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picked out the biggest soldier who might be easier to hit because of his size. He held him in his scope, squeezed the trigger, and put a hole in his heart.
    When the Russians went berserk and crazy for revenge, he didn’t know what to do or where to run or hide. If not for the man who pulled him from the weeds, he would have been dead.
    The man took him to a room where it was dry and too warm. On the first day he just sat silently and kept the distance between them. On the next day he brought a ball—shiny and smooth, black and white—unlike any ball Pauk had seen in his life. The man asked him in broken Chechen, “How old are you? Twelve? Thirteen?”
    The man was a resistance fighter, too, but he came from far away and spoke strange words in a quiet voice. He moved slowly. Even when he made the ball dance and spin and obey, still he moved slowly.
    When he finally sat across from Pauk, the boy saw the man’s dark eyes were different—his left eye slashed with tiny shards of blue—
    A woman’s voice cut into his memories:
“Merde!”
    Pauk blinked, openmouthed, to see Madame jerk forward in her seat.
“Connard!”
    This is Paris, Madame’s apartment
—where he was jolted by the cries of the fat tabby.
    He took the final few steps to the kitchen, where he selected the sharpest knife and a cutting board. He poured out the chicken parts, arranging them neatly with the tip of the knife. He worked, dicing the organs with precision to the rhythm of the steady drip of water from the faucet. Whenever the cats jumped up on the small, cluttered counter, he gently shooed them away.
    In between slices, he opened the cabinet above the sink. Soundlessly sliding the collection of empty canning jars to one side, he slipped the knife blade into the barely visible seam at the back of the shelf. The trick panel released.
    He took a passport from his pocket and set it on top of a pile of a dozen others—the identities he used for jobs. Unremarkable men, all in their early thirties, hailing from countries such as Switzerland and France and Canada and the UK.
    He kept the tools of his trade locked in a broken freezer, chained shut, in the same private one-car garage where he parked the Fiat. Three retractable hunting knives; his Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunov—the same model of “short stroke” semiautomatic Russian-made Dragunov sniper rifle he used to make his first kill as a boy in Chechnya; boxes of 7.62×54R rounds; extra “cans,” or suppressors; and a Leopold Mark IV scope.
    For the garage, he paid cash every month and had the payment delivered to the same box. He and the owner had never met in person.
    He ran his thumb along the stack of passports, sensing which he might use for the next job. Then he replaced the panel, carefully arranging the jars just so, the way Madame liked them.
    He selected three saucers, dividing the diced organs evenly. He fed the cats, rearranging several of the bolder ones and a kitten, so each had its share.
    On the counter, his glass of Beaujolais nouveau awaited.
    He sat in his usual chair and settled in to the noise and the company of the woman and her cats. She raised her glass to greet his:
“À votre santé,”
always the beginning of their
fútbol
ritual.
    He would be her eyes—for the pretty boys in their bright uniforms—and she would let him. She was his only contact with normalcy. But his mind kept circling back to Vienna, and he felt haunted by the dark-haired woman. What, if anything, had she learned from the Iranian traitor?

Thirty minutes to cover fifteen miles between Dulles and safe house Stag, a faux-Colonial condo in the congested, crazy Tysons Corner. Ten minutes to splash water on her face, brush her teeth, run a comb through her hair, and rummage up a Band-Aid for her blistered heel. Another fifty-two minutes of mental and physical pacing. Until she finally opened the door to Chris