The last twenty-four hours had been tense and exhausting, but he suspected the next twenty-four hours would be even worse.

Just getting into Moscow had involved calling in a stack of chits. Like an old friend from his time in Kosovo, an Apache helicopter pilot with the U.S. army’s 82nd Airborne Division who’d taken his retirement from the army and risen up the ranks of an international air-freight company—and was willing to add a fourth crew member to a Moscow flight. And another old friend, a wily KGB careerist named Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin, who’d been in Kosovo at the same time and became one of Middleton’s most-valued sources inside Russian intelligence.

They’d gotten him into Moscow, but Middleton knew that if anything went wrong, they wouldn’t be able to get him out.

Now Middleton found himself staring at the display window of an antiquities shop across the street from the old Praga Restaurant. The shop window was a jumble of dusty curios—brass kaleidoscopes and bad copies of icons and Russian-made Victrolas and shabby oil paintings.

He wasn’t inspecting the antiques, of course. He was watching the reflection in the plate glass. But so far he hadn’t detected any followers. It was only a matter of time before Russian intelligence took notice of a foreigner walking the streets of Moscow. A foreigner who’d somehow managed to slip into Russia without leaving any fingerprints in the databases. If he were brought in for questioning . . .

Well, it was better not to think about that possibility.

Middleton pulled opened the heavy front door. A shopkeeper’s bell tinkled pleasantly. No electronic entry alert here. The place looked, even smelled, a century old, musty and mildewed. Middleton half expected to see Aleksandr Pushkin, who once lived on this very street, browsing the wares.

Behind a crowded dusty glass counter was an elderly man with a pinched, severe face and oversized round black-framed glasses.

“Dobryi dyen’,” the clerk said.

“Good afternoon,” Middleton replied. “I’m interested in icons.”

The clerk raised his eyebrows, and his big round glasses rose along with them. “Ah? Anything in particular, sir?”

“I’m particularly interested in the Novgorod school.”

The flash of recognition on the old man’s face disappeared quickly. “Yes, of course, sir,” he said. “They are some of our finest. But there are very few and they’re quite costly.”

“I understand,” Middleton said.

“Please,” the clerk said, gesturing toward a maroon velvet curtain that divided the front of the shop from his back office. “Please to follow me.”

It was dark in there, and even mustier, and dust motes swam in an oblique shaft of light that came in from between the curtains.