“I understand that,” Timokhin said in his gravely voice. His accent was so thick he sounded like an actor in a low-budget Dracula movie. Even his laugh was like that, like that puppet on Sesame Street with the numbers.

Since then, the two men had been through a lot together. Goldin’s prospects as an assassin rose as Timokhin climbed the ranks of the GRU. Now, Goldin was as tried and true as anyone on the GRU’s books.

Initially, his targets had all been Russian, which was what allowed him to tell himself he wasn’t betraying his country. He was just doing dirty work for a foreign government.

Very dirty work. That paid very well.

Then, targets from NATO countries began showing up in his briefs. That gave Goldin the briefest pause, his atrophied conscience finally raising its head, but the pay increased correspondingly. And as always, Timokhin had the sense not to push the envelope too far too fast. He sent targets from Eastern Europe, Turkey, nationals of the most recent NATO additions, countries he knew Goldin wouldn’t think of as real allies. It was years before Timokhin sent the first French, British and Canadians targets.

And only after years of that did he graduate him to killing Americans.

Goldin had trained himself to carry out his jobs without thinking of any of that. He focused on the mission at hand and didn’t worry whether or not it made him a traitor.

He lived a double life. When he was performing hits for the GRU, he lived the life of a playboy in an expensive New York apartment. The rest of the time, he lived in his childhood home with his mother in New Jersey, mowing her lawn on Saturday mornings, cooking her breakfast. In the psyche profile Timokhin had commissioned in Moscow, they said Goldin probably had a split personality.

This job was a classic. Russian on Russian.

Easy money. Plus, he was getting laid.

His target was a GRU agent. She’d done something to upset someone up the chain, broken a rule, or just found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever it was, they wanted her dead, and that, as far as Goldin was concerned, was that.

Timokhin had sent the file a few hours earlier. The target, Tatyana Aleksandrova, was classed as highly dangerous.

She’d been told Goldin was a senatorial aide being targeted for kompromat. Goldin was no expert on the doings of senators and their aides, but it was a role he knew how to play. His job was to let her seduce him, make her think her mission was going well, then follow her after it was done.

She was expected to make unauthorized contact with someone in the city, someone on the American side. Timokhin needed to know who she was meeting. Goldin was to film the exchange. Then he was to kill her.