Two of Arkady Medvedev’s finest waded into the mud to retrieve him, though their motives were hardly altruistic. One was a skinheaded giant with a right hand like a sledgehammer. The hammer struck Gabrielonly once, for once was all that was necessary. He toppled backward, into the mud, and for an instant saw upside-down pine trees. Then the trees streaked skyward toward the clouds like missiles. And Gabriel blacked out.

At that same moment, El Al Flight 1612 was rapidly gaining altitude over the suburbs of Moscow and banking hard toward the south. Uzi Navot was seated next to the window in the final row of first class, hand wrapped around a glass of whiskey, eyes scanning the vast carpet of winking yellow lights beneath him. For a few seconds, he could see it all clearly: the ring roads around the Kremlin, the snakelike course of the river, the thunderous prospekts leading like spokes into the endless expanse of the Russian interior. Then the plane knifed into the clouds and the lights of Moscow vanished. Navot pulled down his window shade and lifted the whiskey to his lips. I should have broken his arm, he thought. I should have broken the little bastard’s arm.

Gabriel opened his eyes slowly. Not eyes, he thought. Eye. The left eye only. The right eye was unresponsive. The right eye was the one that had been punched by the bald giant. It was now swollen shut and crusted over with clotted blood.

Before attempting movement, he took careful stock of his situation. He was sprawled on the concrete floor of what appeared to be a warehouse, with his hands cuffed at his back and his legs in something resembling a running position, right leg lifted in front of him, left extended backward. His right shoulder was pressing painfully against the floor, as was the right side of his face. Somewhere, a light was burning, but his own corner of the building was in semidarkness. A few feet away stood a stack of large wooden crates with Cyrillic markings on the sides. Gabriel struggled to make out the words but could not. The alphabet was still like hieroglyphics to him; the crates could have been filled with tins of caviar or vials of deadly polonium and he would have never known the difference.

He rolled onto his back and lifted his knees to his chest, then levered himself into a sitting position. The exertion of the movement, combined with the fact that he was now upright, caused his right eye to begin throbbing with catastrophic pain. He reckoned the blow had fractured the orbit around the eye. For all he knew, he no longer had an eye, just an immense crater in the side of his head where once his eye had been.

He leaned against the wooden crates and looked around him. There were other stacks of crates, towering stacks of crates, receding into the distance like the apartment buildings of the Leninsky Prospekt. From his limited vantage point, Gabriel could only see two rows, but he had the impression there were many more. He doubted they were filled with caviar. Not even the gluttonous Ivan Kharkov could devour that much caviar.

He heard the sound of footsteps approaching from a distance. Two sets. Both heavy. Both male. One man significantly larger than the other. The big man was the bald giant who had hit him. The smaller man was several years older, with a fringe of iron-gray hair and a skull that looked as if it been specially designed to withstand much blunt trauma.

“Where are the children?” asked Arkady Medvedev.

“What children?” replied Gabriel.

Medvedev nodded to the giant, then stepped away as if he didn’t want his clothing to be spattered with the blood. The sledgehammer crashed into Gabriel’s skull a second time. Same eye, same result. Pine trees and missiles. Then nothing at all.

63 LUBYANKA SQUARE, MOSCOW

Like almost everyone else in Moscow, Colonel Grigori Bulganov of the FSB was divorced. His marriage, like Russia itself, had been characterized by wild lurches from one extreme to the other: glasnost one day, Great Terror the next. Thankfully, it had been short and had produced no offspring. Irina had won the apartment and the Volkswagen; Grigori Bulganov, his freedom. Not that he had managed to do much with it: a torrid office romance or two, the occasional afternoon in the bed of his neighbor, a mother of three who was divorced herself.

For the most part, Grigori Bulganov worked. He worked early in the morning. He worked late into the evening. He worked Saturdays. He worked Sundays. And sometimes, like now, he could even be found at his desk late on a Sunday night. His brief was counterespionage. More to the point, it was Bulganov’s job to neutralize attempts by foreign intelligence services to spy on the Russian government and State-owned Russian enterprises. His assignment had been made more difficult by the activities of the FSB’s sister service, the SVR. Espionage by the SVR had reached levels not seen since the height of the Cold War, which had prompted Russia ’s adversaries to respond in kind. Grigori Bulganov could hardly blame them. The new Russian president was fond of rattling his saber, and foreign leaders needed to know whether it had an edge to it or had turned to rust in its scabbard.

Like many FSB officers, Bulganov supplemented his government salary by selling his expertise, along with knowledge gained through his work itself, to private industry. In Bulganov’s case, he served as a paid informant for a man named Arkady Medvedev, the chief of security for Russian oligarch Ivan Kharkov. Bulganov fed Medvedev a steady stream of reports dealing with potential threats to his businesses, legal and illicit. Medvedev rewarded him by keeping a secret bank account in Bulganov’s name filled with cash. As a consequence of the arrangement, Grigori Bulganov had been able to penetrate Ivan Kharkov’s operations in a way no other outsider ever had. In fact, Bulganov was quite confident he knew more about Ivan’s arms-trafficking activities than any other intelligence officer in the world. In Russia, such knowledge could be dangerous. Sometimes, it could even be fatal, which explained why Bulganov was careful to stay on Arkady Medvedev’s good side. And why, when Medvedev called his cell at 11:15 P.M. on a Sunday night, he didn’t dare consider not answering it.

Grigori Bulganov did not speak for the next three minutes. Instead, he tore a sheet of notepaper into a hundred pieces while he listened to the account of what had taken place in Moscow that afternoon. He was glad Medvedev had called him. He only wished he had done it on a secure line.

“Are you sure it’s him?” Bulganov asked.

“No question.”

“How did he get back into the country?”

“With an American passport and a crude disguise.”

“Where is he now?”

Medvedev told him the location.

“What about Ivan’s wife?”

“She’s here, too.”

“What are your plans, Arkady?”

“I’m going to give him one more chance to answer a few questions. Then I’m going to drop him in a hole somewhere.” A pause. “Unless you’d like to do that for me, Grigori?”

“Actually, I might enjoy that. After all, he did disobey a direct order.”

“How quickly can you get down here?”

“Give me an hour. I’d like to have a word with the woman, too.”

“A word, Grigori. This matter doesn’t concern you.”

“I’ll be brief. Just make sure she’s there when I arrive.”

“She’ll be here.”

“How many men do you have there?”

“Five.”

“That’s a lot of witnesses.”

“Don’t worry, Grigori. They’re not the talkative sort.”