“She saw us.” Though he kept his voice low, he wore a grimace, and through his clenched teeth wafted the stink of his breath, stomach acid and rot.

She brought a knee up between his legs hard enough to jolt him a foot forward. But he didn’t so much as grunt. He only rolled off her, climbed into the driver’s seat, and waited. Candy rose and stood for a time in the dark alley, giving her breath time to even out. Then she walked around and got in.

They drove several blocks in silence. Jaggers pulled over by the body shop they had scouted the night before. Leaving the car running, he picked the padlock and slid the gate open. He drove through and into the garage.

Another benefit of Škoda Fabias: Crimea was lousy with them, like cockroaches, and every shop worth its salt was stocked with spare parts. As Jaggers pulled off the crumpled bumper, Candy took from Setyeyiva’s briefcase his laptop as well as a hardware token cryptocard that generated a new randomized log-in code every sixty seconds. Sitting on a workbench with the laptop resting across her knees, she waited for the token numbers to flip, then punched in the code.

She and Jaggers slogged away quietly and in concert, Candy clicking on the keyboard while he mounted a new bumper and grille and hammered out creases in the hood. He worked with the quick, efficient movements of a rodent. They were making good headway, and the night was young, but they still had to deal with the bodies in the trunk.

She accessed the databases, finally locating what looked like the right one. Then she ran a search for 1-855-2-NOWHERE and waited for the data to load. The information came up.

“Goddamn it,” she said. “Goddamn it.”

Jaggers looked up from his crouch at the bumper, where he was wielding a spray-paint gun. In the dim light, his dark eyes were holes in his face. A surgeon-like paint mask covered his nose and mouth, so his voice seemed to issue from the air itself.

“What?” it asked.

“Orphan X never parked the phone number here. It was a misdirect. He paid them a fee to open a dummy account.”

“Orphan Y can follow the money.”

Candy sneered. She’d been at this longer than Jaggers. “Orphan X set up that account for us to find, you idiot. Which means there will be no following the money. Not by Van Sciver, his übersoftware, or anyone or anything else.”

Jaggers returned to his work, misting a fine layer of silver across the crease in the hood. The news seemed to carry no weight for him. She wondered if he cared about anything.

“You killed that girl for nothing,” she said.

He didn’t shift focus from his work. “We killed Refat Setyeyiva for nothing.”

“Yeah, but that was the job.”