Arctic Gold

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 Citroen right.

That put him in a narrow canyon, with two- and three-story structures, most with facades 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,” Lia 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.