“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 handlers would probably discount the warning. After all, everyone went through that way.

There were motion sensors and sound detectors along the base inside the wall, but again, the security personnel would be alert to intruders coming over the wall elsewhere around the perimeter, not coming through the main gate where the guard’s scuffings and pacings, the noises from car engines, and the conversations as the guard challenged each arrival all rendered sonic data useless.

As for the lone guard, he was standing on the driveway inside the open gateway, his AKM carelessly slung over his shoulder, his night vision utterly blasted by the headlights of the car that had just passed through. He didn’t see the two figures in black approach the wall behind him, or notice as, one after the other, they slipped silently past his back. He wasn’t paying careful attention to the night around him because after all… that was what dogs and security cameras were for.

Watching from fifty-five hundred miles away, Rockman breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, Lia,” he said. “You’re off the monitor. You weren’t seen.”

“Okay,” she replied. “We’re approaching the house.”

“The flier is on its way.”

On the pole overlooking the driveway entrance, the UAV broke off an inch-long section of its own head, leaving the piece attached by its two slender probes, then launched itself into the air. With a soft flutter of hard-beating wings, it arrowed through the night and came to rest on the outside sill of a second-floor window.

“I feel like a damned Peeping Tom,” Palatino muttered, shifting the remote device to walking mode and moving it higher until its camera could peer through the glass.

“Yeah, but it’s peeping in the line of duty,” Rockman told him. “Let’s have a look.”

The room beyond the glass was darkened, but the probe’s CCD visual pickups could resolve images in almost total darkness and could operate in the IR as well as visual wavelengths. At the same time, two slender wires, like antennas, extended from above the camera and rested against the glass, picking up faint vibrations.

The room might have been dark, but it was definitely occupied-rather enthusiastically so-by two people sharing a large bed.

“Oops,” Sarah Cassidy said, smirking. “I don’t think we want to go in that way.”

“Go to the next window,” Rockman told Palatino.

The next window was also a bedroom, but this one appeared to be empty. Rockman passed the word to Lia and Akulinin, who were already climbing up a pilaster to reach the second floor.

This part of the dacha had a roof extending out from the second story over a trellis-enclosed porch. The Deep Black insertion team had already made the assumption that the first-floor windows would be protected by some sort of security system but that the second floor might be clear. Targets who were lazy, cheap, or both sometimes left obvious holes in their security. Unfortunately, that was not the case here. Sensors inside the slender body of the flier had already detected the trickle of electrical current through a slender wire inside the closed window. If the window was opened or broken, the current would be interrupted and an alarm would sound. Rockman passed the news to the team.

“We’re on it,” Lia said.

Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 2358 hours, GMT + 3

“We’re on it,” Lia murmured. In one hand she held a small device similar to the unit she’d used to look for security systems at the warehouse door on the St. Petersburg waterfront. The LED readout indicated an electrical current, and as she moved it around the edge of the window, she found the point where the sensor wire on the glass connected, through a metal contact, with a wire inside the window’s frame.