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PROLOGUE

MANHATTAN, FEbrUARY 20

O ne young woman held the key to a new world order and a resurgent Russia. The daughter of a traitor. And now he’d found her.

Vladimir Borodin stood at the window of his presidential suite at the sumptuous Court Place Hotel, looking down 5 th Avenue. It was snowing lightly and the streets were thronged with expensively dressed men and women hurrying on their way to dinner or the theater. The shop windows gleamed, full of expensive items, and though he couldn’t hear them through the double glazed windows he knew the streets would be filled with the sounds of rich happy shoppers making dinner plans.

All was well with America.

But thirty-six years ago, instead of being an oligarch, the CEO of Intergaz, the largest energy corporation in Russia, he’d just begun his career in the Komitét Gosudàrstvennoj Bezopàsnosti , the feared KGB, and had watched his country disintegrate just as the KGB had established the tools to destroy this country. It would have taken America a generation, maybe two generations, to come back to a semblance of nationhood, to claw its way back up to a third rate economy.

And the Soviet Union would have become the most powerful nation on earth. Right now, if things hadn’t gone wrong, if a traitor hadn’t abdicated, Russia would be sending blankets and powdered milk to the teeming masses of the poor in America. The Soviet Union would still be alive, strong and rich, bestriding the world.

Instead, after the Soviet Union had fallen, a much reduced Russia had risen from its ashes and never regained its footing.

They had been counting on Nikolai Darin for the means to destroy America. Tragically, Darin died thirty years ago, before finishing the task. Or so they thought. But he hadn’t. He had died a few years ago in America. And they had discovered he had a daughter who went by the outlandish American name of Felicity Ward.

She held the key to everything. There was still time to implement the plan that had been born a generation ago. Catch the woman and make her talk. Make her tell him where they were.

And this time next year, Borodin would come back to America and crow. Manhattan—and Houston and Los Angeles and Chicago—would be no more, radioactive wastelands of cement and ashes where millions of bodies were buried under the rubble. The country would be brought to its knees, as it should have been many years ago.

Borodin checked his watch. It was five pm, soon it would be time to call for room service. After dinner, while waiting for word that Felicity Ward had been caught and on her way to him, he’d treat himself to an Armagnac. He could taste it already. He’d come with a team of three men and one, Anatoli Lagoshin, had been dispatched to intercept the woman at the Portland, Oregon airport. Anatoli was flying cross country in one of Intergaz’s corporate jets and he would land before Felicity Ward.

He’d nab her, fly her back to New York with the same plane and, with a little persuasion, they’d get what they came for.

And if Felicity suffered, it was only fair. Her father had cost Borodin years and their motherland, the Soviet Union, had been wiped off the map. If Darin hadn’t betrayed his country, they would now be masters of the world.

Felicity, Darin’s daughter, should suffer. And she would.