She put a hand over his mouth, and her eyes turned cold and serious, and Sechin realized he was probably not going to get laid. Nor was he going to die. The good with the bad. Such is the intelligence business, he thought.

She stuck her hand out from under the bed’s blanket, and he heard a faint click. What he heard next stunned him. The sounds of Sechin and the previous Twenty-Three making love echoed through the room. Do I really sound like that? Like a boar with a spear stuck in its side, he thought.

“Our mutual friend from the Federation sends his best,” she whispered in his ear.

So the American had heard him after all.

“Then tell me this: Why did he not listen to me when it mattered?” said Sechin. “I risked everything just by using the word Cherenkov. He could have done something.”

“He is doing something now, and you can too,” she said.

“Wait, are you chipped?” he asked.

“Yes, but not by Lotus Flower. I’m still a new girl,” she said. “They’re going to wait to see if I work out before they invest in me. Now tell me about Cherenkov, and none of the Star Trek shit.”

The air under the blanket was heating up quickly and Sechin felt his face flushing from the warmth and his proximity to her. He watched a rivulet of sweat carve an arc between her breasts and move toward an enormous tattoo wreathing her waist.

“It was developed about three years ago at the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects outside Moscow, our equivalent to your DARPA,” he said. “It’s nuclear-reactor detection from space.”

“How does it work?” she asked.

“There is not enough time now. I will get you something to take to them next time,” he said. “I suppose your superiors will also need to know why I am doing this?”

“Why you’re in bed with me, you mean?” she said.

“They would understand that, I hope. Americans are not that prudish,” he said.

“Okay, then, why?” she asked.

“Our dear leader so badly wants to matter in his old age that he fails to see that one day this will all go bad for Russia. America and Russia had our row in the last century, and it is done. I’ve been here long enough to know that the Directorate is the real threat, and this war only makes them stronger. Russia is merely the junior partner, and it just happens to have fifteen million Chinese residing inside its borders. It does not take an old spy to see that one day very soon the Chinese will assert their ‘right to protect’ their compatriots in Siberia, just as we once did to the weak states on our borders. So that is why I tried to warn your officer, for all the good it did.”

“It’s usually more personal. What do you want from this?” she said.

Sechin sighed and ran a finger between her breasts.

“My dear,” he said. “Don’t we all want the same thing? Money? Sex? A bit of power. Any of the three are fine with me. I’m not particular anymore.”

She rolled her eyes. At that moment, the recording of one of his sessions with Twenty-Three ended with an animal abruptness. She reached out to start the recording over.

“Don’t worry, it’s been modified so it will sound like we’re beginning again,” she whispered in his ear, then she pulled back and looked him in the eye as the grunts started once more. “I don’t believe you. We’ve seen your profile. You’re too much of a romantic for the usual banal causes.”

“ ‘Too much of a romantic’ says the whore I am in bed with.”

“Okay, have it your way,” she said. Her voice went from a purr to command mode. “Put your hand here.”

She took his hand and placed it at her waist, stopping at the tattoo. “Do you know what that is?”

He didn’t feel a thing, but he knew enough to make a guess. “It’s one of the new e-tattoos.”

She looked surprised for a second.

“I am not as old as you might think,” he said.

The ink of the tattoo was actually a derivative of the electronic ink used in the old tablet-computer readers. This modified version allowed the liquid injected into the skin to act as a sort of pillow above and below tiny embedded silicon chips wired together in an origami-like pattern. The liquid and microscopic serpentine wires formed a miniature network woven into her skin. He closed his eyes and traced its outlines while he hummed the middle section of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

“I’m going to need you to do something for me, and I can’t lie, it’s going to hurt,” she finally said. “But we think it’s the best way to securely get us the information you offer.”

“I was afraid you might ask that,” he said.

She kissed him gently on the chin.

“How can you know pleasure without understanding pain?” she responded as she kissed him again.

“Push the pace,” Conan hissed, walking in the knee-deep river water. “Or we’re going to miss our window to get inside the perimeter.”

Finn didn’t reply; the only noise was his sandals’ soft sucking in the mud.

The stream was low, hedged in on either side by thick emerald vegetation and slashes of brown. The two walked with hunched backs, their wool blankets drooping heavily on aching shoulders. They were the tail end of the patrol, four more Muj strung out ahead. Charlie had point. He wasn’t military like the rest, but it was time to break him in. He’d been a golf pro at the Turtle Bay Resort, once a star player for Wake Forest University but never making it past the Nike tour level. Finn had served with Charlie’s older brother Aaron, the three of them going out drinking whenever Aaron visited on leave. The Muj had used Charlie’s apartment as a hide site two months back, and he had demanded to go with them. Charlie had said that his big brother had kicked his ass bad enough when they were little, and he wouldn’t survive what happened after the war if Aaron found out he hadn’t been in the fight.

The cuts and scrapes on their legs attested to the night’s hike almost to the top of a nearby peak. They had pulled up a hundred and fifty yards short of the summit to avoid highlighting their position along the ridge line, and Conan had disappeared for an hour while the rest set a security detail below. Conan would not tell Finn or any of the others why they’d had to go there. They knew she kept it from them for operational security, but it still made the whole trek a sullen expedition.

Now, after a long hike back down, it was raining. Finn splashed into the swollen stream behind Conan and trudged on through the water. Going that way, they left no tracks and erased their movement signature in case they were being monitored from above, but really, he’d have chosen to go the stream route anyway. He had an infected cut on his heel that felt better in the water.

They arrived at a small pedestrian bridge they had hidden the bicycles under. It was a motley mix they’d picked up along the way, just like their array of weapons. Finn had scored the best, a 27.5-inch wheeled carbon downhill mountain bike with motorcycle-like suspension they’d stolen from a vacation villa whose owners were unlikely to come back until the war was over. Conan rode a three-speed faded green beater with a narrow white racing seat that they’d found unlocked by the side of the road. Their guess was that it had been a drunk-cycle, a bike used to pedal from bar to bar, before it was pressed into wartime duty.

They left in ones and twos, going out through Hidden Valley Estates to California Avenue. Movement in the open like this had to be carefully choreographed because of the Directorate’s tracking algorithms, which pored through aerial and satellite-sensor footage. Over time, any unusual patterns would become distinct and therefore targetable. The trick was to find patterns that were part of the standard ebb and flow but also had slightly random components that could explain away any anomalies. Patterns like the daily rhythms of kids biking to and from their elementary school.