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Paul and Tatyana boarded a Bell 430 helicopter at the East Thirty-Fourth Street Heliport. They landed at Teterboro a few feet from the Gulfstream.

Four other people were already on board the jet, two couples who appeared to be old friends of the Galkin family. They spoke to Tatyana in rapid-fire Russian, and she didn’t bother translating for him. He found out that they were bound for Bermuda. The yacht was sailing from Bermuda to St. Lucia, where the two couples would remain on the yacht. Paul and Tatyana would fly back, commercial, to New York.

“Where’s your father?” Paul asked Tatyana during a break in the conversation.

“He’s already on the boat.”

Tatyana, for her part, had brought Pushkin with her in his plaid carrier. He mostly slept: she had given him a sedative.

The flight to St. George’s, on the east end of Bermuda, took a little over two hours. The six of them plus Pushkin got onto another helicopter, which flew them over rows of neat pastel cottages and then to what looked like a cruise ship that was docked in the harbor.

This was Galkin’s private yacht, the Pechorin . One of the Russian men, Leonid something—he had to get the man’s last name—explained on the flight that the yacht was named after the protagonist of a novel by Mikhail Lermontov called A Hero of Our Time . Pechorin, a young czarist officer, is handsome, brave, and strong. A hero. But he is also, apparently, sort of a jerk, an asshole to women, prone to duels and playing Russian roulette.

Leonid was an accountant of some sort and apparently knew Galkin from the old country. He made the point that owning a yacht was the ultimate status symbol. “I mean, everyone flies private and has a car and driver, but not everyone has a mega-yacht.”

“Not everyone does,” Paul replied. “That’s true.”

“Moscow is crawling with Porsches and Aston Martins and Bentleys and Lamborghinis. But how many have boats like that one?”

“True.”

The helicopter hovered above the yacht and then landed on one of her two visible helipads, this one on the foredeck, right atop a big brown H .

Paul had been on a yacht once before, Bernie Kovan’s, which was quite spacious and elegant but less than a quarter the size of this one. He had been brought up to Bernie’s yacht, anchored offshore, on a small boat, a yacht tender. Galkin must have thought that landing by helicopter would be more impressive.

He was right. It was.

Tatyana did not seem impressed, but then, she was used to it all. As they clambered out of the chopper, Paul noticed that the brown H was made of stained teak.

The Pechorin was built by the German shipbuilders Blohm and Voss. She was enormous—164 meters long, or 540 feet, yet she was not the largest yacht in the world. A few other oligarchs and sheiks, competitively inclined, had recently commissioned larger ones. This one had seven decks. Two helipads. There were berths for seventy crew, forty staff, and twenty guest cabins. Paul knew the Pechorin had two swimming pools, a steam room, a library for the guests, an IMAX movie theater, a submarine, an underwater observation deck, and a lot of toys like jet skis and speedboats. And a banya , a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch twigs and eucalyptus. She was a floating palace.

They were greeted by a uniformed server bearing a tray of champagne flutes. Paul took a sip and was pretty sure it was Dom. Maybe Krug. Something expensive, anyway.

*

They hadn’t given a single thought to their luggage. It had been taken care of, shuttled from helicopter to plane to helicopter to their room on the yacht. A security guard, a male in his thirties who looked Russian, escorted them and the two other couples into a saloon, where they were asked to sit down before a machine of some sort that Paul didn’t recognize.

“What’s this for?”

The guard replied in a bored voice, “Security.”

Paul looked at Tatyana, who said, “Your palm print. Mine’s already in the system.”

“For what?”

She said something to the guard, who answered with a chuckle. She laughed, then said, “They used to use fingerprint readers to open doors on the Pechorin . But he says the fingerprint reader is bullshit—an intruder can cut off your finger and use it to open any door.”

“Hadn’t thought of that.”

“This system scans the veins in your palm. So it can only open the door while you’re alive, because your veins are readable only when you’re alive.”

The guard pantomimed chopping into his arm.

“Right,” she went on, “once someone cuts off your arm, it’s useless.”

Then they were led to their stateroom. Only, it wasn’t a room. It was a suite of several rooms on an upper deck. A sign on the door read, MARK ROTHKO . It was the Rothko Suite. All the rooms were named after modernist painters. Paul was expecting gold-encrusted everything aboard the yacht, like Galkin’s East Side town house, but the Pechorin was both extravagant and tasteful. And she still had plenty of gold.

“The yacht’s interior was designed by Francois Zuretti,” Tatyana said.

Paul shrugged. The name meant nothing to him.

“He’s the hot designer among the Russians.” The oligarchs, she meant.

Everywhere in the Rothko Suite was marble and onyx and mahogany and teak and custom-made carpeting. Subtle LED lighting. A walk-in closet about the size of Tatyana’s old apartment. The bedsheets were Frette. There was a six-foot-wide movie screen in one of the sitting rooms and one almost as big in the master bedroom. That one was hidden behind a huge painting. You pushed a button, and the painting slid down to reveal the TV screen. The painting, of orange and yellow rectangles, was by Mark Rothko.

Perched on the front table was a bottle of Dom Perignon on ice and an arrangement of orchids. Paul realized that a mega-yacht like the Pechorin was meant never to be seen by the general public, yet her art and design features were recognizable to her owner’s very wealthy private guests, who would appreciate the value of these details.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Tatyana said. “Care to join me?”

“We’d better not,” he said. “I don’t think we have time for that. We have to dress for dinner.” The truth was, ever since he’d agreed to cooperate with the FBI, his and Tatyana’s sex had been almost nonexistent. And he knew it was all on him: the guilt had dampened his ardor. To make love to her felt somehow dishonest. Traitorous.

While she showered, Paul wrote down the names of the Russian couples they’d met on the Gulfstream, as best as he could remember them. (He’d brought along a little black Moleskine.) Then he inspected the suite more closely. Its walls were paneled in mahogany. The bathroom had a floor made of onyx and a vanity, counter, and walls made of marble. The fixtures were gold. Gold-plated? He wondered. Maybe. Probably. The hand towels were all monogrammed with a capital G intertwined with a Russian one, a Г .

“Who else is on board?” he called to Tatyana as she stood under the rain-head shower. “Besides the folks I met on the jet.”

A long pause. Paul was about to repeat his question when she replied, “Papa has invited some rich, important people, and Polina will be here.”

“Isn’t she always?”

“Not always. She doesn’t like to be in the sun. It ages your skin. You’ll be delighted to hear that Niko’s coming, too. With the latest in his parade of beautiful bimbos. A couple other people I don’t know. And of course, Berzin and the security guards.”

She emerged from the shower, dried herself with one of the big Turkish cotton bath towels, wrapped her hair with another, smaller towel.

“Pasha, is everything okay with you?”

“Me? Sure, what do you mean?” What was she picking up from him? She did know how to read him pretty well.

“Us, I mean. There’s, like, this distance. Or, it feels cooler between us. And not in a good way.”

He drew closer, put his arms around her. Was she sensing the guilt that seeped from his every pore?

“You’re not cheating on me, are you?”

Softly, he said, “Come on.”

After a moment, she said, “Well, something’s changed. Anyway, I have to do my hair before it dries.” She pulled away.

She blow-dried her hair, applied her makeup. They dressed for dinner. Tatyana looked amazing; she wore a silky white maxi dress that was extremely sexy. He’d brought his blue blazer and a light-blue linen shirt.

Tatyana brought Pushkin to dinner in his little plaid carrier. “Pushok gets nervous if I leave him alone anywhere that’s not home,” she explained. She had once told Paul that “Pushok,” her nickname for her dog, meant “Fluff Ball.”

Paul put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the suite door. It was in English and Russian.

“Why?” she said.

“We don’t need turndown service.” He was leaving his laptop in there, and he didn’t want their suite searched.

Like that was going to stop anyone.