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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 big meegren headache.”

“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.”

“What happened?”

“War. Now nobody in Kremlin trust nobody.”

“So you’re useless to the CIA?”

“Correct. They say I am”—he smiled, said the words slowly—“‘not viable ’ no more. So, for three, four years, we live as prisoners on naval base.”

“All your money,” Paul said carefully, “wasn’t yours?”

“Wasn’t mine? I invest! I build! I turn a few billion into many billions.”

“But the original infusion of cash that set you up in business in the first place—”

“Ach.” Galkin waved a hand in the air dismissively.

“That woman I met in Moscow—you know, the blind old woman, Ludmilla Zaitseva—was a CIA asset. She recruited you. She helped channel money from the CIA, is that right?” Paul flashed on Ludmilla’s cryptic words: The moment you think you have it all figured out is when you learn how dead wrong you are . And then: As for who pulling strings, that’s where things get complicated.

That had puzzled him, until now.

Galkin shrugged. “Who is CIA, who is KGB, all this I can’t keep track.”

“Okay.” Paul thought for a moment. “But you still know how to reach your handler. Your case officer. You have her email.”

He shook his head. “All channels closed. I am done now.”

“What about in an emergency? Like if your life is threatened?”

“Yes, yes, there is way. I send up flare.”

“Now, where did you used to meet with Dempsey?”

“Hotels, mostly. Sometimes safe house.”

“Where?”

“New York, Washington.”

“Safe house in D.C.?”

“Yes. Near. So?”