“How many vodkas did he drink in the bar?”

“Seven,” said Ricardo.

The concierge put his teeth together and hissed contemptuously. Only a Russian could drink seven vodkas in an hour and a half and still remain on his feet.

“What do you think?” asked Ricardo. “Mobster, spy, or hit man?”

It didn’t matter, thought Philippe gloomily. The walls of the Grand had been breached by a Russian. Resistance was now the order of the day. They retreated to their respective outposts, Ricardo to the grotto of Reception, Philippe to his pulpit near the lift. Ten minutes later came the first call from Room 237. Ricardo endured a Stalinesque tirade before murmuring a few soothing words and hanging up the phone. He looked at Philippe and smiled.

“Monsieur Lubin was wondering when his bags might arrive.”

“I’ll see to it right away,” said Philippe, smothering a yawn.

“He was also wondering whether something could be done about the heat in his room. He says it’s too warm, and the thermostat doesn’t seem to work.”

Philippe picked up his telephone and dialed Maintenance.

“Turn the heat up in Room 237,” he said. “Monsieur Lubin is cold.”

Had they witnessed the first few moments of Lubin’s stay, they would have felt certain in their belief that a miscreant was in their midst. How else to explain that he removed all the drawers from the chest and the bedside tables and unscrewed all the bulbs from the lamps and the light fixtures? Or that he stripped bare the deluxe queen-size bed and pried the lid from the two-line message-center telephone? Or that he poured a complimentary bottle of mineral water into the toilet and hurled a pair of chocolates by Touvier of Geneva into the snow-filled street? Or that, having completed his rampage, he then returned the room to the near-pristine state in which he had found it?

It was because of his profession that he took these rather drastic measures, but his profession was not one of those suggested by Ricardo the receptionist. Aleksandr Viktorovich Lubin was neither a mobster nor a spy, nor a hit man, only a practitioner of the most dangerous trade one could choose in the brave New Russia: the trade of journalism. And not just any type of journalism: independent journalism. His magazine, Moskovsky Gazeta, was one of the country’s last investigative weeklies and had been a persistent stone in the shoe of the Kremlin. Its reporters and photographers were watched and harassed constantly, not only by the secret police but by the private security services of the powerful oligarchs they attempted to cover. Courchevel was now crawling with such men. Men who thought nothing of sprinkling transmitters and poisons around hotel rooms. Men who operated by the creed of Stalin: Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.

Confident the room had not been tampered with, Lubin again dialed the concierge to check on his bags and was informed they would arrive “imminently.” Then, after throwing open the balcony doors to the cold evening air, he settled himself at the writing desk and removed a file folder from his dog-eared leather briefcase. It had been given to him the previous evening by Boris Ostrovsky, the Gazeta’s editor in chief. Their meeting had taken place not in the Gazeta’s offices, which were assumed to be thoroughly bugged, but on a bench in the Arbatskaya Metro station.

I’m only going to give you part of the picture, Ostrovsky had said, handing Lubin the documents with practiced indifference. It’s for your own protection. Do you understand, Aleksandr? Lubin had understood perfectly. Ostrovsky was handing him an assignment that could get him killed.

He opened the file now and examined the photograph that lay atop the dossier. It showed a well-dressed man with cropped dark hair and a prizefighter’s rugged face standing at the side of the Russian president at a Kremlin reception. Attached to the photo was a thumb-nail biography-wholly unnecessary, because Aleksandr Lubin, like every other journalist in Moscow, could recite the particulars of Ivan Borisovich Kharkov’s remarkable career from memory. Son of a senior KGB off icer… graduate of the prestigious Moscow State University… boy wonder of the KGB’s Fifth Main Directorate… As the empire was crumbling, Kharkov had left the KGB and earned a fortune in banking during the anarchic early years of Russian capitalism. He had invested wisely in energy, raw materials, and real estate, and by the dawn of the millennium had joined Moscow ’s growing cadre of newly minted multimillionaires. Among his many holdings was a shipping and air freight company with tentacles stretching across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The true size of his financial empire was impossible for an outsider to estimate. A relative newcomer to capitalism, Ivan Kharkov had mastered the art of the front company and the corporate shell.

Lubin flipped to the next page of the dossier, a glossy magazine-qualityphotograph of “Château Kharkov,” Ivan’s winter palace on the rue de Nogentil in Courchevel.

He spends the winter holiday there along with every other rich and famous Russian, Ostrovsky had said. Watch your step around the house. Ivan’s goons are all former Spetsnaz and OMON. Do you hear what I’m saying to you, Aleksandr? I don’t want you to end up like Irina Chernova.

Irina Chernova was the famous journalist from the Gazeta’s main rival who had exposed one of Kharkov ’s shadier investments. Two nights after the article appeared, she had been shot to death by a pair of hired assassins in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. Ostrovsky, for reasons known only to him, had included a photograph of her bullet-riddled body in the dossier. Now, as then, Lubin turned it over quickly.

Ivan usually operates behind tightly closed doors. Courchevel is one of the few places where he actually moves around in public. We want you to follow him, Aleksandr. We want to know who he’s meeting with. Who he’s skiing with. Who he’s taking to lunch. Get pictures when you can, but never approach him. And don’t tell anyone in town where you work. Ivan’s security boys can smell a reporter a mile away.

Ostrovsky had then handed Lubin an envelope containing airline tickets, a rental car reservation, and hotel accommodations. Check in with the office every couple of days, Ostrovsky had said. And try to have some fun, Aleksandr. Your colleagues are all very jealous. You get to go to Courchevel and party with the rich and famous while we freeze to death in Moscow.

On that note, Ostrovsky had risen to his feet and walked to the edge of the platform. Lubin had slipped the dossier into his briefcase and immediately broken into a drenching sweat. He was sweating again now. The damn heat! The furnace was still blazing away. He was starting to reach for the telephone to lodge another complaint when finally he heard the knock. He covered the length of the short entrance hall in two resentful strides and flung open the door without bothering to ask who was on the other side. A mistake, he thought immediately, for standing in the semidarkness of the corridor was a man of medium height, dressed in a dark ski jacket, a woolen cap, and mirrored goggles.

Lubin was wondering why anyone would wear goggles inside a hotel at night when the first blow came, a vicious sideways chop that seemed to crush his windpipe. The second strike, a well-aimed kick to the groin, caused his body to bend in half at the waist. He was able to emit no protest as the man slipped into the room and closed the door soundlessly behind him. Nor was he able to resist when the man forced him onto the bed and sat astride his hips. The knife that emerged from the inside of the ski jacket was the type wielded by elite soldiers. It entered Lubin’s abdomen just below the ribs and plunged upward toward his heart. As his chest cavity filled with blood, Lubin was forced to suffer the additional indignity of watching his own death reflected in the mirrored lenses of his killer’s goggles. The assassin released his grip on the knife and, with the weapon still lodged in Lubin’s chest, rose from the bed and calmly collected the dossier. Aleksandr Lubin felt his heart beat a final time as his killer slipped silently from the room. The heat, he was thinking. The damn heat…