ANATOLY NIKOLAYEVICH VRONSKY shivered under the leaden gray skies as a cold northerly wind off the Baltic blasted an empty plastic Coca-Cola bottle across the path in front of him. He removed the daysack from his shoulders, placed it at his feet and pulled his black, zip-fronted fleece more closely around his body. To his right the River Daugava, a quarter of a mile wide at this point after its thousand-kilometer journey from its source in the Valdai Hills, in the heartland of Russia, looked dark and forbidding. The wind sent showers of icy spray across the path along the riverbank. “So much for spring,” he muttered to himself, as he checked his watch. Then, sure enough, and exactly on time as ever, he saw the slim, blonde-haired figure of Anna Brezhneva, cover name of Praporshchik Volochka of the FSB, seconded to the Spetsnaz for this mission and his favored operating partner.

Vronsky re-shouldered the daysack, strode toward her and enfolded her in a passionate-looking embrace; to anyone watching, two lovers greeting after an absence. However, his voice was brisk and matter of fact as he murmured in her ear. “You’re exactly on time, Anna . . . We’ll head for Moloney’s now. That’ll give me time to brief you before we meet them.”

Vronsky placed an arm loosely, but proprietorially, around Brezhneva’s shoulders and steered her past the entrance of the Riga Technical University, up Ratslaukums, and then they were amid the elegant art deco buildings and weathered, green copper church spires of the old city of Riga. They continued toward Riharda Vagnera Street and Moloney’s Bar.

“What news from Ukraine?” Vronsky asked. He had been in Riga for a week, since the kidnapping of the American army trainers.

“Total success, Anatoly Nikolayevich,” murmured Brezhneva, pulling Vronsky’s arm more closely around her shoulders. “The land bridge is being opened up to Crimea. Ukraine has been dismembered.”

“Excellent,” replied Vronsky. “That’ll distract the West from what we’re planning here.” Then quickly, as they walked toward Moloney’s Bar, he briefed her on how a major demonstration against the Latvian government was being planned in two days’ time, after weeks of increasing tension between Latvians and their “non-citizens”—ethnic, Russian-speaking Latvians, many of whom had lived there for generations, but were not permitted Latvian citizenship and were therefore not citizens of the European Union either.

A massed crowd of non-citizens, whipped up by the barrage of propaganda and misinformation broadcast into Russian-speaking Latvian homes from Kremlin-controlled TV, would assemble and march to the Soviet-built Monument of Freedom, erected to mark Latvia’s purported “liberation” from fascism by the “fraternal forces” of the Soviet Union in May 1945. It would end with speeches and the laying of flowers.