“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 very entertaining,” Lia said, “and keep it on the back deck, we should have clear sailing inside. Ilya? Break out the dragonfly.”

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 very good at playing video games.

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… son of a bitch!”

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 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 not impossible.

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.