Finished with his depressing reading, he signed the last report and sat back with a heavy sigh. The omens all pointed in the same dark direction. His status, his fortune, and even his personal safety and that of his immediate family were all increasingly at risk. He looked up from his desk, noticing that outside his office windows, the morning’s weak sunshine and pale blue skies had yielded to looming gray clouds. Wonderful, he thought dourly. Even the weather matched his mood. From the look of those clouds, Moscow’s first real snowfall of the season was on the way.

Then Grishin laughed harshly. Enough moaning and pissing, Dmitri, he told himself. He had no intention of sitting frozen in fear, like a mouse transfixed by the hungry, burning gleam of a cat’s eyes. His determination to act first against the threats he saw emerging had been the genesis for the audacious, highly risky scheme he had privately code-named Akt Ischeznoveniya, Vanishing Act.

Leaning forward again, he picked up a secure internal phone. Teams of professionals checked and rechecked North Star’s communications and computer networks every day to make sure they were safe from unauthorized access by corporate rivals and snooping government agencies. Like all rich and powerful men in Russia, Grishin had many secrets that were too dangerous to share. “Send in my visitor,” he ordered tersely.

Moments later, his office door buzzed and then swung open to admit a tall, fit man in his early thirties. From the stylishly tailored shoulders of his Savile Row bespoke suit to the narrow tips of his expensive, Italian leather dress shoes, Pavel Voronin appeared to be the consummate, high-level corporate courtier. He had been educated overseas at the best schools in the United Kingdom and the United States, and it showed. Anyone meeting him for the first time would have pegged him as a polished yes-man—more used to crafting bland, inoffensive memos and massaging delicate executive egos than engaging in the rough-and-tumble, red in tooth and claw, real world of Russian business infighting.

The facade the younger man presented to others amused Grishin.

In reality, Voronin was his top troubleshooter—in all senses of the word. Outwardly genial and cultured, he was actually ruthless, driven, and completely amoral, willing to go to any lengths needed to accomplish whatever task he’d been assigned. In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, he would have been snapped up by the KGB or the GRU at a relatively early age and trained in the dark arts of “wet work,” murder and assassination. Fortunately, Grishin’s talent scouts had spotted him before Russia’s revamped intelligence bureaucracies realized the depths of his ambition and skills. And there was no doubt that the younger man found working for his current patron far more interesting and lucrative than government service. To enhance his effectiveness, only a handful of the oligarch’s closest aides knew that Voronin worked for North Star Capital. On his rare visits to the Mercury City Tower, he used Grishin’s own private executive elevator.