“Mesmerizing … Spellbinding … The kind of intrigue, atmosphere, and excitement not seen from Smith since Renko’s megaselling debut in Gorky Park.… Brimming with political insight and psychological nuance.… A powerful reaffirmation of Renko’s love/hate for Russia as one of the great romances of thriller fiction.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The Soviet upheavals have fueled the glowing talent of Smith, America’s preeminent writer of Russia-based thrillers.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Title Page

Copyright

Red Square is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2007 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1992 by Martin Cruz Smith
Dossier copyright © 2007 by Random House, Inc.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. MORTALIS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Little, Brown and Company for permission to reprint six lines from “The Last Toast” from Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. Copyright © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. First appeared in American Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

The Don Swaim interview of Martin Cruz Smith is courtesy of the WOUB Center for Public Media and the Donald L. Swaim Collection in the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections at Ohio University. The interview can be heard in its entirety at Wired for Books, Wiredforbooks.org/martincruzsmith/.

eISBN: 978-0-307-80977-3

v3.1

I

MOSCOW
 
August 6–August 12, 1991

In Moscow, the summer night looks like fire and smoke. Stars and moon fade. Couples rise and dress and walk the street. Cars wander with their headlights off.

“There.” Jaak saw an Audi passing in the opposite direction.

Arkady slipped on headphones, tapped the receiver. “His radio’s out.”

Jaak U-turned to the other side of the boulevard and picked up speed. The detective had askew eyes set in a muscular face and he hunched over the wheel as if he were bending it.

Arkady tapped out a cigarette. First of the day. Well, it was one A.M., so it wasn’t much to brag about.

“Closer,” he said, and pulled the phones off. “Let’s be sure it’s Rudy.”

Ahead were the lights of the peripheral highway that circled the city. The Audi swung onto the ramp to merge with highway traffic. Jaak edged between two flatbed trucks carrying steel plates that clapped with every undulation of the road. He passed the lead truck, the Audi and a tanker. On the way, Arkady had caught the driver’s profile, but there were two people in the car, not one. “He picked someone up. We need another look,” he said.