The man shook his head. “I’m a man who was taking a car to Vladivostok when somebody I met at the American Embassy in Moscow called to say that two Americans might be coming along that route who could use some help.”

“Just that?”

“Just that.” He looked out the window. “You’d better get going. People will be flooding the platform in a minute and you might want to slip out with them.”

“We will,” said Sam. “Thanks for the ride, Mr. C.”

Remi popped up on tiptoe and gave the white-bearded man a kiss, and they slipped out onto the platform, moving quickly with the rest of the crowd. They found their way to a stand outside the terminal that had a sign with a picture of an airplane on it and boarded the bus that stopped there. Sam watched how much money the other people were paying the driver and did the same.

In a short time, they were at the airport. Without talking about it or making a plan, they had changed their way of traveling. They were much more watchful than they had ever been before. They went together to the counter, where they saw the names of destinations printed in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, bought their tickets together, and then went toward the departure gates. If one of them went to a restroom, the other would wait just outside the door, noting each person who went in and listening for any sound of a scuffle.

Their plane for Astana, Kazakhstan left after five hours. They were both quietly but deeply relieved to get airborne toward Kazakhstan. It seemed to them to be a step away from the conspiracy of criminals who had been trying to harm them since they’d arrived in Berlin weeks before.

The city of Astana was all new and very busy. The airport had two terminals, international and domestic, so they went through the customs office, picked up their written invitation to enter the country and their visas, then made reservations on Air Astana for Almaty, the old capital in the southeast of the huge country.

When they told the airline’s English-speaking representative what their ultimate destination was, they learned that getting to Almaty was easy but that there was just one flight from there to Taraz a week. The Scat Air flight from Almaty to Zhambyl Airport in Taraz took only a couple of hours, but those hours were always five-fifty to seven-fifty p.m., on Thursday. They boarded their first flight for the six hundred five miles to Almaty and later checked into a hotel there to wait for Thursday to come.

They called Selma from the hotel to let her know where they were: the Worldhotel Saltanat Almaty.