The Ice Curtain Read Online Free Page A

world trade. When Mirny was discovered, the cartel’s stock went down twenty-five percent overnight. They flew to Moscow the next day because they were afraid we would flood the market, drive down prices, and break the cartel.”
    â€œSo then why aren’t they afraid of us now?”
    â€œIt’s a good question. You should ask Petrov.”
    â€œI will.” Volsky turned away. In a minute he was snoring softly.
    Four, five, six hours. It was already time for dinner by Nowek’s watch when the roar of the engines quieted to a whisper, and the airliner tilted steeply down. The stewardess reappeared and busied herself with powder and lipstick at a mirror.
    Outside Nowek’s porthole, a deck of clouds swiftly rose up to meet them. The jet slipped through into gray, bumpy murk. Lower, lower, the view below darkened, then cleared, revealing rich green earth, almost wild-seeming, with only the occasional dacha, surrounded by summer gardens gone fallow.
    Ahead, the dark spires of Moscow pierced a smoky horizon, ominous and black in the smudged light. City of Dead Souls.
    The old terminal at Moscow’s Shermetyevo I Airport was part circus, part mob. Traders from the south in Italian clothes, gangsters from the west in leathers, northerners already in fur. Western tourists with backpacks and running shoes, homing beacons for pickpockets, thieves. A poster showed a busty blonde wearing an old leather aviator’s helmet and nothing else. An advertisement for a club. Across the top, in block letters: YOU WILL DO IT TONIGHT .
    â€œThe Kremlin sent a car. It’s probably at the VIP terminal,” said Volsky as they pushed through the crowds. “I’ll wait. You go look.”
    Nowek found a uniformed guard and asked for directions. He got a cold look for an answer. Either Nowek already knew where VIPs should go, or there was no reason for him
to
know.
    Outside, a fine mist fell from pearl-gray clouds. Taxis dove and darted, ignoring Nowek and Volsky, competing for foreign passengers. Mercedes sedans floated by on invisible currents, the
biznismen
within hidden behind tinted glass, shepherded by Jeep Cherokees bristling with gun barrels.
    A loud
blaat,
followed by a crunch, then the almost musical tinkle of a shattered taillight lens, made them turn and look.
    A big black dinosaur of a car, a Chaika 10, backed up, disengaged from a cab’s rear bumper, and rolled forward again in a cloud of blue oil smoke. You could hear each beat of its engine.
    â€œBrezhnev’s ghost,” said Nowek. The Chaika looked like an American car from the fifties with prominent fins and a toothy grille.
    â€œI wonder who . . .” Volsky began, but he stopped when the Chaika rolled up to the curb and stopped. The driver got out, put a blue flasher on the roof and turned it on.
    He was young, dressed in a leather jacket and an officer’s wide-brimmed cap. A long dark ponytail dangled from beneath it, halfway down his back. “Gentlemen! I’m Gavril.”
    â€œSo what?” said Volsky.
    â€œI’m your driver. This is your car. Chairman Petrov sent me.”
    Volsky looked at Nowek, then back.
    Gavril smiled, then said, “Welcome to Moscow.”

Chapter 3
    The City
    Gavril maneuvered the old Chaika into the stream of traffic heading for the M10 highway. Theoretically, the blue flasher on the roof was reserved for official traffic, though you could buy one on any street corner. It might make Moscow’s famously corrupt traffic police hesitate before requesting a bribe. Then again, it might not. “You really work for the President?” asked the driver. “Normally they send his people to the Metropole.”
    The most expensive hotel in Moscow and so tightly controlled by the
mafiya
it appeared
mafiya
-free. Volsky said, “We’re not?”
    Gavril looked into the rearview mirror. “You’re booked at the Rossiya. It’s not the Metropole, but it’s