Author's note: I had to break this one up into two. The next one will follow quickly.

Xing Fu Lee did not like Moscow.

Jump City, where he'd grown up, had occasional snow. Jump City had cold snaps. But this was fucking ridiculous. When he went outside it was in a thick fur coat and fur hat. Fuck PETA. And his teeth still chattered. The average daily high that December was 7. Seven degrees fahrenheit. Seven!

It sounded even worse in celsius.

Minus 14.

You were owed heat or something, weren't you, if the temperatures were minus? Somebody owed a weather debt to you. Xing Fu Lee certainly felt like someone owed him some heat. At least the young women of Moscow were doing their best to compensate To be a ballet star in Moscow, an american come to Moscow to dance with the Bolshoi, an American who had humiliated NBA star Kobe Bryant was to be some combination of sports hero and rock star to muscovites. There was almost no challenge to it, to getting these russian girls to go down on him or to jump in bed with him. Though, he had started to worry, to wonder if, in extreme cold a tongue could only get stuck to a pole made of metal.

No. Celebrity Xing Fu Lee had no trouble finding new extracurricular conquests in Moscow. On the contrary, fending off the unwanted ones was more of a challenge for him.

He'd come to Moscow with great fanfare. "American ballet star who humiliated Kobe Bryant to dance with Bolshoi", said the Moscow papers in their funny cyrillic letters, their 33 letter alphabet. X had started studying russian while he was still in Paris but didn't quite master it till a month into his time in Moscow despite all his work with the cd's, dvd's and books. What kind of language has an alphabet with 33 letters, anyway, he groused to himself. But he had to master it. He had to know exactly what the staff at the Bolshoi wanted him to do. He had to be as technically proficient as humanly possible. Everyone told him that they were nuts about that sort of thing at the Bolshoi and Kirov. In Paris, they wanted you to be charismatic, to act the part, to make the audience believe that you really were the dark prince. They loved how X could totally make audiences believe he was good or bad.

In Moscow and St. Petersburg, everyone told him, they obsessed over the tilt of your head, the angle of your torso, the exact angle of your outstetched leg, your posture. They obsessed about this stuff, the dancers in Paris had told him. They expected technical perfection, even when it didn't seem to be adding a damn thing to your perfromance. You see, the guys in the ballet in Paris told him, even though ballet had been invented by the french, and all the terms of the choreography were french, arabesque, ballon, entrechat, pas de deux, plie, etc, all of them, the russians considered themselves to be the ones preserving classical ballet for the world.

X rededicated himself to improving his dancing. He had to. It was like when he first went to the Gotham City Ballet's school all over again. The staff was always on his ass about one thing or another. They had a preconceived notion of what he would be like and just went with it even when he wasn't like that. He wasn't a lazy dancer who didn't care about posture and the finer points of classical ballet technique. But it took a month of verbal abuse before they finally accepted that. At least it helped him learn the russian version of most derogatory slang terms. But more than those words, he quickly learned the russian word for 'again'. It sound like "yaat". It was the soundtrack of ballet class for him those first few months. Yaat. Yaat. Yaat!

X would leap high enough to dunk a basketball, come down, execute a series of spins, pick up a bellerina and-Yaat! Do it again. Over and over. It was like they were suggesting that those should be the lyrics to the Tchaikovsky piano pieces playing while he and the other dancers practiced.

Rising crescendo. Yaat!

Slowly building tempo. Yaat!

Even a silent dance studio. Yaat!

YaatYaatYaat YaatYaatYaatYaatYaat.

God damn but there were determined to give the pretty boy american a hard time. He might have said the instructors acted as though they were drunk with power but X would have to do so before 5 o'clock. Calling any russian drunk metaphorically after five had a very great likelihood of being redundant. They drank like fish, at least every one he seemed to come across in a bar or club. Three hard drinks was nothing at all. Five in a few hours was getting started. Eight or ten was their idea of moderation. X tried to keep up once, only once. He thought all his open yet illicit drinks on the Gotham City and Paris party circuits had prepared him. He realized he was wrong as he slid to the floor following his seventh vodka in two hours and heard the laughs of his fellow dancers as they reached to pick him up.

He never did that again. He wasn't really a drinker anyway. Why would he want to blur his sensations of his wonderful life? Besides, he didn't want to be hung over. For one, he had to work hard on all the posture and body angle crap they were so obsessed about. Also, he was in the process of building up his upper body a bit. One of the other guys in the Bolshoi told him that, because skinny Nureyev and tiny little Baryshnikov had defected, while muscular Vasiliev had stayed in Russia and remained their biggest star, russians looked on muscular guys as the true dancers. So, almost as a way of trying to show that Vasiliev was better than traitors Nuryev and Baryshnickov, the choreography of russian ballets tended to emphasize the upper body strength in the guys. The russians had altered the choreography of some ballets to include a lot of difficult lifting of ballerinas.

He could tell from their skeptical looks that some of the staff at the Bolshoi didn't think the skinny, six foot tall, 164 pound american with the 27 inch waist would be strong enough but he amazed them with how well he could lift the ballerinas, and how easy he made it seem.

It took a few months, but eventually the fantastically leaping, improbably strong american won over the russian audiences, too. It wasn't only how Xing Fu Lee danced ballet, it was also the joy he seemed to take in it. X's extreme confidence showed through. After a series of leaps and spins, he might stand there chest heaving with the effort but X's natural inclination was to smile at how incredibly well he'd danced. The russian audiences liked it. They didn't seem to go in much for emo or conspicuously sensitive boys. They wanted strength and confidence and X had them.

And after he started to become an audience favorite, the billionaire oligarchs who were patrons and supporters of the Bolshoi practically fought to meet him and have him over for dinner at their huge estate homes. There were Voroshilov, Yagoda, Kuznetsov, Ulrikh, Kobulov, Meshik and Yezhov, all the . . suspiciously wealthy oligarchs who put a little shine on their reputations by supporting the ballet.

They mostly had hot babe wives, all of whom fawned over him and practically groped his buns the moment he came through their front doors. Many meaningful glances, more like stares right at him, were cast by these women. When they saw the extremely handsome young american dancer up close, their eyes would go back and forth in frantic calculation as they looked down or to one side. X could just tell they were wondering how to find an opening to sleep with this apollo instead of the troll at the other end of the dinner table who provided their money. He did manage to fuck Meshik's wife in his dressing room after one performance. But she wasn't that great. And she was a little over the top in being what might be called a leg girl. The whole time, she squeezed his butt and murmured what he had quickly found out was the russian phrase meaning 'great ass'. Oh well, sighed X afterward. They can't all be great fucks.

But, it was true. Their oligarch husbands were all disgusting trolls. Xing Fu Lee didn't want to get too far into the idea that beauty equals moral health, even if he was the best looking ballet dancer there was. It was too junior high school. Good looking equals good. But there was just something about all these guys, a scent, a vibe they gave off, like the corruption of their lives had so permeated them it had even corrupted their appearance. They were disgusting. Slimy. Rubbery jowled with pockmarked skin and ugly tiny eyes, vaguely, well, evil.

Xing Fu Lee might have been a master thief, but he didn't think of himself as evil. He was also an artist! He added beauty to society. He made so many women and, okay, gay men, so happy, just to see him.

On some other nights, he was another sort of bon vivant, redistributing excess lucre from other pockets or more likely safes to his own. But he wasn't like these guys. There was a certain style and even a vague sense of fairness about what he did. These super rich people he encountered and cased out as Xing Fu Lee, ballet star, knew that there were thieves who wanted to rob them. And they tried to stop them. They just couldn't stop him. But everyone knew what the game was.

These russian billionaires were different. They had stolen from everybody, including the poorest russians, like a guy ripping the dollar out of the hands of a bum begging on the street corner. None of them had any money just ten or 15 years before. All of a sudden, as the old soviet state was falling apart, these scheming guys who were supposed to be running factories or warehouses full of machinery or tools or drilling equipment for the soviet state had somehow made off with said machinery or tools or drilling equipment, called it their own and started companies working with russian oil, gas and mining industries. All of a sudden, these guys were nearly running these industries and all these things that were supposed to have belonged to every russian belonged to these guys.

They seemed to give off the stench of corruption to X. He didn't like shaking hands with them. But he did. He played his part and took in everything he saw. But the first couple billionaires he met didn't seem to have anything in their mansions. At least that was X's guess. Their homes, themselves, were colossal, but they both screamed 'secret Swiss bank accounts' to him, with little flashy jewelry on their wives, no good art on the walls and nothing that seemed consistent with a safe full of money or diamonds. No, the first couple seemed almost excessively careful to him.

Kobulov was the opposite. His wife was fairly dripping with diamonds. She'd hugged him upon his entering their home running her hands up and down him as though intending to make a nude sculpture later on, not that X cared. He barely noticed. He was counting all the big, gumdrop sized diamonds of her necklace pressed against his chest. And he couldn't take his eyes off a beautiful painting just inside the door, a landscape by Repin. And Kobulov, himself thrust a handful of bills into the shirt pocket of some guys making a delivery just as X was arriving, only a fraction of the bills inside Kobulov's thick wallet. He had a lot of currency on hand. That said one thing to X.

Safe.

And sure enough, there was one. X introduced knockout gas into the ventilation system and temporarily incapacitated Kobulov, his wife, children and 2 security guards a week later and casually robbed the place.

All the evidence was gone just hours later. It was X's opinion that sending things to Paris was practically ignored by the russian police while sending things to the U.S. attracted attention. So, he sent a fedex to his very close friend Jeremy, the model, in Paris the next day. Jeremy had been instructed to send everything along to old man Guttman. And soon enough X got a postcard from an anonymous source in Jump City telling him two things, first that it was 50 degrees there. X grumbled looking outside at frigid Moscow. And also that Jump City's baseball team was going to sign a guy for $3.7 million. X smiled at their code. He loved these postcard updates that Jump City's basebal team was spending a lot of money. The actual team hadn't signed anyone. X knew what the number really meant.

Following that score, he was approached after a Bolshoi performance by Carreker and Keller, the National Security Administration or NSA operatives he'd met in Paris. They had an autograph book for X to sign. He personalized his signature to his "favorite gay couple" causing angry grunts from Keller while Carreker complained about X not telling them he was going after Kobulov.

"I don't know what you're talking about Mr. Carreker," X smiled.

It was the same thing after X took down Ulrikh's palatial estate outside the city limits. The next day, he'd just finished dancing the lead role in the ballet Spartacus, an extremely athletically demanding one and there were Carreker and Keller, backstage again. "Amazing. You were amazing," said Carreker in russian as someone passed by. And then he started threatening X. What about our deal? He was supposed to help them. How could he knock over Ulrikh's place without telling them, first?

X wondered aloud whether thieves typically did that sort of thing in advance, informed cops or pseudo cops like the NSA, of what they were going to do.

"Fine. Just . . if you get Yezhov, look for any documents of his relating to Gazprom, the giant russian energy company."

X smirked. "I know who they are."

"Just do it!" grunted Keller under his breath.

"I don't know what you're talking about," said X gesturing to his white tights. "I'm just a ballet dancer." and he laughed at the way uptight Keller looked at him standing there casually, still in costume.

Yezhov seemed even slimier than the other billionaires, a short bald man with a large nose and dark deep set eyes above a mouth that seemed permanently curved into a sick sort of smile. And his mansion, outside the city was guarded by a small army. This only intrigued X more. It just made it that much more likely that all Yezhov's money wasn't in vaults in Zurich and Geneva. Also, unlike most such rich men, Yezhov didn't show X and the others around and got upset when X even wandered innocently toward parts of the house. This guy sent up a lot of red flags.

X made his way out there three nights in a row to case the place out. First of all, the property was protected by a green, 20 foot high fence topped by tv cameras. Even to approach the compound, covering perhaps 40 acres inside the fence line, was extremely difficult. X started out watching things from a hillside more than a mile away but even there, security patrols went by twice in four hours and nearly stepped on camouflaged X peering through a telescope from the brush. In addition to the fence and cameras, and perhaps 20 security guards at any one time, there were little metal projections studded across the grounds within the fence that X felt sure must be motion detectors wired to alarms.

X was starting to wonder if he should just leave it. Old Guttman had told him how taking a particular score as a personal challenge was a huge mistake. Take what yuo can and leave what you can't. Period. But X wanted to be sure before passing up this one. He ran this puzzle through his head and went back one more time to see the place. And this time, the outlines of a plan occurred to him.

A week later he got what he needed and put it into action. It snowed heavily. X had an all white outfit, under Armor under North Face outerwear that he got just for this occasion. When the security guards changed shifts, they seemed to briefly turn off the motion detector alarms. And watching the guards, X thought there was a visual gap, a sort of blind spot that they left on one side of the mansion, if only for a minute's time. X made his way to the fence, the last 30 feet taking an excruciating 30 minutes in a snow storm so that he didn't attract the notice of anyone watching camera footage. As the shift change started, X cut through the 20 foot high fence, still 500 yards from the mansion itself, and started sprinting, as quietly as he could, something a ballet dancer trained to precisely controlling his steps could do, all the way to the side wall of the mansion. Once there and done quietly gasping for breath, X climbed the corner between a chimney and the stone building exterior and cut through the glass of a darkened second story window to open the window and let himself in.

Yezhov and his wife were back in Moscow still, their return home delayed by the storm. X only had to avoid a couple servants watching tv. X cut two paintings by the russian master, Levitan, out of their gilt frames just steps away from them while they snorted derisively at some statement by Putin and shouted at the screen that he was a fascist.

X stopped to admire the paintings. He loved Levitan. He'd gained a deep appreciation for the arts with the help of some of the rich people he'd met in Gotham City. They saw what an intelligent, handsome and fantastically athletic young man he was and thought that he should also appreciate the finer things in life. X agreed and thanked them. And he continued his education in the arts in Paris while dancing with the ballet there. Along with the satisfaction of these works of art was the need for X to know which paintings were worth carrying off with him.

After gazing at the Levitans, X continued on through the den and master bedroom cleaning out a safe full of no ruble notes but hundred dollar bills as well as some very official looking Gazprom correspondence and a jewelry box that would have made the Romanovs blush. Getting out was a little harder. He thought the snow might mess with the motion detecting but somewhere just before he reached the fence an alarm sounded and X dispensed with any notions of sprinting quietly. He squeezed through the gap he'd cut in the fence and ran as hard as he could through a stretch of woods where the security guards couldn't follow in their jeeps. He kept sprinting over a hill and then down to a rail line where a freight train was whooshing by right on time. X sprinted and then leaped onto the connection between two cars in the long line of them and watched through the snow as headlights approached the train well back of him from the general direction of the Yezhov estate. But they were too late.

And they never saw him. He was just a slender, athletic body hidden under loose white winter gear and wearing a white ski mask and goggles captured on sketchy security video. They had no idea who had robbed Yezhov. Part of the problem was that russia was a thief state. Anyone might be robbed by just about anyone else. X figured that Yezhov must have suspected the other oligarchs, the mafiya, henchmen acting on orders from Putin, various notorious russian master thieves and, hell, just about anyone between Poland and the pacific before the teenage american pretty boy leaping around the stage in tights at the Bolshoi.

Section chief Carreker and agent Keller knew better. When they finally showed up again, it was just after X had come off stage dancing the role of Apollo, in white tights and bare chested. Keller shook his head in disgust, as usual, radiating a sense of being offended at how X was dressed and that X was not bothered by it.

"What is it with you, Keller? Because, frankly, the guys who get all upset at the sight of me or one of the other guys in tights seem to be the ones who, contrary to all the bluster on the surface secretly desire us."

"Fuck you, ballet boy."

"See that, Carreker? Now he's up to double entendres. Fuck . . me? No matter how much he tries to disguise them, his deepest desires surface. Next thing you know, you'll have to tear him away from me," smirked X.

Keller lunged at X with a punch. "See!" laughed X stepping back as Carreker restrained and calmed his hotheaded partner.

"Come on! Come on!" barked Carreker pushing Keller to the side of X's dressing room opposite X. X did a slow spin on one foot to display himself to Keller and laughed.

"If we didn't need you, pretty boy . . " Keller threatened across the room.

"Need . . ? Even more than . . want, Keller? And 'pretty boy', huh? What a give away!" chuckled X.

"What kind of warped kid comes from a good home like you did and turns into a thief?" barked Keller. "And don't think we don't know about you and that Jeremy, what's his name, that model back in Paris and that other one, Nikolai, a couple weeks ago."

For a split second, X was knocked back. X hated that they were apparently surveilling him. Nikolai? How did they know about that? A red haired model, the other guy in what was supposed to be MMF set up by that wild cover model, that ditz who'd passed out on her own king sized bed. The dude was really smart and funny and they were already undressed, so, what the hell. How did they find out about that?! X recovered quickly and chuckled. "So, you guys have done some research on me, huh? That's cute. What kind of warped kid? The kind who gets you this," said X going over to a small cabinet and removing several folded sheets of paper wrapped in tissue and hand them to Carreker while taking back the tissues. While Carreker inspected them, mumbling about Gazprom and Putin, X continued. "As far as Jeremy and Nikolai, yup. Absolutely true. I enjoyed it, almost as much as I enjoyed all the ballerinas and the girls from Vogue magazine and the ex Mrs. Ritchie and lots and lots of girls from clubs, too. I admit all of it. So what?" said X and he chuckled at how disappointed Keller looked that he hadn't somehow gotten him with the mention of Jeremy and Nikolai.

Keller grumbled something while Carreker continued inspecting documents.

"It's a new millenium, captain uptight. People don't have to lie to themselves and everyone else about having had a good time. So-"

"This is good stuff," interrupted an enthusiastic Carreker brandishing the documents. "We can really use this. How about Yagoda?"

X shook his head. "I'm going to St. Petersburg in a week, to the Kirov. I'll leave you some tickets at the box office for you and Keller."

X liked St. Petersburg.

And it wasn't just that the weather was warming up and that it was normally a bit warmer than Moscow anyway. The people who ran the Kirov didn't try and make a point of establishing their ballet bonafides by criticizing the new american dancer. They were amazed at his leaping and body control and did everything they could to showcase him. Beyond that, X just got along better with the other dancers at the Kirov. There was no particular reason for it but it made things more pleasant for him. And with one of the ballerinas, not a soloist, one in the corps, he had one of the most incredible nights of sex he'd ever had. This was followed, a few days later by an equally fantastic night in bed with a Vogue cover model from St. Petersburg. Life was good in St. Petersburg.

As before, X met and was invited to the homes of rich patrons of the Kirov but one thing after another thwarted him from taking down a score. One rich guy didn't seem to have anything worth the risk in his mansion. He was another guy that gave off that "secret Swiss bank account' vibe to X. So did a couple others. Another one had some paintings worth the effort to steal but the security was insane with motion detectors inside and outside the guy's mansion, lots of guards smartly deployed, and suspicious wiring that seemed to go to every window, door and wall of the place, perhaps some kind of vibration detection. X decided to pass that one up.

In the end, X settled on his first bank job. He'd gone into the largest bank in the city to open an account for show. Just doing my banking, writing checks like anybody else dancing for the Kirov. I don't have millions in secret Swiss accounts. But X saw that the bank seemed to be working on a relatively outdated sort of alarm. He much prefered to work alone but sent a cryptic, coded postcard to Guttman asking about the best alarm man. A few days later, X received a postcard back from Guttman asking a few questions in their agreed code.

X sent another postcard and the next week an unshaven, disheveled looking man in his early 40's perhaps drunk, tall, blond and slightly balding approached him as he was leaving the Kirov's building at the end of a long rehearsal in the late afternoon. He pushed an autograph book into X's chest and begged for a signature in a simpering russian whine. He turned out to be Litton, the greatest alarm man in the world. At the end of his russian whine he had wrapped X in a bear hug and whispered in his ear in clear english. "Are you being watched?"

X nodded slightly. "Push me away. Guttman sent me. I'll see you tomorrow," he muttered. He ran a hand through X's jet black hair. X shoved him away then ran off while the man jogged after him, shouting and pleading in russian for another autograph. The next day, the same man showed up after class and started harassing X before he'd gotten five feet outside the front door. He played a deranged fan, and grabbed onto Xing Fu Lee, wrapped his arms around his waist and would not let go. A security guy tried to pry this crazy man free of the Kirov's star dancer, but he wouldn't let go and a stationary tug of war ensued. Finally a cop stationed at that busy street corner came by and pulled the man off and dragged him away. He was pleading and crying, begging to be allowed to talk to Xing Fu Lee, all in all a great performance thought X. And the man was brought to the nearest station house and thrown into a cell. X, correctly guessing his part, followed him there and asked to speak to the man, to try to talk some sense into him.

"In america we would love to have as many ballet fans as you have here," X told the cop. "Let me try and talk some sense into him. I don't want a man to be treated too harshly for something like this."

The cop shrugged and led X to the cell door then walked away.

The man in the cell shouted some praises to god that the police would bring the great Xing Fu Lee to see him. X said some things about calming down loud enough to be heard by the guard at the end of the hallway and then leaned in closer to the man.

"Crazed fan. Very good."

"Not too over the top, I hope," the man smiled, accent suddenly all Manchester with no Minsk.

"Oh no. Pitch perfect."

"Thank you," he said offering his hand. "I'm Kerensky to them, but actually Litton. You go by Xing or Xing Fu or-"

"Just X."

"Fine. X. Our mutual friend says you're trustworthy and that you think we have a weak target."

"He says the same of you. And, yes, I do think so."

Litton simply raised one eyebrow. Go on. Explain.

X reeled off all that he had seen and inferred about the alarm system at St. Petersburg's biggest bank. Litton only slowly nodded, clearly calculating.

"You're after the boxes, yes?"

X smiled. "Of course. And if they have dollars or Euros or Swiss francs."

"Might as well put rubles on a roll and wipe your arse with them for all the good they are," said Litton and he and X shared a chuckle. "By the way. I just wanted to say that the whole ballet dancer cover is just smashing. I love it."

"But, it's real."

"Well, of course, that's a particularly strong element in it being so bloody good. I mean, you actually are one. And there's all that goes with it. They'll never think of you, will they?"

X smiled as he shook his head. "Can you deal with that alarm?"

"I have. I've dealt with two of those in the past. I don't imagine this one'll be any bloody different. But tell me your plan."

X explained his plan. It all revolved around the duct that he had seen. He'd asked to see their safe deposit boxes. They were in the giant vault and just to get next to the vault had involved getting past two massive steel doors inches thick. But once there, he noticed an air duct in the ceiling right by the vault door and this particular type of door X thought he could beat. The duct, X told Litton, was a rectangular thing about 20 inches by 6 inches. X said he thought he could shimmy down that duct from the roof where he thought it connected to their ventilation and air conditioning pumps. You turn off those alarms and I can get down that vent and into the vault, X told him. It'll be tough. No doubt there are a couple 90 degree bends, but I'm very flexible.

"Hmm. Lot of variables there," said Litton and a guard approached a cell three down and he pleaded and cried in russian promising not to grab X again. The guard rolled his eyes and went away and Minsk left replaced, again, by Manchester. "But I like it. They're all Putin'ed up, this whole country. They think nobody can rob one of their banks in Moscow or Saint Pete. So they don't care that they've got a weak alarm. Let's lock down the uncertain points. Find where those ducts go and get pictures of the roof from one of the high rises around here. Get more certain about that vault door, too. I'll look into a good cutting tool for the boxes and all the other tools. It's at least worth investigating."

X left and put in a good word with the guards for this crazy fan, Kerensky. The next day, X just happened to bump into a super hot girl who lived in the high rise apartment building next to the bank and had a window looking down on it. She was star struck. Xing Fu Lee! He was feeling wildly passionate and fucked her in the middle of the day, quite enjoying this gorgeous brunette's loving and taking pictures of the sun splashed bank building roof with the mini camera he pulled from his coat pocket on the window sill each time he went away to discard a condom. He sent the pictures to an address Litton gave him. He also figured out from a couple more visits to the upper floors of the bank, just where the duct work was within the walls. And he boned up on beating that particular kind of vault door.

The irony was that it was left open, not physically, but not locked. The people running this bank had gotten so lax, so overconfident about their steel doors and their connections to Putin that whoever was responsible hadn't spun the wheel, turned another nob and locked the thing. After X shimmied himself down the duct work, past the three turns and pushed out the grate at the bottom, he was readying to work on the door when he gave it a slight pull and the damn thing swung open. He spoke into his short range radio to Litton up on the roof where he'd disabled the alarm circuitry and had helped X get past the air pump into the duct. "It's already open!"

They had a steady relay for the next four hours. X would fill one of their black nylon satchels, tie it to one of the ropes dangling from the vent over his head and piled up on the floor and tug. Up would go diamonds, saphires, rubies, gold bullion and stacks of dollars, euros and Swiss francs. A few minutes later, X would pull the rope down toward himself till the satchel returned. To get things past the bends in the ducts, he and Litton had 50 feet extra rope on each end. Nothing was just lowered or raised. The line was taut at all times. In between working the rope, X would pick the double keyhole locks on one box after another. The skills he'd learned in his lock picking tutorial from Guttman were much more efficient than the special small saw and other tools Litton had brought.

An hour before sunrise, X made the laborious climb out with Litton pulling on the other end of the rope tied about his waist to help. Getting their six garbage bags full of loot out of there might have presented problems, but Litton had come up with a good solution. He left the roof swung back to the adjacent building from which he and X had started and minutes later came by with the garbage truck he had stolen from the lot of a company with dozens of them. The truck seemed to stall beside the bank and X threw the bags down into the trash hold of the truck and jumped down on top of it before looking around then swinging over to the passenger's door.

They didn't even count their loot. Litton drove the garbage truck to the border of Estonia and then smuggled a car with six incredibly valuable garbage bags in trunk across the border. From there, things were Fedexed to old man Guttman over a period of three weeks. A stack of matryoshka dolls full of diamonds. A stack of books with nothing but covers, nearly all hollowed out and filled with high denomination Swiss francs. One fake after another. Not especially imaginative but they worked.

And X got a postcard with no return adddress stamped from Estonia saying "A good partner not only to ballerinas! Hope to work with you again!". Litton. And a month later another postcard from that anonymous disgruntled sports fan in Jump City informing him that it might take 23 million dollars to sign some outfielder. X smiled. Eleven and a half for him. Eleven and a half for Litton.

The russian papers went nuts about the robbery. Each news outlet pushed a different theory. A foreign gang. Mafiya. Whoever Putin didn't like that day. X just focused on his ballet and enjoyed himself with the St. Petersburg girls.

A week after the robbery, Carreker and Keller showed up again at his dressing room after Le Corsaire. X was removing his makeup.

"It was you, wasn't it?" smirked Carreker.

"What are you talking about?" asked X trying to get just the right degree of innocence to it.

"The bank."

X shrugged. "I don't do banks. Too heavily defended."

"Yeah, right," snorted Keller.

Carreker looked X in the eyes in the mirror, trying to figure if X was telling the truth and X gave him nothing to go on. "Do you guys have some reason for this social visit?"

"Yeah," said Carreker taking a seat as X started to undress. "Our friend with the mansion off Lake Ladoga."

"I told you guys. That one can't be done. Not by me, anyway."

"Well, what about somebody in a glass faced building. Is that the kind of thing you have any idea about?"

X continued undressing and then stepped into the shower. "No good," he said over the spray. "the whole suction cup thing comes off kind of slow and conspicuous. You need to get in some other way than the exterior. Delivery. Maybe a package. No not the kind you're staring at, Keller," laughed X as he continued showering.

"Would you have done a job like that, Lee?" asked Carreker. "Like . . . ," he named the address of the condo penthouse X had robbed in Gotham City.

"Don't know what you're talking about," said X as he soaped himself up. And what surprised him was that Carreker let it drop at that and he and Keller left. He looked out from the shower at his empty dressing room. Hmmph. This was new.

But they kept on showing up after performances and they would sort of perfunctorily ask him about taking down this or that rich russian before asking him questions about a glass tower. It seemed very odd. They were oddly lacking in persistence for a couple of cops. They'd ask him to hit the mansion of this or that rich russian who might have documents their precious NSA wanted. He'd say no and they'd move on to asking him about doing a job in a glass tower. They kept bringing up a hypothetical glass tower job. But they would never say just where it was. All the questions were general, not specific to any one building.

Finally, X's curiosity got the best of him. He followed Keller to his hotel in St. Petersburg late the next afternoon. He approached the front desk and when the clerk looked the other way spun his registry around and flipped a page till he saw the name "Keller". Room 1237. X spun the book back around then smiled and talked with the clerk, who recognized famous, handsome Xing Fu Lee of the Kirov. X moved to an out of the way spot in the lobby and watched Keller go out, perhaps for dinner, a short while later. Then he made his way upstairs, and easily beat the card swipe lock on Keller's room. Once inside, he set up two tiny cameras looking over Keller's laptop computer on his desk.

A day later X was going into the NSA site as Keller, using his password and the number off the NSA security badge he'd stolen from Keller's apartment in Paris. What he found surprised him. He and Carreker and some other contact at the National Security Agency wanted to break into Titans Tower.

X had to read this a second time and then a third time to be sure of what was on his screen.

Uh . . aren't the Teen Titans good guys? Why would a supposedly allied government agency want to break into Titans Tower? There were even pictures of the Tower from different sides at different times of day. There was a picture with a jet seemingly just leaving it and a caption that read "T-Jet entrances and exits completely unpredictable. Flight plans never filed with FAA." Then there was a picture of a giant green pteradactyl flying over the Tower and another notation. "3 Titans with independent flying ability."

But the question that X couldn't get over was why these guys would want to break into Titans Tower. The recent files didn't say. Eventually, he backtracked far enough to come upon some cryptic references to the "Laundry". And soon enough he realized they weren't trying to steal exclusive Teen Titan fabric softener technology. Way back in the chain of communication among the three of them he found emails where the issue was first raised with Carreker and Keller by their boss. And that was where Xing Fu Lee first saw a name with which he became quite familiar.

Red X.