He had a look of wary confusion as he regarded the man before him, as if he recognized him but couldn’t place him. Then his face split into a big toothy grin. “Chairman Juan Cabrillo,” he exclaimed loudly before moderating his voice to a whisper again. “Of all the prisons in all the towns in all the world, why am I not surprised you are in this one?”

“Proverbial bad penny,” Cabrillo said deadpan.

Borodin reached through the observation slit to rub Juan’s head. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Making myself pretty just for you.” Juan started working the lock picks.

“Who sent you?”

“Misha.” Captain Mikhail Kasporov was Borodin’s longtime assistant and aide-de-camp.

“God bless the boy.” A sudden dark thought occurred to him. “To rescue me or kill me?”

Juan glanced up from the lock, which he almost had open. “Does your paranoia know no bounds? To rescue you, you idiot.”

“Ah, he is a good boy. And as for my paranoia, Mr. Chairman of the Corporation, a look at my present surroundings shows that I was not paranoid enough. So what is new, my friend?”

“Let’s see. The civil war in the Sudan is winding down. The Dodgers again have no pitching staff. And I think half the Kardashians are getting married while the other half are divorcing. Oh, and once again you’ve managed to anger the wrong guy.”

On his ruthless rise to power within the Russian Navy, backed by hard-right political cronies, the mercurial Admiral Pytor Kenin had left a trail of destruction in his wake—careers ruined and, in one instance, a rival’s suspicious death. Now that he was one of the youngest fleet admirals in the country’s history, rumors abounded that he would soon turn to politics under the guiding wing of Vladimir Putin.

Yuri Borodin had become one of Kenin’s enemies, though he was too well positioned among the general staff to be dismissed outright and had been arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to this prison to await trial—a trial that he would most likely never survive to see. A company Kenin controlled ran the prison on behalf of the government in a public/private cooperative much like the ones that gave rise to the oligarchs in the days after communism’s demise. His death could be easily arranged and would likely happen after the initial flap over his arrest died down.

That Borodin was corrupt was an open secret, but singling him out was like arresting only a single user in an overcrowded crack house. Corruption in the Russian military was as much a part of the culture as itchy uniforms and lousy food.

“And you do this out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Of course,” Cabrillo said. “And about a tenth of your net worth.”