Arctic Gold

glass mounted on the ceiling-the security cam-and resisted an unprofessional impulse to wave. A few feet farther on, light spilled from beneath a closed door.

Damn…

“We’re at the door to the office,” Lia whispered. “Do you have a camera inside?”

“That’s negative, Lia,” Rockman replied. “It looks like there may be a hookup for another camera on the circuit diagram, but it’s switched off.”

Akulinin tried the doorknob, which turned easily, and gently edged the door open. Beside him, Lia slipped a length of fiber-optic cable through the opening, with the near end attached to her cell phone monitor. Twisting the cable gently between her fingers, she turned the end this way and that, checking out the room’s interior.

A man sat at a computer monitor, his back toward the door. The image resolution was too low to let her read over his shoulder, but he appeared to be about ten feet away, his fingers clattering over a keyboard.

There was no one else in the room within the reach of the fiber-optic viewer, though she did see another of the black hemispheres on the ceiling. Why was the security camera turned off?

Then the answer came to her. The man at the desk was almost certainly Grigor Kotenko, and as the head of one of the more powerful families within the Organizatsiya, he would be afraid not only of outside enemies breaking into his personal fortress but also of traitors among his own people. The camera’s position on the ceiling would have let his own security people see what was on his monitor; switching it off while he was working gave him an extra bit of peace of mind.

It also suggested that Kotenko was more afraid of betrayal from within his own organization than he was of outsiders, an interesting bit of intelligence.

The figure at the desk turned his head just far enough that Lia glimpsed the shaggy corner of his walrus mustache.

“I see Kotenko,” Lia whispered. “Back to the door. I can take him from here.”

“That’s a negative, Lia,” a new voice, Rubens’, replied. “Find another way.”

She bit off a silent expletive. She had the bastard in her sights… the thug who’d given the orders that had ended with Tommy’s death. It would be so easy to take him out. Two taps to the center of mass, a third in the back of the head…

“Lia, Ilya,” Rubens said. “If the op is to succeed, we need Kotenko alive.”

Lia closed her eyes, forcing the muscles of her hands and arms and jaw to relax, bringing herself back from the edge. God, she wanted to kill the man… but Rubens was right. She and Ilya had come here tonight to plant bugs that would give Desk Three an unparalleled window into the Tambov group’s operations. If Kotenko’s people came into the office later and found their boss dead, American intelligence would have to start all over again as some other crime family came to the fore, or as another leader within Tambov-Braslov, perhaps-took over.

In the long run, they could do a lot more damage to the Russian Mafiya-and not just the Tambov group-if Kotenko survived this night.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Ilya, you’re up. Remember, Russian only.”

“Da,” he murmured, and grasping his H &K P9S in both hands, he eased the door open with his shoulder and rolled through.

Lia followed, breaking left and cutting across the room as Akulinin moved right, lunging at Kotenko’s back. Attempting to sneak in quietly invited disaster-a squeak to a floorboard, a flicker of movement glimpsed from the corner of an eye… even a psychic awareness of someone else present in the room. Kotenko heard the movement and began to turn, one hand snapping toward the top drawer of his computer desk, but Akulinin was on him in three swift strides, reversing the pistol in his hand as he moved, grasping it at the meeting of muzzle and sound suppressor, and swinging the butt around from the side, aiming at the base of Kotenko’s skull.

But Kotenko raised his arm, blocking the swing, and for a terrible moment Akulinin and the Mafiya boss struggled in front of the computer desk. Then the office chair scooted out from beneath Kotenko and he fell, heavily. Akulinin’s arm came up, then slashed down, the pistol butt striking the man’s head with a sickening crack.

Lia held her position at the far side of the office, her SIG-Sauer pointed at the half-open door, covering Akulinin as he checked the pulse at Kotenko’s throat, then peeled back one eyelid, then the other.

“He’s out,” Akulinin said in Russian. If the camera was off, there might yet be microphones online. “Breathing’s okay.”

“Gordon!” Lia whispered. “Any response?”

“Negative,” Rockman replied in her ear. By now, the Art Room would have penetrated deep into the dacha’s security network, and would be alerted if an alarm sounded. It was just possible that an open microphone in Kotenko’s office had picked up the sounds of a struggle. If so, guards might be on the way already.

They would have to hurry.

Once he was sure that Kotenko was in no physical danger, Akulinin pulled plastic zip strips from his combat harness and bound the man’s wrists, knees, and ankles. A fistful of facial tissue went into his mouth, with a length of packing tape to secure it awkwardly beneath the brush of his mustache. Another strip of tape went over his eyes. If he regained consciousness in the next few minutes, they didn’t want him seeing what the two intruders were doing.

Lia, meanwhile, pulled out the small induction device that registered the surge in electrical current from any active microphones and swept the room, paying special attention to the camera fixture on the ceiling and to the desk and computer itself. While power was flowing to the computer and its peripherals, of course, it looked like there weren’t any active mikes.

Good. They should have a few minutes then.

“Harashaw,” she said, still speaking Russian just in case Kotenko was faking unconsciousness with an unusual flair for theater. “Room is clear.”

“There’s the safe,” Akulinin said, also in Russian. “Get the door.”

Lia walked to the door and closed it, then snapped off the light. With their LI gear, there was more than enough ambient light through the room’s one large window for them to work. Next, she went to Kotenko’s computer, sat down at the chair, and took a look at the monitor.

The screen saver had come up-a blatantly pornographic image of a bored-looking woman lasciviously entangled with two young men. When Lia moved the mouse, the image was replaced with a screen full of text and several small, inset diagrams.

It looked important. Her Russian was good enough that she could tell it was a technical report about something called Glubahkii Koladeets, or Deep Well, and which was abbreviated elsewhere as “GK- 1,” a term that seemed to refer to a specific place or base. The overall project was called Operatsiya Holodnaya Vayeena… Operation Cold War.

She scanned down the screen quickly, trying to pick up the important bits. Work at GK-1, she saw, had been delayed by the high concentrations of metan something. Metan was “methane,” but what was the following word? It looked like it might transliterate as “clathates,” but she couldn’t pin down the meaning.

Well, they might be able to make something of it back at the Puzzle Palace.

It would have been possible, of course, to flash the entire contents of Kotenko’s hard drive to Fort Meade, or to simply burn a CD of any likely-looking documents. However, there were almost certain to be security measures in place that would, at the very least, alert Kotenko to the fact that files had been copied, if not passwords and fire walls designed to prevent exactly that. They didn’t have the time to track down the man’s computer security system or bypass it, and they couldn’t risk alerting Kotenko that his hard drive had been raided. She did take a moment to photograph the screen with her cell phone camera, being careful to dial the speed down to a thirtieth of a second in order to avoid having large, black scan lines show up across the screen. Then she reached behind the computer tower and yanked out the plug.

The monitor winked out immediately, taking the page of data with it. Kotenko would wake to find the computer off and assume the intruders had pulled the plug just in case it had an open mike.

Next, she pulled a small, plastic case from her equipment pouch. Inside were several hundred minute bugs, each roughly spherical, perhaps a millimeter across, and flat enough to slip through the spaces between the keys on a computer keyboard. She sprinkled them across Kotenko’s keyboard, careful not to allow them to bounce. A few remained stubbornly visible, but she clattered her fingers across the keys, repeatedly hitting several until all of the stragglers vanished down through the cracks.