ain drops like wet cement. Hoffstetler’s umbrella carves out a small, dry column eddying with his own breath. It looks like smoke, feels like he’s being burned at the stake. Anything beyond the umbrella is difficult to see: gray breath, gray rain, gray concrete, gray gravel, gray sky. But he knows where to look, and after an anxious eternity, exhaust fumes, one more layer of gray, rise along the path. The black Chrysler sharks through the water.

Hoffstetler wants to dive into the heated leather backseat, but even the fruition of an eighteen-year mission doesn’t mean the riddance of asinine protocol. He picks up his suitcase, stands from the concrete block, and bounces upon the balls of his feet, woozy with excitement. He’s so close now, so close to shaking the trembling hand of Papa, to wrapping both arms around Mamochka, to making amends for the life he’s lived by starting to live a better one.

The driver’s door, as usual, is thrown open with a clack. The Bison, as usual, steps from the running car, his black suit complemented by a black umbrella. Then, something unusual: The passenger door, too, opens, and a second man exits beneath the spreading wings of his own umbrella. He shivers in the cold, shrugs himself more snugly into a scarf that threatens to flatten his boutonniere. Hoffstetler feels a dropping sensation, as if he’d slid off his concrete block to find no ground at all beneath.

“Zdravstvujtye,” Leo Mihalkov says. “Bob.”

The rain against Hoffstetler’s umbrella is deafening; he tells himself sounds cannot be relied upon. Zdravstvujtye is a cold greeting, and Bob, instead of Dmitri? Something has gone wrong.

“Leo? Are you here to—”

“We have questions,” Mihalkov says.

“A debriefing? In the rain?”

“One question, really. It will not take long. When you injected the asset with the solution, how did it react before it died?”

Hoffstetler is still pinwheeling through a vortex. He wants to reach out for his concrete block, the Chrysler’s grille, anything to save himself, but if he lets go of the umbrella, he’ll drown in all the water. He tries to think. The silver solution, what might it have been? He should know; this is his field. Surely one ingredient was arsenic. Was another hydrogen chloride? Could there have been a scintilla of mercury? And what ruin would such a cocktail wreak upon the Devonian’s anatomy? If only the thrum of rain weren’t so disorienting, he might be able to figure it out. Instead, there is no time. All he can do is blurt and pray.

“It was instant. The asset bled. Profusely. Died right away.”

Rain falls. Mihalkov stares. The ground bubbles like lava.

“That is correct.” Mihalkov’s voice is gentler now, pitched for a booth at the back of the Black Sea Restaurant, soft in the storm’s kettledrums. “You have made your country proud. You always have. You will be remembered. Very few can say that. Not even I will be able to say it when my own time comes. In that way, I envy you.”

A KGB man like Mihalkov would have detected the slow-motion closing of this mousetrap a decade earlier, but Hoffstetler only sees it now. Hadn’t he insisted to the Devonian that he didn’t possess true intelligence? He’s spent too much time in America for Moscow to be comfortable with him back on Soviet soil. All that has ever mattered is that his mission reach completion. To believe anything else was reveling in fantasy. His mama and papa are likely alive as promised, but only as collateral. Now, they will be eliminated, shot through the skull, their bodies weighed with rocks to sink into the Moskva River. Hoffstetler says good-bye to them, quickly, and that he’s sorry, frantically, and that he loves them, desperately, all in the second before the Bison lifts from his hip a revolver.

Hoffstetler cries out and, on instinct, hurls his umbrella in the direction of the Bison, and before he hears the shot, the umbrella blacks out the world, a singularity swallowing the man, the gun, the rain, all of it. These are trained killers, though, and he a bungling academic, and what feels like an iron fist whacks his jaw and what feel like hot stones explode from his face. Teeth, he thinks. He’s spinning now, cheeks ballooned with blood, tongue sludgy with splattered flesh.

Now he’s on the ground. Blood gushes from his mouth in a single splash, the upending of a bowl of tomato soup. Cold air lances through his face from left to right, an odd feeling. He’s been shot through the cheek. Mama would be so upset, her little boy disfigured, his nice straight teeth turned to rubble. He tries to raise himself to his knees, thinking that if he shows Mihalkov the damage done, he might leave it at that, but his head weight is all off, and his knees slip in the mud, and he is on his back, the rain coming at his eyes like silver spears.

The Bison’s black form, still holding his umbrella, occludes all light. He looks down with the same void of personality as ever, and aims the revolver at Hoffstetler’s head. The bang, Hoffstetler thinks, is oddly muffled for being the shot that kills him. Stranger yet is how it’s the Bison who recoils. There is a second bang, and the umbrella falls from the Bison’s hand, on top of Hoffstetler, like soil being pitched into an open grave, and it takes a moment for Hoffstetler to dig his way out and prop himself on his elbows, the rain sluicing a hot mix of blood and saliva down his chest.

What he sees is the Bison’s still, fallen body, the red puddle about him being thrashed into pink by the clobbering rain. Hoffstetler’s eyes won’t focus, but he can see shapes, Mihalkov’s slender ovoid shuffling with a haste incongruous with his usual demeanor. He’s pulling his own gun, that’s clear even in abstract, but perhaps spoiled on lobster and caviar, he holds on to vanity too long, choosing not to drop his umbrella, and in those crucial few seconds, Hoffstetler’s savior, whoever he is, rushes forward, his own weapon still smoking from the Bison’s murder, and he’s no amateur, either. The pistol is held with two hands, steady in the storm, and a single shot is all it takes.

Mihalkov is thrown against the car. Now he drops his umbrella. His gun, too. A circle of red blooms on his shirt, a second boutonniere. He dies instantly and is instantly forgotten, just as he predicted he would be. Hoffstetler squints through the cloudburst to watch the gunman kneel beside the body to make sure it’s dead, then bolt upright and move, with spiderlike speed, toward Hoffstetler. It is the rain that obscures the man’s identity until he looms over Hoffstetler. It is also, Hoffstetler supposes, disbelief.

“Strickland?” His voice is mushy, lispy. “Oh, thank you, thank you.”

Richard Strickland reaches down, loops the thumb of his free hand into the hole in Hoffstetler’s cheek, and pulls. Pulls so hard Hoffstetler’s whole body is dragged through the mud. Pain arrives belatedly, full-fleshed and muscular from under a blanket of shock, and Hoffstetler screams, feeling the jagged rip of his cheek, and screams again, and keeps screaming, until the mud being plowed by his shoulder fills his eyes and his mouth and he is blind, and mute, and then nothing at all.