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helicopter perched on the power lines on the left, the derailed train in the middle of the park, the crashed Aeroflot transport plane on the right.
    Only the Russians would think a Disaster Park would be fun for tourists to visit. She’d heard the park had been closed since 2011.
    Except as a backup safe house for The Company.
    Elena braked to a stop near the derailed train. She thought it was amusing they’d also brought the railway tracks along. The wheels needed to sit on something . The middle four cars listed to one side, as if they were going to topple off the track. But she could see the steel wires pinning them in place. She killed the car engine and picked up her Beretta. She took a pencil flashlight out of her black jewelled bag, checked that the small silver flash drive was still in there, an irrational fear, she knew it was. She put the jewelled bag over her shoulder and climbed out of the Lada.
    She stood for a moment, shivering in the cocktail dress, but savoring the cold on her bare left arm and leg. The burning had died down a little. She searched the darkness. Nothing moved. She listened. The wind howled and blew the very light snow flurries around. She heard nothing. She turned and ran the short distance to the crippled first passenger train car. She kicked off her black Italian pumps and climbed aboard.
    The door to the passenger car was buckled. She squeezed past it into the cold, somber interior. She watched the shadows jump in the light of the pencil flash. It made her heart jump. She walked along the main aisle, past the rotting and split seats on both sides. She was counting the ones on her left. Now she faltered. How many had McCall told her? Five or six? It was six, hadn’t Control confirmed that?
    She reached the sixth set of seats and knelt down. She felt along the panel below the two seats. It was cracked and the paint flaked like on all of the other wooden panels below the seats. Her fingers whispered along the top.
    Nothing.
    She had the wrong seats.
    And her time was running out.
    She was pretty sure she’d given the slip to the FTB agents following her, but she’d had no time to check out other cars leaving the explosion site. She didn’t believe she’d picked up a tail, but she couldn’t be sure. And every moment wasted in this creepy, desolate tragi-park was working against her.
    She found it.
    Her fingers touched a raised area and pressed it to one side. The panel below the seat fell open. She reached in, felt around, and touched an oblong object that was cold and damp and slick. She pulled it out: something wrapped in black shiny polythene. She took off the elastic band holding it together and unwrapped two passports. Both of them had her name in different nationalities: American and Russian. Two pictures of her, one with her hair down, one with it up. ID papers, credit cards, pictures of a family she did not have, receipts from Moscow stores she had never been in, letters of recommendation from CNN and the U.S. Department of Justice. She put them all into her jewelled bag.
    She reached in farther and felt around. Cold, hard, gun-shaped. She pulled out another Beretta, wrapped in plastic, a box of ammunition, a switchblade knife with enough attachments to send a scout troop into ecstasy. And a small envelope.
    She tore it open.
    Car keys. To a gray Volvo XC60, five cylinders, six-speed manual transmission. There was a square piece of paper attached to the key fob. She shone the tiny light onto it: a crude map to where the Volvo was parked behind the derailed train in the shadow of an abandoned building.
    Elena smiled.
    Had she looked up, through the grimy train window, she would have seen the black Gaz-3102 Volga drive through the moonlight, its engine noise covered by the storm. It parked behind the steel ladder leading up to the crippled helicopter sitting precariously on the fake power lines.

 
    CHAPTER 4
    McCall liked this Italian restaurant in his