1
PROLOGUE
RAINA
The room is too predictable for the kind of man I’m here to meet. White tile. Metal table. Four men with guns at the walls. One camera in the corner.
Sergei Baranov sits at the head of the table.
I’ve never seen him in person, only in grainy photos and news clips that never say his name. Every image I saw felt distant. This isn’t.
He’s in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled once, strong wrists bare, suit jacket over the back of his chair. No watch. No ring. Short dark hair, grey at the temples. His eyes move the way the city whispers about—careful, slow, never missing a thing.
He looks at my laptop bag before he looks at my face.
“You’re Raina Mirova,” he says.
His Russian is clean and low. It carries even when he doesn’t raise his voice.
“Yes,” I say. “You’re late.”
One of the guards shifts. His hand tightens on his gun. I hear the breath he takes, ready to speak.
Sergei lifts two fingers.
The guard falls quiet.
“You’re not,” Sergei says. “Good.”
He nods at the chair opposite him.
“Sit.”
I sit. My palms are damp, but my fingers don’t shake when I pull my laptop out. I plug in the small encrypted drive his runner brought to my hostel an hour ago. Plain plastic, no mark. I already checked it for tricks on the metro.
Sergei watches my hands.
“You checked the drive,” he says.
“Of course I did,” I say.
“You find any gifts on it?” he asks.
“Nothing that scared me,” I answer. “Nothing that impressed me either.”
The corner of his mouth moves. It’s not a smile, but it isn’t nothing.
“You read the brief?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “You want me to test your walls. See if anyone is walking in and out of your systems. You want to know if the stories are true.”
“What stories?” he asks.
“The ones that say you built half your empire in Kaliningrad, and the other half in the city’s blind spots,” I say. “And that someone you trained is now carving along those same lines and not reporting in.”
He leans back in his chair, slow and easy.
“And what do they call this someone?” he asks.
