That was week six. They were now in week thirty-seven.

Amir Safieh was entry number 103. Entries 1 through 102 had proved to be dead ends, sooner or later. Every last one of them. But in the course of tracing them, new names were being added to the bottom of the list. Not many, and not often relevant, but they were names.

David Cole had been entry 32.

The search had become annoyance, and then routine, and then frustration, and was just moving into art by the time they came to Safieh. They worked cooperatively but independently, Solenis following deduction and intuition, and Gabriel tracing connections methodically, and much more slowly. Sol's progress usually left Gabe behind, but most times he caught up again. Gabe didn't get stuck.

Safieh had been a Lieutenant in Tactical Response Unit Four at the time of Simon Reiner's court martial; their overlap had been only four months. Furthermore, he'd not been court martialled himself; he had allowed his contract to lapse only five years ago. He would have been discounted as a worthwhile thread altogether, if his name hadn't been mentioned in a nine-year-old conversation between Reiner and the late David Cole.

But they had traced him from his honorable discharge to his home in Saudi Arabia. And then they traced him to Singapore when he moved there two months later. And then to Los Angeles, Rome, Kiev, Bombay, and finally, to Vienna. Once they had his residence chain, they tapped the SOTF's database of Wolf activity in those areas during the corresponding time periods, to see what matched up. The result was close enough to warrant jumping back and tracking his SOTF career. And sure enough, his unit -- he had been promoted to X.O. of TRU9 three years after Reiner's court martial -- had suffered some severe blowback since his instatement.

Amir Safieh had been a Wolf mole, and had been living in Vienna as recently as two weeks ago, when he had used an alias's credit card to pay for an expensive lunch.

Sarah smiled at a female shopkeeper and approached her, greeted her in clumsy German and asked about the pottery she was selling, and Sol watched the man pay for the meal and depart with his companion. Sarah smiled nervously as the shopkeeper spoke to her in equally clumsy English and nodded, scanning the marketplace for another booth to escape to, and Sol watched Safieh and company get into a little green car and drive away. Sarah politely excused herself and walked away from the disappointed merchant to examine the rest that the street had to offer, and Sol smoothed at her hair and reached into her purse to press the tiny comlink button.

"Headed home with Bridgette."

There was a tiny click of static in her ear and then silence; Gabriel was already waiting in position, and no more speech was necessary. She pressed the button once more, withdrew a compact and opened it so she could stare at Sarah's reflection. Everything was in place, and she snapped it shut, took another pair of photographs and then walked back toward the hotel.

The Tourotel Mariahilf was located near the inner city and quite close to many of Safieh's favorite places. Sarah smiled at the desk clerk as she walked through the lobby and he smiled back before she reached the stairs, and she looked pleasantly content with her small tour of Vienna until the door had shut behind her. Then the purse and the scarf dropped to the bed, and Sol went to the sink and washed Sarah away, pausing to pull off the earrings and the necklace before she bound her hair back from her face and looked at her own reflection once again.

She looked tired - she was tired - but the circles under her eyes were nothing that couldn't be hidden, the grim set to her mouth nothing that couldn't be eliminated with enough concentration. Still, after only a few moments she turned away and went back into the bedroom to change. It wasn't that she hated what she was seeing. It was just that she hated what she'd seen.

Two hours later, there were footsteps in the hallway. She recognized the step, but she still took her pistol and stood to the left of the door, just outside the radius of its swing. There was a chirp as the card key opened the lock. The door swung inward, and Sol leveled her pistol at head level until the intruder came into view. The pistol dropped and Gabe blinked at her with his lack of surprise and set his satchel down on the small table to the right of the door.

Meanwhile, Stein was still standing in the bathroom, gripping the counter with white knuckles. She would stand there for a few more minutes yet; Gabriel returned his attention to the main room. Safieh had dressed back into his pants and was buttoning his shirt. He had turned on the television, and was watching what sounded like a news program, but the screen was angled away from the camera's fisheye lens. Gabe picked up the remote sitting on the still-made bed beside him, and turned on the television in his own room, muting the sound and flipping through channels until he came to a program whose anchorpersons' mouths shaped the same words that were coming from the bud in his ear. The program spoke of civil unrest in southeast China following the suppression of a protest march by police in riot armor. Gabriel watched Safieh's reaction to the news: grim satisfaction.

Safieh continued to dress, and at length the dose Stein had taken released her enough for her to set about cleaning up. When she emerged she moved toward Safieh in what was probably intended to be a sensuous manner, though a slight stumble weakened the effect. Safieh noticed neither her saunter nor her falter; he was doing up his tie, and his attention was on the television. Some of Stein's high seemed to bleed off when her seductive mien was ignored, but with redoubled intent she pressed herself against his side and murmured into his ear. Gabriel turned up the volume again, not particularly interested in what was being said but unwilling to let anything go unheard. To her suggestion, Safieh replied that he had to be going, but that he would call her tomorrow. He put on his shoes, collected his keys, and with a peck on Stein's cheek, left the room. On the third monitor Gabriel had with him, which gave him a view of the corridor outside the room, he watched Safied close the door behind him and stride toward the elevator, whistling. Inside the room, Stein sat on the bed, staring into space.

Gabriel turned off each of the three monitors. Normally he would follow Safieh now, but he'd been doing so for two weeks now and the man ran like a clock. Safieh would go back to the building which looked like an office building, and enter an elevator via the lobby. In between the front and elevator doors, he would pass through three separate security systems. When the elevator doors closed, Gabriel would loose sight of the man, and would not see him again until he emerged from those same elevator doors at 1804 hours local time.

Today, instead, he was going to follow Ms. Stein. He folded each monitor up and slotted them into the shaped cavities in the foam cushioning of his briefcase. The earpiece he tucked into the inner pocket of his coat. He unmuted the television, and then turned it off. He closed his briefcase. When he was outside the room's door, he placed the Do Not Disturb notice on the handle, and continued down the hall. Special instructions had been left with the front desk that he was not to be disturbed for any reason for the duration of his stay, but Gabriel liked the security of redundancy.

When he reached the lobby, he went to a pay phone, and dialed the number to his room upstairs. He listened to its ring for seventeen minutes, occasionally making conversation, while he waited. Eventually Stein walked past him, a bit unsteady on her heels and her high. The waver in her step suggested that she had supplemented her earlier dose. Gabriel exchanged parting with ringing phone and hung up, picking up his briefcase and strolling outside.

Stein drove a Japanese sportscar, and haphazardly at that, even when she was not under the influence. Gabriel, sitting in a rented grey coupe, watched her attempt to maneuver the car out of the turnabout. She requested that the car be returned to the parking area after almost clipping a valet, and instead had a cab hailed. Gabriel pulled out a few cars behind the taxi, unconcerned about losing his quarry -- he had these streets memorized, knew how far back he could follow and still be certain of the quarry's course. Stein's apartment was in a nice part of town, not rich, but well-to-do. Gabriel parked a few buildings down, watching the entryway through his right-side mirror. He didn't have to wait long before his guess became fact. A weatherbeaten car pulled up in front of the apartment building, and a man sitting in the passenger's seat got out and went inside while the driver waited. Twenty-six minutes later, the man emerged from the building and got back in the car. He handed the driver a roll of money. The driver counted what appeared to be roughly eight hundred fifty marks, and nodded, handing the roll back to the passenger. The car pulled away.

Gabriel stayed a short while longer, but decided that Stein would probably be staying in for the rest of the evening. He pulled back out into traffic and returned to the Tourotel Mariahilf. He was greeted by the muzzle of a G27 Glock. Sol, on the far end of the pistol, lowered the weapon. "Well?" she asked.

"Stein is our ticket," he said, setting his briefcase down beside the bed. He handed her the small notepad bearing the dry cleaner's number. "Check this out. Probably nothing. If I can make an asset of Stein then we can learn more about that office building. Possibly even bug her and let her do our surveillance for us."

The temperature of the air around Sol dropped a few degrees. "How do you intend to do that?"

"Her addiction. If we can put ourselves in a position to control her smack access, then we have continued access to her, as well as control of what she's taking. Something benzodiazepine-based should help us there. But we'll need to convince her suppliers to provide us with an introduction."

Sol had seated herself at her terminal and was tracking the phone number Gabriel had given her. "She's made it into Vienna's glitterati circle now that she's attached herself to Safieh. She isn't going to trust foreigners. You really think you can pass as a local?"