The Defector

snow cover had recently been disturbed.
    By the time Gabriel returned the photo to the CIA man, the car was traveling along Tverskaya Street. Directly before them rose the Kremlin’s Corner Arsenal Tower, its red star looking oddly like the symbol of a certain Dutch beer that now flowed freely in the watering holes of Moscow. The darkened offices of Galaxy Travel flashed by Gabriel’s window, then the little side street where Anatoly, friend of Viktor Orlov, had been waiting to take Irina to dinner.
    A hundred yards beyond Irina’s office, Tverskaya Street emptied into the twelve lanes of Okhotny Ryad Street. They turned left and sped past the Duma, the House of Unions, and the Bolshoi Theatre. The next landmark Gabriel saw was a floodlit fortress of yellow stone looming directly ahead over Lubyanka Square—the former headquarters of the KGB, now home to its domestic successor, the FSB. In any other country, the building would have been blown to bits and its horrors exposed to the healing light of day. But not Russia. They had simply hung a new sign, and buried its terrible secrets where they couldn’t be found.
    Just down the hill from Lubyanka, in Teatralnyy Prospekt, was the famed Hotel Metropol. Bag in hand, Gabriel sailed through the art deco entrance as if he owned the place, which is how Americans always seemed to enter hotels. The lobby, empty and silent, had been faithfully restored to its original décor—indeed, Gabriel could almost imagine Lenin and his disciples plotting the Red Terror over tea and cakes. The check-in counter was absent any customers; even so, Gabriel had to wait an eternity before Khrushchev’s doppelgänger beckoned him forward. After filling out the lengthy registration form, Gabriel refused a bell-man’s indifferent offer of assistance and made his way upstairs to his room alone. It was now approaching five o’clock. He stood in the window, hand to his chin, head tilted to one side, and waited for the sun to rise over Red Square.

58
    MOSCOW
    THOUGH THE global financial crisis had caused economic pain across the industrialized world, few countries had fallen further or faster than Russia. Fueled by skyrocketing oil prices, Russia’s economy had grown at dizzying speed in the first years of the new millennium, only to come crashing back to earth again with oil’s sharp decline. Her stock market was a shambles, her banking system in ruins, and her once-docile population was now clamoring for relief. Inside the foreign ministries and intelligence services of the West, there was fear Russia’s weakening economy might provoke the Kremlin to retreat even deeper into a Cold War posture—a sentiment shared by several key European leaders, who were becoming increasingly dependent on Russia for their supplies of natural gas. It was this concern that had prompted them to hold the emergency G-8 summit in Moscow in the dead of winter. Show the bully respect, they reckoned, and he might be encouraged to change his behavior. At least, that was the hope.
    Had the summit taken place in any other G-8 country, the arrival of the leaders and their delegations would scarcely have been a blip on the local media’s radar. But the summit was being held in Russia, and Russia, despite protests to the contrary, was not yet a normal country. Its media was either owned by the state or controlled by it, and its television networks went live as each presidential or prime ministerial aircraft sunk out of the iron-gray sky over Sheremetyevo. To hear the Russian reporters explain it, the Western leaders were coming to Moscow because they had been personally summoned by the Russian president. The world was in turmoil, the reporters warned, and only Russia could save it.
    Inevitably, the American president suffered in comparison. The moment his plane appeared above the horizon, a number of Russian officials and commentators paraded before the cameras to denounce him and all he stood for. The global economic crisis was America’s fault, they howled. America had been brought low by greed and hubris, and she was threatening to take the rest of the world down with her. The sun was setting on America. And good riddance.
    Gabriel found little disagreement in the salons and restaurants of the Hotel Metropol. By midmorning, it was overrun with reporters and bureaucrats, all proudly wearing their official G-8 credentials as if a piece of plastic dangling from a strand of nylon gave them entrée to the inner