“Silent my ass!” screamed Dallas Trace, his western drawl magically replaced by a nasal New Jersey accent. “Tell that sow-bitch to get those cuffs off me.”

Later polling showed that it was this comment, aired live on a popular CNN program, that most alienated potential female jurors.

“Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law,” continued SAC Faber as the two men in black Kevlar stripped the lawyer of his lavalier microphone, belt-pack, and wiring, and then guided Trace out from behind his desk. “You have the right to an attorney—”

“I am an attorney, you dipshit!” shouted Dallas Trace, spittle flying. “I am the foremost defense attorney in the United States of—”

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you,” continued Faber, calmly, as the five of them—three agents, Trace, and Syd—shoved past the goggling floor producer. Both cameramen were grinning broadly as they panned the lenses around to the door where the other tactical-team agents waited with their weapons at parade rest.

Dallas Trace looked back over his shoulder at the cameras. “Greta!” he cried, calling to his New York CNN cohost. “You saw this. You saw what they did to me…”

And then Trace was gone.

The line producer lunged for the still live lavalier mike and thrust it in Syd’s face.

“Why this outrageous arrest in the middle of—” began the producer, before Syd interrupted with, “No comment.” She and the two agents walked out the door.

On that same Thursday morning, six FBI men and five Sherman Oaks plainclothes officers raided Dallas Trace’s home. There was no resistance. The bodyguard who had been left behind to guard Mrs. Trace happened to be in bed with her at the time the black-garbed FBI tactical team kicked open the bedroom door.

The bodyguard disentangled himself from Destiny Trace’s enveloping and unyielding legs, rolled over, looked at his shoulder holster and pistol on the chair twenty feet away, looked into four suppressed H&K muzzles with laser sights dancing small red dots across his forehead, and held up his hands.

Mrs. Trace sat up in bed, apparently resisting any impulse to cover her bare breasts. One of the FBI men’s attention must have strayed for an instant, because a laser dot flickered across Mrs. Trace’s bouncing breasts, before returning to the bodyguard’s forehead.

Destiny Trace frowned, pursed her lips, and looked at the hulking man in bed with her, looked at the crowding FBI agents in their storm-trooper helmets, goggles, and flak jackets, looked at the Sherman Oaks detectives in their Kevlar vests, frowned again and suddenly shouted, “Help! Rape! Thank God you’re here, Officers…This man was assaulting me!”

The Monday before the Thursday raids, Lawrence spent most of the day helping Dar set up the new surveillance cameras.

“This is costing you a shitload—with overnight delivery and everything,” volunteered Lawrence as they carried the first video unit, its battery, cables, and waterproof camouflage tarp from the Trooper into the trees along the road to the cabin. “If you’d given me a couple of weeks, I could have saved you about a thousand bucks on this stuff.”

“I won’t need it in a couple of weeks,” said Dar.

They positioned the first camera in a tree along the side of the gravel driveway about one half kilometer from the cabin. It was a sophisticated video unit—not much larger than a paperback book—with zoom lenses and a remote controlled motor that allowed it to pan and swivel. Thin cables ran to its own triple-lithium battery pack and the tiny transmitter, which were both easily concealed in the base of the rottedout birch. The remote controlled camera had two lenses: one for daylight use and the other for electronic light amplification after dark. It and the other gear had indeed cost Dar a metaphorical shitload.

When the camera was properly situated, Dar drove up to the cabin and sat in his Land Cruiser while he used the remote unit to swivel, pan, zoom, and switch lenses. He practiced turning the unit on and off. He checked the reception on his portable receiving and control unit with its three-inch black-and-white monitor. Then he called Lawrence on his cell phone.

“Works fine, Larry.”

“Lawrence.”

“Come on up to the cabin and I’ll fix us some coffee before we mount the other cameras. Also, I’ll show you something I found in the woods.”

After coffee, Dar left the boxed video equipment in the cabin and took Lawrence for a stroll. They headed east toward the sheep wagon but then cut uphill from the trail, through boulders, toward the high ridge above the cabin. From there they bushwhacked downhill until they came to a Douglas fir about thirty meters above the cabin itself. Dar silently pointed to a bulky video camera set in a camouflaged nook in the tree. The camera’s lens was aimed at the cabin.

Lawrence said nothing, but inspected the thing as carefully as a munitions expert would inspect a land mine. Finally Lawrence said, “No microphone. No pan or scan or zoom or night-vision capability. It’s just a fixed lens—wide angle—but it gives a good view of your parking area and cabin entrance. Plus, it has one hell of a strong battery, an extra-long-play recorder, almost certainly a time-stamp feature, and the whip antenna is way the hell up there. Whoever’s monitoring you can call up several days worth of video and fast-forward through it to see who’s in the cabin and when they arrived.”

“Yeah,” said Dar.

“With that powerful a transmitter and the antenna way up there, it could be broadcast for several miles,” said Lawrence.

“Yeah,” agreed Dar.

Lawrence crawled up the sap-covered lower trunk and inspected the instrument again. “It’s not FBI technology, Dar. Foreign…Czech, I think…crude but tough. My guess is that it’s transmitting on a PAL format.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Dar.

“The Russians?” said Lawrence.

“Almost certainly,” said Dar.

“Want me to disable it?”

“I want them to know where I am,” said Dar. “I just wanted to show this to you so that we don’t reveal anything about our work while we’re in front of this lens.”

“Are there others?” asked Lawrence, squinting suspiciously into the dappled daylight of the forest.

“None that I’ve found.”

“I’ll take a look for you,” said Lawrence.

“I’d appreciate that, Larry.” Dar had great respect for his electronic surveillance expertise.

“Lawrence,” said Lawrence, sliding back down the tree like a noisy bear.

Tony Constanza had sung like a canary after coming out of sedation for surgery on the previous Saturday afternoon. Even though his hospital room was guarded by half a dozen FBI agents, he was obviously terrified that the Organizatsiya hit men would come after him as soon as they learned that he was alive. Constanza must have figured that his best chance was to squeal and to squeal quickly, before Yaponchik, Zuker, and the others discovered where he was being guarded. He obviously had a healthy respect for their lethal capabilities. He also had some enthusiasm for being in the Witness Protection Program and living—he was quite specific about this—in Bozeman, Montana.

Constanza said that he didn’t know exactly where the Russians were holed up, but that it was “like a ranch house, you know, all by itself, somewhere out beyond Santa Anita Racetrack somewhere past Sierra Madre Boulevard…up in the brown hills there with all that tumbleweed shit.” The FBI had already received such an address from an anonymous mailing—it was the address of one of the phone numbers that Dar had seen Dallas Trace dial during his overnight surveillance of Trace’s house. Now the FBI’s own surveillance pinpointed the house and confirmed the presence of the five Russians.

SAC James Warren assigned twenty-three FBI agents to carry out constant surveillance on the location—a Mediterranean-style ranch house set half a mile from its nearest neighbor—from that Saturday evening. He told Sydney Olson that he would have preferred to move in immediately, but that it would take several days to obtain search and arrest warrants for the others now being incriminated by Constanza, and any premature arrest of the Russians would have tipped everyone else. In the meantime, every move the Russians made was being followed carefully by FBI agents in vans, via undercover roles as phone-company and street-repair people, by video surveillance, and by helicopter. The phone line into the house was not only tapped, it was trapped. Warren had twenty more agents with tactical assault training available at a minute’s notice. Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, and LAPD SWAT teams were volunteering to help, even though they knew no details of the operation.