He sank into a guilty humor. Felicia had barely escaped death in London, the cost of her staying at his apartment. How much misfortune can you visit upon a friend, he thought, before the friendship twists into a curse? And what of Charley—hadn’t he inflicted the same jeopardy on her, insisting she join him on this quixotic crusade? What kind of father does that to his daughter?

The questions lifted him from his overstuffed chair and sent him ambling ruminatively toward the window. The distant reaches of Moscow sprawled beneath layers of urban haze fouling an ashen, moonlit sky. His impression of a transformed Russia had vanished. Trash fires dotted the less central reaches of the cityscape, surest testament to the country’s lingering Third World status. The putrid stench of the rancid smoke filtered through the window glass: shoddy glazing, one more relic from the worker’s paradise.

The gloss of prosperity he’d glimpsed on his way into Moscow was no more substantial than the paint-on-rust veneer of the Soviet era, the main pretense to wealth being the surge in petro revenues the past few years. Even that was suddenly at risk with plummeting oil prices—so much so, even oligarchs like Arkady Chernayev had to seek bailouts from the government. Just last week, he’d been literally moments away from losing his chief subsidiary to European banks.

Oil, Middleton thought. The mephitic sinkhole of modern politics. Correction, he told himself: oil and drugs. Those were the two gluttonous wants that kept the U.S. beholden to tinhorn despots like Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad, kept it tied to dubious friends like Saudi Arabia and Colombia or perpetually failing states like Nigeria and Mexico. Somewhere during the course of my life, he mused, the country I grew up in, the land of self-reliance and initiative, devolved into a daytime talk show populated by the obese, the whiny, the addicted. It was enough to make a patriot weep.

Which brought him back to Felicia—Polish by birth, she was in truth a gypsy. He suddenly felt the shock of an impossible and poignant envy, in which he sensed that what promise the future held belonged to the Felicias of the world—those with talent for a passport, as long as they kept moving, maintaining an ever fluid distance from men with patriotic obsessions and idealistic whims—men like Devras Sikari. Men like Harold Middleton.