That’s when she noticed something in the dark corner of the closet. She had left the door open after looking for a doorway to the attic or some kind of crawl space into another room. A dim shaft of light emerged from the far corner of the closet. She had not noticed it before.

She rolled off the bed and stepped softly on bare feet to the closet, making sure no one in the room below could hear. Scooting a couple of boxes aside, she found an old-fashioned metal grate that looked through to the floor beneath. Crouching, Goldman peered through the opening. Nothing was visible down there but the dusty top of some piece of furniture, maybe a china cabinet or bookcase.

She was about to tiptoe back to the bed when she heard voices. Men’s voices. The deep, guttural tones were clearly in Russian.

For the first time in a while, Catherine Goldman smiled. Russian just happened to be the language she had learned at her grandmother’s knee. She said a silent prayer of thanks for the long-departed old lady who had doggedly insisted that the family learn her native language, even though she had fled the pogroms as a teenager.

“It will stand you in good stead someday, my child,” she had said. Catherine had doubted it until this very moment.

She recognized the voice. The one she knew as Mikhail was speaking.

“Nicholas, what are we going to do? Sit here and babysit that SEC bitch until the end of time?”

That was the one she believed to be the polite one. He didn’t seem so polite now. She heard the disembodied voice of “Nicholas” as he answered him rather heatedly. She struggled to understand his rapid-fire Russian. She was rusty, but still could make out most of it.

“If that is what Boris Medikov orders, that is what we will do.”

“Why don’t we just kill her?” Mikhail shot back. “We could bury the body and go back to the city and make certain the balance of the plan is carried out properly.”

She breathed in sharply and closed her eyes, forcing herself to listen harder.

“Simple. Because Boris Medikov says that we should keep her alive until after the plan is put into effect. She may be useful in dealing with those OptiMarx idiots. Medikov said the time is very soon. At the best, we will only have a few days to make our profits before Admiral Durov puts his plan into effect. From then on, we have to disrupt the U.S. market to divert their attention…from us and Durov as well.”