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candles and sex—she hadn’t been a shy woman, that he remembered with perfect clarity—and resiny white wine, and his nearly empty apartment. He’d had just a pine bed with rough white sheets he’d bought down at a dreary government-run department store on Lenin Square, a single pillow, a kitchen table that was actually an elementary-school desk he’d found in an alley and had cleaned up, two metal chairs, and lots of wine-bottle candlestick holders for when the electricity would go out.
    “Goddamn traffic,” said Keal, interrupting Mark’s thoughts. “It’s usually not this bad at this time of day.”
    Stick with the present, Mark told himself. And stop thinking about sex you had twenty-four years ago when you have a beautiful wife now. He looked out the front windshield of the Ford Mondeo sedan they were riding in, to the line of stopped cars. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he noted just as many were piled up in back.
    Keal added, “There must be an accident up ahead.”
    Mark pulled the SDXC card out of his satchel, slotted it into Larry’s laptop, typed in Larry’s password, and began to examine the photos more carefully, zooming in as best he could on the various Russian-made vehicles Larry had documented coming in and out of the Russian military base—UAZ Hunter 4×4’s, BRDM and BTR armored cars, old Zil trucks, and new T-90 tanks. There were hundreds of images. It seemed like a lot of activity—the T-90 tanks were a worry—but without any baseline to compare it to, Mark couldn’t come to any useful conclusions.
    The contract Mark had signed with the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division had specified that Global Intelligence Solutions—Mark’s firm—was to surveil the entrance to a Russian military base located in South Ossetia, a disputed patch of land claimed by Georgia but occupied by Russia.
    Via satellite observations, the CIA had detected increased activity at the base. But the Agency hadn’t been satisfied with the satellite data; they’d wanted ground-level photos that could lend additional insight into the types of troops that were exiting and entering the base. Because the CIA station chief in Tbilisi had balked at assigning one of his own operatives to the task—the Agency tended to promote the cautious over the cowboys—Kaufman had turned to Mark’s firm.
    Upon arrival in South Ossetia, Larry had boozed and schmoozed with local vintners, then rented an apartment on the top floor of a six-story building in Tskhinvali, the region’s capital. From that vantage point, he’d been able to photograph Russian military vehicles and personnel entering and exiting the adjacent military base.
    Was it possible that the Russians had discovered what Larry was up to and killed him? Sure, thought Mark. But that didn’t even begin to explain the painting.
    He clicked through more of the photos, but there wasn’t much to see. They might eventually prove useful to Kaufman, who could have them analyzed by Russia specialists, who in turn could study the uniforms and license plates and armor, and contrast the level of activity at the base when Larry was there with what satellite data suggested had been the level of activity over the past year. But to Mark the photos said little. South Ossetia was a heavily militarized disputed territory, and it lay just south of Chechnya and several other heavily militarized disputed territories—the Russians had been fighting a series of low-grade civil wars in the North Caucasus for years—so it would have been surprising not to see a robust level of activity at the base.
    It was only when he got to the end that he noticed that the last photo of the lot was dated June sixth, four days earlier. It was a late afternoon shot of a Russian armored car just outside the base. But Larry hadn’t left South Ossetia until the afternoon of the seventh.
    “Shit,” said Mark. Was it possible Larry had just neglected to take any photos on the seventh? Mark doubted it; Larry