His thoughts stuttered to a stop. And do what? He had no money, and no passport. Talk to the cops? The cops all appeared to be backing the various mobsters. Maybe somebody would let him use the phone? To make an international call? Yeah, like that was going to happen. No, he had to resign himself—he was not going to be boarding a plane out of this shithole. It appeared that for the moment Baba Yaga was his only ticket out. Maybe he’d find an opportunity to help himself to some of the loot in her satchel and then he could consider other options.

Once again he thought of Mollie and that flash he’d seen through the doorway she’d opened for her escape. She had gone to Paris. Fucking Paris.

He returned to the private hangar. Baba Yaga just stared at him. “They’re waiting for you to show up,” Franny said.

The old woman nodded and spoke to Stache. He started the van. Franny scrambled into the passenger seat next to him and they were on the move.

Once again they skirted the city until they hit the entrance to a modern highway. There was a cop car parked there, lights revolving, a uniformed officer leaning against the side. Baba Yaga snapped out a command, and Stache swerved away from the entrance.

Another hurried and incomprehensible conversation ensued. Stache pulled a hard U-turn and they headed back toward the airport, only this time they sailed past. The Belt of Venus formed a pink arch on the horizon. Above it stars littered the sky. It also told Franny they were traveling east, but to where?

“Where are we going?” he asked. Baba Yaga ignored him, and kept scrolling on the cell phone. “May I use your phone? Call my captain.”

“No.”

“How about my mother?”

“No.”

They turned down a road that seemed to be heading for distant hills rising like dark blue cutouts against a paler sky. After another couple of turns it was clear that was where they were heading.

“So we’re literally heading for the hills?” The smile he’d summoned at his own feeble joke curdled and died under Baba Yaga’s gelid gaze.

The Angel sat on the desk chair, towel in hand, watching expressionless as the cop surveyed her handiwork. She’d mopped her face dry, but her long brown hair, tightly braided in a thick rope that hung nearly to her waist, was still soaked and dripping lightly onto the soaked hotel-room rug. Fortunately, the leather jumpsuit that she favored while in the field had repelled the sprinklers’ advances and she was still dry underneath it.

“Andrei the Ice Man,” the blond detective-inspector said as the EMTs lifted him, groaning, onto a dolly and wheeled him across the squishy carpet. “Nice work. How many times did you hit him?”

The cop didn’t sound reproachful, just curious. She was a tall woman, almost the Angel’s height but the Angel probably had forty pounds on her. She had a lean body and a lean, sharp-featured face. Her hair was long and blond, her eyes a mild blue.