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  Rubens glared at the satellite map on the wall above him, which mirrored Akulinin’s description. Damn it, Lia should have clapped a hold on things until her partner could get into position. Alekseev, their Russian contact, had been too anxious, however, too skittish, and Lia had told the Art Room that she was going in, whether she had backup or not.

  “We think Lia is inside the building. We’re not getting a clear signal. We need you in place to relay her transmissions… and to watch for the opposition.”

  “Yes, sir.” Akulinin’s voice was momentarily garbled by static. Then, “I should be there in five minutes.”

  “Make it faster. I don’t like the way this one is playing out.”

  Operation Magpie had been running rough since its inception. A good intelligence op flowed, like a carefully orchestrated ballet. Every operative had a place and a task, a precise and meticulously choreographed passage of a ballet. Of course, many of the dancers didn’t even know they were performing-the local contacts, the informers, the marks, the opposition. The only way to keep them in the dance was for the operatives to stay in complete control of the situation… meaning each of them was where he or she was supposed to be when he or she was supposed to be there, leading the unwilling and hopefully clueless participants in the drama through their steps and turns without their ever knowing they were onstage.

  Of course things were bound to go wrong from time to time, but good operators could ad lib until things were back in control, back in the flow.

  This time around, Rubens thought, someone had lost the beat, and now the situation was fast slipping into chaos.

  The ballet, he thought, was fast on its way to becoming a brawl.

  “What is the current position of Ghost Blue?” Rubens demanded. He didn’t want to use that option, but…

  Ghost Blue was an F-22 Raptor deployed hours ago out of Lakenheath. Stealthier than the F-117 Nighthawk, which it was currently in the process of replacing, more reliable than the smaller, robotic F- 47C UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), the F-22 had sophisticated avionics and onboard computer gear that allowed it to serve as an advance platform for ELINT, electronics intelligence, enabling it to pick up transmissions from the ground and relay them back to Fort Meade via the constellation of military comsats.

  “Ninety-six miles west-northwest of St. Petersburg, sir,” James Higgins replied from another console. “Over the Gulf of Finland, tucked in close by the Finnish-Russian border.”

  “Send him in.”

  “Yes, sir.” Higgins hesitated. “Uh, that requires special-”

  “I know what it requires. Send him in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ninety-six miles. Ghost Blue would be staying subsonic to maintain his stealth signature, so that was seven and a half minutes’ flight time… or a bit less to a point where he would be able to intercept Magpie’s transmissions. Call it seven minutes.

  Of course, this was a flagrant violation of Russian airspace and territorial sovereignty. At the moment, the Raptor was loitering unseen within Finnish airspace, also a violation of territorial boundaries, but not so deadly a sin as moving into Russian territory. St. Petersburg sat like a spider within a far-flung web of radar installations and surface-to-air missile sites, protecting dozens of high-value military installations in and around the city.

  And if anyone could defeat U.S. stealth technology, it was the Russians. In 1999, Yugoslav forces had scored a kill, probably with Russian help, shooting down an F-117 with an SA-3 missile. The pilot had been rescued, but Yugoslav forces had grabbed the wreckage-and almost certainly turned it over to the Russians for study. The Russians, it was well known, were very interested in learning how to defeat American stealth technology.

  Rubens had just kicked up the ante in an already dangerous game.

  He reached for a telephone on the console beside him.

  DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0025 hours

  Well, they’d warned her she might find herself out of communications with the Art Room. There was nothing Lia could do about it now, however.

  Like all Desk Three field operatives, Lia had a tiny speaker unit implanted in her skull just behind her left ear. The microphone was attached to her black utilities, while the antenna was coiled up in her belt. The system provided safe, clear, secure communications… usually. It was a bitch, though, when the technology failed.

  Still, the satellite dish receivers at Fort Meade were a lot better as antennas than the wire in her belt. It was possible that they were receiving her back in the Art Room even if she couldn’t hear them.

  She would have to keep operating on that assumption.

  What she couldn’t rely on was the Art Room warning her of approaching threats.

  She tried raising her backup. “Romeo, this is Juliet.”

  Nothing. And that was worrying. It meant she and Alekseev were on their own.

  Alekseev had moved ahead and was searching the huge chamber now with his own flashlight. She could see stacks of crates, some covered in tarpaulins, looming out of the darkness.

  But one large crate was off by itself, near the back wall of the warehouse. She could see words stenciled in bold, black Cyrillic lettering on the sides: stahnka.

  Machine parts.

  Akulinin Operation Magpie St. Petersburg 0026 hours

  Ilya Ilyitch Akulinin peered ahead through fog and cold drizzle, past the monotonous beat of the rented car’s windshield wipers. Kosaya came to a T at Kozhevennaya Liniya, and he turned the ugly little Citroën right.

  That put him in a narrow canyon, with two- and three-story structures, most with façades of either concrete blocks or rusting sheet metal, looming to either side. Lia should be in the third warehouse in the row on the left side of the street; he pulled over to the curb and parked. He didn’t want to get too close.

  Akulinin was new to the National Security Agency and Desk Three. Born in Brooklyn, the son of naturalized Russian immigrants, he’d joined the Army out of high school and served as a Green Beret with the Army Special Forces, where his fluency in Russian had put him in great demand in joint operations with America ’s new ally, the Russian Federation. His had been among the first American boots on the ground in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, just prior to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

  Leaving the car, he dropped a button-sized sensor on the street, then walked across the street with casual nonchalance. If anyone was watching, they would see a tall, blond man in laborer’s coveralls, carrying a large toolbox. Reaching a warehouse two down from the one Lia should be in, he stepped into the narrow junk- and garbage-littered space between two buildings and began looking for a way up. There was a ladder-or the remnants of one-but it began halfway up the side of the building. The rest had rusted away, or been stolen long ago.

  Much of St. Petersburg ’s infrastructure showed the same advanced state of decay and crumbling collapse. Many of the buildings in this area were abandoned, and scavangers had long since stripped them of copper, lead, brass, and anything else they could pry loose, haul off, and sell.

  He stepped over a pile of garbage and a set of rusted bedsprings. Something large and furry squeaked as it scuttled from beneath an overturned two-legged chair.

  At least, he thought, he shouldn’t have an audience here tonight.

  Except for the rats.

  DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0027 hours

  Removing yet another small gray case from a pouch on her combat blacks, Lia slipped a plug into her ear and held the device itself out in front of her. Instantly a staccato burst of clicks, harsh as the earlier static, sounded in her ear as numerals appeared on the small LED readout screen.

  “Machine parts, my ass,” she said.

  “It is radioactive, yes?” Alekseev said.

  “It is radioactive, yes.”

  “It is not harmful, I was told,” Alekseev told her. “I was told-”

  “Not harmful unless there’s prolonged exposure,” L
ia corrected him. “So let’s get this the hell over with and get out of here. Give me the pry.”

  “Huh? Oh, yes.” He handed her one of the tools he’d been carrying at his belt, a short pry bar. She used it to jimmy up one of the boards on the crate’s top with a sharp squeak of dry wood and bending staples, giving her a peek inside.

  The crate was filled with what looked like thin sheets of metal, dull steel-gray, gleaming in the flash beam. Bingo.

  But just to be sure…

  Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0027 hours

  Placing some more sensors, Akulinin emerged from the alley on a broad concrete promenade. The fog clung low and close above the black flow of the Neva. A thousand yards across the water lay a Russian Navy shipyard, but he could see no sign of it, not even a fog-shrouded light. Somewhere in the distance, a buoy-mounted bell clanged fitfully with the chop of the water, followed by the lowing of a foghorn.

  Sticking to the shadows next to the line of dilapidated warehouses, he began making his way toward Lia’s position.

  When Ilya Akulinin had left the Army, shortly after his third tour in Afghanistan, he’d been approached by a recruiter with the the National Security Agency. The NSA was America ’s premier eavesdropping agency, and they, too, could use a man with his language skills, experience, and security clearances.

  That had been just three years ago. After six months of training in Georgia and at the CIA’s “Farm” at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, they’d put him at a desk listening to electronic intercepts from Russia… for the most part tracking the activities and the shadowy members of Russia’s far-flung criminal underground.

  Crouching beside a rust-clotted cliff of sheet metal, the southwestern wall of an empty warehouse, he paused to check his communications link with the Art Room. “ Verona, this is Romeo,” he called softly… but the answer came as a harsh burst of static. The surrounding buildings, concrete and metal, must be blocking the signal. He’d thought that perhaps here, directly next to the water, he would have a clean line of sight to a satellite, but evidently there were buildings across the Neva high enough to block the signal. He would need to get up high for a clear line of sight… and it would be better if he could deploy a small dish antenna and get a good lock on a comsat.

  He touched his belt, changing frequencies. “Juliet, Juliet,” he called. “Wherefore art thou, Juliet?”

  “Knock it off, Romeo,” was her response. Her voice was scratchy, with a lot of static, but he could hear her well enough. “We’re almost done here.”

  “Where do you want me?”

  “Sit tight. Everything’s cool. Where are you?”

  “On the ground, at the corner of the warehouse southeast of you, about fifty yards from your position.”

  “Stay put. We’ll be done in a second.”

  “Roger that.”

  He waited. The damp breeze off the water made him shiver.

  Akulinin had endured the boredom of a desk job for the next couple of years after his recruitment, until last month when out of the blue they’d asked him to volunteer for a routine but possibly dangerous operation in Russia. After almost two years of listening to recorded voices and filing ream upon electronic ream of reports, of course he’d volunteered.

  He’d volunteered without ever having heard of Desk Three. And that had proven to be quite a revelation in itself.

  The National Security Agency was the largest of America ’s intelligence agencies, and the most secretive, the least known. The old joke held that the letters stood for “Never Say Anything” or, more sinister still, for “No Such Agency.” The NSA’s charter had given it two basic missions-creating codes to ensure national security and breaking the codes of other nations. The few people who’d even heard of the organization assumed it handled nothing but SIGINT-signals intelligence-that it was a security-conscious band of mathematicians, programmers, cryptographers, and similar geeks who would never get their hands dirty on an actual black op overseas. That was the sort of thing left to the CIA…

  But the Deputy Director of the NSA, William Rubens, had approached him in one of the staff cafeterias last January and asked if he would consider transferring to the Agency’s Desk Three, where both his language skills and his combat training and experience as a Green Beanie were badly needed. Some outpatient surgery to plant a communications device behind his ear, another month at a specialist school at the CIA’s Farm, a quick series of briefings bringing him up to speed on something called Operation Magpie, and he’d found himself on a plane bound for Pulkovo International Airport.

  And so far the mission had, indeed, seemed pretty routine. He and Lia had entered the country on separate flights, linked up in a seemingly casual encounter beneath Alexander’s Column in the Palace Square in front of the Hermitage. That night, they’d picked up their special mission equipment where their support team had left it, in a well-hidden drop on the shore of a wooded lake in Primorskiy Park. Yesterday Lia had met with the furtive Sergei Alekseev in an out-of-the-way teahouse off the Nevsky Prospect while Akulinin had provided backup, listening in unobtrusively from a nearby table.

  And Alekseev had brought them here.

  But now things were turning sour. Akulinin had been supposed to be here forty minutes ago, before Lia and Alekseev even arrived, scoping out the dockyard and the approaches to the warehouse and setting up a satellite dish on top of a nearby building to provide reliable communications with the Art Room. No one had counted on his being stopped by that damned officious traffic inspector demanding to see his papers… or the need for him to bribe his way back onto the road.

  Anxiously he watched the front of the warehouse, waiting for Lia and Alekseev to emerge. Smears of wet illumination from a couple of streetlights up on Kozhevennaya Liniya cast just enough of a mist-shrouded glow for him to see the main door and a line of loading docks above a parking lot.

  Opening his workman’s toolbox, he extracted his weapon-an H &K MP5K PDW-a compact little submachine gun chosen precisely because its fourteen-and-a-half-inch length would fit into a standard tool kit. He opened the folding stock and felt it lock, snapped in a thirty-round magazine, and dragged back the charging lever to chamber a round.

  “Come on, come on,” he muttered, half-aloud.

  2

  DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0029 hours

  LIA USED AN AEROSOL SPRAY from a canister the size of a lipstick to mist over one corner of the metal. She then twisted the cylinder of her flashlight sharply clockwise. The visible beam snapped off, but in its place, the wet corner of the metal took on a magical green-blue luminosity, glowing brightly in the near darkness.

  “What is that?” Alekseev asked.

  “A solution of sulfonated hydroxybenzoquinoline,” Lia replied, rattling off the tongue twister with practiced ease. “It fluoresces in the presence of beryllium and an ultraviolet light source.” It was all the proof she needed.

  “It is as I told you, yes?”

  “Yes, it is. You did good, Sergei. Hold the board for me.”

  As Alekseev held the crate open, she took a final device from a pouch, a flexible bit of metallic foil the size and thickness of a postage stamp, its surface precisely the same dull gray as the beryllium shipment. Reaching gingerly into the crate, she slapped the rectangle onto the metal at one corner, pressing it hard to activate the sticky side. Then she nodded to Alekseev, and he lowered the loosened slat, working the protruding ends of the staples back into the wood so that it was not evident that the crate had been opened.

  She checked her cell phone, this time tuning it to the low-level signal emitted by the tracking device they’d just planted. When she sent a low-frequency RF signal, the microtransponder on the chip caught the pulse and flashed it back, a good, sharp signal.

  “Verona, Juliet,” she said, just in case they were reading her back at the Art Room. “We found the shipment. Tracking device is in place, transponder test positive. We’re
initiating our E and E.”

  Still, nothing but static.

  They started for the front of the warehouse.

  Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0030 hours

  The sound of a vehicle engine startled Akulinin. It was coming from behind, moving toward him along the concrete wharf. He turned, crouching low to stay out of sight behind another pile of discarded rust- and rat-infested trash. One… no, two cars were approaching, driving up the wharf with their lights off. They raced past, then turned into the trailer-loading area in front of Lia’s warehouse.

  Not good…

  “Lia!” he called urgently. “Lia! We have company!”

  Car doors slammed as men tumbled out into the night. He counted ten, five in each vehicle. It was tough to see in the dim light, but they appeared to be wearing civilian clothing. Reaching into the tool kit again, he fished out a set of OVGN6 binoculars, a compact handheld unit with two eyepieces but only a single light amplifier tube. Switching the unit on, he pressed it to his eyes.

  Under LI, details sprang into sharp, close focus.

  He could see their weapons…

  DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0030 hours

  Lia and Alekseev were halfway back to the warehouse entrance when Akulinin’s warning came through. An instant later, they heard the bang of car doors outside.

  “This way!” Lia hissed, tugging at Alekseev’s elbow. She moved off to the right, ducking behind the shelter offered by a stack of wooden crates. It took her a moment to realize that Alekseev hadn’t followed her, that he was still standing in the open with a deer-in-the-headlights look to him.

  A hollow boom echoed through the warehouse, followed by the sound of the main door sliding open. An instant later, the lights snapped on, the overhead lights first, then the glare of a powerful spot from the main entrance.

  “Stoy!” a voice boomed from behind the light. “Ktah v’ takoi?”

  “Nyeh strelyaii!” Alekseev screamed, throwing his hands straight up in the air.