Kenin’s luxury apartment was only a ten-minute drive from the gym where he regularly trained. The palatial flat had its own exercise room equipped with the latest gear, but he preferred to work out in the dank gymnasium surrounded by other men whose single dedication to the pugilist arts was an inspiration.

He could never have afforded the ten-thousand-square-foot floor of the high-rise building overlooking the river. His was but an admiral’s salary, after all. No, the apartment had been a gift of one of his many benefactors, an oligarch who had made his fortune in the Wild West days following the collapse of the Soviet Union and now backed several political and military up-and-comers in order to preserve it.

In the building’s lobby, he slotted his key into the elevator controls, telling it to take him to his private floor. There, the doors opened to the apartment’s entry foyer, a marble-and-gilt affair that looked like it had been stripped out of the palace at Versailles. Kenin ignored the opulence. He was a man interested in only one trapping of wealth and that was power. The material side of the equation meant nothing to him.

A moment later, he was in his office, staring at a flat-panel monitor mounted on a wall to the left of his desk. Most of the screen was black, though one corner showed an image of himself taken from a camera placed to make him appear massive behind his desk. He hit a button on his desktop computer when he was satisfied with how he looked on the monitor.

The screen came to life. In the foreground sat a man behind his own desk. Behind him was a casement window, looking out over the ocean. The weather appeared cloudy where the man was; the sky leaden, and the ocean churned as it raced for shore. Kenin had spoken to this man enough over the years that his physical form was something he no longer noticed.

No one knew the origin of the fire that had robbed the man of so much. Some claimed it was an assassination attempt, others said his mother deliberately set him on fire when he was a child. Still others said it was an accident from the days when he made bombs for Turkish separatists on Cyprus. His left hand was nothing more than a pair of lobster-like pincers, though the right had been spared. He had no hair. The scar tissue that covered his skull had the tight sheen of a Halloween mask pulled too tight. Both ears were burned away, as was his nose. The skin on his neck looked like the scaly hide of a desert lizard. One eye was covered with a simple black patch, though the other glittered with intellect.

“Admiral Kenin, so delighted you wished to call me this fine morning,” the man known in intelligence circles as L’Enfant said.