Moscow Rules

attempting movement, he took careful stock of his situation. He was sprawled on the concrete floor of what appeared to be a warehouse, with his hands cuffed at his back and his legs in something resembling a running position, right leg lifted in front of him, left extended backward. His right shoulder was pressing painfully against the floor, as was the right side of his face. Somewhere, a light was burning, but his own corner of the building was in semidarkness. A few feet away stood a stack of large wooden crates with Cyrillic markings on the sides. Gabriel struggled to make out the words but could not. The alphabet was still like hieroglyphics to him; the crates could have been filled with tins of caviar or vials of deadly polonium and he would have never known the difference.
     
     
    He rolled onto his back and lifted his knees to his chest, then levered himself into a sitting position. The exertion of the movement, combined with the fact that he was now upright, caused his right eye to begin throbbing with catastrophic pain. He reckoned the blow had fractured the orbit around the eye. For all he knew, he no longer had an eye, just an immense crater in the side of his head where once his eye had been.
     
     
    He leaned against the wooden crates and looked around him. There were other stacks of crates, towering stacks of crates, receding into the distance like the apartment buildings of the Leninsky Prospekt. From his limited vantage point, Gabriel could only see two rows, but he had the impression there were many more. He doubted they were filled with caviar. Not even the gluttonous Ivan Kharkov could devour that much caviar.
     
     
    He heard the sound of footsteps approaching from a distance. Two sets. Both heavy. Both male. One man significantly larger than the other. The big man was the bald giant who had hit him. The smaller man was several years older, with a fringe of iron-gray hair and a skull that looked as if it been specially designed to withstand much blunt trauma.
     
     
    “Where are the children?” asked Arkady Medvedev.
     
     
    “What children?” replied Gabriel.
     
     
    Medvedev nodded to the giant, then stepped away as if he didn’t want his clothing to be spattered with the blood. The sledgehammer crashed into Gabriel’s skull a second time. Same eye, same result. Pine trees and missiles. Then nothing at all.
     

 
    63
     
     
    LUBYANKA SQUARE, MOSCOW
     
     
    Like almost everyone else in Moscow, Colonel Grigori Bulganov of the FSB was divorced. His marriage, like Russia itself, had been characterized by wild lurches from one extreme to the other: glasnost one day, Great Terror the next. Thankfully, it had been short and had produced no offspring. Irina had won the apartment and the Volkswagen; Grigori Bulganov, his freedom. Not that he had managed to do much with it: a torrid office romance or two, the occasional afternoon in the bed of his neighbor, a mother of three who was divorced herself.
     
     
    For the most part, Grigori Bulganov worked. He worked early in the morning. He worked late into the evening. He worked Saturdays. He worked Sundays. And sometimes, like now, he could even be found at his desk late on a Sunday night. His brief was counterespionage. More to the point, it was Bulganov’s job to neutralize attempts by foreign intelligence services to spy on the Russian government and State-owned Russian enterprises. His assignment had been made more difficult by the activities of the FSB’s sister service, the SVR. Espionage by the SVR had reached levels not seen since the height of the Cold War, which had prompted Russia’s adversaries to respond in kind. Grigori Bulganov could hardly blame them. The new Russian president was fond of rattling his saber, and foreign leaders needed to know whether it had an edge to it or had turned to rust in its scabbard.
     
     
    Like many FSB officers, Bulganov supplemented his government salary by selling his expertise, along with knowledge gained through his work itself, to private industry. In Bulganov’s case, he served as a paid informant for a man named Arkady Medvedev, the chief of security for Russian oligarch Ivan Kharkov. Bulganov fed Medvedev a steady stream of reports dealing with potential threats to his businesses, legal and illicit. Medvedev rewarded him by keeping a secret bank account in Bulganov’s name filled with cash. As a consequence of the arrangement, Grigori Bulganov had been able to penetrate Ivan