She planned her course of action with the mathematical precision of an experienced cartographer. The entire exercise took her fifteen minutes.
The Caves Monastery was four miles southeast of her present location at Independence Square. Nadia ambled like a tourist south on Khreschatyk, back toward Hotel Rus. After twenty steps, she turned and took a mental snapshot of the scene behind her. Pedestrians crowded the promenades. She didn’t try to memorize faces, just shapes and colors. Three beats later, she resumed walking south.
At the corner of Arkhitectora, she took a left to head east. The crowd thinned on the side street. Nadia accelerated her pace. Counted twenty paces. Stopped. Turned. A young couple, a businessman, and a babushka rounded the corner toward her.
Nadia took another left onto a promenade beside the Cinema Ukraina. Jogged twenty paces. Turned. Waited.
The couple walked by. The businessman and the babushka turned left and followed her.
Nadia took her third fast left onto Institutska. Twenty paces later, she was back on Khreshchatyk, right where she’d started. She turned right and headed north, in the opposite direction of the Caves Monastery. Twenty paces later, she stopped and turned.
The babushka rounded the corner alone. She wore an old gray sweater and a floral scarf around her head that obscured her face. She might have been seventy-two or twenty-seven. Twenty meters away, their eyes met. The babushka quickly pulled away to peruse a Benetton store window.
Nadia checked her watch: 12:28. She power walked a kilometer farther north. When she got to the Golden Domes of the Cathedral of St. Mikhail, she asked a young man in a warm-up suit for the entrance to the funicular train. He pointed a block ahead toward the far side of the domes.
Nadia looked around. No sign of the babushka. She glanced at her wrist: 12:38. She pulled out her guidebook and strolled onward, pretending to be sightseeing.
The back of the cathedral hung on a cliff. An ancient-looking tram with a sky-blue roof and immaculate white body sat on steep rails, locked in place by heavy cables. People jammed the interior so tightly their faces seemed plastered against the window.
Nadia started toward the cathedral’s rear entrance. She took deep, even breaths.
A bell sounded.
Nadia raced for the funicular.
Snack vendors beneath green-and-white umbrellas gaped as she blew by them. She burst into the domed entrance. The funicular door started to close.
“Wait,” she shouted in English, the language of opportunity. The guidebook said conductors loved to fine foreigners for any and all violations.
The door slid to a close.
Nadia leaped onto the edge of the tram. She wedged an arm and a shoulder inside. The door pressed against her.
A heavyset woman reached out with one hand and pulled it open a few inches. A fat man with garlic breath in her way, however, would not move. Nadia pleaded with her eyes.
“Push him,” the woman said, aiming her disgust at Nadia for not being more assertive.
“Push,” they all shouted, as though her stupidity far outweighed his rudeness.
Nadia spun, stuck her butt into the man’s upper thighs, put her head down, and pushed with her rear.
The man swore under his breath. Nadia slid inside. The woman released her grip. The door slammed shut. Nadia looked up.
A fist smashed against the glass door. A fierce young man in a blue warm-up suit pointed a finger at her. He hurled a single word at her. It sounded like Russian slang. Nadia didn’t understand the word but was certain it wasn’t a compliment.
In the distance, the babushka sprinted toward the empty station like the world’s fastest granny. She was closer to twenty-seven than seventy-two after all. Two people were tailing her, and neither was Specter. As the funicular rolled down the cliff toward Podil, the man in the warm-up suit touched the headphone wrapped around his left ear and jabbered into it.
It was too late. The funicular was the fastest way from Upper to Lower Kiev. She’d be in Podil in ten minutes. In daytime rush hour, it would take a car half an hour to catch up.
The tram was packed so tight it was impossible for Nadia to get to the front. She bought a ticket by passing one hryvnia to the conductor through the hands of her fellow passengers. A stamped ticket and fifty kopek were returned to her the same way. No one grumbled. This was the norm.
The tram descended along a wooded cliffside and a white steel fence. Halfway down the mountain, the vista opened up to reveal the waterfront scene of the Dnipro River. Ships lay moored beside venerable warehouses at the harbor’s edge. Cranes and derricks elevated the skyline.
At the bottom station, the funicular deposited Nadia in Podil, at the opposite end of Kiev from the Caves Monastery. She raced to the subway across the street. Trains ran every two and a half minutes. She boarded a train within sixty seconds of her arrival, repeating the last-second process she had used to board the funicular.