Nathalie Dumond stood in front of a three-way mirror in her hotel suite and gazed at herself in the dress she had chosen. He hair was piled high upon her head, and her dress was tight and strapless, exposing breasts of which she was proud, since they were her own and very beautiful. Her heels were high, bringing her total height to five feet, ten inches. Her only piece of jewelry was a choker of large diamonds, a relic of a former relationship with a billionaire boyfriend. She draped a black mink cape around her shoulders and secured it at the throat with a jeweled clasp. Perfection.

Her doorbell rang, and she opened it to find Howard Fine waiting for her. “I’ll walk you down to the car,” he said.

“Thank you, Howard.”

They emerged from the elevator to find a brigade of TV cameramen and flash photographers lining a red carpet that had been laid from the lift to the curb outside, where awaited a large limousine of a type Nathalie had never seen before.

“It’s a ZIL,” Howard said to her. “No high-up Russian would be seen in anything else.”

The hotel doorman held open the car door, and Nathalie got in and arranged herself on the plush velvet seat. Howard leaned in and said, “Knock ’im dead,” and closed the door.

The car pulled smoothly away, and the cabin was nearly silent. The ZIL drove directly across Red Square, in a blatant contravention of the traffic rules, and drove up an ornate ramp and into the Kremlin itself, and thence to an entranceway guarded by two tightly uniformed soldiers. A man in a black suit emerged from the building, held open the car door, and assisted her. She took the proffered arm and was escorted into a marble hallway and after a short walk, into an elevator. The man pressed a button, then left the car. “You will be met,” he said.

The elevator rose to the top floor, and when the doors opened, the president of the Russian Federation, Viktor Petrov, stood waiting for her, encased in a finely tailored tuxedo. He was an imposing man of about fifty, perhaps six-two or -three, and more than two hundred pounds of firm muscle. His hair was iron gray, cut in a short military style. He made a good first impression.

“Good evening, and welcome to my home,” Petrov said in lightly accented English. “I hope your drive here was not too tiring.”

She laughed; the ride had been less than three minutes, and she had not expected him to be funny. “Hardly, and I’m very pleased to be here, Mr. President.”