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The cab took him to 10 Lavrushinsky Lane, and he entered the ornate nineteenth-century building. He paid five hundred rubles for a ticket, checked his carry-on case at the museum’s cloakroom, and joined a crowd of tourists. On the second floor, he found Princess Tarakanova .

The painting was extraordinary, arresting. A large crowd had gathered in front of it. The canvas was large, eight feet by over six feet, and dramatic, painted in the Russian realist manner. A beautiful young woman stands on a bed trying to escape a rising tide of water flooding her gloomy prison cell. She leans back against a crumbling wall, helpless, her face wracked with despair.

Paul looked around for the FBI agent, heard Japanese and French being spoken. A guy standing next to him said, “Pretty great, huh?”

Paul turned. It was a craggy-faced American tourist, a bulky white-haired man wearing a Chicago Cubs cap and holding a guidebook to Moscow.

“Great use of light and shadow.” Paul said.

“Notice the rats scrambling onto the bed?”

“Oh, yes.”

“This chick,” the man said, pointing at the young woman standing on the bed, “was going around the salons of Rome during the reign of Catherine the Great claiming she was the real heir to the Russian throne. She said she was the daughter of Empress Elizabeth. Turned out to be a real threat to Catherine—who’d seized power in a coup. So Catherine laid a clever trap. She sent her former lover, Count Alexei Orlov, to Italy to seduce the woman. He pretended to fall in love with her and then invited her to get married on board his ship in the waters off Tuscany. Soon as she boarded the ship, she was clapped in shackles, kidnapped, and hauled back to Mother Russia. Imprisoned for life. Died in prison.”

Paul smiled at the chatty older man. “So was she really the daughter of the empress?”

“No one knows. She was just one in a long line of pretenders to the Russian throne. Russia had lots of them. More than in most countries. And this was Catherine’s way of saying to all of Russia, ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas.’ Now, that’s how you stay in power in this country. I’m Andrew, by the way.” He shook Paul’s hand firmly and turned to leave.

Paul felt something in his hand, something small and rigid, like a hotel key card, and when he glanced around to look for the tourist, the man had already disappeared into the crowd.

*

By instinct, Paul didn’t look at the little card until he’d left the hall.

On it was printed, in Russian, “11 Lavrushinsky Lane.” Underneath that, in black Sharpie marker, was scrawled “9C.” The Tretyakov Gallery was also located on Lavrushinsky Lane, so the hotel the card was from had to be nearby.

He retrieved the carry-on case from the cloakroom on the first floor and exited the building. As he did so, he hit the phone number he had called back fifteen minutes before. “What’s going on?” he said when the man answered. “I thought we were meeting in front of the painting.”

“Last-minute change of plans. Didn’t want to take the chance.”

“Was I followed?”

“Apparently not. You weren’t. Well done. Me, I can’t be certain. I’m in the apartment building right across the street.”

Paul spotted the modern apartment complex and crossed the street. Passing a well-tended flower garden, he found the entrance. A small, empty lobby furnished with a few easy chairs. There was a bank of mailboxes and an internal door with a card reader affixed to its side, which the key card buzzed open.

Down a gray-carpeted hall on the right was an elevator. He entered it and hit 9. Nothing happened, so he waved the key card in front of the card reader under the number panel, and the elevator doors closed.

Apartment 9C was down the hall on the left. He tried the key card there, but got no response. He hit a doorbell, and the door came right open.

Standing there was “Andrew,” the tourist from the gallery, the bulky white-haired man, only now he wasn’t wearing a Cubs cap. Paul entered quickly, and the door shut behind him.

He’d entered a spacious and utterly empty apartment: an expanse of polished wooden floors in a herringbone pattern, white walls, no furniture. “I’d offer you a seat, but as you can see, I don’t have any. My name is Aaron. I’m a friend of Mark Addison’s.” The man had an acne-scarred face, chapped lips, and thinning white hair.

“What happened to ‘Andrew’?”

Aaron shook his head. “Sorry about all the precautions. It’s for your own good.”

“Mark said the KGB doesn’t follow foreigners around so much anymore.”

“It’s the FSB now, and it’s different for American embassy employees. For us, life hasn’t changed that much. Listen, I’ll make this quick.” From the floor, he pulled a burnished leather briefcase—identical, Paul realized, to the one Arkady Galkin carried. “This way.”

Paul followed him into the spacious empty kitchen, where they stopped before a large island topped with black granite. There the man set down the briefcase. He unzipped it and pulled out a small, squarish white tile.

“That an Apple AirTag?” Paul asked.

“Modified. It doesn’t reach out to other Apple devices like the AirTag does. It’s a non-emissive passive transponder. Here’s all you do.”

He slipped the tile into the briefcase and immediately pulled his empty hand out. “You put it into the inside-facing side of a pocket. It’ll adhere to the leather. Try it.”

“How am I supposed to do this?”

“All you need is twenty seconds alone.”

“With Galkin’s briefcase?”

“Right.”

“And when’s that supposed to happen?”

“You’re a member of the family now. You’ll have opportunities.”

“Easy for you to say. Am I supposed to keep this phone?”

The FBI man nodded. “It’s clean. No bugs.”

“If the . . . FSB can tap my iPhone, they can tap this one.”

“But they don’t know you have it, see. It’s called security through obscurity. Nothing is uncrackable anymore. Security is a dated concept. I mean, the only uncrackable safe is one that no one can find to crack.”

Paul nodded dubiously. He had to make sure to keep the two phones separate. Maybe one in his pocket, one in his suitcase. He didn’t want Tatyana discovering that he had two identical iPhones. “By the way, I had dinner with Tatyana’s mother last night.”

“I know,” Aaron said. “How’d that go?”

Paul nodded. “Galina Borisovna said something interesting about her ex.”

“Oh, yeah?” The man seemed to perk up.

“She said when he was a student at the Bauman Institute, he had an affair with one of his professors, who made him rich.”

“What does that mean, ‘made him rich’?”

“She was apparently a recruiter for the Kremlin.”

“You catch her name?”

“Ludmilla something.”

“Last name?”

Paul shook his head. He knew more but didn’t want to say. Knowledge was power. “Tatyana’s mother said Ludmilla even tried to talk Arkady out of marrying her.”

“Jesus, that’s the woman who recruited him for Mother Russia. Need her full name.”

“Sorry . . .”

“Would your wife know?”

“She doesn’t remember. Anyway, that was before she was born.”

“Find the name, if you can. Help us, and we help you. You know how this works. You want the Bureau’s protection, you gotta play ball.”

“Actually, I thought I was helping you by planting this fucking tracker,” Paul snapped. “Isn’t that playing ball ?”

The man smiled. His smile seemed to crack the lunar surface of his face. “That’s playing ball, all right. But you’d better practice. Right now.” He handed Paul the briefcase. “You don’t want to strike out.”