The door to the back room swung open and Middleton turned to greet Korovin returning at last from his interminable phone call—except it wasn’t his bearish friend who approached. It was the ancient waitress. Perhaps it was because he’d just had Felicia on his mind—or more to the point, her reproach of his inattentiveness—but he detected now what he should have noticed before, something artificial in her shambling gait, a subtle vigor in her movement that belied the woman’s age. And the snowy white hair, offkilter just slightly: a wig.

Middleton intuited instantly that his friend, Ruslan Korovin, was dead, the insight slamming home at the same instant his gaze met the imposter’s pale gray eyes.

He reached inside his jacket, tugged the SIG Sauer P229 from his belt as the waitress lost all pretense of disguise and lunged forward. Middleton thumbed the safety down, pulled the trigger, point blank range: nothing. The gun didn’t fire. In an instant of adrenalin-compressed recollection he wondered whether he’d loaded it, remembered that he had—no, the clip was full, he’d even chambered a bullet. By then the fake waitress was upon him, delivering a kick to the chest that sent him reeling backwards into the room, crashing against the low serving table with its tray of zakuski. The attacker’s wig fell free, her real hair was closely cropped, a manlike burr. She pulled a knife from inside the shabby white blouse. Middleton struggled to his feet, slipping in the briny mess, changing his grip on the pistol to use it as a club, sensing vaguely that the ex-KGB officers in the room were stirring, ready to rise.

The attacker hadn’t bargained on Middleton’s discernment. She’d hoped for a quick kill, a darting escape. She lunged, not slashing with the knife but thrusting with it, no hesitation, no squeamishness—slashing was for cowards. Middleton fought off the blow with the pistol, parrying it, but the woman responded with a thundering left that caught him at the temple—his vision went white, his knees buckled. His mind coughed up a single word: Charley.

The unmistakable pop of a Makarov PM erupted seemingly inside his ear—from somewhere close behind him, one of the old apparatchiks had stirred to action, choosing at least for now the side of the American whom one of his old cohorts had befriended.

Through the watery film his field of vision had become, Middleton saw the waitress clutch her shoulder, tumble back a step, crumple to one knee.

The old KGB man stepped forward and murmured something brief and blunt in Russian. The knife fell from the shorn woman’s hand. The man kicked it across the room where one of the others shuffled hurriedly to retrieve it.

The woman was panting, clutching her shoulder, pale hand over the growing bloodstain.