Moscow Twilight — William E. Holland

Moscow, January 1989: In the cold of the Russian winter, the Soviet Union burns with the heat of political change. Moscovites worry more about bartering for Western goods than about the secret police; throughout the country, long-suppressed national rivalries threaten to overwhelm the fading power of the state. Fear still chokes the Soviet people, but, as KGB captain Sergo Chanturia realizes to his astonishment, 'There is someone they fear more than they fear us.'

A gang of thugs bursts into an after-hours Moscow cafe and leaves a foreigner dead - stabbed to the heart. Sent to investigate what looks like an organized crime protection racket, Chanturia discovers that the foreigner was the CIA station chief at the U.S. Embassy - and that the beautiful Russian woman who had been dining with him vanished. Embassy staffer Ben Martin makes a suggestion that would have been unthinkable just months before: Why don't the Americans and the Soviets investigate this one together? Curious about each other's agenda, they begin to cooperate; but entrenched suspicions die hard among spymasters. Impatient with bureaucratic caution, Martin and Chanturia start tracking the ever-more-dangerous truth alone - except for the growing trust they are forced to place in one another.

The deadly trail spreads across a decaying empire in which the Communist Party's cynical monopoly is fragmenting, giving way to ethnic passion and unchecked crime. Martin finds the missing woman, actress and artist Alina Obraz; Chanturia's investigation draws him into the corrupt world of the Soviet Mafia, whose wealth and power have grown as those of the government have waned. Their guest for the killers takes them from the grim housing projects of Moscow to the streets of Soviet Georgia's capital, left running with blood by the Soviet army; from the lavish hillside estate of a powerful gang leader to a squalid village in western Russia; and into a conspiracy more frightening than the worst scenarios of the Cold War...