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year after that extraction in Serbia. When she had, she was a new agent in The Company, much to his horror, and they didn’t speak after that for another year. But then there’d been a mission in Vienna. She’d been his backup.
    And things between them had changed.
    Their feelings for each other had taken over.
    She turned off the boulevard onto a paved road that went through a kind of wasteland. It was desolate and somehow post-apocalyptic. Death hung in the air, seeping up out of the broken concrete, along the rusting barbed wire coiled like glistening snakes in the fractured moonlight, on stunted trees and blackened walls and streets that led nowhere. Her eyes were constantly flicking up to the rearview mirror. There were no headlights behind her, just the distant blur of the lights on the faraway boulevard. If she remembered the Google map Robert had shown her, the park was up ahead about five miles.
    The road twisted and turned through the no-man’s-land and then she saw the first disaster , hanging in the air ahead of her like a wounded bird. It looked as if it had been snared on power lines that had buckled. It just hung there, almost gracefully, but in danger of tipping over at any moment and crashing the rest of the way down to the ground. The main rotor blades were clearly visible. It was a blue Mi-38 helicopter. The rear tail and rotor had been sheared off. Data flashed through her mind, like she was Robocop, like it always did. Mi-38, max speed 320 km/h, cruising speed 290 km/h, operating ceiling at 5900 meters, hover ceiling at 3200 meters, GT engines, aircrew 2, passengers 30. She wondered if it had ever flown, or if it had been dragged out of some junkyard, driven on a flatbed to the park, hoisted up with a crane, and delicately placed on the fake power lines. A steel ladder glittered from the ground up to the hanging chopper.
    Elena turned a steep right and then the road straightened out to a pair of gates closing off the park. Except they weren’t closed. One was open, beckoning her.
    She drove through.
    On her right was the eerie sight of the crashed airliner. This one was real. She remembered the details. It was a Douglas C-47-DL operated by Aeroflot. On April 13, 1947, the plane was on its way to Khatanga Airport in Russia when it made a forced landing after the failure of engine one. All passengers survived, but nine died while desperately searching for help in the bleak, snow-laden tundra. The remaining twenty-eight passengers were rescued after twenty days. The pieces of the transport were stored in a warehouse in Rostov and then sixty years later shipped to the park over the period of a week and carefully laid out to look as if it had just that moment crash-landed and split apart. Its carcass gleamed and chilled in the frigid air. Elena kept expecting to see some flash of movement, a survivor crawling out of the wreckage toward the sound of her car. But if anything moved, it was only rats who had infested the twisted fuselage.
    Elena skirted around a small frozen lake, which gleamed in the pale light, as black as the night around it.
    It was the train wreck she was headed for.
    The details of this she also knew by heart, because of that night with Robert McCall in the Jupiter Hotel in Split, Croatia, when they’d talked in the darkness about staying alive in the field. Control had also confirmed the location of the Disaster Park at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel that day in their 4:00 P.M . briefing. There were eight passenger cars from the 2007 Nevsky Express bombing. The high-speed intercity passenger train had been heading to Saint Petersburg from Moscow when a bomb had exploded just before it reached Malaya Vishera. No one had been killed, although the line had been blocked both ways for several days. These eight railway cars were deemed beyond repair, so they were transported, crushed and dented, to the park and laid to rest. It was a foreboding triangle of mangled death: the