"You see, Nikolai?" General Kosigan said. "Everyone notices it." He turned a chair around, straddled it, and pointed at Dogin, his index finger extended, thumb upraised as though his hand were a gun. "If you'd been less serious than you are, perhaps we wouldn't be here now. The new Russia likes leaders who can laugh and drink with them, not someone who seems to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders."

Dogin unbuttoned his coat and sat in the last chair. There was a tray with cups, a teapot, and a bottle of vodka. He poured himself tea. "The new Russia has followed a piper who will lead them laughing and drinking to destruction."

"It sounds like fun," Kosigan admitted. "But Russians have never known what's best for them-- and, fortunately, we are here to show them, What a noble bunch we are."

Shovich folded his hands on the table. "General, I'm not noble, nor am I interested in saving Russia. Russia sent me to hell for nine years before Gorbachev's general amnesty freed me. I am only interested in the terms we discussed previously. Are they still acceptable to you both?"

"They are," said the General.

The gangster's cold eyes shifted to Dogin. "Does he speak for you, Minister?"

The Interior Minister stirred a lump of sugar into his tea. In the five years since his release, Shovich had gone from being a convicted robber to the leader of a global crime network that was comprised of an army of 100,000 men in Russia, Europe, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere-- most of whom had been admitted to the ancient order of the thieves' world after proving their loyalty by murdering a friend or relative.

Am I mad to be joining forces with this man? Dogin asked himself. Shovich would be loyal only as long as they gave him twenty percent of the total assets of the former Soviet republics, which included the largest petroleum reserves on earth, double the timber found in the Amazon, nearly a quarter of the planet's unmined diamonds and gold, and some of the world's largest deposits of uranium, plutonium, lead, iron, coal, copper, nickel, silver, and platinum. The man wasn't a patriot. He wanted to exploit the natural resources of a rebuilt Soviet Union and use their legitimacy to launder drug money.

It made Dogin sick to contemplate, but Kosigan maintained that as long as he and his colleagues controlled the world's largest standing army, and Dogin ran the secret new surveillance operation in St. Petersburg, they would have nothing to fear from Shovich. He could be forced out at some later date, exiled to one of his residences in New York, London, Mexico City, Hong Kong, or Buenos Aires. Or he could be shot from the sky if he refused to go.