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.

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.