"Wrong again," said Gavallan. "Even Boris couldn't stop Luca from E-mailing the article to his friends before he was killed. It's a matter of time until it turns up on the Net."

"So what?" spat Kirov. "One more rumor floated by a dead lunatic. One more piece of jetsam drifting over the ether. The public will pay it no mind. As for Yuri Baranov, I don't think he's going to be holding office much longer. I have it from a reliable source that the president is dissatisfied with his performance. Let me be the first to proclaim the investigation into Novastar Airlines closed."

Gavallan stared into Kirov's eyes, catching a glint of real malice. He wasn't sure what Kirov was hinting at- Baranov's impending firing or his murder. He knew only that he was dealing with a killer, a man utterly without morals for whom murder was a legitimate business tool.

"I think there's been a little misunderstanding between us," he said, walking up to the oligarch, standing close to him to emphasize the difference in their heights, in the beams of their shoulders. "I'm the guy's got you by the short and curlies, not the other way around."

"Is that right?" Kirov kept his eyes locked on Gavallan's, neither man giving an inch.

"Before I visited Silber, Goldi, and Grimm's offices this morning, I took a few precautions to cover my ass, just in case something like this happened. You see, I'm pretty thorough, too. First thing I did was make a copy of Pillonel's original due diligence report and send it to my lawyer. We spoke, and I filled him in on everything that's gone on over the past couple of days. I told him that if I didn't get in touch by Tuesday morning at the opening, he should contact the stock exchange and the SEC's enforcement division. I gave him instructions to hand over the real due diligence report and to inform them that Black Jet was pulling the Mercury IPO."

"You're lying."

"Am I?" Gavallan picked up the brandy and downed it in a gulp. Fuck it. He needed a drink even if the poison came from a scoundrel like Kirov. "Pillonel was a big help too. Sang like a canary, Jean-Jacques did, right into my attorney's tape recorder. I wouldn't say the confession was entirely of his own free will, but so what- it'll do in the short run."

"You're lying." Kirov broke off his stare and retreated behind the sofa. "You didn't have time to make a copy."

"We had plenty of time."

"No, no. It's not possible. It simply isn't." The words were high-pitched, almost hysterical. Kirov's mouth twitched and his eyes furrowed in thought. "Why should you have bothered taping a confession? Was it not your intention to turn Pillonel over to the police? No. No. You're lying." And as he reasoned through Gavallan's actions, his voice calmed, the steady confidence returning. "You couldn't have known you were being followed. You had every intention of flying back to the States with your precious evidence. Maybe even with Pillonel. There was no reason to take precautions at that point. I wouldn't have. You're lying. I know it."

Gavallan shook his head, his iron gaze letting Kirov know he was not. Putting down the snifter, he pointed a blunt finger at his host, his jailer, his willing executioner. "Here's the deal: Tomorrow morning, you will wire me the fifty million dollars you borrowed from Black Jet. With interest. Graf, Cate, and I climb on board a commercial airliner and fly back to the States. And you will issue a statement that due to unforeseen market conditions, you've decided to postpone the offering to a later date." Gavallan thought about Ray Luca and the others at Cornerstone, enraged that no one would ever be brought to trial for the crimes. "Believe me, you're getting off easy."

Kirov's eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets, to expand with boiling hatred. "So now you're issuing ultimatums? Look around you- you're hardly in the right place. If you like ultimatums, however, I'll be happy to give you one of my own: The Mercury offering will go through. It will be a bigger success than any of us dares imagine. We shall earn our two billion and then some. And you, dear friend, will help see to it. Do you know why? Do you? Because if you don't, Mr. Grafton Byrnes will die. Slowly. Terribly. Very, very painfully. And you will be on hand to watch it."

"Fuck you, Konstantin. You've got the wrong guy. I don't respond well to extortion."

Kirov laughed, an ugly derisory snort. "We'll see very shortly what you do or do not respond to. Personally I think your story about Pillonel is utter shit. But not to worry: One way or another we'll ferret out the truth. Either Jean-Jacques Pillonel will tell me or you will." He smiled invitingly. "I guarantee it."

51

This was where all paths led.

To Russia.

To Moscow.

To her father.

Cate waited alone in the wood-paneled den off the entry hall. The lights were dim, and the room smelled of new carpet and worn leather. Through the heating vents, murmurs of a violent conversation drifted to her ears. Jett and her father were arguing, and it made her afraid. She'd spent her last teenage years here. Something about the Edwardian house seemed to goad its inhabitants into perfectly dreadful behavior. "She used to lie with her ear to the floor, listening to every word of her parents' fights, wincing, crying, silently ordering them to stop and make up.

The past.

Everywhere she looked it was crowding in on her, suffocating her with nightmares and obligations.

Moving to the window, she drew a curtain and peeked outside. If she lifted her eyes, she could make out the top floors of Moscow State University, towering above a stand of trees. Well past midnight, the building's lights were ablaze. Built in the late 1940s as one of seven "Stalin Skyscrapers" meant to showcase Soviet prowess in architecture and engineering, the university was ever the brilliant trophy. The stern spires and bold, conformist tower were masterpieces of their kind and stirred in her pangs of nostalgia so strong as to be painful. It was not the first time this evening she'd been overcome with sentiment.

Passing St. Basil's, the Novodevichy Monastery, the Kremlin, even the most mundane of office buildings, she'd found her throat choked with emotion. These were the landmarks not only of the city but of a childhood she'd willed dead and buried, and each in turn provoked a cascade of memories. Cate and her mother pausing for a tea in one of the unsmiling cafes that dotted the upper levels of the GUM department store. Cate skating for the first time on an impromptu ice rink in the courtyard of their apartment building, the result of a broken main that had spewed water into the air for two weeks running. A reverent Cate, barely thirteen, passing through Lenin's tomb for the first time, frightened for the life of her to stare down at the great man's embalmed face, her teacher stopping her and forcing her to look, berating her in the sacrosanct hall to open her eyes and gaze upon the motherland's savior. She'd obeyed and fainted straightaway.

But the stirring went deeper than nostalgia. It went to her heart. To her blood. It was her history awakening inside her. The past beckoning her to return. She was no longer Catherine Elizabeth Magnus, but Ekaterina Konstantinovna Elisabeth Kirova, a Russian woman born in Leningrad to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father almost thirty years ago. There was nothing her devotion to the West could do about it. Nothing her love for Ayn Rand or her addiction to Bruce Springsteen could do to rectify the error of her birth. All were accessories she'd acquired to paper over her true colors. Garments designed to deceive, to camouflage, to lie. The intended victim, of course, being none other than Katya Kirov herself.

Too wound up to sit, she dropped the curtain and made a tour of the room. The walls were covered with photographs, cartoons, framed articles, and here and there a diploma or honorary citation. Their common link was Konstantin Kirov. There was her father with Boris Yeltsin. Her father with Gorbachev. A photo with Bush the Elder. Oh, how he loved mingling with the big names, if only so he might position himself as champion of the free media. If, that is, one's definition of "free media" meant using your television stations, your newspapers, your radio networks, to trumpet your own pet causes. If "free media" meant decrying taxes on aluminum production in order to favor your smelters in Krasnoyarsk. Or savaging the academic who had issued a report claiming that oligarchs exerted a drag on the economy equal to two percentage points of GNP. If so, then Kirov was your man.