Arkady, the double agent whom Nat is flying to Prague to meet, has spent the intervening years since his retirement living peacefully and quietly in the countryside. Nat likes Arkady, considering him intelligent and fundamentally decent. Arkady had been a lifelong spy for Russia, first for the KGB and then for Russian security services after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2008, he approached Nat to become a double agent due to his hatred for Putin’s autocratic leadership. After years of being a valuable asset, Britain’s intelligence analysts discovered signs of fabrication in his reports and had to cut him loose. After this, Nat discovered that Arkady had “gather[ed] to himself a slice of his country’s criminal wealth on a scale that neither his Russian nor his British paymasters at their most munificent could have dreamed of” (130).

In Czechia, Nat takes a taxi to the hotel, which is guarded by armed men out front. Arkady lives in Karlovy Vary, which is known as a haven for Russian and Azerbaijani organized crime. At the hotel, he meets Dimitri, who introduces himself as Arkady’s son. During the drive to Arkady, Dimitri tells Nat that he’s soon to attend Stanford to study marine biology.