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To all the foster children

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer needs a lot of friends: At least this writer does. These are the friends that don’t mind fielding a call, often out of the blue, and being asked a question of fact or preference, or being willing to read an outline or character study and lend an opinion. You all know who you are, and thanks. Of course there’s always Joe Cox, who knows more about law and business than I’ll ever know, and Mark Flowenbaum, a real forensic pathologist. And, of course, there’s Jean Reeds Cook, who is a great reader and doesn’t allow me any slack. Thank you all.

PROLOGUE

KRASNOYARSK, RUSSIA
MARCH 14, 2011, 4:22 P.M.

Prek Vllasi touched his right forefinger to the scar on his upper lip, where the cleft had been crudely repaired when he was an infant. It was something he did without thinking many times each day, more often when he was under pressure. Right now, standing in a filthy room on the tenth floor of a derelict Soviet-era tower block in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, he was getting more nervous by the minute.

Prek checked his watch again and looked over at Genti Hajdini. Genti was leaning against a foldout table, periodically yawning as he worked on a fingernail with his pocketknife. Every time he saw Genti, Prek was slightly taken aback by the straight lines of his lieutenant’s beaky nose. From this angle, it looked more like the sharp end of a hatchet. Yes, he was sure the Chechens were coming, Genti had just told him for the tenth time. Good people back home in Albania had vouched for this outfit. Even though he could feel it, Prek checked the Makarov pistol stuck in his belt at the small of his back. The Puma bag containing 500,000 euros was on the floor. Genti had brought the guns and money hidden in a truckload of Turkish fruit he’d driven deep into Russia. No wonder he was tired.

There was nothing else to do but wait.

It was freezing—the temperature had topped out at twenty below and the sun would be gone in an hour and a half. Outside, the sky was the same dirty color as the buildings and the ground. Prek started pacing around the large room, what must once have been a communal area in the apartment block that sat just outside town. Prek was a meticulous man; he’d read up about Krasnoyarsk. Forty miles or so down the Yenisei River was the town of Zheleznogorsk, better known by its old Soviet name, Krasnoyarsk-26. This was a closed city, home to factories handling God-knows-what exotic and dangerous materials to make God-knows-which agents of destruction. Weapons-grade plutonium had been produced in three nuclear reactors there, the last of which had just recently closed. For years the Soviets simply dumped the radioactive waste from the nuclear plants straight into the river until they thought better of it and drilled hundreds of wells to pump the deadly sludge underground. Prek knew there was as much radioactivity as a hundred Chernobyls humming away in the caverns around here, another reason he’d be happy to get out of this place.