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had hired them—making it a good guess that she was Yakuza. Maybe there was another way to find out who she was. Before heading back to the bike, he stooped to pick up Tokko-fuku’s severed fingers. Rolling them in a blue bandana, he shoved them in the pocket of his leather jacket.
    Back on the BMW he turned on the FM radio, letting the horrific news of panic and death surrounding the dirty bomb flood the speaker in his helmet. Hartman Drake, terrorist mole, murderer, and Speaker of the House, would have to wait.

C HAPTER 4
    St. Petersburg
7:26 PM
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    A leksandra Kanatova slumped against the wheel of her black Lada sedan and wiped the tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand. She was smartly dressed in a white down ski jacket, gray cowl-neck wool cardigan, and jeans snug enough to show off the round hips of her gymnast’s body. A stylish blue fox ushanka sat low over her ears against the cold. The splash of freckles across her tawny complexion made wearing makeup an afterthought.
    At first glance one would say she was the icon of a young Russian professional. But something was not quite right. The clothes she wore were crisp and fashionable—but her fingernails were chewed down to sorry nubs. Golden green eyes that should have sparkled in the glow of streetlights held the damaged, sidelong stare of a young woman with a deep bruise on her soul.
    Aleksandra’s grandmother was one of the few in generations of Soviets who had consistently read the Bible despite the atheist views of her government. She called Aleksandra a pretty whited tomb with dead men’s bones inside, ever chiding her for some unatoned sin. Babushkas were known more for their unbridled candor than their tact.
    Aleksandra was well aware that she carried a heavy load of unresolved sins, but these were not the cause of her darkness. Her eyes had once shone as they should have, before Mikhail was dead. There was nothing she could do to bring him back, but such deep and abiding sadness was not a thing she could peel off like a dirty cloak and exchange for a new one. Death was final, and now, so it seemed, was despair.
    The coffin-like cold inside the musty car and the heaviness in her heart pressed against Aleksandra’s chest and threatened to rob her of all auspices of control. She pounded on the steering wheel with both hands and screamed at the top of her lungs for a full minute. Then, drying her eyes, she squared her shoulders and cursed herself for such weakness.
    The Lada’s fan had a difficult time keeping the windscreen free of encroaching frost. Aleksandra had to lean forward with her eyes just above the top of the steering wheel, to peer through the tiny oval of clear glass as she drove. With such a small view of the world, it was difficult to make sense of everything amid the flashing lights and glowing ice fog outside. It was chilly enough in the car to make her blue fox hat a necessity to keep her ears from freezing while she drove. Some men in her unit insisted that the sedan was in perfect order and it was she who frosted up the windows with her frigid heart.
    Traffic on Zagorodny Prospekt had snarled to a standstill with gawkers and arriving politsia vehicles. A heavy snow poured from the blackness above the city as if from a sieve, choking arterial roads and slowing emergency vehicles. Mournful wails of the wounded—and Russian women were masters at wailing—mingled with the hi-lo sirens of arriving ambulances.
    In well-practiced Soviet bureaucratic fashion, a roadblock had been erected even before rescue efforts had begun, as if it was a foregone conclusion that there was something to hide at the blast site. Two bleary-eyed politsia sentries in navy-blue waist-length parkas with curly gray Astrakhan collars and hats stood in the swirling snow. The shorter of the two, an Asian-looking woman with almond eyes and huge metal hoop earrings, held back while her male partner, a young man with the piercing