Kovac says something to his daughter in a language I don’t understand. Serbian? Hungarian?

Katra keeps nodding as her father speaks. Then she decides apparently to speak to me.

“Lucy, my papa says that you say you will try. Try. Try. Try. He understands your heart is big. But he says that trying is good, but is not good enough.”

I nod. I tell her that I understand.

Troy walks toward me. He holds his iPad in my line of vision. “Take a look. The news media is all over us,” he says.

I look down at the screen.

“Let me borrow your iPad,” I say to Troy. “I’m going to visit our leader.”

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Five years ago

ONLY TWO PASSENGERS FLEW on the private plane that left Saratov, Russia. They were a man and a woman, each about forty years old. They were not linked romantically. In fact, they did not particularly enjoy each other’s company. But their supervisors had put them together. They would work as a team.

Fifteen hours later, they landed on a small airstrip somewhere just west of the Jersey shore. Two cars then brought them to a very small cottage—a shack, really—in Cranbury, New Jersey. One of the cars, a decrepit 1998 Toyota, was left with them.

After a week in Cranbury, the man told the woman that their “patrons” in Russia had emailed him. She was to take a job they had arranged for her. She would be clearing tables at the Molly Pitcher Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike.

The woman was outraged. “I am a trained pediatrician. Now they want me to watch people eat hamburgers and cinnamon buns and then clean up their shit. No.”

The man responded quietly but firmly. “They have told me that if you don’t take some kind of job, we will be sent out of the country. Or even worse, sent to prison. And listen, Doctor, you will not be working any harder than myself. My job is terrible.”

That was true, and the woman knew it. Almost every day the man drove into the city of Trenton and talked his way into homeless shelters or women’s shelters. He went to the areas behind the railroad station and near the transient hotels where prostitutes gathered to meet clients, to shoot up, and often to perform their services right on the streets.

It was at those places the man searched for pregnant women, women who might be persuaded to sell their babies when they were born. The women—often addled by fear or drugs, or both—usually accepted his proposal.

So his partner angrily agreed to take the job. Every night after he worked in Trenton, he would pick her up at the Molly Pitcher Service Area. They would sit in the 1998 Toyota and dine on the food she had sneaked from the fast-food restaurants—cold, chewy shish kebabs, Coca-Colas without fizz, hot dogs without buns.