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and fire department would be forced to respond at once to calls about a burning van. They would arrive in time to save some of the vehicle along with what little evidence Charles had left for them to find. That included the traces of Charles's blood. The heat of the fire would cause the water content of the blood to evaporate, leaving clear stains on the metal door handle, glove compartment knob, and other sections of the van that had not burned. The police would conclude that the wounded terrorist had tried to destroy the van and the evidence before leaving. They would assume that their quick response had enabled them to save what they were not supposed to see. Charles punched in the number of the KCP. He waited while his signal traveled twenty-five miles into space and bounced back to a street three blocks away. There were two short clicks and then the dial tone returned. That meant the call had been completed. The chip had been designed to disconnect from the Zed-4 as it began to heat up.

Charles hung up. He put everything into his backpack except for the 45.

As he did, he heard sirens. They stopped exactly where they were supposed to. By the burning van. Comforted by the unparalleled feeling of a job well done, Maurice Charles made the final preparations for his stay. He removed one of the pillows from the bed and put it on the floor between the bed and the window, directly in front of the nightstand. Then he lay down and looked to his right, toward the bed.

The hem of the bedspread reached nearly to the floor. Beneath and beyond the bed, he could see the front door. If for some reason anyone came in, Charles would see their feet. That was all he had to see to stop them. Charles kept his clothes and shoes on in case he had to leave in a hurry, but they did not distract him. Nothing did now. This was the time he enjoyed most. When he had earned his rest and his pay. Soon, even the sound of the police and fire sirens did not penetrate his deep, rewarding sleep.

Saint Petersburg, Russia Tuesday, 9:31 a.m.

At 9:22 a.m. Piotr Korsov e-mailed General Orlov a brief data file. The file contained a list of the secure calls that had been intercepted between Azerbaijan and Washington during the past few weeks. Most of those calls had been between the American embassy and either the CIA or the NSA. The Russian Op-Center had been unable to decrypt any of the conversations, but Orlov was able to scratch them off his list. Those calls were pretty much routine and not likely suspects for calls made by the Harpooner. Over the past few days, there had also been calls to the NSA from Gobustan, a village to the south of Baku. They were all made before the attack on the oil rig. The calls from the embassy to the United States had a slightly different band with from the Gobustan calls. That meant the calls were made from different secure phones. In a note attached to the file, Korsov said he was watching for new calls made from either line. Orlov was not very hopeful. The Harpooner probably would not signal his allies to tell them he had been successful. Whoever he was in league with would hear about that from their own intelligence sources. The very fact that a secure satellite uplink had played any part in this business was personally disturbing to Orlov. That was the kind of technology his space flights had helped to pioneer-satellite communications. The fact that they were being so expertly abused by terrorists like the Harpooner made him wonder if the technology should have been developed at all. It was the same argument people had made for and against splitting the atom. It had produced plentiful and relatively clean atomic power, but it had also bred the atomic bomb. But Orlov had not had a hand in that work. Just in this.

Then again, Orlov thought, as Boris Pasternak wrote in one of his favorite novels. Doctor Zhivago, "I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them." Progress had to allow monsters like the Harpooner to surface.