There was a man at the rail.
Frankie Osei came up the funicular at eight o'clock in the morning on the fourth of March with a coffee and a notebook and one job, which was to decide where to go next, and there was a man at the rail.
She stopped about four feet behind him.
He was tall and fair and about thirty and he was doing the specific thing that people do when they are deciding something: standing entirely still, looking out over a city in flat early light, with his hands on a rail and a coffee going cold in one of them.
He had a notebook in his coat pocket.
And Frankie Osei, twenty-eight, who had been in thirty-one cities in six years, stood on a terrace at the top of Mtatsminda and did the arithmetic she had already done twice on the way up.
Naples. The second week of September.
A bar near the station at eleven o'clock at night. She had noticed him because he was the only other person in there on his own, and because he had a paperback face down on the counter, and because he had ordered in Italian that had quite obviously been learned in about a fortnight and was being deployed with enormous care.
Chisinau. The eleventh of November.
A bus from the airport. He got on at the airport and off in the centre and she was four seats behind him and did not think about it for about nine hours, and then thought about it at two in the morning for approximately forty minutes.
Almaty. January.
A canteen where the buses stop. He was three places ahead of her in the queue and she looked at the back of his head for eleven minutes and told herself, in four separate ways, that she was being ridiculous.
And now the highest place in a fourth city, at eight in the morning, on the morning of rule eleven.
Four cities in six months.
Chosen by a method that is specifically, deliberately designed to make it impossible for you to know where you are going.
She stood there for about forty seconds and considered, seriously, going back down.
There are two versions of what this was, and she had been turning them over since Almaty, and both of them were bad.
The first is that a man had been following her across four countries for six months with a patience that did not bear thinking about.
The second is that something else was happening, and she has been a journalist since she was twenty-two and she does not believe in the second one.
Frankie Osei walked up to the rail and stood next to him and said:
"Naples. Chisinau. Almaty."
The man at the rail did not move at all for about two seconds.
Then he said, "Oh, thank God," and put both hands over his face.