Grigor had returned to the rental car he’d parked up the street. Hastened over to it with the grocery bag, dropped it onto the back seat and pulled into Gelfland’s driveway to collect his body. Afterward, he transported it to an abandoned barn and left it in a bath of sodium hydroxide, burying the groceries and Gelfland’s clothes deep in the heavily wooded Pine Barrens.

But he was sure there hadn’t been a cash register slip. He had picked up the scattered grocery items and thoroughly emptied Gelfland’s pockets. He was meticulous with his cleanup.

There was no receipt.

Unless Gelfland had left it in the car. It could have fallen out of the grocery bag, or he might have set it aside when putting change or his credit card into his wallet. Not that it made any difference. The important thing was that Musil had found the receipt and taken it with him. Probably for the date stamp. Which was only days before the start of Gelfland’s training for the CloudCable cruise, when Grigor had assumed his identity. Add all that to Clara Hughes’s picture of him and missing person report to the police, and it left no doubt Musil had sniffed a connection between Gelfland and the Stalwart’s disappearance.

Fake Gelfland’s expiration date had come due. Musil’s visit to New Hampshire set the clock ticking a little sooner than anticipated, but it really wasn’t too big of a deal. Everything was still following the script Koschei had written months ago.

A moment passed. Grigor opened his eyes and went to get his backpack. He would take care of business here, finish up ahead of schedule, then move on to Pearl Harbor and prepare for the fireworks.

Crimea

On the south side of the villa’s rooftop turret, a door opened onto a small, flat promenade where Drajan sometimes came to breathe the night air and think. The balustrade and rail were carved from local marble, and he had stood leaning against it in his black silk robe for some minutes, listening to the pulse of the sea. The hardware for Assassin’s Mace would be installed within days. But it had to be completely reprogrammed before it became operative.

He went back into the turret, where his laptop sat on a long, draw-leaf table in the center of a three-hundred-year-old Turkish rug. A tulip glass filled with amber liquid stood beside the computer. He hadn’t left it there.

He walked over to the table, lifted the glass and sniffed above its rim. Medovukha. The Russian still mead, prepared from fermented honey, water, herbs and spices. Its aroma was sweet and flowery.