If he’d had on his stiff jeans, maybe he could have hidden it, but he had on very expensive lightweight pure virgin wool pants that outlined him completely.

If someone yelled fire! he was a dead man.

This was unheard of. His cock obeyed him at all times. When he said go, it went. When he said stop, it stopped. When he said down, it went down and stayed down.

And Christ, he wasn’t hurting for sex. True, he hadn’t had a woman for a couple of weeks, except for one girl who’d picked him up in a bar the night after the takedown, when he was still pumped full of adrenaline. Four whiskeys and he was more than ready for the brunette who’d sidled up to him and told him exactly what she wanted. Waking up next to her had been depressing, though, particularly since he couldn’t remember her name.

All the sex he’d had in the past year had been depressing, come to think of it.

Sex with Consuelo had been creepier’n hell and with what’s-her-name had been completely unsatisfactory, like being given wax food when you’re hungry.

Sex with Consuelo had felt like one of those sexual perversions in psychiatric manuals, like fucking dead people or something. It took a lot to put Nick off sex, but Consuelo had done it. The memory of sex with her made him nauseous.

The thought of sex with Charity Prewitt, now that was something else entirely. Another activity altogether.

Everything about Charity was delightful—her skin, her voice, her manner, her smell. Feminine and elegant. Totally enticing.

No wonder his dick was standing to attention, like a divining rod that had finally found a cool, fresh spring after panning over mud flats for a year.

“You’re staring,” Charity said dryly. He met those amazing eyes—like looking directly into a pale summer sky at noon.

“Yes, I am,” he confessed. “But then that’s what men do—stare at pretty women. It’s what makes us different from, say, trees.”

She smiled. Charity didn’t seem to have the coy gene most beautiful women were born with. She didn’t simper, she didn’t flutter her eyelashes—though they were so long she could probably blow candles out at twenty paces just by batting her eyes—she didn’t breathe deeply to showcase her breasts. Nick had been on the receiving end of every single one of those ploys and could write the script.

Charity simply kept on eating serenely.

Nick had to get his head out of his ass and start pumping—no, don’t think of that word! — for intel. There was a reason he was here, and it wasn’t to stare into Charity Prewitt’s beautiful eyes and fantasize about being inside her. And he sure as hell wasn’t here to eat Emilio’s delicious fagottini, though that was a lucky fringe benefit, too.

By all rights, Nick should be with his partners in a freezing cold surveillance van, washing his socks and briefs out in a bucket of cold water, pissing in a jar, shitting in the woods, just like the bears. The reason he wasn’t was because he was acknowledged as being good with the ladies.

And, of course, because he was a really, really good liar.

Tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

However, having all the blood rush down from his head straight into his blue steeler was not good news. He needed that blood above his neck so he could pry information out of her. Hard to do that with a hard-on that hurt.

Think Worontzoff, he told himself. Think what a scumbag the man is.

Vassily Worontzoff. Man of letters, novelist, the last of the Russian intellectuals sent to the Gulag. The Soviet Union was dying, but like a scorpion that still has a sting in its dying tail, it lashed, sweeping Worontzoff away.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. The air had been full of perestroika and glasnost. Newspapers blossomed, the Berlin Wall came down. Intellectuals were the flavor of the month.

But something went wrong somewhere and Worontzoff and his lover Katya were sent to the place humanity forgot—Kolyma. The most notorious of Stalin’s camps, where the prisoners were used as slave labor in the gold mines. Where so many died that the road to Kolyma was called the Road of Bones. Where it was said every ounce of gold mined cost a human life. It certainly cost Katya’s.

Nick could almost feel sorry for the poor fuck, except for the fact that in the prison camp he joined the vory v zukone, the thieves-in-law. A criminal underclass sworn to revenge against society. The vory rejected everything about society—its mores, its laws, its affections.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the vory roared to power, an engine that had been idling, waiting for the brakes to come off. Post—Soviet Russia was a giant that had been felled, its prone body ripe for gutting. And gut it they did.

The Russian Mafiya exploded. In a little over a decade and a half, it had become more powerful than the state. It owned factories and railroads and telcos and oil wells. It held the power of life and death over something like two hundred million citizens. It signed contracts and treaties, with almost the dignity of a separate country.

Powerful Vors—Mafia dons—arose from the ashes of the Soviet Union, the stuff of legend. The thieves-in-law weren’t talking, but Chechens and Azeris weren’t sworn to secrecy, and slowly intel leaked out. The greatest Vor of all was a kulturny chelovek—a man of culture. He’d been a zek, had survived the Gulag. His hands were useless, scarred beyond repair.

There was only one possible man who fit that description, Vassily Worontzoff, a man revered inside Russia, a legend throughout the world. The writer whose Dry Your Tears in Moscow was considered one of the classic novels of the twentieth century. After the Gulag, he never wrote another word for public consumption. Many speculated why this was so, but Nick knew why. The thieves-in-law swore they would never again toil at legal work. So Worontzoff’s legend grew while he pulled the strings of an increasingly powerful Mafiya network.

As his power and reach expanded, so did the legend. His name was spoken only in whispers on street corners. He was insulated by layers and layers of lawyers and flunkies. Few knew his real identity.

One of them had been a Russian former Special Forces operator Nick had worked with trying to run down Khan’s nuclear network in Uzbekistan, Sergei Petrov. Brother-in-arms. Straight-up guy who was handy with his GSh-18, was a good man to have at your back and who liked his vodka just a little too much.

They’d been on a mission in Waziristan, tracking down possible al Qaeda nests when Sergei stumbled onto a drug operation his contact in Peshawar said was run by the Russian Mafiya. Sergei had sniffed around a little, was given Worontzoff’s name, which he passed on to Nick. One more sniff, and it turned lethal. Forty minutes after giving Nick the name over a cell phone, his throat had been slashed so deeply the knife nicked Sergei’s spinal column. His penis had been sliced off and stuffed in his mouth—the universal symbol for keeping your mouth shut.

The memory of kneeling in Sergei’s blood helped get Nick’s dick down.

There are two ways to be a bad guy and Worontzoff covered both. You could do bad things to things or to people. Nick didn’t really give a shit about crime against property, though Worontzoff was in the hit list of top ten men doing damage to the world economy. Thanks to him, the Russian economy was starved of cash, several banks had crashed, and a couple of third world economies had gone bankrupt while their presidents for life played with their dicks and their money in Geneva.

Bootleg gas scams, laundering billions, reselling stolen Mercedes—it was all bad stuff, sure, but Nick could live with it. What he couldn’t live with—what he’d dedicated his life to fighting—was people being hurt.

As far as Nick could tell from the file, Worontzoff had gone into prison camp a writer and had come out a monster. Over the past fifteen years, he’d been personally responsible for death and misery on an unimaginable scale.