Both of the outside sentries were in the process of turning as he fired, distracted from the sudden gunfire inside. The man on the left seemed to stumble as he turned, then sagged, clutching at his side as he dropped to his knees. Akulinin had already shifted his aim to the man on the right, drawing a bead and triggering another three-round burst.

The man on the right, apparently not hit, went to his partner’s aid. Akulinin took aim again and tapped off two more bursts. The man staggered, slammed backward into the half-open sliding door, and crumpled to the ground. The wounded man on the left slumped into an untidy heap.

“Two down outside the door,” Akulinin reported.

“Check fire!” Lia called. “I’m coming through!”

DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0035 hours

For just an instant, every armed man in the warehouse was turned toward the northeast end of the huge room, some of them firing with wild imprecision, weapons blasting away on full rock and roll.

“Prekrazhenii ogeya! Prekrazhenii ogeya!”

From five feet away, Lia put a bullet into the back of the head of the man with the spotlight, her pistol emitting a harsh chuff as it fired. She was so close she didn’t even need to watch for the red blip of laser light marking the impact point.

She fired as she moved, holding the SOCOM pistol two-handed and stiff-armed as she tapped off two more rounds at the first target, then shifted to the man next to him. That man was just beginning to register the fact that the guy with the spotlight had been hit, the front of his skull blossoming in a nasty red burst of blood, bone, and tissue. The second man turned, mouth gaping, hands fumbling at his assault rifle… and pitched backward as two of Lia’s rounds slammed into his throat and upper chest.

Then she was through the open door. Two bodies lay sprawled on the concrete; she leaped over one and bounded across the open parking lot.

“Stoy!” another voice called, not from straight behind, but from behind and to her right. “Slushaisya elee ya budu strelyaht’!”

She kept running.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1636 hours EDT

GUNFIRE, MUFFLED BY DISTANCE, boomed and rattled.

“Now, Ilya! Take them out!”

“Two down outside the door.”

“Check fire! I’m coming through!”

The words emerged from the overhead speaker, and Rubens felt an inward sag of relief. Ghost Blue was picking up Magpie’s transmissions and relaying them through the satellite net to the Art Room.

“Someone’s yelling at her to stop, to obey, or he’ll fire,” Ivan Maslovski said from his console, several stations away. He was one of Desk Three’s Russian specialists, brought in to provide linguistic support for Magpie. “Should I translate?”

One of the advantages of the implanted com system used by Desk Three operatives was that an agent in the field didn’t need to speak the local language. Someone listening in from the Art Room could provide a running translation and even lead the agent through a simple but appropriate response.

“No,” Rubens said, shaking his head. “I think she gets the general idea.”

The big map on the main display screen had been resized again, zooming in on two warehouses, some storage sheds, and the concrete wharf along the river. Lia’s icon was moving south across the open parking and loading zone between the two warehouses; Akulinin was at the corner of the warehouse to the south.

Two new pinpoints of light, red this time, marking presumed hostiles, appeared on the satellite map. The ground sensors placed by Lia during her approach to the warehouse picked up sound and motion over a wide area and transmitted the data back to Fort Meade, where the enormous computational power resident within the Tordella Supercomputer Facility translated raw data into moving points of light on a map.

“Lia! Ilya!” Jeff Rockman said at his console. “Two hostiles, southeast of the big warehouse!”

Sounds of gunfire erupted from the speaker. “I see them,” Akulinin replied. “Lia, drop!…”

Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0036 hours

Akulinin had risen to a half crouch, still holding the tiny MP5K tucked in against his shoulder. Lia, running straight toward him from the main warehouse entrance, was almost between him and the hostiles emerging from between the warehouse and the shed. One of the gunmen opened fire with his AK, the sharp crack-crack-crack echoing across the parking lot. Bullets slammed into sheet metal somewhere above Akulinin’s head.

As he shouted, “Drop!” Lia fell to the pavement in what must have been a painful slide, hugging the ground as the gunmen behind her sprayed rounds above her. Akulinin had a clear shot, now, at one of the Russians as he emerged from between the two buildings at a dead run. With luck, he thought he’d knocked Lia down and didn’t yet know Akulinin was there.

Akulinin tapped the trigger, hitting the man with a three-round burst high in his chest, knocking him backward with a wild flailing of his arms. “Three down!” he called.

Fort Meade, Maryland 1636 hours EDT

Dean climbed into his car, backed out of the parking spot, and all but peeled rubber as he left the pistol range, pulling on to Rochenbach Road and accelerating toward the towering structure visible on the wooded Maryland horizon ahead. He had to show his ID at a gate-even inside the far-flung confines of Fort Meade, security gates and checkpoints kept casual civilians and Army personnel out of the ultra-secure zone set aside for the NSA complex.

In a way, the NSA was the tail wagging the dog. Fort Meade sprawled across over some six thousand acres of the Maryland countryside between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. About nine thousand active-duty military personnel were stationed here, along with about six thousand civilian dependents in base housing, but the NSA employed over thirty thousand civilians. In fact, the Army post at Fort Meade had been scheduled for closure in the 1990s and ultimately had remained active solely to support the NSA’s activities. That huge complex ahead, the large, pale ocher office building, the two black-glass, ultra-modern monoliths behind it, and the tangle of smaller buildings in between, was called the Puzzle Palace, a moniker once applied to the Pentagon but now reserved solely for the NSA’s headquarters.

“Rockman?” Dean called over his radio. “I’m en route. Anything new?”

There was a worrisome pause. Then, “We’re back in touch with them,” Rockman said. Dean felt a surge of relief, but the feeling was overturned almost immediately by Rockman’s next words. “She’s in a firefight. Wait one…”

Dean fumed and pressed down harder on the accelerator. He turned left onto Canine Road, which put the towering ten-story monolith of the NSA’s headquarters building on his right, beyond several acres’ worth of parking lots.

A gunfight was the worst possible news. No matter what Hollywood cared to depict in the way of James Bond and other fictional spooks, in Lia and Dean’s line of work, firefights rarely took place. In fact, a firefight could only mean that something had gone seriously and drastically wrong. He hadn’t been briefed on her mission-such operations were kept tightly compartmentalized and shared strictly on a need-to-know basis-but he knew she was in Russia and that her op involved going in, planting something, and leaving again, all without alerting the locals.

If there was shooting, the op had been compromised.

Another turn, and Dean arrived at a parking lot outside a nondescript building sheathed in metal, almost in the shadow of the titanic edifice of the headquarters building itself. Inside was another security check… and an elevator ride, plunging deep into the bedrock beneath the facility, and two more security checkpoints after that, both requiring handprint, voiceprint, and retinal scans.