Pakistan had protested to the U.N. that the dam threatened irrigation from the Chenab River, on which the country’s agriculture relied. It even went so far as to accuse India of deliberately going ahead with the project simply to deprive Pakistan of the water it needed to survive. Negotiations between the two countries had broken down over the issue of Islamic terrorism in the region, and so the World Bank, which brokered the 1960 Indus Water treaty for Kashmir, had appointed an arbitrator to review the dispute. Just recently the arbitrator had issued his determination: India, which claimed the dam was needed to provide much-needed electric power, was fully within its rights to finish the project, with a minor concession of lowering the spillway five feet.

Tesla said, “What does the dispute have to do with Sikari? His side won.”

“Did it now?” Barrett-Bone sank back into the seat, arms crossed, winking. “I’m afraid that’s all I’m prepared to say. For now. Till I get my face-to-face with the fabled Harold Middleton.”

As prison cells went it wasn’t half bad—one of those vast drafty rooms in some provincial estate house on the outskirts of Moscow, or possibly out in the neighboring countryside, a relic from the Romanov era, showing all too well the inevitable wear and principled neglect of the socialist century.

The floorboards were dull and pitted, the walls dingy and water-stained. The windows had been sealed up, leaving a musty smell of mildew and rot, tinged with the scent of wood smoke seeping in from somewhere. Not here—no wood in the fireplace, no warming blaze, just a ridiculously clap-trap space heater resembling a helmet with a red-hot face behind the grille. It gave off about as much heat as a nightlight. Except for three rickety chairs, it was the only piece of furniture in the room.

Middleton gathered his coat tight around his body, breath purling out from his nostrils in airy plumes. His lips felt numb.

How many hours had they kept him here? How many more to go—and what then?

At least there’d been no torture, not for him. He’d heard the cries from elsewhere in the large house—the woman with the buzz-cut hair, he supposed, his attacker. Ruslan’s killer. They’d spare her no excess. The questioning would almost be secondary.

He glanced up at the ceiling, a stained expanse of yellowing plaster blistered and cracked to the point it resembled a contour map. He’d sat there staring up at it for hours at a time, creating an imagined landscape, tracing the rivers, the feed-streams and tributaries, the floodplains, the drainage basins, the terraced hillsides and marshy wetlands and vast beckoning steppes. Where would the cities reside, he wondered, where the outlying villages? From which direction would the Mongol horsemen—or the Nazis’ vaunted Sixth Army—invade?