It could have been an accident. He swiped at his brow and told himself that anything was possible.

Don't be a fool. They're closing in. How much do they know?

He sipped at the gritty coffee and scanned the street.

Just get through the next few days, he told himself. Once the transfer's complete, your part's over.

He was reaching for his small white cup when he noticed the woman, striding directly toward his table, smiling, catching his eye. The way she was swinging her brown leather purse, the jaunty thrust of hips beneath the suede skirt, the carefully groomed auburn hair--all marked her as American. Rich American. Probably headed into American Express to cash a thousand or so in traveler's checks. America . . .

He lounged back in his chair with a rakish air. He was, he knew, an attractive man. He had deep blue eyes, sandy hair, a practiced smile, a trim figure far younger than his fifty-six years. He'd divorced his wife Natasha three years ago, after she discovered his lunchtime liaisons with one of the girls in the State Committee typing pool. He had experience handling women.

Three weeks in Athens, he thought, and maybe my luck is about to change. If you can get her, the nightmare could be over for a while.

You can't go back to the hotel now; they may be watching. But if she's got a room somewhere? What better way to hide out till the transfer is complete?

He was still trying to make his ragged mind function. Now was the time for a "pick-up" routine. The lonely traveler . . . _Kak grussno mnye, tak zhalostno mnye _. . . no, damn, not the sentimental Russian, think American.

But where? He'd heard of New York, San Francisco, Miami, even Chicago.

But what if she was from one of those places?

All the careful preparation and he still didn't dare put himself to the test. So what would he say? Canada? Australia?

Her eyes held his, interest growing as she continued to approach. They were darkened with kohl, sensual, inviting. And she was still smiling, even as she placed her hand on the chair across from him.

Was this how the women . . .? America was the Promised Land.

"_Etot stolnik osvobodetsya_, Viktor Fedorovich?"

It took a second for the language to register. She was speaking Russian, calmly inquiring if the table was free, but his mind was rejecting it, refusing to accept the implications.

"Perhaps you'd like to buy me a _kofye_, Comrade. I prefer it very sweet." Now she was settling her purse on the table, adjusting her tight skirt in preparation to sit. "Or would you rather take me shopping. I could help you spend some of the money."

He'd never seen her before in his life.

Your part will be routine. Somewhere in the back of his mind echoed the voice of the president's personal aide, the brisk young Muscovite who had come to his dacha that snowy evening last October. We will take care of any risks.

It had all been a lie. Every word. They must have known where he was every minute.

Then he spotted the two men approaching from opposite sides of the square. The suits that didn't quite fit, the trudging gait. Why must they always look like the stupid, brutal party hacks they are, he thought bitterly. The incompetent bastards.

Who betrayed me? Was it Novosty? Did he do this, to get them off his trail?

So be it. First I'll kill her, and then I kill him.

Seething, he pulled his body erect while his right hand plunged for the snap on the holster at his belt. Simple. He'd just shoot her on the spot, then make a run for it. Through the cafe, out the back. They wouldn't dare start anything here, in the middle of Athens, that would cause an international "incident." The snap was open. He thumbed up the leather flap and realized the holster was empty.

The crash. It must have jarred loose. His new Walther automatic had been incinerated, along with the Audi. His life began to flash before his eyes. Make a run for it, he heard his mind saying, commandeer the first taxi, any taxi. He shoved back from the table, sending his chair clattering across the patched sidewalk.

She reached into her leather purse, now lying atop the table, next to his coffee. He heard the click of a safety sliding off. "Don't be impetuous, Viktor Fedorovich. You've been such a good boy this last week, showing us the sights. The perfect tour guide. But now your little vacation is over. We must talk."

"About what?"

She smiled. "Whatever you think we need to hear."

"I don't know anything." He could feel the cold sweat on his palms.

"Viktor Fedorovich." She brushed at her auburn hair as she continued in Russian. "You have the most valuable commodity in the world, knowledge.

That makes you even richer than you think you are now."

They didn't try to kill me this morning, he suddenly realized. It was Alex they were-- Is he planning to double- cross everybody? No, that's insane. He'd never get away with it. He has to deliver the payment.

KGB wants me alive, he thought with a wave of relief. They think I'm the one who knows where it is.

His pulse raced. "What do you want?"

"We need you to answer certain questions. But not here. At a place where it's quieter."

The two men were loitering closer now, only a few feet away, one on each side of the table. The first was overweight, with bushy eyebrows and pockmarked cheeks. He could be Ukrainian. The other was medium height, wearing a cheap polyester suit, balding and sallow. Neither looked as though he had smiled in the last decade.

"Where do you want to go?"

"We will take a stroll in the park." She gestured toward Amalias Avenue. On the other side was Ethnikos Kipos, the National Garden. Then she smiled again. "We thought you would like to take the morning air."

She rose, purse in hand, and tossed a wad of drachmas onto the wooden table. The coffee drinkers around them did not look up from their newspapers and tourist maps.

As they made their way past the Olympic Airways office on the corner and across the avenue, she said nothing. Her silence is deliberate, he told himself, part of a trick to unnerve me.

It was working. He was learning something about himself he'd never before known. He was learning he was a coward.

That was the reality. He wouldn't hold out. He'd tell them everything he knew, because they would hurt him badly. He couldn't bear pain; they probably knew that. And then they'd kill him anyway because he couldn't tell them the one thing they wanted to know. He didn't know it himself.

Viktor Fedorovich Volodin realized he was about to die. All the years of pointless intrigue in the party, the fudging of production figures, the father-in-law who'd made his existence wretched, it all added up to a lifetime of nothing but misery, with the payoff a bullet. Rasstrel, a KGB execution.

They were entering the national garden, a mirage of green in the desert of asphalt and cement that is central Athens. Its informal walkways were shady lanes of quiet and cool that seemed miles away from the smoke and glare and heat of the avenues.

Finally she spoke. "We're running out of time, and patience, Viktor Fedorovich. Let's start with the money. Where have you deposited it?

Next, we want to know the names of everyone--"

"It--it's--I don't know where it is now."

"You're lying." She did not break her pace. "The time for that is over."

"But I don't have it. Someone else--" He heard himself blurting out the truth. "He's in charge of everything."

"You are lying, again. You are the one who embezzled the funds." She was walking by his side as they entered a secluded alleyway of hedges, the other two trailed only inches behind. There was no escape. "The criminal is you, Viktor Fedorovich."

"No, he--I--I don't know anything." How true was that? he asked himself.

He knew where the money was supposed to go, but he didn't know what it was for, at least not specifically. That part had been classified. He had the small picture but not the big one.