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.

Like the window upstairs, this one was safety glass, laminated in plastic. There was a loud thud, but the glass barely gave under the blow. Swiftly Lia raised her sound-suppressed SIG-Sauer in a two-handed stance. The weapon coughed sharply as she triggered three rounds in rapid succession into the pane; the glass crazed around three neat impacts, and Akulinin smashed the window again with the tool case.

This time, the glass bulged out, then disintegrated in a spray of rounded fragments. At the same instant, the door swung open and Kotenko’s bodyguard burst into the room, his own weapon already drawn.

Pivoting sharply, her P220 still in a two-handed grip, Lia squeezed off three quick shots into the center of the man’s considerable mass. He howled, staggering backward into the hall, and Lia put two more rounds into him as he collapsed, just to make sure. Outside, in the corridor, a woman screamed.

Akulinin used his gloved hands to peel away some of the remaining glass. Then, stooping, he patted the bound Kotenko on the shoulder. “Dobreh nochee,” he said, grinning, wishing the crime lord a good night. Lia scrambled through the window and Akulinin followed.

They dropped a few feet onto the back deck, where a dozen men and women stared with gaping mouths as the two insect-faced agents clambered through the broken window. Ignoring them, Lia raced to the low stone wall rising at the edge of the deck. Beyond, there was a narrow stretch of ground, and then the hillside dropped steeply away toward the road along the seaside, heavily covered with brush and small trees. Vaulting the wall, she dropped feetfirst over the edge and began sliding rapidly down the hill.

Akulinin followed. As she bumped and rolled through loose earth and leaves, she heard shouts and screams from above, and a sharp-barked command to halt: “Stoy!”

“Dragon!” she cried as she slid, trying desperately to keep from losing control. “Change of plan! Pickup at extraction two!”

“Got it, Lia,” Llewellyn said. “We’re on the way!”

They’d plotted three separate pickup points, allowing for the possibility that they’d have to leave by a different route than the one they’d taken going in. Gunfire cracked from above and behind, and she heard the snap of bullets among the branches above her head.

The trouble was that Llewellyn had the van on the road above the property, while Lia and Akulinin were plunging through brush and loose dirt toward a different road, some fifty yards below Kotenko’s dacha. Llewellyn would have to drive like a maniac to pick up a crossroad two miles to the south, then double back along the seashore to meet them.