The old KGB man’s directions had been precise. And they’d been relayed to Middleton using the simplest, yet most modern, of all spy trade-craft techniques: Korovin had written an email, but instead of sending it, he’d saved it as a draft, on a Gmail account for which both men had the password. The email account was one of many set up by Wiki Chang, back at the Volunteers’ small office headquarters in Virginia. Intelligence agents no longer needed things like microdots and burst transmitters, not when they could use the good old Internet.

“It went far more easily than I expected, to be honest,” Middleton said.

“From me you should expect only the best,” Korovin said. “And I hear you made a purchase at Volodya’s shop on the Arbat, yes? He has the finest selection of icons in all of Moscow.”

“Pricy, though,” Middleton said.

“Well, after all, it is a sellers’ market, my friend,” Korovin said.

“I didn’t dicker,” said Middleton.

Korovin led him to the dining room, dark and dismal and mostly empty. They sat at a small table, which was already set with mineralnaya voda and dusty-looking tumblers and shot glasses.

A waitress shambled over with a tray. An old crone with thinning white hair and pale gray eyes who looked to be in her eighties, she wore a long black shirt and a long-sleeved white blouse. Probably, Middleton thought, a pensioner from some back office at the Lubyanka. With fumbling hands, she set down an assortment of zakuski, Russian appetizers like beet salad and mushroom “caviar,” smoked fish and pickled onions. Then she unsteadily filled their shot glasses with a domestic brand of vodka.

Korovin slid a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros, lit it with an old Red Army lighter and then offered a toast to their work in Kosovo. The two intelligence operatives had played a behind-the-scenes role in that ugly conflict a decade earlier, a role the world would never know about.

Ten years ago, they’d seen how close the Kosovo conflict had brought the two superpowers to war. The Russians backed the Serb guerrillas, and NATO and the Americans defended the ethnic Albanians, even though there was plenty of “ethnic cleansing”—that grotesque euphemism—on both sides. When Russia finally agreed to abandon the Serbs in exchange for a separate role in the peacekeeping process, NATO reneged on the deal. The Russian forces found themselves taking orders from a U.S. general. They felt humiliated and double-crossed. The tensions could well have boiled over into a war between two nuclear powers were it not for the quiet, back-channel efforts of a few intelligence officers like Korovin and Middleton.

Now, the two men drank and then Korovin poured again. But before he could offer another flowery toast, he gave Middleton a sideways glance. “I thought you were retired, Garrold.”

“I thought I was too,” Middleton said.