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“I have something for you also,” said Tony Ruiz, pulling a gift-bagged bottle of Kentucky’s finest out of his suitcase.

Uggin smiled broadly, admiring the American whiskey. He didn’t hesitate.

“Can we open this one? You know, I’m a big fan of scotch, but I’ve never tried bourbon.”

Tony grinned as he fetched ice from the suite’s minibar. He felt at a slight disadvantage because it was clear that Daniel knew more about him than vice versa. His Russian guest deftly shortened the distance between them with a quick, initial explanation of his international role at Volga Gaz. After that, the conversation became light and easy, avoiding anything even remotely related to work. They felt an immediate kinship upon realizing that both were originally from smaller cities far from the political buzz of their countries’ capitals.

Daniel Uggin stayed only fifteen minutes. It was clear he didn’t want to disturb his guest after the long transatlantic trip.

“Tony, I should go. You need to rest. We start in the morning at eight thirty and have three long days ahead of us. Tomorrow evening, we have a formal dinner with both delegations. But perhaps after the dinner—if you’re up for it—or the next day, I hope you’ll let me take you out to see how this city lives at night. Moscow, you know, has become New York on steroids.”

“I saw that on the way in from the airport. You’ve got yourself a deal, Daniel.” Tony Ruiz laughed.

The two men clasped hands warmly before Daniel headed down the hallway toward the elevators.

Nice guy, Tony Ruiz thought as he closed his hotel door and headed straight to bed. But as he closed his eyes to sleep, the thought occurred to Tony that perhaps Daniel Uggin’s easygoing manner had been just a little too nice.

MOSCOW
SEPTEMBER 3, 8:20 A.M.
TO VOLGA GAZ HEADQUARTERS

Tony Ruiz had slept profoundly, awakening before the hotel wake-up call. A shower and a room-service breakfast followed in quick succession. He had already been in the lobby a good twenty minutes when Martha Packard strode purposefully off the Metropol’s elevators, followed closely by the obese Betty Angler and Stuart Altman, the CIA’s energy expert.

Two very contrary impressions struck Tony on seeing General Martha Packard and her trailing acolytes.

First, the fact that the group had descended in the elevator together gave him the unpleasant impression that they had just concluded a preparatory breakfast meeting without him. The woman had an agenda and she was freezing him out.

Right then and there, Tony resolved to take the first possible private opportunity with Packard to protest her ongoing efforts to keep him away. Coming on this trip hadn’t been his choice. But he was determined not to be treated as the never-acknowledged Hispanic busboy by the CIA’s WASP ice queen.

Immediately behind his initial jolt of resentment, a second, more amusing, thought seeped through his mind. Following Packard’s steely pace through the lobby, Tony realized that this was the first time he had ever seen her—either in person or in news photographs—dressed as a civilian.

Packard’s outfit was elegant. A fitted blue jacket and matching skirt that hovered ever so slightly above the knees were mixed with a white brass-buttoned shirt. An antique necklace of small silver squares and colored semiprecious stones accented her long neck. Her dark hair, combed backward and held in place by a hair band
with embedded yellow sparkles, contrasted with her white skin, chiseled nose, and glossed red lips.

Jewelry, makeup, hair band. All that was impressive enough. But what Tony really had trouble keeping his eyes off of were the general’s sheer-hosed legs and her dark blue, high-heeled pumps. Prior to this moment, it would never have occurred to him that this forty-five-year-old military woman could walk in anything but spit-polished, black, tie-up flat shoes.

Any thought that connected the words “Packard” and “pleasant” in the same brainwave was instantly erased by her demeanor. “Martha” and “menacing” became once again the prevailing synonyms.

“Let’s move, Mr. Ruiz. Or we’ll be late,” she called his way as she glided past.

The ride to Volga Gaz headquarters took less than ten minutes. As the Americans alighted, they were whisked off to a fifth-floor boardroom. Tan-colored thick-leather chairs were fitted against an enormous light-colored conference table. In front of each chair was a setting that jumbled dinnerware with office supplies. The sophisticated and the mundane were mixed on place mats, as beautifully crafted, rose-colored Russian breakfast china and crystal goblets lay side by side with sharpened pencils and yellow pads.

After an initial round of greeting, Viktor Zhironovsky tapped a pencil against the crystal ware, the chiming ring filling the conference room.

“I would like to officially welcome my friends from America. General Packard, you especially. My colleagues at the FSB warned me about your legendary toughness. But they did not caution me sufficiently about your alluring beauty,” Zhironovsky began unctuously.

“We have an opportunity today to create history. To bend the present into a better future. Russia and the United States are far apart in many ways. Yet one idea, one dream, one bold stroke can
bring us together. What we accomplish here in the coming days has the potential to bind our two countries politically, strategically, and geographically. Shall we get to work?”

All participants—four Americans and six Russians—took their seats. A young, impeccably dressed assistant distributed reams of paper to each delegation member. The document, its contents divided into two separate English and Russian columns, was ceremoniously titled “Agenda for Negotiating an Agreement on the Historic Construction of a Bering Strait Tunnel Between Our Countries.”

After just one glance at the agenda, Tony Ruiz felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. In one fell swoop, his suspicions were confirmed. Tolberg had told him that the trip was to be only a fact-finding mission. Tony had doubted it then. And now, clear as daylight, the agenda he had in front of him said these meetings were real negotiations.

The title wasn’t the only thing about the schedule that concerned him. The program also noted that, after long discussions on financing, engineering, environmental implications, tunnel contents, gas amounts, pricing, and political requirements, there would be a daily, end-of-afternoon, one-hour time period slotted simply as “Private Discussions Between Chairman Viktor Zhironovsky and General Martha Packard.”

The truth hit him like a hammer, its implication obvious. The meetings were rigged. There was no doubt about what was happening. Martha Packard had come to Russia to ride the Bering Strait negotiation straight to a political career. She planned to use her mission to Moscow to show that she was the one person in the administration who had a long-term solution to America’s energy scarcity. The CIA director would return to Washington holding a document that was a fait accompli. A done deal.

The more Tony thought about it, the clearer it became. Martha Packard intended to negotiate the Russians to near completion. She would then land in Washington with the agreement already ham
mered out. All that would be needed to seal the deal would be the president’s approval.

Yes, yes. He could see it all in sharp focus now. Packard was going to force Gene Laurence’s hand. One way or another, she was going to get what she wanted. If the president agreed to the deal, the CIA director would get the credit for being the intellectual force behind a brave new shift in U.S. energy policy. If Laurence didn’t sign the agreement, Tony could already taste the acerbic headlines of leaked press reports about the president’s reluctance. Unnamed press sources would paint Packard as a patriotic victim, the brilliant woman who had offered a clear solution to her country’s problems only to have it spurned by a shortsighted president.

Tony shook his head in disappointment. One look at the schedule the Russians had just passed out said it all. And there was almost nothing he could do to change the course of events. He was completely frozen out.

MOSCOW
SEPTEMBER 3, 11:30 P.M.
THE CAFÉ PUSHKIN

Spread over four floors in a gorgeous turn-of-the-century mansion, the Café Pushkin was a twenty-four-hour cascade of food, drink, and sophistication. The bar, with floor-to-ceiling windows and wood-paneled walls, was packed with a heady mix of good-looking humanity. Half the crowd looked like Swiss bankers, the other half like bohemian filmmakers.

Having initially hesitated in agreeing to the outing, Tony Ruiz now felt relieved to be here with Daniel Uggin and his two gorgeous blond friends. The Café Pushkin’s loud, manic atmosphere swiveled his mind away from the directed fury every nerve in his body aimed toward Martha Packard.

The discussions at Volga Gaz’s offices had been an endless numerical siege. The day had been entirely quantitative. In the morning, Packard’s deputy, Stuart Altman, had given a long presentation of the CIA’s analysis of America’s gas import requirements. Using ratios juxtaposing predicted U.S. economic growth with expanding gas needs, the American side outlined the millions of cubic feet of natural gas that could be purchased from the Russians over the next twenty years.

The afternoon centered on gas production in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Engineers from Volga Gaz had presented a withering onslaught of numbers from geological and engineering analyses of the present and future output from the various eastern Siberian fields.

Tony had tuned most of it out. Throughout the day, he had debated his next move. His choices were clear. His first instinct was to call Isaiah J. Tolberg and inform the White House chief of staff about what he thought Packard was doing in Moscow. But he doubted that the tattling would produce the one result he really wanted—to pull Packard off the trip.

There was only one other alternative, namely, to force a showdown with Packard. He had no choice, really. The only way to get Tolberg to take action from Washington was to convince the White House chief of staff that Tony had tried everything possible to rein her in. Tomorrow Altman would be going alone to a first meeting that centered on construction obstacles. The rest of the group was assembling at ten
A.M.
at Volga Gaz.

This would give Tony more than enough time in the morning to demand a meeting with Packard at the hotel.

It had taken nearly all day for Tony to decide what to do. In the late afternoon, Zhironovsky and Packard had, as dictated by the agenda, retired to the Volga Gaz chairman’s office for private discussions. The elegant dinner for both nations’ teams had been long in speechmaking but blissfully short in duration. Martha Packard may have had the sleeping quarters on the airplane, but by 10:00
P.M.
she had begged off more toasts, asking for her host’s understanding of her acute jet lag.

Daniel Uggin had slid close to Tony. “Are you tired, my friend? Come on; let me show you the city.”

Tony knew he probably should go to bed, but he desperately needed the distraction. Nodding in the affirmative, Uggin reached for the cell phone in his coat pocket.

“I’m going to ask some friends to join us. No business. Only fun, okay?”

Now, sitting in the Café Pushkin, Tony thanked his lucky stars for Daniel Uggin’s insistence. He liked the group. Besides gorgeous, both girls were spunky. One of them, Dariya, was clearly close to Uggin.

The other woman, Nina, wore an Armani dress that Tony swore he had seen the previous evening in a swank fashion magazine on his hotel room’s coffee table. Her smooth, tawny-colored shoulders were totally bare. The dress she wore began in black, tightly fashioned around ample round breasts. From there, the outfit converted to broad diagonal white-and-black stripes of shiny sequins that fell straight down, but only a very short distance. Indeed, the dress was extraordinarily mini, ending suddenly at the top third of Nina’s thighs. The rest was long, perfectly shaped legs.

“I have to tell you,” Tony said, leaning over Nina. “I never expected Russia to be like this. In the United States, we still have this outdated image of Soviet shabbiness. But Moscow is incredibly alive. And all the people are gorgeous.”

“All?” Nina asked. Her nose wrinkled in a cute smile as she fished for a compliment.

Putting a warm hand on her shoulder, Tony laughed. “All of them. But none more than both of you.”

“I heard that,” interrupted Dariya, breaking away from her conversation with Uggin. “So American guys do know how to compliment pretty girls after all. I was under the impression you were all tough cowboys.”

“Look, let me ask you guys a question,” said Tony, turning serious. “How did all this money, good looks, and sophistication happen so fast? I guess part of our outdated image of Russia is that we haven’t realized the depth of the change. It’s been only fifteen years since you had a repressive communist system.”

“Well,” said Nina firmly, “we don’t exactly have a government like yours now either. Don’t let Daniel’s friend Rudzhin hear me; he would throw me in jail. But the fact is that these guys in charge of our country have trouble holding back their authoritarian tendencies too.”

“She’s right,” laughed Dariya. “But, unlike the communists, at least today the government lets us dress well and eat good food in nice places.”

Tony wondered why Uggin didn’t join the conversation. Was he part of the government establishment? But if he was, how bad could these bureaucrats be? He seemed to be enjoying the women’s antigovernment banter.

“Okay. Here you are teasing about the government. Your jokes are good natured. But I hear real complaints. Why doesn’t anybody do anything about it?”

“Like what?” both girls asked in unison. They seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.

“I don’t know. Write a newspaper column. Organize a march. Take a protest advertisement out in the newspaper. Convince your neighbors to sign a petition. There are lots of things to do.”

Dariya and Nina looked at each other in utter surprise. Nina turned to Tony, her blue eyes sparkling with mirth.