The message was signed
Rubens sagged back in his chair, letting the relief wash through his body. It wasn’t the
Outwardly, Rubens always maintained a level of control and composure that some thought cold. He didn’t rattle, he didn’t express his worry, and he didn’t apologize for sending good men and women into harm’s way when the situation demanded it. Composure-even coldness-was part of the territory, the price necessary to keep Desk Three running at peak efficiency.
But he’d also seen Delallo’s personnel file-and knew the man had a wife and two daughters, currently living in base housing at Lakenheath.
Rubens made a mental note to make arrangements to have the family flown back to Washington, so they could be with the major as he recovered at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda.
With a mental sigh, Rubens deleted the message, then checked the time.
One operator had been recovered alive… but two more were about to insert at Solchi.
He wondered for a moment if he should go down to the Art Room and supervise the insert personally but then decided against it. He had good people. They knew what they were doing.
And he couldn’t afford to let them know that he was worried. He worked at his desk for almost an hour before deciding to go down anyway.
Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 2310 hours, GMT + 3
The Kotenko dacha was built on the western face of a mountain overlooking the Black Sea. Llewellyn and an assistant named Vasily had driven Lia and Akulinin to a spot on the road above the Kotenko dacha after it got dark. From the hillside below the road, but well above the eastern side of the property, they could look down on the house and its grounds, which were spread out for their inspection, well lit and apparently well guarded. Lia held a set of electronic binoculars to her eyes and studied the scene. “Okay, people,” she said quietly. “Everybody online? Gordon, do you copy?”
“We copy,” the voice of Jeff Rockman said in her ear from a workstation back at Fort Meade. “Good voice. Good picture.”
“Dragon, do you copy?”
“Copy, Lia,” Llewellyn’s voice said an instant later. “We can see and hear just fine.” Llewellyn and Vasily, with the handle Dragon, had parked the van beneath some trees a quarter of a mile up the road and were linked in through the vehicle’s satellite communications suite. Both the team in the van and the runners back in the Art Room could see the scene transmitted from Lia’s binoculars, as well as hear the two of them through the mikes mounted on the collars of their combat blacks.
“Let’s have a closer look at that gate,” Rockman said.
“Here you are.” Lia pressed the zoom function on the camera, and the scene expanded, centering on the main gate where a paved driveway entered the property. A blond man in civilian clothes, but holding an AKM assault rifle, stood guard. Nearby, another armed guard followed the inside of the perimeter wall, a German Shepherd tugging at the leash in his hand. The gate was open and, as Lia watched, a car drove up and stopped beside the guard, who spoke briefly with the driver before waving him through.
A security camera watched it all from a telephone pole beside the driveway.
“I see two dogs,” Akulinin said, peering through his own binoculars. “The other one’s at the far side of the property, above the cliff.”
“We see him,” Rockman said. “Let’s have a look at the party in the back.”
From the hillside above the east side of the mansion, the two agents could see about half of the back deck, which extended from the west side of the house almost all the way to the cliff above the sea. The swimming pool was brightly lit, the blue light shimmering and wavering as it reflected off trees and walls. A dozen people or so were visible, engaged in laughing conversation. Most were casually dressed, though the people sculling in the pool or lounging in the hot tub were nude.
“I don’t see Kotenko,” Lia said. “Gordon, are you getting IDs on these people?”
“The bald guy talking with the tall blond is Vladymir Malyshkin,” Rockman said. “He runs the exploratory division of Gazprom’s oil subsidiary. The guy with thick glasses and his arm around the brunette over by the diving board is Sergei Poroskov, a member of the St. Petersburg Duma, and a major shareholder in Gazprom.” There was a hesitation as Rockman called up more data on his monitor back in the Art Room. “Yeah… all of the men are movers and shakers, either with the Russian government or in the Russian oil and gas industries. The guy skinny-dipping with the two chicks in the pool is CEO of a major construction company.”
“What about the women?” Akulinin asked.
“I think they’re the floor show,” Lia said.
“Kotenko owns a string of gentlemen’s clubs in half a dozen cities,” Rockman said, “and he’s also into producing, um, adult films. Like Lia says, they’re probably part of the entertainment.”
“Well, as long as they’re
Akulinin pulled off his backpack and extracted a plastic case the size of an encyclopedia. He opened it, revealing a delicate device, mostly wire and gauze but with a core the size of a pencil. He switched it on and the filmy wings unfolded, quivering in the slight breeze. “How about it, James?” he said. “You have a signal?”
“That’s affirmative,” Llewellyn replied. “We’re good to go.”
“Right then. Here goes.” Akulinin raised his hand and gave the device a gentle shove, lofting it into the air like a paper airplane. The gauze wings caught the breeze and the device soared higher, circling out into the darkness above the dacha with a faint rasping flutter of its wings.
“Okay,” Llewellyn said. “We’ve got good signal, good picture.”
“We have positive control,” Rockman put in.
The flier faded into shadowy invisibility against the night. Lia and Akulinin stayed hunkered down on the dark and brush-covered hillside as the team in the Art Room flew the probe from the other side of the Earth, guided by real-time imagery transmitted from the tiny camera in the dragonfly’s nose.
The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1625 hours EDT
Chris Palatino had been hired by the National Security Agency for one reason. He was
The winner of the Extreme Gamer competition at the Origins gaming convention two years before, he’d been approached by a recruiter for a defense-related corporation. Only later, after Palatino had passed the security clearances, was the true nature of the job made clear: he would have to move from central Michigan to Laurel, Maryland, and take a job with the NSA. The money was less than he might have made writing software for a major corporation, but money wasn’t Palatino’s major interest.
He called it the gamer’s ultimate fantasy, and he was living it-an overweight twenty-seven-year-old geek getting paid to remote-pilot micro-UAVs on missions halfway around the world.
“Good hands, Chris,” Jeff Rockman told him. Half a dozen members of the Art Room team were standing behind his workstation, watching as Palatino jockied two joysticks on the console before him, eyes fixed on the large flat- screen monitor on the wall in front of him.
“I know, man,” Palatino replied, though his voice had that dreamy, off-in-another-world vagueness it usually acquired when he was on a mission. “Watch and learn, watch and…
Fifty-five hundred miles away-measured along a great circle route that skimmed south of the top of Greenland and north of the Shetland Islands-the eight-ounce flier had caught a heavy updraft along the side of the mountain that threatened to sweep it into the trees. Palatino gave the device an extra burst of power, flying into a downdraft and using the descent to pick up speed. A moment later he was clear, skimming above the tree tops toward the mansion.
The UAV had been designed to operate on software modeled on the sculling motions of a fly’s wings. The wings
