stopped, electrical cardioversion was applied. Electrode paddles were applied to her chest and a single shock was administered.

She was unconscious at the time, somewhere between life and death, prepared to go either way. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, her heart flickered again. If she had been gone-wherever souls go to-she was back.

Or trying to get back.

She was admitted to an emergency room, where the bizarre nature of her injury was properly assessed for the first time. The bullet that had hit her had ricocheted off the Métro wall. Its impact had been greatly defused. And somehow, in the center of her chest, right above her breastbone, the bullet had scored a direct hit on the stone pendant that she had bought in Barranco Lajoya.

The stone had broken under the impact of the bullet, but it had defused the damage from the fired round. While there was a flesh wound and severe trauma to the breastbone, including a hairline fracture, the bullet had not broken through beyond the flesh at the surface. Contrary to how it appeared in the Métro, it had not entered her body.

Detectives who inspected the crime scene in the hours after the shooting found the spent bullet in the center of the tracks, in the spot to which it had been deflected.

The stone had saved her life.

On her first day in the hospital, she lay by herself in a private room under heavy sedation. She was groggy. She was on heavy pain-relief medication and an IV fed into her arm. Her chest throbbed. Under the bandages, the skin of her chest had turned the color of an eggplant. Every breath hurt. She was afraid to look at her wound. And above all, she was surprised to be alive.