contracted to the pinpoint of a star in the night sky. He was locked within the confines of his mind, but despite all his training, all his courage, he could not compartmentalize the pain. There was a hood over his head, drawn tight around his neck. This confinement magnified the pain a hundredfold because, despite his fearlessness, Pyotr was subject to claustrophobia. For someone who never went into caves, small spaces, or even underwater, the hood was the worst of all possible worlds. His senses could tell him that, in fact, he wasn't confined at all, but his mind wouldn't accept that input-it was in the full flight of panic. The pain Arkadin was inflicting on him was one thing, its magnification was quite another. Pyotr's mind was spinning out of control. He felt a wildness enter him-the wolf caught in a trap that begins to frantically gnaw its leg off. But the mind was not a limb; he couldn't gnaw it off.
Dimly, he heard someone asking him a question to which he knew the answer. He didn't want to give the answer, but he knew he would because the voice told him the hood would come off if he answered. His crazed mind only knew it needed the hood off; it could no longer distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, lies from truth. It reacted to only one imperative: the need to survive. He tried to move his fingers, but in bending over him his interrogator must have been pressing down on them with the heels of his hands.
Pyotr couldn't hang on any longer. He answered the question.
The hood didn't come off. He howled in indignation and terror. Of course it didn't come off, he thought in a tiny instant of lucidity. If it did, he'd have no incentive to answer the next question and the next and the next.
And he would answer them-all of them. He knew this with a bone-chilling certainty. Even though part of him suspected that the hood might never come off, his trapped mind would take the chance. It had no other choice.
But now that he could move his fingers, there was another choice. Just before the whirlwind of panicked madness overtook him again, Pyotr made that choice. There was one way out and, saying a silent prayer to Allah, he took it.
Icoupov and Arkadin stood over Pyotr's body. Pyotr's head lay on one side; his lips were very blue, and a faint but distinct foam emanated from his half-open mouth. Icoupov bent down, sniffed the scent of bitter almonds.
"I didn't want him dead, Leonid, I was very clear on the point." Icoupov was vexed. "How did he get hold of cyanide?"
"They used a variation I've never encountered." Arkadin did not look happy himself. "He was fitted with a false fingernail."
"He would have talked."
"Of course he would have talked," Arkadin said. "He'd already begun."
"So he took it upon himself to shut his own mouth, forever." Icoupov shook his head in distaste. "This will have significant fallout. He's got dangerous friends."
"I'll find them," Arkadin said. "I'll kill them."
Icoupov shook his head. "Even you can't kill them all in time."
"I can contact Mischa."
"And risk losing everything? No. I understand your connection with him-closest friend, mentor. I understand the urge to talk to him, to see him. But you can't, not until this is finished and Mischa comes home. That's final."
"I understand."
Icoupov walked over the window, stood with his hand behind his back contemplating the fall of darkness. Lights sparkled along the edges of the lake, up the hillside of Campione d'Italia. There ensued a long silence while he contemplated the face of the altered landscape. "We'll have to move up the timetable, that's all there is to it. And you'll take Sevastopol as a starting point. Use the one name you got out of Pyotr before he committed suicide."
He turned around to face Arkadin. "Everything now rides on you, Leonid. This attack has been in the planning stages for three years. It has been designed to cripple the American economy. Now there are barely two weeks left before it becomes a reality." He walked noiselessly across the carpet. "Philippe will provide you with money, documents, weaponry that will escape electronic detection, anything you need. Find this man in Sevastopol. Retrieve the document, and when you do, follow the pipeline back and shut it down so that it will never again be used to threaten our plans."
Chapter One
Book One