Hannibal kept his eyes on the stranger as he pushed the door closed. He could almost feel his irises widening, adjusting to the darkness. The man behind the automatic had military-short hair. His tight, angular face looked as if someone had assembled it from a number of flat planes. The eyes were a sharp, piercing blue, like ice chips set into the ruddy face. This man would think nothing of killing Hannibal. The silencer attached to the barrel of his nine millimeter Browning Hi-power said that he might even get away after doing so.

"Remove your coat," the stranger said. Hannibal considered the situation and decided that if this fellow wanted him dead he already would be, so he had nothing to lose.

"Say please."

The stranger smiled then, a cold, hard smile, and leaned back in Hannibal's chair. "Please."

Well, the man was at least being respectful. Hannibal pulled off his coat and hung it on the coat rack beside the door.

"Now, with your middle finger and thumb lift that Sig Sauer out of its holster and set it here on the desk. Please."

This man was very calm and well controlled. A professional, not like the amateurs Hannibal dealt with earlier. That knowledge put him more at ease. He might die tonight, but not because of a jumpy gunman having a careless accident. Hannibal watched those hard blue eyes as he reached under his right arm and pulled his gun free of its holster. He placed it carefully on his desk in front of the gunman. Interesting, Hannibal thought, that he was left-handed too. With a nod, the other man turned on Hannibal's desk lamp. After a second he waved the tip of his barrel at Hannibal's face.

"They are truly hazel, just as your file said."

He would be referring to Hannibal's eyes. But what file was he talking about? Hannibal had no police record, except of course as a past officer. He had never served in the military. And not many people could get into his old Secret Service jacket. Now he was more curious than worried.

"Look, I hope you won't consider this rude, but this is my office after all. Just who the hell are you?"

The stranger motioned Hannibal into the guest chair. "I am Aleksandr Dimitri Ivanovich. And you are Hannibal Jones, the self-described troubleshooter, born in Frankfurt of an American soldier and a German mother. Six years New York City Police Department, three of them as a detective. Seven years in the Treasury Department's Protective Service. Licensed investigator in Washington, Virginia and Maryland."

"Okay, so you've done your homework," Hannibal said, unbuttoning his shirtsleeves. "Obviously you're not just some casual burglar."

"Of course not. Do I look like a thief? It is important that you know who I am, so that you will not make a foolish mistake. I am in fact a professional assassin."

"Really," Hannibal said. "Killers don't usually open up so easily. Freelance?"

"I do not simply work for the highest bidder," Ivanovich said with an air of indignance. "I work for what you would call the Red Mafiya. The Russian mob. So you see I am in my way a troubleshooter as well."

Hannibal sat forward, his mouth suddenly dry. The shadows behind Ivanovich seemed to grow taller and more menacing. Hannibal's mind raced back through his most recent cases, searching for an enemy who might be in the position to place an assignment in this man's hands. Then he considered Russians or Eastern Europeans he might have offended while doing his job. Ivanovich allowed him all the silence he needed to consider and reject every possibility.

"I give up. Who sent you? Why are you here?"

Ivanovich surprised Hannibal with a charming smile, although the gun's muzzle never wavered. "No one sent me here. I have come to your office for the same reason most people do. I need your help."

"My help? At gunpoint?"

Ivanovich lifted a photo album from under the chair and placed it on the desk. He slid out an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo and turned it to face Hannibal.

"This is Dani Gana, a wealthy Algerian, or so I am told."

Hannibal took the face in. The man was darker than Hannibal but his features were not African. He was aggressively handsome, wearing a day's growth of beard and the kind of self-possessed smirk that women are drawn to and men want to slap off any face they see it on. Hannibal would have disliked him right away if someone other than a hired killer had presented the picture. He raised his eyes back to Ivanovich.

"I won't find your target for you."

Ivanovich shook his head. "I already know where he is. I want to know who he really is, where he is from, where his fortune came from, and why he is in Washington."

Hannibal crossed his legs. "So you just want me to do a background investigation on this fellow. And no one is paying you to kill him?"

"No."

"Then what makes him a person of interest for you?"

"His relationship with Viktoriya Petrova."

Hannibal took his time standing up in order to avoid any threatening movement. He found his curiosity piqued despite himself, and felt confident that he was in no real danger as long as he didn't get too close to Ivanovich.

"There's a woman," Hannibal said. "That means there's a story. How about some coffee?"

Ivanovich nodded, his lips pressed together. He looked uncomfortable, maybe more so than Hannibal. After all, Hannibal had had guns pointed at him plenty of times before. But Ivanovich looked like a man who had rarely asked anyone for help and didn't like doing it at all.

Hannibal took the coffee carafe from the machine on the table beside his desk and headed toward the kitchen at the other end of the five-room apartment that served as his office. Its rooms formed one long space unless the pocket doors set in the walls were pulled together to separate them. Ivanovich followed. As Hannibal filled the carafe, he asked, "You have a relationship with this girl?"

"Viktoriya and I have a long history."

Ivanovich stood, stiff as a wooden soldier, in the doorway to the kitchen. He held his gun close to his ribs, pointed at Hannibal's chest. Once the carafe was full, Hannibal turned to face him. "What has the girl to do with the man whose picture you showed me?"

"They are engaged to be married."

Hannibal nodded and headed back through the apartment, passing the bed in the room beside the kitchen. "So why aren't you with her now?"

"There are times when one must lay low," Ivanovich answered, stepping around the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling in the middle room. "This is one of those times."

They continued past the small table in what Hannibal sometimes referred to as his conference room and into his office. He poured the water into his coffee maker, wondering how close the police might be to finding Ivanovich.

"Well, you must have been watching this guy for a while to be able to get that picture of him," Hannibal said.

"Yes," Ivanovich said, pulling an airtight canister from a shelf behind Hannibal and handing it to him. "I was simply observing him, but as it turned out the FBI was watching him also. I was spotted but escaped before the agent could call in backup."

Hannibal poured beans into the grinder side of his coffee maker. It was a custom blend of Kenyan, Colombian, and Guatemalan coffees prepared for him by The Coffee Mill in Rehoboth Beach. It was much better than his captor deserved. He hated the fact that the proposed case was beginning to interest him.

"So the FBI...