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“No chance”

“Well, on the bright side, Kholkov’s name and picture are everywhere If he tries to leave the country through an airport, port, or train station, they’ll pick him up”

“Then again,” Sam said, “from what you told me it sounds like the Spetsnaz are trained to slip across borders And he doesn’t strike h to walk into an airport”

“True”

“What about Bondaruk?” Re into his fa him?”

“Possibly It turns out the Iranian Pasdaran colonel as Bondaruk’s handler during the border war ran into some trouble with the Ayatollah a few years later We’re not sure what the rigmarole was about, but the colonel—his na for the British He’s still there I’ve got so out to him”

“Thanks, Rub

e,” Re up

The nextthey slept in until nine and had breakfast on the balcony The previous night’s rain had disappeared, leaving behind a blue sky with scattered cotton-puff clouds Over coffee they called Selht in California As far as they could tell, their chief researcher slept only five or so hours a night but never seemed the worse for it

Leaving out the finer details, Sa place eh, and it looked like a perfect match for Laurent’s chisel stamp”

“That’s better than nothing,” Sel lines three and four on the bottle, but as for the rest, zilch And I think I knohy: There’s a third key”

“Explain,” Sam said

“Laurent’s book is one key and the bottle we have is another—at least the first four lines are I’ the third key is another bottle We need all three to cross-reference and decode the rest of the lines”

“This feels convoluted,” Remi said

“Froot to make some assumptions: first, that Laurent intended to hide the twelve bottles froinal case individually, at scattered locations—his ‘arrows on a map’ to whatever’s at the end of all this”