Page 170 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“It’s difficult for me,” she said. “Seeing you.”

He nodded as they pulled apart. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I know you’ll never forgive me, but I still want to say I’m sorry.”

“For what?” he said softly.

She bowed her head, closed her eyes, shook her head again. “Don’t make this hard for me. I chose my family. You know that. But you were my family, too. I just never really understood that.”

After five years, he still felt guilty for having left her the way he had. He felt the pain of having once loved her and still loving her. He felt a swirl of emotions.

A long pause. He said, “Is your father—”

She interrupted him. “Berzin wasn’t going to kill you. I would never have gone along with that. It was a sedative. A tranquilizer.”

He shook his head. No need to revisit that day. “How—how’ve you been?” He wanted to ask if she was with someone else now, but this wasn’t the time.

“Look at the way we live.”

He looked around at the generic house with its generic furnishings and thought about what a comedown it was from Arkady Galkin’s life of extraordinary luxury.

“But it’s safe,” Paul said. “You’re protected.”

“We’re prisoners.”

Behind her, Arkady Galkin loomed into view. “Music is too much,” he told his daughter. “Turn off.” He turned to Paul as Tatyana backed away. “Brightman,” he said without a smile.

Galkin looked ten years older, not five. His potbelly was even larger. Now there were purplish circles under his eyes, which were dwarfed by his wild gray eyebrows. His face was scored with deep lines. His shoulders were stooped.

The music went quiet.

112

The two men sat in a screened-in gazebo behind the house. Galkin was smoking a cigar. The smoke filled the gazebo, burning Paul’s eyes. Galkin was wearing the familiar blue-and-white-checked L.L.Bean fleece he liked to wear at home. His eyes were hooded and tired looking, bloodshot and sunken. His teeth were whiter, which might have been cosmetic dentistry, but he was a shell of his former boisterous self.

“Once I was one of richest men in world,” Galkin said. “Now I am prisoner. Under house arrest. See, life unpredictable.”

“‘Man plans . . .’”

“‘God laughs.’ Yes. You are clever man.” Galkin’s head was wreathed in a low-hanging stratus cloud of gray smoke. “You disappear for five years. Can’t be easy.”

“Took some discipline,” Paul said.

“You marry my daughter and then you disappear.”

Paul said. “I think she knows why.”

“I knew you are alive! I tell Berzin this all the time. You run out on my daughter. You steal from me. Take computer disk.”

“Flash drive, maybe.”

“Yes.”

“Is causing me bigmeegrenheadache.”

“I understand,” Paul said. He had read some of the decrypted Phantom drive—certainly not all, since it was mostly in Russian, but enough to understand its staggering import. “I understand, too, that for the last two decades you’ve been a CIA asset. Controlled by Geraldine Dempsey.”

There was a long silence. So long that Paul began to wonder if Galkin had heard him, had understood what he’d said.

“Was,” said Galkin. “No longer.”