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hungry, Irina had no time for food nor for the sleep her weary body demanded.
    An anonymously blue minivan, a Ford Aerostar, glided by. Irina tapped her brake. The van nosed into a parking space near the store’s glass front. A moment later, a woman stepped out. Trim in shorts and halter, she wore her hair tucked up in a baseball cap.
    Irina knew she should get a similar hat when she had a chance, if she had a chance.
    Sliding the Ford’s side panel open, the woman lifted two toddlers from the backseat. They were of an age to walk, but not to walk quickly. Not bothering to lock her car, she shepherded their clumsy steps toward the grocery store, chattering to them as a good mother will, and never looking behind.
    Irina gently edged forward, sliding her Volvo into the slot next to the Aerostar. The woman was herding her children to the store’s automatic doors. Both were girls, both carried baggy, floppy, cloth dolls. Once Irina’s mother had bought her such a doll. Father ordered it returned to the GUM department store. Her birthday present that year was a soccer ball.
    Two steps, three. One girl started to dart back. Her mother seized her shoulder and pointed her in the opposite direction. The doors whooshed open, hissed closed. Irina brushed her eye.
    The woman was inside shopping with her youngsters in tow. How long before she was done? A half hour, easily.
    Ample time. Irina had all the time in the world.
    Stepping warily out of the Volvo, she stood rolling her shoulders, tilting her head left and right, stretching the stiffness out while surreptitiously scanning the parking lot, studying every car to be certain that, no, grandpa was not sitting there patiently waiting for grandma to buy her morning prunes.
    No one in sight.
    It was too hot. They were all inside pushing their shopping carts down blessedly air-conditioned aisles.
    Irina walked slowly to the Volvo’s back hatch. After taking one last look to be sure that no one was watching, she moved like lightning.
    The Volvo’s hatch flew up. The Aerostar’s extra-wide side door slid open. A weighty brown object appeared from inside the Volvo, disappeared into the Aerostar. An overnight bag followed it.
    Shoulder bag between her knees, Irina was in the front seat, crouched low, tickling the wires out of the steering column. Penknife in hand, she scraped insulation off two wires, crossed them, and tapped the Ford’s gas pedal.
    She was back on the interstate in less than two minutes.
    This time, she drove west.
    The motel from which she’d stolen the Volvo was east of the place where Dominik had died. A bullet-pocked Jeep would tell the authorities who the car thief was. In a half hour or so, a good mother gone shopping would report her minivan had been taken from the parking lot of a grocery store farther east. The missing Volvo was right next to where the Aerostar should have been.
    Three points on a map: a secret base, a bourgeois motel, a supermarket. Connect the dots. The line pointed east.
    Someone would shout with excitement: we know where she’s been! We know the direction she’s headed!
    They’d deploy their resources to the east. Roadblocks on every highway, every graveled lane. Helicopters on patrol. Surveillance planes stuttering along only a little faster than their stall speed. Local law enforcement officers, national security agents, soldiers in uniform they’d all be there, scouring a bleak and baking landscape for a boring blue Ford Aerostar speeding east.
    Her best hope was to backtrack west. Although alone and by itself, it was a slender hope. She had her hands on a Magma Black secret. The Americans would stop at nothing to get it back.
    Of course, they’d assume she knew what the heavy brown box was; just as they’d assume she’d had time to examine the computer file in her breast pocket. Given those assumptions, given the implications of a foreign spy knowing a Magma Black secret, what must follow was simply logical: if they caught her,