"Oh, he meddled all right. Just like he meddled with Novastar. What we need to do is nail him for stealing the hundred twenty-five million from his own country. Put him in the gulag where he belongs."

"One thing at a time, Cate. I'd say our plates are full as it is."

"I can dream, can't I?"

Cate wheeled the chair to the foot of the stairwell and helped Gavallan board the plane. It wasn't hard to adopt the gait of an older man. His lower back had stiffened and the throbbing in his head had returned with a vengeance. Still, it was impossible to deny the rush of excitement he felt as he entered the fuselage.

"So, you old codger," she said. "Where you headed?"

"Geneva. I hear there are a lot of crooks in those parts. Guess you're coming too?"

Cate stared at him over the top of her sunglasses, but when she spoke the smile had left her voice. "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

35

Grafton Byrnes rose at the sound of the approaching engine and shuffled to the wall. It was late afternoon. The sky was cloudy, the air growing cooler. He was sick with fever and painfully hungry. The engine meant dinner, if that was what you called a mess tin half filled with weak broth and a few skimpy vegetables. Twice a day, an old, dented truck lumbered into the clearing, delivering the same meal. Twice a day he both cursed and rejoiced. He'd never imagined how famished a man could grow in two days. How terribly, desperately hungry. The stomach did not accept maltreatment complacently. It howled, it stabbed, it cramped.

Glancing up, Byrnes noticed dark clouds gathering overhead. A drop of rain dodged what was left of the roof and caught him on the cheek. Days tended to be warm, but when the sun fell, the temperature plummeted to freezing, the wind picked up, and his teeth chattered like marble on ice. Wiping away the raindrop, he tried to imagine another night lying huddled like an animal in the corner of the shed, toes dug into the dirt, bandaged hands clenched, tucked close to his chest, left with only his trousers and Ascot Chang's finest Egyptian cotton dress shirt to fend off the cold. He began to shiver.

He knew men who'd toughed out eight years in the Hanoi Hilton. He told himself he could stand a couple of days at the Moscow Marriott, or as Konstantin Kirov had eloquently christened the place, "the dacha." Either way, it would be over soon, his freedom granted in one form or another.

He looked down at his bare feet, at the toenails clogged with dirt, at the white, defenseless flesh. "Bastards," he muttered, the shivering growing worse now. "You could have left me my socks."

The shed measured six feet by six feet and had been constructed from the slim, round corpus of birch trees. The walls rose eight feet in height. A padlock secured the door. There were no windows, but by peering through the gaps that separated one log from the next, he had a fine view of the compound. A three-room log cabin with a stone chimney and large picture windows stood a hundred feet to his right. Two smaller structures stood farther away, visible among the towering pines. One was a rotted cabin with a rickety antenna attached to its roof, the other a stone sump house with a redbrick smokestack. In his time at the dacha, Byrnes had yet to see a soul anywhere, save the grizzled man who served as his jailer.

To his left, maybe sixty feet, was another shed like his own: a storage shack, if the shards of coal and wood embedded in the dirt floor were anything to go by. A double fence surrounded the compound, twelve feet high, topped with a run of razor wire. Again he wondered why there were no guards. He stared at the fence. He guessed it was electrified. There was no better guard than twenty thousand volts of raw current.

It would be difficult to get out, Byrnes knew. Difficult, but not impossible. The real question was where he'd go once he was free. He had no money, no shoes. His clothes were tattered and bloody, his face a mess. In his present condition, he could hardly expect to walk back to Moscow.

Difficult… but there was a way.

A few rotting signposts stood inside the fences, and Byrnes recognized the place as a military camp of some kind. Though blindfolded during the drive out from Moscow, he'd felt the rise in elevation, especially on the last stretch of road. He could tell by the sun they'd driven north. If he had to guess, he'd say he was in an observation post, something Stalin had built in the paranoid years after the war when the Russians thought every American hiccup presaged a full-scale invasion.

The sound of the approaching motor grew louder. Byrnes's trained ear was quick to notice the smoother, richer growl of the engine. It wasn't the run-down pickup that brought him his meals every day. This was a new-model vehicle with a sturdy V-8. He listened closer. Two trucks, one engine pitched lower than the other.

Pressing his cheek to the coarse wood, he found it suddenly very hard to breathe. He'd warned himself it would happen. It was the natural course of events. He'd signaled Jett the deal was rotten. Jett had canceled the IPO. Kirov had sent his men to make good on his promise.

Newton's Third Law, barked a strict voice from a long-ago classroom. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Or as the modern world had cynically paraphrased it: No good deed goes unpunished.

Byrnes stepped away from the wall and brushed the sprinkling of dirt and pine needles from his clothing. He stood a little straighter. This is how they would find him, he decided. With his pride and dignity intact.

A black Chevrolet Suburban pulled into the clearing in front of the main cabin. Doors opened and two of Kirov's troopers got out, dressed in dark suits, shirts open at the collar. Byrnes wondered whether they minted men like that in a factory. Six-feet-something, two hundred pounds of bone and muscle. The first was stocky, with a Marine's crew cut and a Slav's dark scowl. The second, who was taller and had blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, hesitated by the passenger door, then barked out a series of instructions. A moment later, he leaned into the cabin and pulled from it a thin, belligerent man, whom he chucked onto the ground kicking and screaming as if he didn't weigh anything at all. Not finished, the blond giant leaned right back in and came out with a woman, whom he threw over a shoulder and dumped a few steps away, where she lay among the pine needles, silently gathering herself.

Byrnes slid his eyes to the second SUV, of which only the hood was visible. His worry had shifted from himself to the poor wretches fifty feet away. Above the pained whimpering, he heard more voices- economical, cultured, at ease.

Konstantin Kirov appeared, dressed in a charcoal suit, a topcoat tossed over his shoulders in the manner of an Italian aristocrat to ward off the coming rain. Beside him walked a slim, dark-skinned man sporting a traffic cop's mustache and wearing a grimy houndstooth jacket. Byrnes caught the eyes- the steady, soulless gaze- and recognized the type if not the man. He was the muscle.

Kirov and his colleague took up position fifteen yards in front of Byrnes, their backs turned toward him. They stood that way for a minute or so, taut, motionless, two general officers waiting for their troops to pass in review. Another man stumbled into sight, clothes torn, nose bloodied, followed by the big-boned clone who'd shoved him.

Kirov addressed the three unfortunates in a formal voice, and Byrnes was able to pick out a phrase here and there. "Sorry to have disturbed you." "Over quickly." "Tell the truth. You have nothing to fear." And finally, an absurdly polite, "Spaseeba bolshoi." Thank you very much. As if these people hadn't been dragged from their homes or offices and driven to a deserted army outpost two hours outside of Moscow to answer to Kirov for their offenses, real or alleged.