"What about?"

"I don't know," Haley said.

Carroll halted to examine him through narrowed eyes. "Like hell. You're worse than a Soviet mole in the CIA. You always know what's going on."

Haley's red face darkened to purple and he very nearly wriggled with pleasure. "Really. He just said to find you, he didn't say why."

"But your best guess would be--?" Casanare said.

Haley only shook his head and marched determinedly to the elevator.

Casanare raised an eyebrow at Carroll, who shrugged and followed.

The lack of windows in Samuel Golden's office was disguised by the blizzard of memos, department communiques, ten-most-wanted lists, crime reports and hand drawn, crudely lettered cartoons scatological and profane dealing mostly with Senate oversight committees tacked to the walls. Golden himself was an intense, wiry man of fifty-two years, smart, tenacious and a Bureau man down to his toes. His family was Jewish, originally from Minsk, and he was fluent in Russian. He'd been a twenty-year veteran when tapped to head up the Russian Mafia task force.

At first the task force had been him and one administrative aide.

After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Republic broke up, the power and global reach of the Russian Mafia expanded exponentially, and eventually he was allocated his pick of the personnel roster. His first choice had been Alberto Casanare. On Al's recommendation, his second was Maxine Carroll. As they settled into their seats, he ran a mental review of their jackets, which were very nearly as colorful as his own.

Maxine Carroll's great-grandfather had been born Anatoli Chernofski, which became Carroll on his way through Ellis Island in 1899. He had traveled by train across the country to Dawson City, where he met a dance hall girl named Norma Swensen. They married and moved to Seattle, where Anatoli used Norma's savings to establish himself in the timber industry, gradually diversifying into paper products, soon landing a lucrative and apparently infinite contract with the Department of the Interior and thereby ensuring the security and comfort of his family well into the next century. In the fullness of time, Anatoli and Norma had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, of which Carroll was the third. At her great-grandfather's insistence, his children had grown up speaking both Russian and English, a tradition passed down through the generations. When Carroll graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in economics, she was recruited by the FBI. She was thirty-four years old, single, with no children. Golden looked at her beneath drooping lids. If he could have said the same, and if he weren't her superior officer, she wouldn't have been for long.