the men her father surrounded himself with. They were capable, dangerous men with cold hearts and dead eyes, even though they could smile at a moment’s notice.
As a girl, she had often seen her father among such men. She had been impressed to see how he instantly commanded respect and obedience from those men that she instinctively knew were warriors. Her father had told her nothing of what he had seen or gone through. That was what he was like. Very close-mouthed about those things. When Anna had asked her mother about them, if that was what made her father so stubborn and narrow-minded, her mother had admitted that the general had never told her anything of those times either.
But her mother did mention her father’s nightmares and that sometimes he called out to dead men in his sleep.
Her brother, Rodion, however, had sometimes told her stories of her father’s experiences fighting the Chechen rebels. He filled Anna’s head with the images of the war her father had waged. He’d researched the military efforts in Chechnya and brought back copies of newspaper stories and pictures. Those stories, the way they had laid out the struggles between the Chechen and Russian peoples against the Islamic International Brigade, had deeply affected her.
For the first time, she’d understood the power of the written word. Those stories had allowed her to step into her father’s world and get a better understanding of why he was distant and aloof at times. She had a deeper insight into why he lived his life in such a regimented and organized way and why he’d demanded that others around him do the same thing.
Her father had lived a hard life and seen many horrible things. She had learned that. So she had taken up writing, trying to put into words her own feelings about the Russian war on the Chechen rebels and what she saw in her father.
At seventeen years old, she had gotten a story published in The Moscow Times. It had been the culmination of her perception of her father and of the ongoing struggle in Chechnya. It had almost won a prize and had become the basis of the relationship she currently had with the Russian newspaper.
The general had not approved of the story, and he had made his displeasure known. He said that the story made Russians everywhere appear weak, that it made him appear weak.
Anna had been crushed. She had wanted the world to understand the sacrifices her father was making.
If she had to point at any one thing that had fractured her relationship with her father, Anna knew that story would be the one. She had continued to occasionally write for the paper, though she only had a few pieces published afterward, because she had been young and there had been so much she hadn’t known. She only understood later that her first story had been published mostly because she was the daughter of a much-decorated general.
That had driven her to the United States, to the Columbia School of Journalism, where she hoped to further hone her skills and become a success. She had been driven to show her father that she could succeed on her own.
Now, though, she just had stories to tell, and she hoped to help people embrace the idea of a new Russia, one with more freedoms and bravery and more prominence in today’s world. Her father, she realized, wanted the old Russia, the one that he had grown up with, back.
Thinking about such things only made her sad. She supposed the melancholy was brought on by Boris Glukov’s death. Or perhaps it was how close she had come to her own.
Mortality was a fierce thing to face.
Her phone rang, startling her. She crossed to the desk and picked it up. The general’s face showed in the viewscreen. She hesitated just a moment before answering the call. She had already talked to her mother. Her mother knew she was all right, and her mother would pass the information along.
Was the call about concern or control? Anna knew this would be a toss-up. She didn’t know if she was prepared to deal with either. There was too much guilt with one and too much frustration with the other.
Then she thought of Yakov’s picture and the fact that none of her contacts had so far been able to identify the man. However, there still remained a few, and one of them was a military officer she had known for several