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Up till now, he had almost bought into the myth of Arkady Galkin, the self-made man who’d built his fortune over the years steadily, maybe ruthlessly, but on his own.

Until Moscow. And what Ludmilla, the nearly blind woman, had told him. And what he’d found in the files.

Was that why Jake Larsen had been killed, for asking too many questions about a Russian operation? It was no secret that the Russian intelligence services resorted to deadly means to deal with their enemies.

And was he next?

Would what had happened in Moscow catch up with him?

He rented a Chevy Malibu at Hertz. As he got on 495 West at Tenth Avenue and then, a few minutes later, I-87 North, he found himself thinking obsessively about his father-in-law and the danger he had stepped into, about Frost and Berzin. And Mark Addison and the FBI. And Tatyana. Addison had promised that the FBI would provide protection for Paul, but he hadn’t been specific enough to settle Paul’s qualms.

Would it be enough? And would they protect his wife, too?

The view as he drove got increasingly picturesque. It was jarring, the beautiful scenery juxtaposed against the paranoia he was feeling, the sour plumes of acid it jetted into his stomach. By the time he reached Ulster County, he was driving across farmland, beside pastures and herds of cows and grain silos and stacks of hay. It made him think about his childhood, the time he spent with his father in the woods outside Bellingham. In some ways, his New York City life had been an unsettling change for him. He’d grown up identifying trees and hiking through forests, spending much of his time outdoors. But he’d given all that up to move to Manhattan and get a job on Wall Street. It had been a trade-off, and he wondered if he was really happy as an urban guy. Tatyana, certainly, wouldn’t want to leave the city. He was reminded of a TV show, Schitt’s Creek , where a once-wealthy family moves to a small rural town. Hilarity ensues.

He didn’t see any signs for Hudson DataVault, so he placed his trust in his GPS to guide him to the facility. The route there was a series of perfectly straight farm roads. Then the landscape became hilly and more densely forested, and the roads were winding. Finally, a newly paved access road took him to a small, low-slung, white-painted cinderblock office building built into the side of a mountain. Next to it was a tunnel, down which a couple of large white Hudson DataVault trucks were then driving, probably dropping off boxes of files. Or other things besides files. He had read that the storage facility, which was located in an abandoned limestone mine, held a whole range of things: racks of computer storage devices; studio master recordings from music companies; original negatives of thousands of movies, new and old, stored by movie studios, some of them extremely valuable; videotapes of years of Major League baseball games; priceless paintings that belonged to rich people—all kept in giant underground vaults.

And according to his research, the facility held miles of file boxes on steel shelves, mountains of paper documents deposited there by financial institutions and thousands of other corporations. So much for the myth of the paperless office. You needed someplace to store all your old stuff, the photocopies, minutes, tax returns, personnel files, invoices, and correspondence—all the documents you’re required by law to keep, for compliance reasons. ( Compliance was the big buzzword in the corporate world these days.)

Somewhere in the seven underground levels were boxes containing the old files from Arkady Galkin’s firm. And included among them would be a few files—not a whole box, surely—about the gaming company FanStars.