Two

The wretched conveyance was slowing, steel wheels creaking and brakes squealing as it approached the tiny rail station. Tvas was a bleak Siberian outpost, a small village situated literally in the middle of frozen nowhere. Picture perfect for his appointment in Samarra. After the long hours of worry, waiting, and trying to distract himself by reading, Alex Hawke finally turned the last page of his well-thumbed book, a volume by Balzac, and reread the final passage for the umpteenth time.

THE TRADE OF A SPY IS A VERY FINE ONE, WHEN THE SPY IS WORKING ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT. IS IT NOT IN FACT ENJOYING THE EXCITEMENTS OF A THIEF, WHILE RETAINING THE CHARACTER OF AN HONEST CITIZEN? BUT A MAN WHO UNDERTAKES THIS TRADE MUST MAKE UP HIS MIND TO SIMMER WITH WRATH, TO FRET WITH IMPATIENCE, TO STAND ABOUT IN THE MUD WITH HIS FEET FREEZING, TO BE CHILLED OR TO BE SCORCHED, AND TO BE DECEIVED BY FALSE HOPES. (OH YES, YES, THERE WAS ALWAYS THAT LITTLE POSSIBILITY!) HE MUST BE READY, ON THE FAITH OF A MERE INDICATION, TO WORK UP TO AN UNKNOWN GOAL; HE MUST BEAR THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF FAILING IN HIS AIM; HE MUST BE PREPARED TO RUN, TO BE MOTIONLESS, TO REMAIN FOR LONG HOURS WATCHING A WINDOW; TO INVENT A THOUSAND THEORIES OF ACTION . . . THE ONLY EXCITEMENT WHICH CAN COMPARE WITH IT IS THE LIFE OF A GAMBLER.

Monsieur Honoré de Balzac. A century and a half ago, he had nailed this bloody business to a fare-thee-well. Hawke closed the book, stood, and stretched his weary body, reaching with both hands toward the smoke and grease-stained green ceiling overhead. He rose up on his toes, flexing his taut quad and calf muscles, and his fingertips easily brushed the grimy ceiling. Hawke was tall, well over six feet, trim, but powerfully built.

And afraid of no one.

He possessed a martial spirit; his strong heart beat with the grim, stubborn, earnest energy, the might and main that had won at Waterloo and Trafalgar. At his naval college, Dartmouth, he’d once asked his boxing trainer what it took to become a fighter truly worthy of the name. He never forgot the man’s response. “The ideal fighter has heart, Alex, skill, movement, intelligence, but also creativity. You can have everything, but if you can’t make it up while you’re in the ring, you can’t be great. A lot of chaps have the mechanics and no heart; lots of guys have heart, no mechanics; the thing that puts it all together, it’s mysterious, it’s like making a work of art, you bring everything to it, you make it up while you’re doing it.”

He’d recently turned thirty-three, a fine age for a man, but old by his accounting methods. Still, a daily regimen of rigorous Royal Navy training and conditioning kept him fitter than most men ten years younger. Hawke cut an imposing figure. He had a heroic head of rather unruly thick black hair and a fine Roman nose, straight and imperial; his glacial blue eyes were startling above the high and finely molded planes of his cheeks and strong chin. His mouth could be a bit cruel at the corners but one always sensed a smile lurking there, a smile that was at once dangerous and sympathetic.

“Quite a simple man, actually,” his friend Ambrose Congreve, the famous Scotland Yard criminalist, had once explained about Hawke. “Men want to be him, women want to bed him. And when he puts his mind to it, he’s an immovable object.”

Hawke, to put it quite simply, went through life with the supremely confident outlook of a man with nothing left to prove. He had a dark and magnificent aspect about him, proud and fiery. Women, as Congreve had said, seemed taken by him. He was both funny and sad, that irresistible combination that is one of the secrets of charm. For one thing, he had no idea that he was especially charming or even remotely good-looking. Or the faintest notion that the affection he gave and inspired so freely among others was anything but natural, at least among normal, healthy people.

What he possessed was the real thing, and he adulterated it with nothing else. If one, and many were prone to do so, went looking for his faults, it could easily be said of him that he was not given to deep introspection. His heart and mind were always simply too busy. Elsewhere. His focus was outside, not inside. And if it was a shortcoming, so be it. He didn’t have time to worry about it.

He reached up and took his grandfather’s battered Gladstone portmanteau down from the overhead rack and placed it on the seat. Underneath his clothing were twin false bottoms. Unfastening the straps, he reached inside the hidden compartments and removed a handheld GPS, a miniature sat phone, and his only weapon, a SIG .45-calibre handgun. He popped the mag and ensured that the hollow-point parabellum rounds were properly loaded, leaving one in the chamber. Feeling the heft of the pistol, he almost laughed out loud at the puny state of his armament.

He slipped the gun into a quick-draw nylon holster suspended inside his worn black leather jacket. Underarm protection you just can’t find at the corner druggist. He took his ridiculous-looking and heavy bearskin coat down from the hook on the door and shouldered into the damn thing. Donning the black sable trapper’s hat that Anastasia had given him years ago, he stepped out into the narrow corridor and made his way, carefully lurching toward the exit at the rear of the car.

I’m walking straight into a bloody trap, the voice in his head warned for the hundredth time, seduced by false hopes. I’m willfully entering a wholly hostile environment alone, dressed in a bloody bear suit and carrying a bloody popgun.

Insanity!

The train screeched to a stop, the passenger door slid aside, and a blast of icy particles stung his face like so many chips of diamonds. Enormous white billowing clouds were spilling from beneath the cars as he stepped down onto the deserted, snow-crusted platform. The new mantle of eggshell snow was already turning mushy in the strong winter sunlight. He quickly cast his eyes right then left. The platform, mercifully, appeared empty.

No one was waiting for him, not this time. No beautiful Russian tsarina. Not even some grey-faced KGB goon squad waiting to simply gun him down right here at the steps. Alex Hawke, apparently not dead on arrival. He shrugged, finally admitting what had been the most likely scenario hiding in the back of his mind: that he would step off this train and into a hail of bullets.

The trip was off to a good start. He had not really expected to leave this train depot alive. He smiled at his good fortune and started for the stationmaster’s office. He had not even noticed two large men in heavy black overcoats who’d stepped down from a first-class car near the locomotive of the train once his back was turned.

After the stuffy, foul-smelling compartment, the icy air was bracing and, feeling cautiously optimistic, he made his way toward the station house, glancing at the elderly stationmaster through the ice-glazed window, the same man Anastasia had once introduced him to as her trusted friend. He paused at the door, the snow piled up against it like dirty sherbet.

“Good morning,” Hawke said in Russian, stamping his boots to rid them of snow. Then, since his Russian was so embarrassingly poor, he asked the white-bearded stationmaster if they might speak in English.

“Da, da, da,” the wizened old man said, staring up at him, this towering alien from another planet. He squinted through his gold pince-nez glasses and smiled, recognizing Hawke as the man the famous Anastasia Korsakova had journeyed by troika to meet here many years ago. “I’ve been expecting you, sir. I am Nikolai. Remember?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Hawke said. “The good Dr. Halter told me he paid you a visit sometime last month. He said you would have a name for me. Someone who might be of assistance in my travels.” Hawke extracted an envelope containing five thousand rubles and passed it to the old fellow. “I believe this is for you.”