THE GRAND PALACE HOTEL, RIGA, LATVIA —23 SEPTEMBER

“You’re not going to believe this.”

Annie Stewart could barely contain her smile as she found the senator and the team huddled in the back corner of the Pils Bar, its walls covered with the mounted heads of elk and deer and other hunting trophies, in one of Riga’s oldest and most elegant hotels. It was nearly midnight. Most of the patrons had turned in for the night. Even the print and cable reporters covering their trip had paid their tabs and gone to bed. But Dayton and his chief of staff were poring over the latest draft of the senator’s new Russia sanctions bill they’d been working on for the last few days. Pete was returning emails. Marcus was listening to a Nats game on his iPhone. The security detail was standing post by the front and side doors. But Annie had news.

“What’ve you got?” asked the senator.

“I just got off the phone with the Kremlin,” Annie said, instinctively lowering her voice even though the only one within earshot was the bartender, who, as they’d already found out, barely spoke English. “It’s a done deal.”

“What is?” Pete asked, struggling to appear more interested in what she had to say than how attractive she looked in her black cashmere sweater, faded blue jeans, brown boots, and Cartier watch.

“Luganov,” she said. “He’s agreed to a meeting.”

“You’re kidding,” Dayton said.

“No, sir. I’ve been working on it all evening. That’s why I missed dinner with the foreign minister.”

“This is tremendous —great work.”

“So when is it?” Marcus asked.

“Well, that’s the thing —the only time he has to meet is tomorrow at four thirty.”

“Where?”

“In his office at the Kremlin.”

Pete slapped Marcus on the back. “Wow —this is huge!”

“But we’re supposed to be in Vilnius tomorrow,” the senator protested.

“I know,” Annie said.

“I’m supposed to have dinner with the prime minister.”

“It’s your call, sir, but if we decline, I don’t know that we’ll have another opportunity.”

“What do you all think? Pete?”

“I say we do it, sir. Definitely. We can always reschedule with the Lithuanians.”

Everyone else agreed with Pete. Everyone except Marcus.

“What’s the matter, Marcus?” the senator asked. “This was your idea, after all.”

“I realize that, sir —and I still support a meeting with Luganov. But I would recommend against looking too eager.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Decline the invitation for tomorrow,” Marcus continued. “Have Annie call back and explain that you have meetings in Vilnius that cannot be changed, but you could be in Moscow the following day or the day after that.”

“But Annie just said Luganov isn’t available for the rest of the week.”

“Sir, do you think it’s wise to blow off a NATO ally to meet with the enemy? Is that really the message you want to send on this trip? And what if you do and Luganov stands you up when you get there?”

The senator turned back to Annie. “The man does have a point.”

“May I make a suggestion?” she asked.

“By all means.”

“Let me make a quick call to my contact in the PM’s office in Vilnius and explain the situation. If they have a problem with it, then we accept Marcus’s advice. But if they’re okay with rescheduling the meeting, then we proceed to Moscow in the morning. The following day we can fly directly to Vilnius, and you can brief the PM on your meeting with Luganov. How’s that sound?”

Marcus hesitated. He still wasn’t crazy about the idea. But it was the senator’s trip, not his. “Works for me,” he said.

Dayton grinned. “Me, too. Good thinking. Get it done, Annie. This might be the break we’ve been hoping for.”

The Lithuanian prime minister agreed.

They were heading to Moscow.

Dayton and his team landed at Domodedovo International Airport just after 11 a.m. on Wednesday. They checked into the Hotel National a little after one that afternoon. Marcus insisted that they enter from the back and not let the media know where they were staying. He remembered every grisly detail of the suicide bombing that had occurred there, which he’d been briefed about when he’d done an advance trip for the VP a while back. He and his men took the senator up a service elevator to a set of suites on the fourth floor. After making sure the rooms were secure, Marcus posted one man at the main elevators and another by the service elevator. One he put downstairs in the café to keep an eye on the lobby. The rest he posted inside the doors of the senator’s personal suite.

None of them had been permitted to bring their weapons off the jet. But a discreet request to Nick Vinetti at the U.S. Embassy had gotten around that. Nick made sure each man on Marcus’s team was given a Sig Sauer automatic pistol from the Marine armory. Nick also loaned them several MP5 machine guns and plenty of rounds of ammunition, plus several Uzis rarely used anymore. What’s more, the embassy was providing three armor-plated black Chevy Suburbans, drivers from the embassy motor pool, and whatever logistics the senator needed. As a prospective presidential candidate, Robert Dayton had no access to the embassy’s official diplomatic resources. But since he was the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, his trip qualified as a “codel,” State Department parlance for a congressional delegation. And for a codel, it was Nick’s responsibility as deputy chief of mission to make sure everything went smoothly and safely for Dayton and his team.

The time for the Luganov meeting kept changing. When they landed, Annie was told the meeting had been moved back to 7 p.m. Upon arriving at the hotel, she was told it had been moved up to 3 p.m. Yet as Marcus took a quick shower and changed into a suit, he received an urgent text from Annie to the team that the meeting had been postponed indefinitely.

“They’re playing with you, Senator,” Marcus said when he arrived at Dayton’s suite. “Plan for the original four thirty time slot. If the meeting is going to happen at all, I can almost guarantee it will be then. Let’s roll at three thirty as originally planned so we have enough time to clear Kremlin security.”

Dayton was skeptical and visibly agitated. As it happened, however, Marcus had called it exactly right. During the brief ride to the Kremlin, Pete leaned over and whispered to his friend that his stock was definitely on the rise with the senator. Marcus nodded to confirm he’d heard, but privately his doubts were growing about whether any of this was a good idea. They were now deep in enemy territory, and as honest and principled as Dayton might be, Marcus knew the senator was no match for Luganov, the reigning grand master of geopolitical chess.

The three-vehicle American motorcade was escorted by the Moscow police’s VIP unit. This thrilled Dayton’s press secretary and chief of staff. After all, the images of their man entering Red Square and passing St. Basil’s Cathedral and then passing through the gates into the Kremlin itself would look great on CNN and MSNBC that night. But Marcus’s anxiety began to spike when only the lead Suburban —the one carrying Dayton, Annie, Pete, and himself —was cleared to enter and the other two were not. Even without their security detail, Marcus had few concerns for their physical safety. Besides the White House itself, there was no government compound in the world as secure as this one. There was certainly no way President Luganov was going to allow a prominent American senator —especially such a harsh critic —to be assassinated in the heart of the Russian capital. No, Marcus’s real worries were for the senator’s reputation and political viability. The man was entering the lair of a wolf. He would likely reemerge, but the question was, how damaged?