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radiantly alive, on the snowy steps of the Bolshoi ballet theatre. Asia stared back at him, her profound beauty still a knife deep to the heart after these years. How this pain created a longing for his fleeting youth, that halcyon time before he had ever prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Never again, he told himself constantly. Alex Hawke had learned a hard lesson the hard way:
    A man must never place himself in a position to lose. He must search out and find only those things he cannot lose. He must develop a heart as hard as flint.
    And, after all his bloody pain and suffering, now this truly bizarre twist of fate. His beloved Anastasia, if you believed the Kremlin rumors anyway, was still alive. After narrowly escaping a death sentence for treasonous acts against her father, the late Tsar, she was rumored to have spent two years or more imprisoned in Moscow’s notoriously cruel Lubyanka Prison. Now, so he’d heard from his Russian friend the great Stefan Halter, she was held prisoner at a high-security Siberian KGB facility, Jasna Polana, the former winter palace of her father. British spooks even had a nickname for it, stolen from a spy tale by the American author Nelson DeMille: the Charm School.
    But.
    “It could all be a ruse.” He still heard Stefan Halter’s sonorous voice echo in his mind . “After all, you and I are the only two eyewitnesses to General Kuragin’s treason against the late Tsar. If Kuragin is ever to feel completely secure within the walls of the Kremlin, his only option is to eliminate us. To lure you back to Russia in search of Anastasia by encouraging false hopes would be a standard KGB ruse. As you well know, my dear friend.”
    C , his superior at Six, had been told only that Hawke was “headed up into the Swiss Alps for a bit of thinking and hiking, perhaps an assault on the Eiger.” Had Alex told his colleagues in the SIS the truth, Sir David Trulove would never have allowed this bizarre misadventure. Hawke was entirely too valuable, far too weighty a capital investment, to have himself shot out of a cannon on some wild-goose chase, indeed, chasing a woman who, by all accounts, was in all likelihood long dead.
    The beckoning trap, in fairness, had been exquisitely set. Not only had Anastasia survived, he had been told, but she’d borne him a son in prison. A son! So here he was, the forlorn fool driven onward by hope alone. But. If, by some miracle, Anastasia and his son truly were alive, he was determined to find some way, any way, to smuggle them out of Russia to safety. Precisely how he would achieve this, he had no bloody idea. All he knew was that he was bound and determined to rescue his little family in the unlikely event that they were still alive. Or simply die trying.

Two
    T he wretched conveyance was slowing, steel wheels creaking and brakes squealing as it approached the tiny rail station. Tvas was a bleak Siberian outpost, a small village situated literally in the middle of frozen nowhere. Picture perfect for his appointment in Samarra. After the long hours of worry, waiting, and trying to distract himself by reading, Alex Hawke finally turned the last page of his well-thumbed book, a volume by Balzac, and reread the final passage for the umpteenth time.
    T HE TRADE OF A SPY IS A VERY FINE ONE, WHEN THE SPY IS WORKING ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT. I S IT NOT IN FACT ENJOYING THE EXCITEMENTS OF A THIEF, WHILE RETAINING THE CHARACTER OF AN HONEST CITIZEN? B UT A MAN WHO UNDERTAKES THIS TRADE MUST MAKE UP HIS MIND TO SIMMER WITH WRATH, TO FRET WITH IMPATIENCE, TO STAND ABOUT IN THE MUD WITH HIS FEET FREEZING, TO BE CHILLED OR TO BE SCORCHED, AND TO BE DECEIVED BY FALSE HOPES. (O H YES, YES, THERE WAS ALWAYS THAT LITTLE POSSIBILITY !) H E MUST BE READY, ON THE FAITH OF A MERE INDICATION, TO WORK UP TO AN UNKNOWN GOAL; HE MUST BEAR THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF FAILING IN HIS AIM; HE MUST BE PREPARED TO RUN, TO BE MOTIONLESS, TO REMAIN FOR LONG HOURS WATCHING A WINDOW; TO