phone calls to all of those places, as well as Karachi, Kabul, and Dushanbe.
Connect the dots, Rubens thought, and a rather disturbing picture appeared, one involving transporting something from the heart of Central Asia south to Pakistan’s major port, then by ship to the Middle East — Cairo, perhaps, or Israel, or just possibly northern Europe.
That’s why Rubens wanted an operator inside Feng’s organization, someone who could get a lead on some of these mysterious business contacts of Feng’s, and someone who might have the opportunity to bug Feng’s computer and phone.
If anyone within the NSA’s Deep Black service could handle the job, it was Lia, but that didn’t make it any easier for Rubens to walk out of the Art Room at a critical moment in her op.
No, the dots didn’t make a pretty picture at all — and Lia and her team might be right at ground zero.
Lia was sitting on her bed in her hotel room when the knock sounded at her door.
“Sounds like opportunity knocking, Lia,” CJ told her.
Lia was alone in her room. CJ was still watching from down on the street, while Castelano and Daimler were in their room up on the seventh floor, but all three — as well as the Art Room crew — were linked in through her communications implant. She was careful of what she said while in the room. Though a sweep earlier had failed to turn up any electronic listening devices, Feng’s people might have still managed to bug it.
“Coming,” she called out. She’d changed out of her heels, skirt, and low-cut blouse in favor of more comfortable — and practical — clothing: blue jeans, a black pullover, and tennis shoes. Her hat, however, rested on the hotel room desk, its hidden camera set to provide Desk Three with a clear view of the entire room. Swiftly, she pulled her weapon from her open suitcase — a 9 mm SIG SAUER P226 Blackwater Tactical — and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, tugging the pullover down to conceal it.
She unlocked the door. “Yes?”
It was one of the maroon-jacketed hotel bellhops. “Fraulein Lau?”
“Yes.”
“I have two packages for you,” he said in passable English. He handed her a manila envelope — that would be the promised COSCO contract — and a small white box tied with red ribbon.
“What’s this?” she asked, accepting the box.
“I don’t know, fraulein. I was told to give you both of these. And I’m to wait for you to sign something and return it.”
“Wait a moment.”
Closing the door, she took the envelope back to the desk and opened it. As expected, it was from Feng, three copies of two close-spaced printed pages — more of a letter of agreement than a full-blown contract. She scanned through it quickly, murmuring aloud the pertinent paragraphs for the benefit of the Art Room.
“Looks good and as promised,” she said, completing the document. She picked up a pen and signed all three copies. Two went back into the envelope for return to Feng. She looked at the white box for a moment, then decided to wait until she’d given the envelope back to the bellhop.
She opened the door and handed him the envelope and a generous five-euro tip. “Here you go. Thank you.”
“
Lia returned to the desk and picked up the box. “So, is Mr. Feng making a play for me already?” she asked. “Too big for a diamond ring.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the sort to propose marriage,” CJ said. “Are you going to open it?”
“It’s also too small to be a bomb,” she added.
“But not too small to be a listening device of some sort,” Tom Blake said. “Be careful what you say, Lia.”
She didn’t reply, but she set the package in front of her hat, directly beneath the camera, and began opening it.
A moment later, she pulled the contents out and dangled them for Desk Three’s inspection. “Oh, my.”
There was a handwritten note inside the package.
“Are you actually going to wear that?” Marie Telach asked.
“What is it?” CJ said. “I’m blind out here, you know.”
“A bikini,” Lia said. “A very
“It’s too small to hide a listening device, at least,” she said. “Too small to hide much of
“Another fine item of female apparel from Testosterone Fantasies Are Us,” Marie put in. “You’re not actually going to wear those postage stamps in public, are you?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Lia said. “I’ll have to see if this sort of thing is in my new job description.”
In fact, she knew, in a sense it was, since keeping Feng happy — being “eye candy,” as Rubens had described it — was as precise a description of the job as was possible.
She knew one other thing, too. If this was supposed to be her working outfit, she was going to have a hell of a time hiding any SIGINT devices inside — to say nothing of her P226.
5
Oh, God, no,” Masha said, taking several halting steps backward.
“What’s the matter?” Akulinin passed the radiation counter over the Chinese man’s body. There was no response — or very little. A few clicks that might represent normal background radiation, but nothing like the hiss of static that the other two had shown, even on his hands.
So … this one had stayed back while the other two had gotten their hands dirty. Had he been the one in charge? Or had he just not been involved with the actual transfer of radioactive materials?
“The radiation on those two …”
“Don’t worry,” Akulinin told her. “It’s not enough to make you sick or anything.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. She looked desperate, and scared. “Those men who were here a few minutes ago, Vasilyev …”
“What about them?”
“They’re FSB! That means they’re part of an antiterror unit, or maybe nuclear security, and they were after these three.”
“Yeah … so …”
“So I’m not
She was quick on the uptake.
He indicated the gray-eyed corpse, “This guy was a
