"Then the train station and airport are out of the question," Elena observed sensibly. "They'll alert those places first."
Alex nodded. "But I think they'll check hospitals and doctor's offices before they do anything else." He squeezed Elena's leg. "The nearest land border is our best chance." He twisted around in the seat and peered at Eugene. "You still have your cell phone?"
Eugene patted himself down. "It's gone. It was still sitting on the table when you pulled me down. I'll bet it's still there."
"Of course."
"Our passports, Alex, they have them," Elena remembered with a jolt. "Maybe it would be better just to stay here. Find a safe place and hide."
"I don't think so." Alex held up a clutch of small red booklets and waved them in front of her. "These were packed in a hidden compartment of my overnight bag."
Elena shook her head. Her husband's cleverness had long since ceased to surprise her, but to insist on bringing the overnight bags for the restaurant meeting with Eugene was an amazing stroke of clear thinking. She didn't need to ask about the fistful of little booklets.
But Eugene did. "Are those legal?"
Elena caught his eye in the rearview mirror. "Whenever Alex accompanied Yeltsin on overseas trips he submitted his passport for the required visa. Now that Russians are free to travel overseas, seventy years of curiosity about the outside world demands to be instantly vented. The visa office of the Foreign Ministry is choked with requests. Mountains of paper everywhere. And more often than not, requests with the accompanying passports get lost or misplaced in the logjam. These are former Soviet bureaucrats we're talking about. It's a miracle they find their way home at night."
Alex continued, "Two or three days out, my office would call to complain, and liberally mention Yeltsin's name. Rather than hunt for a pin in a haystack, a clerk would just issue a new passport with the appropriate visa and send it by courier. That's the right expression, right? Pin in a haystack? Anyway, a month or two later, when the original turned up, it was returned by mail."
"Exactly how many do you have?" Eugene asked, enjoying his little peek into Russian inefficiency. A died-in-the-wool capitalist, he loved hearing about the sins of former commies.
"I honestly don't know."
"Guess."
"Ten. A dozen. Perhaps more."
Elena had twice gone along on Yeltsin's trips; she had three passports, one, of course, now inconveniently tucked in the back pocket of Vladimir's corpse. But Alex always shoved a few extras in his baggage, in the event the ones he or she were using got lost or stolen.
"There are two borders we can head for," Alex was saying, sharing the possibilities as he tried to think this through. "Austria to the south. Or due east, to Czechoslovakia."
"Okay, which?"
"I think Austria makes the most sense. It's closer. Also, I have part ownership of an advertising company in the capital. Illya Mechoukov is the president. A good man. I trust him. Better yet, the KGB had little influence there." He opened the window and took a deep breath. The night had turned cold. A frigid blast of air hit him in the face, but he felt dizzy. He briefly pondered the possibility that the exhaust was spewing carbon monoxide into the cabin. "Unfortunately, that border takes a visa. The Czechs and Slovaks, though, as former Bloc members, still have open borders for Russian passports."
"Where do you want to cross?" Elena asked, now that Austria was ruled out. She searched the rearview mirror. Nothing.
"Avoid the major arteries. Our best chance is a secondary or backcountry road. The guards at the smaller checkpoints will be the last ones alerted."
Eugene decided to join the discussion and leaned forward from the backseat. "Then what?"
"Then… directly to the nearest international airport. That would be Slovakia," Alex answered.
"Then Russia, right?"
"Maybe."
"I don't see that you have a choice, pal. You better get back there fast," Eugene advised.
"Do you think?"
"You better rescind those letters before anybody can act on them."
"I have other worries right now," Alex replied almost absently. He reached up and switched on the overhead light, which thankfully seemed to be the one thing in the car that functioned properly. He began flipping through passports and thumbing the pages.
"You know what?" Eugene announced, lurching forward in his seat.
"I think you're about to tell me what."
"Damn right I am. I think you got conked on the head harder than you realize. You're not thinking clearly. They could empty out your bank accounts in hours and, in a day or so, swipe all the investors' money in your banks."
"Don't you think that's a lot of cash to haul away?" Alex replied, curiously indifferent.
"You know damn well what I'm talking about. Come on, pal. They'll wire it all to a bank in the Azores or Switzerland. Then it'll shuttle around to a hundred banks and fall off the radar."
With no small amount of pleasure, Alex said, "I don't think so."
"Think harder."
"The people who forced me to sign those letters know nothing about banking. To move even a dollar they need my account numbers and the security codes."
"Oh."
"And those are all locked away in a safe in my office, guarded around the clock. They didn't know enough to ask about the numbers and I wasn't in the mood to educate them."
Elena reached over and patted her husband on the leg. "You're a genius."
His nose was stuffed back inside the passports. Sergei Golitsin sat behind Alex Konevitch's massive hand-carved desk and stared across it at the ten hungry faces around the long conference table. The irony of using Alex's own office as a command post to track him down and kill him was too delicious.
A phone was positioned directly in front of each man. A yellow notepad and a slew of satphones were poised within arm's reach. Empty coffee mugs littered the table. Ashtrays overflowed with snuffed-out butts. A large, 10,000-to-1 map of Hungary was taped to a wall, with dozens of little yellow and red pins stuck here and there. Another map, even larger, displaying the entire European continent and punctured with a similar mixture of multicolored pins, was fastened to the adjoining wall.
The men inside the room knew the address of Konevitch's unpretentious but nicely located Parisian apartment. They knew what hotels he preferred when he traveled, as well as the address of each and every office and subsidiary of Konevitch Associates outside the Russian border. A pin for each one, with a man or two now lurking at each destination. A mushroom of cigarette smoke rose from the table and swirled in cancerous eddies just below the ceiling.
Below them, the six floors of Konevitch Associates were nearly deserted. A handpicked crew of security guards ambled around the building; otherwise, the employees were home, cleaning up after dinner, mixing it up with their lovers, or snoring loudly in their beds. A few hyperambitious souls had tried to work late, but the guards had chased them out and shut down their phones and computers.
A sign was posted on the front door downstairs announcing a two-day holiday. A squad of burly guards would be placed there in the morning to make sure everybody got the message.
At that second, for the first time in two frantic hours, only one noise interrupted the sound of breathing-a buzzing that emanated from a specialist and his assistant employing a noisy instrument of some sort to crack a wall safe. The specialist had twice reassured everybody it was going "super splendidly." No hitches. No surprises, and Golitsin had good reason not to doubt him.
Six months before, when Alex Konevitch had ordered a personal safe to be installed in his office, the job naturally landed on the desk of his corporate security chief. Golitsin promptly handed it off to a black job specialist who once worked under him at the KGB, a master thief with an encyclopedic knowledge of safes and locks. Golitsin's instructions were precise and contradictory.