“You don’t talk much,” the second officer said. He hadn’t stopped talking since they departed Frankfurt.

“Yeah, well,” said the other man.

“Ever been to Moscow before?”

“Once or twice. Long time ago.”

“You won’t recognize the place.”

“So I hear.”

“Well, you got one whole night to see Moscow before we turn around and fly out of here in the morning. I know a couple of awesome night-clubs. Smokin’ hot Russian babes.”

“Thanks anyway,” the new man said. “I thought I might just do a little sightseeing.”

“Come on, man. What’re you gonna do, go see Lenin’s tomb or something? This place I’m going to, it’ll totally blow your mind when you see the way these Russian babes—”

“I’m good,” said the new man. “I’m wiped. I’ll probably just walk around, see what Moscow’s like these days.”

“Well, be careful, buddy,” the second officer said. “They got street crime now, you know. Some parts of the city you don’t want to walk around at night, being a foreigner and all.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said the new crew member.

The second officer stood up and said, “I gotta use the john.”

When he emerged from the lavatory, he heard a sharp rap on the plane’s exterior. A beefy uniformed agent from FSB Frontier Control came aboard.

“Passport,” the Russian barked.

The second officer handed his passport over and watched as the agent scanned it with a handheld device.

Then the second officer turned to look at his colleague, but the other pull-down seat was empty.

No one was there.

As the Russian entered the cockpit to check the passports of the pilot and co-pilot, the second officer looked around, bewildered. He got up, glanced into the cockpit, but the new guy wasn’t there either. He yanked open the door to the cargo compartment, but there was barely enough room for someone to squeeze in between the rows of igloos.

The guy wasn’t there.

Very strange.

Colonel Harry Middleton strolled along the Old Arbat, a cobblestone street that had been converted into a pedestrian mall crowded with shoppers and peddlers, bearded minstrels playing strange-looking guitars and teenagers just hanging out. There were souvenir shops selling ornate lacquer palekh boxes and Russian nesting dolls painted with the faces of foreign leaders and pop stars.

He’d visited Moscow once before during the height of the Cold War. Everything looked and felt different now: colorful instead of gray; boisterous and teeming instead of quiet and ominous. The rusty old Volgas and Zhigulis had been replaced by Ferraris and Bentleys. But the immense Stalinist tower that housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still there, at the end of the Arbat, just as it was half a century earlier. Maybe the changes didn’t really run all that deep after all.