The protesters trickled into Red Square in small clusters so that the Moscow City Militia and leather-jacketed thugs of the FSB wouldn’t notice—artists, writers, journalists, punk rockers, even a few old babushkas who dreamed of spending their last years on earth in a truly free country. By noon, the crowd numbered several hundred, too large to conceal its true motives. Someone unfurled a banner. Someone else produced a bullhorn and accused the Russian president of having stolen the last election, which had the advantage of being entirely true. Then he made a joke about all the other things the president had stolen from the Russian people, which the leader of the leather-jacketed FSB thugs didn’t find funny at all. With scarcely more than a nod, he unleashed the militiamen, who responded by smashing everything in sight, including several of the more important heads. The man with the bullhorn got the worst of it. When last seen, he was being hurled bloody and semiconscious into the back of a police van. Later, the Kremlin announced he would be charged with attempting to instigate a riot, an offense that carried a ten-year sentence in the neo-gulag. The subservient Russian press referred to the protesters as “hooligans,” the same label the Soviet regime applied to its opponents, and not a single commentator dared to criticize the heavy-handed tactics. They were to be forgiven for their silence. Journalists who annoyed the Kremlin these days had a funny way of ending up dead.
At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, the news from Red Square flashed briefly across the television screens as Mikhail stepped from the Jetway, followed thirty seconds later by Gabriel. As they approached passport control, Gabriel noticed a man in a tailored suit standing next to a malnourished border policeman in a threadbare uniform. The suited man had a photograph in his hand, which he consulted twice as Mikhail drew near. Then he walked over to Mikhail and said something to him in Russian that Gabriel couldn’t understand. Mikhail smiled and shook the man’s hand before following him through an unmarked doorway. Alone, Gabriel proceeded to passport control, where an unsmiling woman scrutinized his face for an uncomfortably long moment before vehemently stamping his passport and waving him on. Welcome to Russia, he thought, as he entered the crowded arrivals hall. It was good to be back again.
Stepping outside, Gabriel immediately inhaled a blast of tobacco smoke and diesel fumes that made his head swim. The evening skies were hard and clear; the air was serrated with cold. Glancing to his left, Gabriel saw Mikhail and his Volgatek escort settling into the warmth of a waiting Mercedes sedan. Then he joined the long queue for a taxi. The cold of the concrete ate its way through the thin soles of his Western loafers; and by the time he finally crawled into the back of a rattletrap Lada, his jaw was so frozen he was nearly incapable of speech. Asked for a destination, he replied that he wished to be taken to the Hotel Metropol, though it sounded as if he’d requested a manhole.
After leaving the airport, the driver headed to the Leningradsky Prospekt and started the long, slow slog into the center of Moscow. It was a few minutes past seven, the tail end of the city’s murderous evening rush. Even so, their pace was glacial. The driver tried to engage Gabriel in conversation, but his English was as impenetrable as the traffic. Gabriel made thoughtful noises every now and again; mainly, he stared out the window at the crumbling Soviet-era buildings lining the dirty old prospekt. For a brief period they had been merely hideous. Now they were ruins. On every street corner, and upon every rooftop, billboards assaulted the eye with promises of luxury and copulation. It was the Communist nightmare with a new coat of capitalism, thought Gabriel. And it was crushingly depressing.
Eventually, they crossed the Garden Ring, and the prospekt gave way to Tverskaya Street, Moscow’s version of Madison Avenue. It bore them down a long gentle hill, past Volgatek’s glittering new headquarters, to the redbrick walls of the Kremlin, where it emptied into the eight lanes of Okhotnyy Ryad Street. Turning left, they sped past the Russian Duma, the old House of Unions, and the Bolshoi Theatre. Gabriel saw none of them. He had eyes only for the floodlit yellow fortress perched atop the heights of Lubyanka Square.
“KGB,” said the driver, pointing over the top of the wheel.
“There is no KGB,” Gabriel replied distantly. “The KGB is a thing of the past.”
The driver muttered something about the na?veté of foreigners and guided the taxi toward the entrance of the Metropol. The lobby had been faithfully restored to its original decor, but the middle-aged woman at the check-in counter hadn’t fared nearly as well. She greeted Gabriel with a frozen smile, made polite inquiries about the nature of his travel, and then handed him a long registration form, a copy of which would be forwarded to the relevant authorities. Gabriel completed it swiftly as Jonathan Albright of Markham Capital Advisers and was rewarded with a key to his room. A bellman offered to assist with his bag and seemed relieved when Gabriel said he could manage on his own. Nevertheless, he gave the bellman a tip for his troubles. Its size suggested he was unfamiliar with the value of Russian currency.