Page 97 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“What do you mean they’re coming? For what? Meeting you isn’t breaking any law.”

“You are in Russia, my friend. Knowing the law won’t help you. It’s no defense. If they wish to arrest you, they will. They will make up a pretext.”

“Why FSB?”

“I have spoken critically of government, so they put watch on me. They listen to my telephone. Is easy to do now. Is automated. Someone calls me, a light goes on, maybe a bell rings somewhere. I don’t know how. They want to know who I am meeting with. American, they know this. Now,go.Now.”

“How close are they?

“Please!Move!”

64

He clambered down the inner stairwell of Ludmilla’s building, down floor after floor, his footsteps echoing in the space. On the ground floor, he looked around quickly for a rear exit, but didn’t find one. There was no one in front of the building, so he chanced it and ran out that way.

He tried to call to mind the map of the Chertanovo District as he ran back the way he came. He saw the statue of the cosmonauts in the small park, saw the Metro entrance, and decided not to go that way.Don’t go the way you came, he directed himself.If the FSB is coming for you, don’t make it easy for them.

They’ve probably come to question me, he thought. To find out who was meeting with Ludmilla Zaitseva. But why? Being publicly critical of the Kremlin would get you arrested in Russia these days, Paul knew. That was a fact. So meeting with someone like her—was that enough to get him arrested?

He didn’t want to find out. But if he were detained, couldn’t he simply call Arkady Galkin? Galkin had to be connected to the top. He could surely make one call and have the whole thing go away.

Still, Paul didn’t want to be taken into custody and questioned. He had to elude the FSB, in a city where he was a novice, in a country where they had their own rules. Heart thudding, he walked past the Metro entrance and crossed busy Chertanov Street. He knew he looked like an American, and there weren’t a lot of them around this remote part of town.

Down Kedrova Street, then a right onto Trade Union Street, crossing the street and striding down the median separating opposing lanes of traffic. He glanced at his watch.

There wasn’t time to call an Uber, so he went to the side of the road and waved his arm. A compact SUV, a black Chevy Niva, pulled over, its tires squealing. A gypsy cab. A rip-off, he knew, but he didn’t have time to do anything else.

Heaving a sigh, Paul sank down in the car’s backseat.

The driver, who wore a flat, gray woolen cap, said, “Kuda?” “Where are you going?”

65

No one from the FSB was waiting for him back at the hotel, as far as he could determine. Somehow he felt safer amid the luxurious trappings of the finest hotel in Moscow, as if the locals wouldn’t dare intervene here. Then again, the FSB didn’t know his name. They knew only the name “Robert Langfitt.” That was all the old lady knew, too.

Unless his face had been caught by a CCTV camera. Paul hadn’t noticed any in or on Ludmilla’s apartment building. But if he’d been identified . . . he didn’t want to think about that. Because then Galkin would know he’d been going around Moscow looking into his past, that he’d met with the woman who’d recruited Galkin to work for the Kremlin. And maybe then he wouldn’t be so forgiving.

Paul had courted danger. The question was, would he face the consequences?

He went directly to their suite, didn’t find Tatyana there. On his iPhone was a text from her telling him to meet her at eight at a restaurant on Novinskiy Boulevard called Selfie.

On the other iPhone was a Signal message from Addison that simply read,Congrats!

For what?Paul wondered.

Another Signal message, this one from Aaron, saying,Success, thank you.

The tracker he’d put inside Galkin’s briefcase. For a moment, he’d actually forgotten he’d done it.

A few hours later, he left for dinner, taking Galkin’s Bentley to the restaurant. Lowercase English letters on the outside of a modern building spelled out “selfie.” Inside, the décor was very hip, with a sleek open kitchen. He found Tatyana and her mother at a desirable-looking table, rapt in conversation.

*

They stayed at the restaurant until past midnight. After many vodka toasts, mother and daughter were fairly blitzed. They said a protracted goodbye—Tatyana and Paul were leaving Moscow in the morning—and Paul finally managed to trundle Tatyana into the waiting Bentley and back to the hotel.

He took her arm as she walked unsteadily into the empty lobby.

Then he saw that the lobby wasn’t quite empty. Two men in ill-fitting suits and one in a green uniform were standing before the reception desk, questioning the night clerk.

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