“When the bad thing happens, you’ll ask who’s causing it.”

“And you’ll tell me?”

“I’m telling you now. It’s Dmitri Ilich Dvorkin. He’s the cause of your problems.”

“I don’t have any problems, asshole.”

“You didn’t, until yesterday. Then you made a mistake—asshole.”

The men around Nik tensed, but he remained calm. “Yesterday?” His eyes narrowed. “Are you the creep she’s fucking?”

“When you find yourself in so much trouble that you don’t know what to do, remember my name.”

“You’re Dimka!”

“You’ll see me again,” said Dimka, and he turned slowly and walked out of the room.

As he walked through the bar, all eyes were on him. He looked straight ahead, expecting a bullet in the back at any moment.

He reached the door and went out.

He grinned to himself. I got away with it, he thought.

Now he had to make good on his threat.

He drove six miles from the city center to the Khodynka airfield and parked at the headquarters of Red Army Intelligence. The old building was a bizarre piece of Stalin-era architecture, a nine-story tower surrounded by a two-story outer ring. The directorate had expanded into a newer fifteen-story building nearby: intelligence organizations never got smaller.

Carrying the KGB file on Nik, Dimka went into the old building and asked for General Volodya Peshkov.

A guard said: “Do you have an appointment?”

Dimka raised his voice. “Don’t fuck around, son. Just call the general’s secretary and say I’m here.”

After a flurry of anxious activity—few people dropped by this place without a summons—he was directed through a metal detector and led up in the lift to an office on the top floor.

This was the highest building around and it had a fine view over the roofs of Moscow. Volodya welcomed Dimka and offered him tea. Dimka had always liked his uncle. Now in his midfifties, Volodya had silver-gray hair. Despite the hard blue-eyed stare, he was a reformer—unusual among the generally conservative military. But he had been to America.

“What’s on your mind?” said Volodya. “You look ready to kill someone.”

“I’ve got a problem,” Dimka told him. “I’ve made an enemy.”

“Not unusual, in the circles within which you work.”

“This is nothing to do with politics. Nik Smotrov is a gangster.”

“How did you come to fall foul of such a man?”

“I’m sleeping with his wife.”

Volodya looked disapproving. “And he’s threatening you.”

Volodya had probably never been unfaithful to Zoya, his scientist wife, who was as beautiful as she was brilliant. But that meant he had scant sympathy for Dimka. Volodya might have felt differently if he had been so foolish as to marry someone like Nina.

Dimka said: “Nik kidnapped Grisha.”

Volodya sat upright. “What? When?”

“Yesterday. We got him back. He was only shut in the cellar of Government House. But it was a warning.”

“You have to give up this woman!”

Dimka ignored that. “There’s a particular reason why I’ve come to you, Uncle. There’s a way you could help me and do the army some good at the same time.”