Spike peered up at Gage. “Weren’t you just in Moscow?”

Gage nodded slowly as a slide show of Slavic mug shots flashed through his mind.

“Did it have anything to do with Jack?”

Gage trusted Spike as a man, but if a gangster had reached across the Atlantic to assassinate Burch, no local cop could help Gage punch back.

“Not directly.”

“What about indirect-” Gage’s opaque eyes and tone of irrevocability strangled the word in Spike’s throat. He reddened. “Don’t stonewall me on this thing, Graham.”

“It’s not my decision. As long as there’s a chance he’ll survive, it’s up to him what gets revealed about what he did over there. I’m not taking that away from him.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Gage fixed his eyes on Spike. “Then I’ll decide.”

“Come on, man,” Spike’s voice turned pleading. “For all we know the guy who did this is boarding a flight back to Moscow right now.”

“Then it’s already too late.”

They stood silently at the impasse until Gage found a middle ground that he knew would leave Spike stranded.

“I’ll tell you what’s been in the European press and you can take it as far as you want.”

Spike nodded.

Gage paused, trying both to tear his mind from the image of the bullet holes in Burch’s chest and to find a way to make a complicated story short, simple, and vague enough that Spike couldn’t extract any leads from it.

“This was the issue,” Gage finally said. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, crime bosses and politicians in Russia and Ukraine began using the natural gas trade as their private piggy bank. Billions of dollars were extorted by the maffiya to fund arms-and sex-trafficking schemes. Billions more were siphoned off by Russian and Ukrainian presidents to finance their political campaigns.