Free Hidden Prey by John Sandford Page A

Oleshev.”
    “That’s not the name on his papers,” Chu said.
    Nadya shrugged.
    “All the people from the ship agreed he was a guy named Oleg Moshalov,” said Reasons, pressing just a little.
    Nadya said, “Well, he’s not.” To Chu: “If you could make some fingerprints for me, that I could witness . . .” She dipped into her bag again and took out a stack of thin plastic envelopes.
    “We’ve got prints . . .” Chu began.
    “She’d like to witness it,” Lucas said. “With her own stuff.”
    The pathologist nodded. “What do I do?”
    She opened one of the envelopes and slipped out a sheet of plastic half the size of a dollar bill. In the center of the plastic sheet was a red square covered with a strip of peel-off film.
    “You pull off the cover and roll one of the right-hand fingers in the red square,” she said.
    “Red Square,” Chu said. To Lucas: “Get it?”
    Lucas shook his head once and Nadya sighed and said, “Then you let the sheet dry for a few seconds, and we put it back in the envelope.”
    The pathologist said, “Slick,” and took the prints. He did it quickly, expertly, and as he finished each print, Nadya lifted it to the overhead light to look through the plastic. Satisfied, she fanned each print for a moment, drying it, then slipped each plastic sheet back in its individual envelope.
    “Where would you get a fingerprint kit like that?” Chu asked.
    “You would have to call the consulate,” Nadya said. She handed him an unused envelope. “You can have this one, if you would like. The manufacturer is named on the back, but it is in Russian. There’s a phone number in St. Petersburg.”
    “Get my wife to translate it,” Reasons said.
    Nadya nodded: “The chemical on the sheet is made to . . . mmm . . . I don’t know the English word, but it is, er, compounded to reflect light from a scanner, so that any scanner can be used to digitize the fingerprints.” She used her hands when she talked, like a French woman.
    “Slick,” Chu said again. “Thanks.”
    Outside, Nadya took a breath, looked up and down the street and said, “This could be a Russian town, except for the signs. I don’t mean the words on the signs, I mean the signs are everywhere. Everything is signs.”
    “So you want to look at the files, or what?” Reasons asked.
    “No. If we could go to the hotel, I could transmit the fingerprints back to Washington, and use the toilet and maybe get clean from the trip. Then the files?”
     
    L IKE L UCAS , Nadya was staying at the Radisson, a cylindrical building that looked like a chubby, upright tower of Pisa; the hotel was conveniently across the street from the police station. They took her all the way to her room, where Lucas explained the TV remote and the movies channel, and they showed her how to hook the modem through the hotel’s phone system. They dialed into the Russian embassy’s server, got the connect tone, and left her.
    “We’ll wait in the restaurant. Back in half an hour,” Lucas said, as they went out the door.
    Going back down the hallway to the elevators, Reasons said, “She said she didn’t know him.”
    “I don’t think she did,” Lucas said. “She was too careful about the fingerprints.”
    “You saw her jump, though.”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said. “She’s no cop.”
    “What do you think? She’s a spy?”
    “I think she’s probably with one of their intelligence services, and for some reason, they sent somebody who isn’t used to dealing with bodies,” Lucas said. They got to the elevators and Lucas pushed the up button; Reasons pushed it again just to make sure it was pushed. “She’s not a clerk. She’s an executive. She’s been around.”
    “More than me,” Reasons said.
    “I’m not exactly a world traveler,” Lucas said. “I went to Mexico acouple of years ago, on a job. I went to Europe when I was in college. That’s about it.”
    “Europe,” Reasons said. “French pussy.”
    “I was playing