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had known that the contract with the CIA had specified ninety-six hours of surveillance. Those ninety-six hours would have ended at noon on the seventh.
    “Something wrong?” asked Keal.
    “Yeah. This traffic.”
    A hunchbacked old man with a handful of tacky nesting dolls was making his way down the line of cars, hoping for a sale.
    Keal waved him off, then said, “We’re almost there.”
    Mark navigated to the folder on the laptop’s hard drive where Larry had stored backup copies of all the photo files. No, he hadn’t messed up—the photos that had been backed up on the laptop were exactly the same as those on the SDXC card. Nothing from June seventh.
    Which left one more thing to check: Mark had made sure that Larry’s laptop had been equipped with a wireless Internet card with international roaming capabilities—so that Larry would be able to backup offsite, even when traveling to remote locations.
    He clicked open the Internet browser, navigated to the online backup storage site for Global Intelligence Solutions, and typed in the password for Larry’s account.
    A long list of folders appeared, each representing a different job executed by Larry over the past six months. Mark opened the most recent and examined the photos inside it.
    There were, he realized, twenty-eight more photos stored online—all from the morning of the seventh—than were stored on Larry’s laptop and on the SDXC memory card that had been hidden in the Band-Aid box. Which could only mean one thing—someone had found, and then deleted, the extra photos on the laptop and memory card, but had done so after they’d been backed up online.
    Mark began examining the photos in question. All were of the entrance to the military base; none seemed much different from any of the earlier photos. He tried enlarging a few, but the image-editing software Larry had on his laptop was lousy, and the enlarged photos looked grainier than they should have.
    Traffic started moving again. Mark glanced at the cars in front of him, and then at the rearview mirror. He wondered whether he was being followed.
    Photos of a Russian military base deleted. Katerina’s self-portrait. Larry dead. What was the connection ? He sensed menace, as though a fog of poison gas were gathering at his feet, slowly billowing upward.
    He googled Katerina Kustinskaya Tbilisi , first typing her name as it would appear in Georgian, then in Cyrillic. He came up with a few hits, but nothing that pointed to the woman he’d known. He dug up what phone records he could for Tbilisi. Nothing.
    To Keal, Mark said, “If I were to give you a name of someone, a Russian woman who used to live here in Tbilisi and might still be living here, would you be able to run it for me at the embassy? Maybe come up with an address?”
    “I can try. What’s the name?”
    He told him. “She’d be forty-five years old.” Mark searched his memory. “Born in July. I don’t remember the exact day.”
    Keal pulled a pen out of the dash compartment. “Spell it.”
    Mark did, and Keal jotted down the name as he drove. “You have a photo?”
    “No. Kustinskaya might not be her last name anymore, she might have gotten married. But she was a student at Tbilisi State University from 1988 to at least the middle of 1991. You might find some information about her there.”
    Keal picked up his phone. As he dialed the embassy, he said, “Why am I running this name?”
    “She’s an old friend I lost touch with years ago.” Mark paused. What would he say to Katerina if he saw her again? To be sure, he’d have to ask her about Larry, but…he just hoped this wasn’t all leading to a place he didn’t want to go.
    “Larry knew her a lot better than I did”—Mark thought that was a lie, but wasn’t sure—“and it’s possible he tried to contact her when he was here. If I could find her, it would be worth asking her whether she and Larry saw each other, and if they did, whether he was feeling OK. I’d