Arctic Gold

Next, she looked around along the walls of the room until she found an outlet. When she found one out in the open, she knelt in front of it, swiftly unscrewing the front plate, then pulling the outlet itself free at the end of a length of wires.

She used a small tester to check which wire was which, then took a microrelay and clipped it to the wires, as far back as she could reach. Finally, she stuffed the wires back into place, replaced the outlet and cover, and screwed the plate back on. The whole operation took less than two minutes.

Returning to the keyboard, she softly said, “Gordon, ready to test.”

“Copy, Lia. We have signal.”

“Starting with the letters, then… ah… beh… veh… geh…”

One by one she struck each Cyrillic letter on the keyboard. The tiny sensors worked together to pick up the distinctive sound of each key as it was struck and transmit it to the relay in the wall.

The microphones themselves were sound powered and activated, while the relay drew on the electrical current in the house. The relay, using the electrical wiring of the entire house as an enormous antenna, was powerful enough to transmit each sound to the waiting van; before Llewellyn left the area, he would plant a larger satellite relay on the side of the mountain, where it would continue to receive transmissions from Kotenko’s keyboard and send them on through the satellite uplink to Fort Meade.

There the Tordella Center supercomputers would identify each separate key from the distinct and unique sound it made when struck and reassemble a complete readout of what Kotenko was typing at his workstation fifty-five hundred miles away. The system would let them pick up passwords and activation codes, which in turn would allow them to study and bypass his security systems and, soon, to be able to record his entire hard drive, read all of his mail, and track down every one of his electronic correspondents without ever again coming close to the Black Sea dacha.

With the keyboard bugs online and double-checked, Lia turned her attention to bugging the rest of the office. Another tiny microphone went inside the telephone handset on the desk, while a microcam-hidden inside the barrel of a working ballpoint pen with the lens disguised as a clear plastic clicker-went on the highest bookshelf, positioned so that it gave the Art Room a view of both the computer and the door. Another pen, this one masking a backup relay unit, went into the sofa behind the cushions.

Akulinin, meanwhile, was working at the safe. A flat case with an LED readout was placed just above the combination dial, and as he slowly turned the dial right or left, lights winked on to indicate the fall of tumblers inside. Within a couple of minutes, there was an audible thump and he operated the handle to pull the heavy door open.

“Udacha!” he cried, reaching in and retrieving the lost tool kit. “Success!”

Lia gave him a thumbs-up and began going over the room, checking to see if anything had been left undone or disturbed. Akulinin took the time to write out the combination to the safe, together with the letters P for prava, or “right,” and L for leva, or “left.” He dropped the paper on the floor in front of the open safe before checking through the shelves inside.

There was money, a great deal of it, in three briefcases, in rubles, euros, and U.S. dollars. There were a number of engineering charts and reports, all of which fitted-barely-inside the tool kit. And there were a number of plastic jewel cases, each with a CD cryptically labeled with Cyrillic notations. These went into various pouches in Akulinin’s combat blacks.

A groan from the bound and prone Kotenko warned that he was beginning to come around. After one last, swift check, Lia and Akulinin went to the door. “We’re done,” she whispered.

“Passageway outside is clear,” Rockman told her. “Still no alarm.”

She opened the door. “We’re moving,” she said. “Ready for exfil.”

“Satlink is in place,” Llewellyn told them. “We’ll be waiting at the primary.”

With luck, Kotenko would assume that one of his rivals had broken in and cleaned out his safe. The paper with the safe’s combination could only have one logical explanation-that someone inside Kotenko’s personal retinue, or, just possibly, one of his houseguests, had discovered the combination and given it to the intruders.

That ought to make life inside the dacha interesting for the next few days.

“Lia!” Rockman’s voice called in her head. “You’ve got company!”

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1721 hours EDT

The big display screen in the Art Room showed the layout of the Kotenko dacha as a series of architectural floor plans. Two points of light, one following the other, moved along one of the hallways. On a nearby monitor, ranks of inset windows showed the overhead views of empty rooms and hallways set in pairs, one with the monochromatic image of what someone watching from the security office was seeing, the window next to it showing the real-time image of the same scene.

In one real-time window, Lia and Akulinin, anonymous figures in their combat blacks and LI goggles, could be seen moving through one of the corridors.

And in another, a solitary figure could be seen just coming in from the back deck, a bulky, muscular man built like a professional wrestler. The Deep Black records department had already identified him as Andre Malenkovich, a onetime Moscow street criminal now in Kotenko’s employ as bodyguard and personal assistant.

And Malenkovich had just entered the same hallway now being used by Lia and Akulinin. The computers managing the imaging session had just thrown a third light onto the architectural schematics, showing the bodyguard just one bend in the hallway away. In another few seconds he would round a corner and come face-to- face with the Deep Black insertion team.

“Turn around!” Rockman told Lia and Akulinin. “Back the way you came! There’s a janitor’s closet ten feet behind you! Hurry!”

Malenkovich was almost up to the corner…

Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 0022 hours, GMT + 3

Akulinin reached the closet door and turned the knob. Locked!…

Lia bit off a curse as she turned, pulling her sidearm from its holster. The door to Kotenko’s office was eight feet farther up the hall; keeping her weapon with its heavy sound suppressor trained on the bend in the corridor ahead, she started backing toward it. Akulinin did the same.

“He’s stopped!” Rockman told them. “Two more people just came in from the pool! I think he’s talking to them!”

Which might give them another few seconds. The hallway came to an abrupt end behind them, with the only way out going around the corner and squarely into Malenkovich. They didn’t have time to pick the lock on the closet, but just possibly they could hide in the office. Lia reached the office door first, opened the door, and slipped inside. Akulinin followed.

“He’s around the corner,” Rockman told them. “He’s coming toward the office door!”

Not good. Lia looked around the office. There wasn’t much in the way of places to hide; worse, Kotenko was now awake, struggling against the plastic zip strips binding his wrists and legs and making desperate mmphing noises into his gag. As the two NSA agents reentered the office, though, he went still. He probably couldn’t see anything more than human-shaped shadows against the light spilling in from the hall, but he knew they were there.

And so would the bodyguard in another moment.

“Bad guy is definitely headed for the office,” Rockman warned. “There’s nothing else in that arm of the hallway for him to go to unless he’s looking for a mop.”

“Oknah!” Lia said, lowering and roughening her voice to a growl for Kotenko’s benefit. There was no sense in telling him that one of the intruders was a woman-and possibly letting him begin to connect the dots all the way back to the St. Petersburg warehouse.

Oknah-the office window. It was large and looked west out over the Black Sea. During daylight hours, Kotenko must have a hell of a view.

And right now, that was their only escape route. Akulinin understood her terse exclamation. Lia pulled back the drapes as he holstered his pistol and experimentally hefted the toolbox he was carrying. “Beregeess’! ” he warned, and slammed the long metal case squarely into the window like a battering ram.