“Nine a.m. at the Konakovo airfield. Remember, no Ivan, no children. Are we clear, Mr. Ambassador?”

“He’ll be there.”

“You’re free to leave. You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake your hand. I’m feeling a bit ill myself.”

ED FIELDING remained on the observation deck until the ambassador and his entourage were safely off base, then boarded the waiting Gulfstream. Elena Kharkov was buckled into her seat, eyes fixed on the deserted tarmac.

“How long do we have to wait?”

“Not long, Elena. Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine, Ed. Let’s go home.”

GABRIEL WAS notified of the plane’s departure at 10:45 p.m. Moscow time while standing in the window of his room at the Metropol. He had been there, on and off, since returning from his foray into Tverskaya Street. Ten hours with nothing to do but pace the floor and make himself sick with worry. Ten hours with nothing to do but picture the operation from beginning to end a thousand times. Ten hours with nothing to do but think about Ivan. He wondered how his enemy would spend this night. Would he spend it quietly with his child bride? Or perhaps a celebration was in order: a blowout. That was the word Ivan and his cohorts used to describe the parties thrown at the conclusion of a major arms deal. The bigger the deal, the bigger the blowout.

With the children’s plane now bound for Russia, Gabriel felt his nerves turn to piano wire. He tried to slow his racing heart, but his body refused his commands. He tried to close his eyes, but saw only satellite photos of the little dacha in the birch forest. And the room where Chiara and Grigori were surely being kept chained and bound. And the four streams that converged in a great marshland. And the parallel depressions in the woods.

My husband is a devout Stalinist… His love of Stalin has influenced his real estate purchases.

The secure PDA helped pass the time. It told him that Navot, Yaakov, and Oded were proceeding to the target. It told him that the concealed camera had detected no change at the dacha or in the disposition of Ivan’s forces. It told him that God had granted them a heavy ground fog over the marshes to help conceal their approach. And finally, at 1:48 a.m., it told him that it was nearly time to leave.

Gabriel had dressed long ago and was sweating beneath layer upon layer of protective clothing. He forced himself to remain in the room a few minutes longer, then switched off the lights and slipped quietly into the corridor. As the clock in the lobby tolled 2 a.m., he stepped from the elevator and passed Khrushchev’s doppelgänger with a curt nod. The Range Rover was waiting in Teatralnyy Prospekt, engine running. Mikhail drummed his fingers nervously as they swept up the hill toward FSB Headquarters.

“You okay, Mikhail?”

“I’m fine, boss.”

“You’re not nervous, are you?”

“Why would I be nervous? I love being around Lubyanka. The KGB kept my father in there for six months when I was a kid. Did I ever tell you that, Gabriel?”

He had.

“Do you have the guns?”

“Plenty.”

“Radios?”

“Of course.”

“Sat phone?”

“Gabriel, please.”

“Coffee?”

“Two thermoses. One for us, one for them.”

“What about the bolt cutters?”

“A pair for each of us. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“One of us goes down.”

“Nobody’s going down except Ivan’s guards.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Mikhail resumed his tapping.

“You’re not going to do that all the way?”

“I’ll try not to.”

“That’s good. Because you’re giving me a headache.”

MOSCOW REFUSED to relinquish its grip on them without a fight. It took thirty minutes just to get from Lubyanka to the MKAD outer ring road: thirty minutes of traffic jams, broken signal lights, sinkholes, crime scenes, and unexplained militia roadblocks. “And it’s two in the morning,” Mikhail said in exasperation. “Imagine what it’s like during the evening rush, when half of Moscow is trying to get home at the same time.”

“If it continues like this, we won’t have to imagine.”

Once beyond the city, the massive apartment houses began to gradually disappear only to be replaced by mile after mile of smoking rail yards and factories. They were, of course, the biggest factories Gabriel had ever seen-behemoths with towering smokestacks and scarcely a light burning anywhere. A freight train rattled by heading in the opposite direction. It seemed to take an eternity to pass. It was five miles long, thought Gabriel. Or perhaps it was a hundred. Surely it was the world’s longest.

They were driving on the M7. It ran eastward into Russia’s vast middle, all the way through Tatarstan. And if you were feeling really adventurous, Mikhail explained, you could hit the Trans-Siberian in Ufa and drive to Mongolia and China. “China, Gabriel! Can you imagine driving to China?”

Actually, Gabriel could. The sheer scale of the place made anything possible: the endless black sky filled with hard white stars, the vast frozen plains dotted with slumbering towns and villages, the unbearable cold. In some of the villages he could see onion domes shining in the bright moonlight. Ivan’s hero had been hard on the churches of Russia. He’d ordered Kaganovich to dynamite Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1931-supposedly because it blocked the view from the windows of his Kremlin apartment-and in the countryside he’d turned the churches into barns and grain silos. Some were now being restored. Others, like the villages they once served, were in ruins. It was Russia’s dirty little secret. The glitz and glamour of Moscow was matched only by the poverty and deprivation of the countryside. Moscow got the money, the villages got absentee governors and the occasional visit from some Kremlin flunky. They were the places you left behind to make your fortune in the big city. They were for the losers. In the villages, you did nothing but drink and curse the rich bastards in Moscow.

They flashed through a string of towns, each more desolate than the last: Lakinsk, Demidovo, Vorsha. Ahead lay Vladimir, capital of the oblast. Its five-domed Cathedral of the Assumption had been the model for all the cathedrals of Russia-the cathedrals Stalin had destroyed or turned into pigpens. Mikhail explained that people had been living in and around Vladimir for twenty-five thousand years, an impressive statistic even for a boy from the Valley of Jezreel. Twenty-five thousand years, Gabriel thought, gazing out at the broken factories on the city’s western outskirts. Why had they come? Why had they stayed?

Reclining his seat, he saw an image of his last late-night drive through the Russian countryside: Olga and Elena sleeping in the backseat, Grigori behind the wheel. Promise me one thing, Gabriel… At least then they had been driving out of Russia, not directly into the belly of the beast. Mikhail found a news bulletin on the radio and provided simultaneous translation while he drove. The first day of the G-8 summit had gone well, at least from the point of view of the Russian president, which was the only one that mattered. Then, by some miracle of atmospheric conditions, Mikhail found a BBC bulletin in English. There had been an important political development in Zimbabwe. A fatal plane crash in South Korea. And in Afghanistan, Taliban forces had carried out a major raid in Kabul. With Ivan’s guns, no doubt.

“Is it possible to drive to Afghanistan from here?”

“Sure,” said Mikhail. He then proceeded to recite the road numbers and the distances while Vladimir, center of human habitation for twenty-five millennia, receded once more into the darkness.