"About what?"
She smiled. "Whatever you think we need to hear."
"I don't know anything." He could feel the cold sweat on his palms.
"Viktor Fedorovich." She brushed at her auburn hair as she continued in Russian. "You have the most valuable commodity in the world, knowledge. That makes you even richer than you think you are now."
They didn't try to kill me this morning, he suddenly realized. It was Alex they were— Is he planning to double- cross everybody? No, that's insane. He'd never get away with it. He has to deliver the payment.
KGB wants me alive, he thought with a wave of relief. They think I'm the one who knows where it is.
His pulse raced. "What do you want?"
"We need you to answer certain questions. But not here. At a place where it's quieter."
The two men were loitering closer now, only a few feet away, one on each side of the table. The first was overweight, with bushy eyebrows and pockmarked cheeks. He could be Ukrainian. The other was medium height, wearing a cheap polyester suit, balding and sallow. Neither looked as though he had smiled in the last decade.
"Where do you want to go?"