Book One: The Heist

November 1991 In the final days of an empire that was wheezing and lurching toward death, the aide watched his boss stare out the window into the darkness. Time was running out. The fate of the entire nation hinged on the next move at this juncture; the entire planet, possibly.

Any minute, his boss was due to pop upstairs and see Mikhail Gorbachev to deliver either a path to salvation or a verdict of damnation.

But exactly what advice do you offer the doctor who has just poisoned his own patient?

Only three short miles away, he knew, Boris Yeltsin had just uncorked and was slurping down his third bottle of champagne. Totally looped, the man was getting even more utterly hammered. A celebration of some sort, or so it appeared, though the aide had not a clue what lay behind it. A KGB operative dressed as a waiter was hauling the hooch, keeping a watchful eye on ol' Boris and, between refills, calling in the latest updates.

After seventy years of struggle and turmoil, it all came down to this; the fate of the world's last great empire hinged on a titanic struggle between two men-one ordained to go down as the most pathetically naive general secretary ever; the other an obnoxious, loudmouthed lush.

Gorbachev was frustrated and humiliated, both men knew. He had inherited a kingdom founded on a catechism of bad ideas and constructed on a mountain of corpses. What was supposed to be a worker's paradise now looked with unrequited envy at third world countries and pondered how it had all gone so horribly wrong. How ironic.

Pitiful, really.

For all its fearsome power-the world's largest nuclear arsenal, the world's biggest army, colonies and "client" nations sprinkled willy-nilly around the globe-the homeland itself was a festering pile of human misery and material junk.