When he'd asked his mother why he had been chosen to go rather than one of his siblings, she had explained it was because he'd always excelled in school and had the greatest chance of benefitting from his uncle's tutelage. But despite her stated reasons Sergei had felt discarded, cast off like an undesirable sentenced to the Gulag, and suspected she had been more concerned with the wages his working-age brothers could bring into the household than his academic prospects. In the end, however, he had come to be grateful for her decision. Whatever he knew about life and living he had learned on his own, but to his uncle he credited the scientific curiosity that had led to his becoming a physicist.

Now the Citroen took a sharp curve in the road, flinging Sergei sideways so that he was bumped against the right passenger door. He peered out his window, where the switchback skirted the very edge of the mountain-side, a dizzying sight that knotted his stomach with tension. Yet his driver had only accelerated as he took the turn, as if never pausing to consider that a single lapse would plunge them over the dropoff into some nameless chasm. How odd, then, for Sergei to still find himself thinking about an absurd paternal injunction to always take notice of men's shoes--but perhaps it was just a distraction to keep his panic at bay.

What, he wondered, would his father make of the pair of men who had been his guards and traveling companions for the past several days? Both had on Western-style boots of finely tooled leather, yet both were also adorned with tattoos that literally stamped them as hardened career criminals. The burly, thick-featured one on his left, Molkov, had a cross on each knuckle of his right hand, indicating the number of times he had been imprisoned. The "seal" of the ring tattoo on his middle finger, a dagger entwined in a fanged serpent, denoted a murder conviction. The signet on his index finger resembling an inverted spade on a playing card labeled him as a gangster who had been jailed for a violent offense such as assault or armed robbery. The larger gladiator tattoo on his right arm--its bottom half discernible below the rolled-up sleeve of his khaki shirt--was perhaps the most malign of all, identifying him as an executioner with a passion for inflicting sadistic deaths upon his victims.

Alexandre, the thin, bony Georgian seated in front of Sergei, wore a similar resume of offenses on his flesh--the knuckle crosses, the symbols boasting of myriad felonies. But there was another that Sergei found of particular interest, a signet-ring tattoo rendered in careful detail, depicting the sun rising above a horizon that was patterned like a checkerboard. This, he knew, was a testament to Alexandre's criminal ancestry, a proud declaration that he was upholding a familial tradition of lawlessness.