By then, it was approaching eleven. There was just enough time to return Nazari to the InterContinental by his deadline. Gabriel warned the Iranian of the consequences of any breach of their hastily drawn contract. Then he cut him loose from the chair. Nazari looked surprisingly well for a man who had been subjected to a thrashing and a mock execution. The only visible evidence of his ordeal was the small burn in the center of his forehead. “Put some ice on it when you get back to your room,” said Yaakov as he shoved Nazari into the car. “We want you to look your best for the negotiations tomorrow.”

They dropped him at the eastern edge of the Stadtpark, and Mikhail trailed him back to the hotel. The lobby was deserted; Nazari boarded an elevator alone and rode it to the seventh floor, where his compromised room awaited him. Hunched over a laptop computer in the room next door, Eli Lavon listened to what came next. A man being violently sick into the toilet, a man weeping uncontrollably after a phone call to his home in Tehran went unanswered. Lavon lowered the volume and gave his quarry a modicum of privacy. Big boys’ games, he was thinking. Big boys’ rules.

44

SPARROW HILLS, MOSCOW

KATERINA AKULOVA’S DREAM UNFOLDED THE way it always did. She was walking through a birch forest near her old training camp when the trees parted like a curtain and a lake of crystalline blue appeared. She had no need to disrobe; in her dreams she was always unclothed, no matter the situation. She slid beneath the calm flat surface and swam through the streets of her ersatz German village. Then the water turned to blood, and she realized she was drowning in it. Starved of oxygen, her heart banging against her ribs, she kicked wildly toward a pinprick of light. But each time she breached the surface, a hand pushed her down again. It was a woman’s hand, smooth, flawless. Though Katerina had never felt its touch, she knew it to be the hand of her mother.

Finally, she sat upright in bed, gasping for air as though she had not drawn a breath in several minutes. Her hair was damp and limp, her hands were shaking with fear. She reached out for her cigarettes, lit one with difficulty, and drew the smoke deeply into her lungs. The nicotine calmed her, as it always did. She looked at the clock and saw it was approaching noon. Somehow, she’d slept nearly twelve hours. Outside, the previous night’s snow had moved on and a white disk of a sun blazed low in the pale sky. Moscow, it seemed, had been granted a few hours’ reprieve from winter.

She swung her feet to the floor, padded into the kitchen, and brewed a cup of coffee in the automatic maker. She drank it while standing over the machine and immediately prepared another. Her SVR-issue mobile phone was lying on the counter. She picked it up and frowned at the screen. There was still no departure order from Alexei. She was convinced it was not oversight on Alexei’s part. Alexei had his reasons. He always did.

She checked the weather forecast. It was a few degrees above freezing, rare for Moscow at that time of year, and the clouds were expected to stay away for the remainder of the afternoon. It had been a long time since she’d had any exercise, and she decided a run would do her good. She carried her coffee into the bedroom and dressed: a base layer top and bottom, a cold-weather tracksuit, a pair of new running shoes—genuine American shoes, not the cheap, threadbare knockoffs that came out of Russian factories. Better to run barefoot than in Russian trainers. Next she pulled on a pair of heavy gloves and stuffed her hair beneath a woolen cap. All that remained was her gun, a Makarov 9mm that she hated to carry when she was running. Besides, if some vodka-soaked pervert were foolish enough to try something, she was more than capable of looking after herself. She had once beaten a groper unconscious on the footpaths of Gorky Park. Alexei had finished the job—at least that was the rumor at Moscow Center. Katerina had never bothered to inquire about the man’s fate. He had deserved it, whatever it was.

She stretched for a few minutes while smoking her second cigarette and drinking her third cup of black coffee. Then she rode the elevator down to the lobby and, ignoring the hungover greeting of the unshaven concierge, stepped into the street. The pavements had been cleared of snow; she set out at an easy pace westward to Michurinsky Prospekt. It bordered Moscow State University, the school Katerina might have attended if she had been a normal child and not the daughter of a KGB officer who’d forgotten to take her birth control while setting a honey trap.

At the bottom of the hill she turned right onto the gentle sweep of Kosygina Street. In the median was a paved footpath lined on both sides by bare-limbed trees. Her legs were beginning to warm; she could feel the first beads of perspiration forming beneath her jacket. She lengthened her stride, increased her pace. She passed a pretty green-and-white church and the Sparrow Hills observation point, where two smiling newlyweds were posed for photographs against the backdrop of the city. It was a tradition for Russian couples, one that Katerina would never experience. In the unlikely event she were to marry, the SVR would have to approve of her spouse. The wedding would take place in secret, and no photographers would be present. No family, either. Not a problem for Katerina, for she had none.

It was her intention to run to the Russian Academy of Sciences and then start toward home along the embankment of the Moscow River. But as she was passing the garish entrance of the Korston Hotel, she became aware of the fact that she was being followed by a Range Rover with blacked-out windows. She had seen it for the first time on Michurinsky Prospekt and a second time at the Sparrow Hills observation point, where one of the occupants, a man in a leather jacket, had been pretending to admire the view. Now the vehicle was parked outside the Korston, and the man in the leather jacket was walking toward Katerina through the trees. He was over six feet tall, well over two hundred pounds, and walked with the rolling arm-swinging stride of a man who spent a great deal of time in the gym.

It went against Katerina’s training to turn her back to a potential threat, so she continued toward the man at the same pace, her eyes straight ahead, as though only vaguely aware of his presence. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his leather coat. As she tried to pass, he removed one, his right, and grabbed her by the bicep. It was like being seized by the claw of a mechanical digger. Her feet skidded from beneath her. She would have fallen to the pavement if the hand had not kept her upright.

“Let go!” she snapped.

“Nyet,” he said coldly.

She tried to pull away, more as a warning than a true attempt to escape, but he tightened his grip further still. Her next moves flowed by instinct. She stamped hard on the instep of his right foot and blinded him with a stiletto-like finger to each eye. As his grip relaxed, she pivoted and raised a knee into his groin. Then she pivoted again and delivered a vicious elbow to the temple that dropped him to the ground. She was preparing to do permanent damage to his exposed throat but stopped when she heard laughter on the path behind her. She placed her hands on her knees and fought hard for breath in the frigid air. Her mouth tasted of blood. She imagined it was the blood of her dreams.

“Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to make sure you were ready to go back into the field.”

“I’m always ready.”

“You made that quite obvious.” Alexei Rozanov shook his head slowly. “That poor devil will never need to bother with a condom again. I suppose he’s lucky in a way.”