“Are you sure you want them both, Gabriel?”

“Both.”

“Because I can take the one on the left.”

“Just get out.”

Once again, Mikhail opened the door and climbed out. This time, Gabriel did the same thing, parka unzipped, Beretta at the seam of his trousers. Mikhail approached the sentries, thermos aloft, chattering in Russian. Something about hot coffee. Something about the Moscow traffic being shit. Something about Ivan being on the warpath. Gabriel couldn’t be certain. He didn’t much care. He was looking at the spot, just beyond the Rover’s right-front tire, where he was going to drop to one knee and end two more Russian lives.

The guards were no longer looking at Mikhail but at each other. Shoulders shrugged. Heads shook.

And Gabriel knelt on his spot.

Two more flashes. Two more Russians down.

No sound. No broken windows.

Mikhail leaned the thermos against the base of the door and quickly retreated several steps.

The birch forest trembled.

Silence no more.

ON THE back side of the dacha, three men rose in unison and advanced slowly through the trees. Navot reminded them to keep their heads down. There was about to be a lot of lead in the air.

CHIARA SAT up with a start, hands cuffed, feet shackled, dust and debris raining down on her in the pitch-darkness. From above, she could hear the hammer of footfalls against the floorboards. Then muffled gunshots. Then screams.

“Someone’s coming, Grigori!”

More gunshots. More screams.

“Get on your feet, Grigori! Can you get on your feet?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You have to try.”

Chiara heard a moan.

“Too many broken bones, Chiara. Too little strength.”

She reached her cuffed hands into the darkness.

“Take my hands, Grigori. We can do it.”

A few seconds elapsed while they found each other in the gloom.

“Pull, Grigori! Pull me up.”

He moaned again in agony as he pulled on Chiara’s hands. The instant her weight was centered over the balls of her feet, she straightened her legs and stood. Then, amid the gunshots, she heard another sound: the woman with milk-white skin and translucent eyes coming down the stairs in a hurry. Chiara inched closer to the door, careful not to trip over the shackles, and squeezed into the corner. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she was certain of one thing. She wasn’t going to die. Not without a fight.

IT TURNED out none of the phones were working. Yekaterina’s didn’t work. The built-in on board the Bell didn’t work. And not one phone among the security detail worked. Not a single phone. Not until the children’s plane was airborne. Then the phones worked just fine. Ivan called the Kremlin and was soon talking to a close aide of the president’s. Oleg Rudenko placed several calls to his men at the dacha, none of which were answered. He glanced at his watch: 9:08. Another shift of guards was due any minute. Rudenko dialed the number for the senior man and lifted the phone to his ear.

THE COMBINATION of the concussive blast wave and the deafening thunderclap did most of the heavy lifting for them. All Mikhail and Gabriel had to do was take care of a few loose ends.

Loose end number one was the guard who had peered briefly through the window. Gabriel dispatched him with a quick burst of a Mini-Uzi seconds after entry.

Before the blast, two more guards had been enjoying a quiet breakfast. Now they were sprawled across the floor, separated from their weapons. Gabriel raked them with Uzi fire and stepped into the kitchen, where a fourth guard had been making tea. That one managed to squeeze off a single shot before taking several rounds in the chest.

The right side of the dacha was now secured.

A few feet away, Mikhail was having similar success. After following Gabriel through the blown-out doorway, he had immediately spotted two dazed guards in the dacha’s central hall. Gabriel had crouched instinctively before squeezing off his first shots, thus opening a clean firing line for Mikhail. Mikhail had taken it, sending a sustained burst of gunfire down the hall just a few inches over Gabriel’s head. Then he had immediately pivoted toward the sitting room. One of Ivan’s men had been watching the highlights of a big football match on television when the charge went off. Now he was covered in plaster and dust and searching blindly for his weapon. Mikhail put him down with a shot to the chest.

“Where’s the girl?” he asked the dying man in Russian.

“In the cellar.”

“Good boy.”

Mikhail shot him in the face. Left side of the dacha secured.

They headed to the stairs.

SQUEEZED INTO the corner of the blacked-out cell, Chiara heard three sounds in rapid succession: a padlock snapping open, a dead bolt sliding back, a latch turning. The metal door moved away with a heavy scrape, allowing a trapezoid of weak light to enter the cell and illuminate Grigori. Next came a Makarov 9mm, held by a pair of hands. The hands of the woman who had killed Chiara’s child with sedatives. The gun moved away from Chiara a few degrees and took aim at Grigori. His battered face registered no fear. He was in too much pain to be afraid, too weary to resist death. Chiara resisted for him. Lunging forward out of the gloom, she seized the woman by the wrists and bent them backward. The gun went off; in the tiny concrete chamber, it sounded like cannon fire. Then it went off again. Then a third time. Chiara held on. For Grigori. For her baby.

For Gabriel.

IVAN KHARKOV was a man of many secrets, many lives. No one knew this any better than Yekaterina, his former mistress turned devoted wife. Like Elena before her, she had entered into a foolish pact. In exchange for being granted her every material wish, she would ask no questions. No questions about Ivan’s business. No questions about Ivan’s friends and associates. No questions about why Elena had decided to hand over the children. And now, no questions about why the children had refused to leave the plane. Instead, she attempted to play the role Ivan had given her. She tried to hold his hand, but Ivan refused to be touched. Tried to soothe him with words, but Ivan refused to listen. For the moment, he had eyes only for Oleg Rudenko. The security man was shouting into his cell phone over the thudding of the rotors. Yekaterina heard words she wished she had not. How many men do you have? How many minutes until you arrive? No blood! Do you hear me? No blood until we get there! She summoned the courage to ask where they were going. Ivan told her she would find out soon enough. She told him she wanted to go home. Ivan told her to shut her mouth. She stared out the window of the helicopter. Somewhere down there was her old village. The village where she had lived before being discovered by the woman from the modeling agency. The village filled with drunks and losers. She closed her eyes. Take me home, you monster. Please, take me home.

THE YOUNG aide approached the Russian president with considerable caution. Aides usually did, regardless of their age. The president leaned away from the table and allowed the aide to whisper into his ear, a rare privilege. Then the look again, chin to his chest, eyes like daggers.

“He doesn’t look happy,” the British prime minister said.

“Oh, really? How can you tell?”

“I suppose things didn’t go well at the airport.”

“Wait until he hears the encore.”

THEY HAD hit the stairs on the run and were halfway down when the first gunshot erupted. Mikhail was leading the way, Gabriel a step behind, his view partially obscured. Nearing the bottom, a terrible smell greeted them: the stench of humans confined in a small place for too long. The stench of death. Then another gunshot rang out. And another. And another…