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  Shakily, she tried to stand. With hands secured behind her back, she couldn’t balance; she rolled on to one side on the cold mossy floor.

  Pursing her lips, she folded both legs at the knee. Wincing, she managed to pull booted feet up over the handcuff’s chain. Then her wrists, though still bound, were in front of her. Leaning against a stone wall, she gained her feet.

  Too much motion; her head whirled. She held perfectly still. Eventually, the dizziness retreated.

  Cautiously, she pushed off the wall.

  The cell was made of crenellated cement, extending six paces in one direction and three in the other. The only visible door was a narrow slot by the floor, blocked by a steel plate too small for human passage. The single tiny window was nearly opaque with a gleaming admixture of ice crystals and grime. In one dank corner, a fetid-smelling hole in the floor functioned as a latrine.

  After a few moments’ exploration, she slumped back down. The air was heavy with midnight chill. The cold was terrible, killing cold. At least the parka, filthy and smelling of smoke, remained essentially intact. But the pockets had been emptied; there was no lighter with which to start a fire, even if she could find something to burn, which she couldn’t.

  For a while, she stared vacantly into space. Then she shook her head. Hadn’t she been in the middle of something?

  Yes. Sluggishly, she had been trying to form a thought.

  How did they put me in here?

  Thrusting out her chin, she forced herself up again. She turned a slow circle, teeth chattering. The only visible entrance, the slot by the floor, was not even big enough for a cat.

  She began a methodical search, using fingertips more than eyes. Feeling around the perimeter of the room, she found nothing but lichen and grime. Then she turned her attention to the low ceiling – cobwebby, mossy, and slimy. Straining until her calves felt the stretch, keeping her weight pitched forward, she walked her fingertips up and down the cinderblock. If there was a hidden door in the ceiling, she couldn’t find it.

  Focus proved difficult to maintain; her thinking skittered, a stone skipping across a pond. As she felt around the walls again, she became distracted by the thought that the moss might be edible. Squinting, she examined a patch closely. If nothing else, it might serve to moisten her parched throat. A moment later, she was chewing carefully. Do like the monks who chew every bite a hundred times—

  She vomited.

  Nothing in her stomach except bile. Spitting, dry-heaving, she clutched her head wretchedly. Now her thirst was awake – terrific, slavering, dwarfing the hunger.

  She forced herself to keep searching.

  At last she found a current of frigid air moving with more force than other currents of air. Apparently, an invisible crack formed a rough square around the steel grate, extending four cinderblocks up from the floor, two out to either side. She pushed, pulled, prodded, succeeding only in exhausting herself. Of course the mechanism to work the hidden door would be external – no lock to be picked, no visible hinges to be removed.

  Now … she would get back on to the floor.

  She got back on to the floor.

  After a while, since nobody was watching, she allowed herself to cry. She cried silently, small tears leading to bigger ones, until her shoulders were chuffing and whatever was in her eye floated away. She wound down slowly, hiccuping, and then passed out.

  The next time she swam awake, her cheeks were damp. She had continued crying in her sleep. Stupid body, she thought. Wasting water.

  Her eyes closed again. A bee buzzed distractingly inside her skull. Her ears were popping. Her mouth tasted like pennies. Her head was on fire. Fever, she thought … She was on a raft, on a river, beneath a burning sun. She and Huck Finn were hammering out a deal in which she would exchange sexual favors for food. Above the cloudy river, mosquitoes floated in dense thickets. No wonder she had a fever. She had … malaria?

  She felt both hot and cold, both flushed and empty. Her head was pounding, buzzing, thrumming. The base of her spine ached horribly. Her joints felt as if they had been emptied of cartilage and then refilled with molten steel. And the molten steel was beginning to seep out into her lungs – hot and thick, bubbling with every tortured breath.

  Sick, she thought miserably.

  She coughed. The cough started out dry and shallow and ended up deep, hacking, and wet. She was sitting up again, soaked in sweat. Dying, she thought.

  She fell back with a congested, liquid sigh. Rallying, she tried again. This time she managed to gain her feet, propping herself against one wall to keep her balance. Woozily, she paused.

  She listed to the window. One blunt-nailed index finger poked between cold metal bars. Slowly, she scratched a clean line on the grimy pane. Then another. Then a longer one connecting them, forming an F.

  If you had a million years to do it, Holden Caulfield had said, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world.

  On the heels of this came another memory, so time-worn that she wasn’t quite sure it was a real memory at all. She had been a little girl, walking with her father, and they had come upon a snarl of red graffiti spray-painted on to the sidewalk. FUCK, the graffiti read. Cassie had sounded out the letters and then asked what they meant. Her father had chosen the words for his answer carefully. It’s a beautiful thing between two people, Cass, m’lass. It’s when a man loves a woman and they make a baby together. Sometimes people use it in a different way; but it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Don’t ever forget that …

  She laughed aloud.

  Unsteadily, she returned to the floor. Dizzy. Nauseated. Wretched. Funny how she didn’t even feel the cold any more. Her breath was visible, yet she felt almost comfortable. Just like the Jack London story. And that was the most frightening part.

  She drifted.

  Sometime later, she woke with a small choked sob.

  Still dark. Gooseflesh prickled her forearms beneath the parka. Her heart felt heavy and slow. If she didn’t move, she thought, she would freeze to death.

  She staggered to her feet again. Tottering, she paced. Every few seconds she paused to lean against the wall and let her head stop spinning. Her stomach was trying to eat itself. Soon that moss might start to look worth a second try.

  Not yet.

  She trudged on. The headache was terrible, crippling. Chills shivered from scalp to toes. With stupid determination, she kept pacing. She felt like crying or screaming. She rode the feeling, surfing, tingling, until the wave crashed. Then she was in weird territory, frightening but somehow familiar. There’s another place, Fiver had said in a passage her father had highlighted in Watership Down, another of her favorite books – another country, isn’t there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die. It’s a wild place, and very unsafe. And where are we really – there or here?

  Then, except for sore feet, she felt almost all right. Then a not-unpleasant but completely terrifying warmth bloomed in her extremities.

  A tear ran down her cheek. She pictured a Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast: eggs, sausages, pancakes, hash browns gloppy with ketchup. A toasted everything bagel with strawberry cream cheese – the breakfast of champions, Michelle had called it. A frosty glass of orange juice. Granola with nuts and cranberries. Chocolate-chip Pop-Tarts. Banana waffles, sweet maple syrup. Cinnamon scones.

  Breakfast, her father had liked to say, was the most important meal of the day.

  Irritated, she swiped at her face.

  She kept pacing.

  For a time Quinn seemed to occupy the cell. He stood in one corner, wearing his crew-neck cotton sweater and brown loafers. Moonlight sparkled off his glasses, pooling in the cleft of his chin. His expression was expectant, mildly exasperated.

  Eventually, a strange new thought wormed its way into her consciousness. For the first time she realized how comfortable a place to die this cell might be. The moss would yield, form-fitting. Agonies of hunger and thirst and fatigue would f
ade. She could close her eyes. Let go. And rejoin eternity.

  Another feverish shiver. Groaning, hugging herself, she collapsed back on to the floor.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh God. Oh God.’

  An image from Anna Karenina lurched into her mind. When Anna had been pushed too far, when her exhaustion and loneliness and suffering had become too much to bear, she’d considered downing an entire phial of morphine instead of her usual nightly dose. And as she had lain back on her bed, the shadow from a single candle had danced across a stucco cornice. Suddenly, the shadow had spread, covering the entire ceiling, and other shadows had rushed to meet it, melting together and dripping over the room, consuming Anna as she lay shivering in her bed, thinking, Death! Only later had her tortured, feverish mind realized that the spreading shadows had been the result of the candle going out. But by then it had been too late; the seed had been planted, the dark urge had taken root.

  Close your eyes. Let go. And rejoin eternity.

  She moaned again, head swimming.

  It’s a beautiful thing between two people, Cass, m’lass. Sometimes people use it in a different way; but it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Don’t ever forget that …

  Shuddering coughs wracked her body. Then, like Anna in her moment of extremis, she watched shadows spread from the ceiling corners, filling the cell, joining together, forming a single tremendous blot of darkness, and finally engulfing her.

  COBBLER’S COVE: ONE YEAR EARLIER

  ‘The world’s most effective lock pick,’ said Quinn, ‘is a woman’s charms.’

  He was at his most pedantic: sitting with impeccable posture on the sofa beside her, speaking in a dry monotone. A professor again, not of comparative literature, now, but of biology.

  ‘Kissing decreases cortisol, which lowers stress. Love-making floods the body with chemicals promoting calm and trust. Your most powerful weapon is nature itself. Spymasters have known this for centuries. Vide the “honey trap”. Courtship begins with the exchange of non-verbal signs. “I am here.” “I am female.” “I mean you no harm.” “You may approach.” Crickets chirp. Humans wear bright colors, jewelry and watches that gleam during crepuscular hours, and beads and other geometric shapes that draw an eye evolved to find berries. Flowers lure us with fragrance as well as beauty …’

  Why would he tell her this? If there was one thing she didn’t need him to teach, it was how to seduce a man.

  For the same reason hookers refused to kiss their johns, she answered herself: to remove from the transaction the personal element, emphasize the clinical. His sophism implied that she could sleep with someone as a tactic, with no emotional cost, no emotional investment.

  Nor was he entirely wrong. As a little girl she’d pictured having a boyfriend as going shopping together for Christmas presents in the mall, arm in arm while carols played over the loudspeaker system. Or walking home from school, letting her suitor carry her books – talk about quaint. But she had spent a lot of time living in the real world since then. And in the real world she had already given herself to many men, and even some women, for many reasons besides love.

  ‘Men,’ Quinn was saying, ‘puff out their chest like peacocks. Women drift past, announcing themselves. They’ve exaggerated their sexual identity to make their intentions clear: pigmenting their eyes, cheekbones, and lips. They emphasize the infantile schema by covering the nose with make-up. Welcome signs include the head-tilt-side, the palm-up, the shoulder-shrug, and the smile. Phase Two: validation of the signs sent out during Phase One. Acceptance signals include full body alignment, rapid blinking, flushing, submissive gaze-down, head-toss, postural echo, anxious self-touching, and shoulder-shrugging. Negative cues include gaze aversion, crossing the arms, or angling the body away – the proverbial cold shoulder.’

  She would ensnare Oleg Zimyanin, Quinn had said, in the Moscow art gallery where he picked up most of his girls. She would use the oldest and most dependable of all trade-crafts. She would have no trouble, as the target’s fondness for her type had been well-established.

  ‘Phase Three: conversation. In many cases this also involves food, which engages the nervous system’s parasympathetic division, shifting us from fight-or-flight toward relaxation and tranquility. Ventromedial-nucleus circuits of the hypothalamus slow heartbeats, constrict pupils, warm and dry the palms. Sharing food, clinking glasses, and eating fortune cookies together stimulates bonding. Of course, alcohol always greases the tracks.’

  He had shown her a long-lens photograph of Zimyanin, a man in his late twenties, in leather jacket and tracksuit and gold chains and ponytail, striking a faintly ridiculous pose – puffing out his chest, one hand cupping an elbow, the other reflectively stroking his chin – as he examined a painting.

  ‘Phase Four. Overall, men prefer sloppy kisses, which pass chem-icals, including testosterone, via saliva. Testosterone increases sex drive in both males and females. Oxytocin levels start to rise …’

  Upon hearing the subject of her dissertation, Zimyanin would do a slight double-take. The Bubnovy Valet school, really? Why, it must be fate. I have the finest private collection in the city. You’ll have to come see it … but first, if you like, I know a wonderful restaurant just down the block. The maître d’ is a personal friend. She would dimple fetchingly, tucking a strand of hair behind one ear, tilting her head as she did so to catch the light.

  ‘Phase Five: intercourse. Rocking back and forth while hugging stimulates pleasure centers linked to the ear’s vestibular sense. Orgasm is triggered by nerve impulses traveling through dorsal aspects of the spinal cord’s pudendal nerve—’

  The next photographs, fish-eyed, as if taken with a hidden camera, portrayed a penthouse apartment as dapperly sleazy as its owner: framed erotica hanging on the walls, ornate Oushak carpets underfoot, a wall-sized window overlooking Moscow’s Golden Mile. The bedroom featured a circular cherrywood bed and, comically, mirrors hanging on the ceiling, polished to a high gleam.

  Once it was finished, she would excuse herself to use the ladies’ room. In the study two doors from the bedroom she would find a spring-loaded, lever-fence Sargent & Greenleaf model R6730 lock, dial divided into a standard one hundred gradations, each marked with a white tick against a black background, with every tenth digit highlighted. Time and design flaws would have created slight inconsistencies within the mechanism that interacted with the drive cam to turn the lock bolt. By feeling the left and right contact points of the dial against the fence, she would quickly learn the lock’s subtle but crucial flaws, and line up the gates under the fence by touch.

  Inside the safe she would discover binders, maps, blueprints. She would not remove a single schematic; instead, she would memorize any information pertinent to the target dacha. Like everyone, Cassie, you possess perfect eidetic recall. The only difficulty comes in activating the ability. I’ll teach you some tricks to help things along. First, you’ll find something like page numbers to serve as index points …

  And later, inside a small, anonymous hostel on Zhukovskogo Ulitsa, she would meticulously reproduce the documents she had memorized. Then, considering options and consequences, she would devise a method of incursion. She would have access to Quinn’s bottomless bank accounts, his network of contacts. She would remember his lessons: that power mattered less than accuracy, that courage was resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. Once she had decided to go ahead, she would not hesitate.

  Hesitation, Quinn said, would ruin her.

  SAINT PETERSBURG

  Awake.

  Her ribs still ached. Her belly was still empty, her head still swimming. Still dark outside. She had been here for less than one night. It had been forever; but it had been less than one night.

  Quinn was in the cell with her again, a suggestion of mirth etched across his face now – mirth at her expense, of course. He had tricked her, used her, and thrown her away. She would never get the chance to exact her revenge. She would never learn if his
story had been all lies, or lies mixed with truth. She would freeze to death in this cell, or they would beat her fatally during the interrogation, or they would execute her after a show trial. She would cease being … but Quinn would go on and on, abducting other young people, tricking them, using them for his own nefarious purposes. She had not been the first – look how skilfully he’d played her; he had it down to a science – and she would not be the last.

  She drifted again, down endless tunnels, past dim silhouettes, echoes of echoes.

  Sometime later a new thought sparked, a dull ember floating through the darkness: break the window and she might use the glass to cut her wrist, and thus spare herself some suffering.

  She let the thought drift right past. Unlike Anna Karenina, Cassie Bradbury was a survivor. If suicide had been an option she would have done it long ago, during some wintry, hopeless night on the streets of Manhattan.

  Then another spark flared, brighter:

  Use the glass to cut their throats, dummy, when they come to get you.

  She stirred, lifting her head off the cold stone floor.

  Pushing to her feet, she waited out a swirl of zigzagging black dots marring her vision. Gathering her strength, she maneuvered toward the window. The F she had scratched into the frosty grime had faded to a spectral stencil. Extending her index finger, she traced it again, contemplatively.

  She tapped the glass with as much force as she could muster. Bars and handcuffs prevented her from getting her arm into it – but she managed to shiver the glass in its frame. If the handcuffs had been gone …

  She examined the parka’s zipper. The tab, a thin sheet of bent and sooty nickel, had seen better days. Clumsily, she brought her shackled hands into her sternum, closing thumb and forefinger around the tab, working it back and forth. Almost immediately, it snapped off. Then she was holding a centimeter-and-a-half of weak, flat metal. Not worth much by itself. But …

  Finding the brightest available splash of moonlight, she experimented with the best angle from which to insert the tab into the lock of the handcuffs. Intended as only temporary restraints, handcuffs did not, as a rule, feature the most secure of locks. Just a matter of jigging the tongue back and forth, again and again, with increasing pressure and speed, building momentum, until—