themselves went rigid with the application of a low-voltage trickle of current, twisting and turning to put out some ten beats per second. That was about a twentieth of the beat frequency for a housefly, but these wings were larger in comparison to the size of the body driving them, and included the ability to glide for long distances. Once clear of the downdraft, Palatino canted the wings into a rigid-locked configuration and, twitching gently at one of the joysticks, nudged the device into a gentle glide that carried it across the back deck twenty feet up.
Any of the party guests who chanced to look up might have glimpsed a dark shape reflecting the light from the pool and dismissed it as a large moth or even a bat. The UAV circled the deck area twice as the Art Room team located and counted guests, staff, and guards.
“Okay, Lia,” Rockman said after the second pass. “Still no sign of Kotenko, so he may be inside. We’ve identified twelve guests, five people who are probably staff, and four guards, not counting the two on perimeter patrol with dogs, or the guy at the front gate. It looks like they’re pretty well set out there, not much traffic in and out of the house.”
“Copy that,” Lia’s voice came back over a wall speaker. “Let’s get this over with, okay?” She sounded tense, on edge.
Rockman pointed at the screen. “The security camera is there,” he said. “On top of that pole.”
“I see it; I see it,” Palatino said. “Gimme a sec…”
He flipped the UAV’s wings out of their locked position, and with a soft rattle of sound the device streaked across the roof of the house, angling toward a solitary pole rising just inside the fence encircling the property, not far from the main gate and driveway. Hunched over the controllers, tongue sticking out in an unconscious expression of pure concentration, Palatino brought the tiny UAV to a near hover a foot from the top of the pole, dropping the body into a vertical orientation at the same moment that he extended four wire-slender and hook- tipped legs. An instant later, the device touched the creosote-blackened wood, and the scene displayed on the monitor became still, an extreme close-up of the pole’s weathered wood surface. The flier was now resting on the pole, a few inches behind the target camera.
The NSA possessed the technology to hijack security camera networks anywhere in the world, but doing so required gaining access. Many networks used the Internet for their security cam systems, which made the NSA eavesdropper’s task simplicity itself.
The security cameras at Kotenko’s dacha, however, were on their own, private network, with no outside connections and, apparently, no computers to sort, clean up, or channel the data. That made tapping into the network more difficult. They also used universal cable connections rather than wireless LAN or Ethernet connections and that, too, made stealing the signal harder.
But
The camera, a small black box with a sunshade extended over the barrel of the lens, was set up to scan the entrance to the property twenty feet below. On the display, the cable emerged from the back of the camera, ran down the side of the pole a few inches to where it was stapled to the wood, then extended out into the night in the direction of the house.
“Damned primitive crapola,” Palatino muttered. “Haven’t these people heard of wireless networks?”
“That’s okay,” Rockman told him. “That’s why the dragonfly has a sting. Go ahead. Take a bite.”
On the pole behind the camera’s field of view, the remote-operated flier edged a couple of careful sideways steps, bringing it to rest directly above the cable. Targeting brackets appeared on the big wall display, centering on and closing around the cable, and flashing when the device had locked onto the target. There was a tiny whine of servomotors, and a slender needle, like a mosquito’s sucking proboscis, extended down from the device’s head, delicately piercing the cable.
“Okay,” Rockman said, looking at another monitor. “We have a signal.”
At Palatino’s touch, a second needle bit the cable just below the first. A window opened in the lower left-hand portion of the big screen, showing the grainy, low-light black-and-white image currently being transmitted by the camera.
The remote dragonfly probe was now wired into the dacha’s security camera system.
“We’re recording,” another Art Room technician reported.
“Okay,” Rockman said. “Nothing’s happening. Get about a twenty-second loop.”
The seconds passed. “Got it. Ready to repeat.”
“Good. Okay, Lia, Ilya. We’re hooked into the network. You can proceed.”
“Moving,” Lia replied.
Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 2340 hours, GMT + 3
Lia led the way as the two agents scrambled down the slope, making their way toward the dacha property. Both of them wore black head-to-toe, with light-intensifier goggles over their faces, which gave them the look of curious four-limbed insects.
For this op, they were going in semi-sterile, which meant that with one key exception, all of their equipment, everything except their communications implants, anyway, was available through commercial European markets or low-security military sources. The exception was the satchel Lia carried at her hip, which carried the bugging devices they intended to plant inside the dacha.
Once they disposed of those, they would have nothing on their persons that would identify them, if the worst happened, as agents of an American intelligence organization.
They reached the base of the hill and worked their way to a point close to the property entrance. Black figures crouching against black shadows, they waited for long minutes, watching the solitary guard at the gate. He looked bored and not particularly attentive, but Lia wanted to wait for the best opportunity.
“Gordon, are you ready to transmit?”
“We’re ready here, Lia,” Rockman replied. “Waiting on your word.”
“Copy.”
That opportunity came ten minutes later, as the headlights of a car swung across the driveway, illuminating the guard and the open gate in a glare immediately stopped down by the automatic filters inside their LI goggles. The car pulled up alongside the guard, who leaned over to look inside, then stepped back and saluted. The car, a long, black sedan, eased past the guard and onto the drive. “Now,” Lia whispered.
The two figures separated from the shadows and slipped into the clear-cut zone outside the wall, angling toward the gate.
The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1654 hours EDT
“Now,” Lia’s voice said from the speaker.
Jeff Rockman looked up at the display on the monitor, which now showed two inset windows, both with identical images from the security camera. On both, the guard at the front gate could be seen standing a few feet from the wall, shifting his weight from foot to foot and managing to look dead bored, even though his face could not be seen.
“Okay,” Jeff said. “Insert the recorded signal.”
There was the faintest flicker of static on the left-hand window, and the image of the guard seemed to jump to one side by about a foot. Several seconds later, a black figure entered the lower edge of the right-hand window, easing between the wall of white-painted stone and the guard’s back, then vanishing. A moment later, a second figure came into view, stealthily slipping behind the less than fully attentive guard.
By physically tapping into the length of cable on the security cam pole, the Art Room had been able to record a twenty-second segment of video, which they were now feeding into the security network while blocking the real- time signal from the camera. Somewhere inside the dacha, a presumably bored security guard was looking at the monitor, which showed absolutely nothing unusual happening outside the front gate. If he’d noticed the static or the shift in the guard’s position, chances were good he’d shrug it off to a fault in the cable… which wouldn’t have been far off the mark.
There were any number of ways to penetrate a secure target such as the Kotenko dacha. The best and simplest, however, was generally through the front gate. The dogs patrolling the perimeter were trained to pick up strange scents and alert their handlers if they detected the trails of intruders coming over the wall… but at the main gate the ground would be a jumble of crisscrossing scent trails, of guards, of automobiles, of guests coming and going. Even if the dogs were well enough trained to alert their handlers that intruders had passed that way, the
