Pattern Recognition

She climbs a few steps, then stops. "I'm wearing Minnie Mouse shoes, I'm so tired I'm not sure I know what it's like not to be, jet lag seems like a luxury of those who don't travel much, and I feel like I've been beaten with rubber hoses. Not to mention a general lack of skin on my feet."

They climb three flights of concrete stairs, Cayce increasingly relying on the railing, and enter what must be the interior of the ugly concrete tiara she'd seen as she was running away.

An oval, its windows set between canted concrete uprights. The ceiling vaults determinedly toward the front of the building, to reach a mural depicting the world, Eurasia front and center, bracketed by heroic wheat sheaves erupting with nose cones and Sputniks, colors faded from their original brightness, like an old globe discovered in a hot dusty room above a high school gymnasium.

She sees Bigend raise a glass in greeting, from the center of a group of people.

"Time to meet the big guy," Parkaboy says quietly, smiling and offering her his arm. Which she takes, in an absurd flashback to prom night, and they walk forward together.

"Peter," Bigend says, "we've all heard you were the one who found her." He shakes Parkaboy's hand, then hugs and air-kisses Cayce. "We've been very worried about you." He's roseate with some dire new energy she hasn't seen in him before. His dark forelock falls across his eyes; he tosses his head to throw it back, entirely too coltish for anyone's good, then turns to the man beside him. "Andrei, this is Cayce Pollard, the woman who's brought us all together. You've already met Peter. Cayce, this is Andrei Volkov." Displaying his white and worryingly numerous teeth.

Cayce looks at Volkov and thinks immediately of Eichmann in the dock.

A nondescript, balding man in indeterminate middle age, gold glinting at the temples of his rimless glasses. He wears the sort of dark suit that rewards its expense primarily with a certain invisibility, a white shirt whose collar might be linen-finish porcelain, and a necktie of thick, lustrous, patternless silk, midnight blue.

Volkov takes her hand. His touch is ritual and brief.

"My English is poor," he says, "but I must tell you how sorry we are, that you were treated so badly. I am sorry also," and here he turns to a young man Cayce realizes she recognizes from the squat behind Georgievsky, and continues in Russian.

"He regrets that he is unable to join you now for dinner, but he has pressing engagements in Moscow," translates the young man, his bushy ginger hair a few shades lighter than Parkaboy's. He's wearing a suit as well, but one that looks as though he's rented it.

Volkov says something more, in Russian.

"He says that Stella Volkova also apologizes for the discomfort you have so unnecessarily suffered, and that she would be here, tonight, but, as you know, her sister requires her in Moscow. Both the Volkovas look forward to your next visit, upon your return to Moscow."

"Thank you," Cayce says, noticing the neat deep wedge missing from the upper curve of Volkov's right ear, and hearing the doctor's shears cutting through the suede of the Parco boots.

"Goodbye, then," Volkov says. He turns to Bigend and says something in what she guesses is quick and probably idiomatic French.

"Goodbye," Cayce says, automatically, as he starts for the door, two young men in dark suits falling into step beside him. A third remains, standing nearby, until Volkov is out of sight, then follows.

"Systema," Bigend says.

"What?"

"Those three. The Russian martial art, formerly forbidden to all but Spetsnaz and KGB bodyguards. It has its formal basis in Cossack dancing. Quite unlike anything Eastern." He looks like a very determined child, on Christmas morning, who's finally gotten his way and been allowed downstairs. "But you haven't been introduced to Sergei Magome-dov," he says, indicating the young translator, who offers her his hand.

"I saw you at the studio," the young man says. Twenty-three at the oldest.

"I remember."

"And Wiktor Marchwinska-Wyrwal," Bigend says, introducing the fifth member of the remaining party, a tall man with very carefully bar-bered gray hair, dressed for a French preppies idea of a British country weekend, the silky tweed of his jacket looking as though it were woven from the wool of unborn lambs. Cayce shakes his hand. He has Voytek's perfectly horizontal cheekbones, and a phone plugged discreetly into his right ear.

"A great pleasure," this one says. "I am, of course, hugely glad to see you here, safe and I hope relatively sound. I am, I should tell you, Andrei Volkov's security chief, new to the job, and I have you to thank for it."

"You do?" She sees three men in white jackets and dark trousers enter, pushing stainless-steel carts on hard rubber wheels.

"Perhaps I can explain over dinner," he says, gesturing to a round table she hasn't noticed, its white cloth set for six. Two of the three in white coats are positioning the carts, but the third is removing the sixth setting.