Ally was very fond of Kristen's West Village neighborhood, since she herself had once had an apartment on West Eleventh Street, just west of Seventh Avenue. The street was tree-lined and many of its nineteenth- century town houses were home to single families, though sometimes the ground floor, with the entry "under the stoop," i.e., beneath the stairs, was rented out to provide a little side income. She had rented one of those "garden apartments"--the upstairs owners were two gay bankers--and had loved it. However, it also was entirely possible that Kristen had the whole town house to herself--that was the kind of thing that a lot of celebrities who lived, or even just spent time, in New York did. There was privacy and there also was the sense of living in an actual house instead of in some cookie-cutter apartment. Then again she could have a downstairs neighbor. A solitary town house seemed somewhat at odds with the extroverted personality Kristen displayed on TV, but the privacy was probably intended more for her sugar daddy, Winston Bartlett, than for her. Ally had been pushing the pace ever since she got off the phone with Stone. At Twenty-third Street she had peeled off the West Side Highway and gone over to Seventh Avenue, where she had a straight shot downtown. She passed St Vincent's Hospital, and the notorious six-way intersection that caused so many accidents, and hung a right on West Eleventh. She was approaching the corner at Bleecker Street when a huge black Lincoln Navigator lumbered in front of her, at an angle that cut her off and blocked the street. Then the vehicle abruptly slammed to a halt. "What--!" She hit her own brakes and managed to slide to a stop just before she collided with the Lincoln's rear bumper. At first she thought they'd deliberately cut her off, but then she realized the move had nothing to do with her. A man and a woman were piling out. He was muscular and balding, with dark hair and sunglasses, and he was dressed in black. She had red hair streaked with white and was dressed in a nurse's whites. They were in a major hurry. That was when she recognized the man she'd met at Gramercy Park, the Japanese sidekick Bartlett had called Ken. Oh shit. Then she realized that a thirtyish woman was running down West Eleventh Street toward them, carrying a dark green backpack in her left hand. They were gesturing for her to come to them and get into the vehicle, though she didn't appear to see them yet. Halfway down the block behind her, a man in a tan flight jacket was running, calling out. "Kristen, wait I just want to talk--" The running woman glanced over her shoulder at him and, at that moment collided with Bartlett's flunky. As she recoiled from the impact the red-haired woman seized her left arm. "Kirby, come," the woman said. "You're not well. We'll take you back." "No!" she yelled, and twisted free of the woman's grasp. But now the Japanese guy had grabbed her other arm.