The Russian took out a battered leather briefcase from a file drawer and popped open the clasp. Inside, the case was lined with black egg-carton shell foam. Set snugly in a cutout at its center was a brand-new SIG Sauer P229, a compact semiautomatic pistol, with a matte black finish.

Middleton checked it quickly, pulled back the slide and was satisfied. “Chambered for 9mm,” he said.

The old clerk nodded, pursed his lips.

Middleton peeled five hundred-dollar bills from the roll of cash in his front pocket and set them on the counter. The Russian scowled and shook his head. He held up two fingers. “Two thousand,” he said.

“That was not the deal,” Middleton protested.

“Then I am so sorry that we cannot do business today,” said the Russian.

Middleton sighed, then put down another fifteen bills. He hated being held up this way, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice. “I assume you’ll throw in a box of ammo,” he said.

The Russian produced an ancient-looking, dog-eared box of Winchester cartridges from another drawer. About twenty or thirty bucks back home. “Today we make special deal,” the clerk said. “Only five hundred dollars.”

Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin was a Russian bear of a man, short and rotund, with a neatly trimmed goatee that adorned a fleshy, ruddy face. He extended his short arms and gave Middleton a hug.

“Garrold!” Korovin exclaimed. This was as close to “Harold” as Korovin was able to say. He escorted Middleton into a large, comfortable room that looked like an English gentleman’s club. Oriental carpets covered the floor; here and there were leather chairs in which doddering old men snoozed behind tented copies of Pravda. Except for the choice of newspaper, it could have been Boodle’s in London.

Actually, it was a men’s club of sorts, only the men were old KGB officers. In this nineteenth-century townhouse on a narrow street off Pyatnitskaya Street, former and retired Russian intelligence officers gathered over vodka and sturgeon and cabbage soup to reminiscence about the bad old days.

“Ruslan Maksimovich,” Middleton said, stumbling slightly over the unwieldy patronymic. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

In a lower voice, Korovin said, “I trust my friends at the airport treated you with the proper deference.”

Korovin, who’d spent more than three decades in the KGB, was a legendary operative who knew how to pull strings that most people didn’t even know existed. His web of contacts extended even into the facilities maintenance operations at Domodedovo Airport, where a refueling crew had smuggled Middleton off the cargo plane and into central Moscow. A risky infiltration, to be sure, but Middleton knew he could trust Korovin to make the plan go off flawlessly.