Tom Clancy's op-centre_ mirror image - Tom Clancy [13]
Did the Russians build a center here because they were anticipating a war? Fields-Hutton wondered.
Fields-Hutton consulted the layout of the museum in his Blue Guide. He had memorized it on the train but didn't want to arouse the suspicion of guards by appearing to know where he needed to go. Each guard was a potential Ministry of Security freelancer.
After glancing at the map Fields-Hutton turned to the left, to the long, columned Rastrelli Gallery. Every inch of floor space was exposed, leaving no place to hide a secret room aboveground or a hidden staircase that could lead underground. Strolling around the wall that separated the Rastrelli Gallery from the East Wing, he stopped when he spotted what had once apparently been a custodial closet. There was a keypad beside the door, and he smiled when he read the printed sign on an easel to the left. It said, in Cyrillic letters:
This is the future home of Arts for Children, a television service that will broadcast the treasures of the Hermitage to students in schools throughout the nation.
Maybe, thought Fields-Hutton, and maybe not.
Pretending to read his Blue Guide while he watched the guard, Fields-Hutton waited until the man turned away, then hurried over to the door. There was a security camera above it, so he made sure not to look up from his book or show his face. He pretended to sneeze, covering his face with his hand and stealing a look at the lens. It was short, under twenty millimeters. It had to be a wide-angle lens, covering the door as well as the area well to the left and to the right, but not on the bottom.
Fields-Hutton reached into his pants pocket and removed his handkerchief. Inside was a Mexican peso, one of the few coins which had no value in Russia. At worst, if it were found, it would he picked up and kept as a souvenir-- hopefully, by a high-ranking official who had something useful to say in private.
Sneezing again and bending hard as he did, Fields-Hutton slid the peso under the door. He was relatively certain that there would be a motion detector on the other side of the door, but that it wouldn't be sensitive enough to notice the coin. Otherwise, every cockroach and mouse in the museum would set it off. Rising quickly, he walked away, his nose buried in the handkerchief.
Meandering back toward the main entrance, he allowed a guard to search his shoulder bag and then went outside, found a spot under a tree by the river, and slipped his CD Walkman from the bag. He jumped the machine to different tracks on the disc-- the numbers describing, in code, just what he'd seen in the museum. These numbers were recorded on the writable disc. Later, when he was away from any receivers that might be based in the museum, he would order the Walkman to transmit the signal to the British Consulate in Helsinki, where it would be relayed to London.
When he finished telling them about the TV studio, Fields-Hutton sat back to listen to what he hoped were the sounds of espionage taking place around his small peso.
CHAPTER SIX
Sunday, 12:50 P.M.,
St. Petersburg
When the coin slid under the door of the reception area, it passed through an electromagnetic CIS. The counterimpulse screen was designed to be disrupted by any signal that passed beneath it, down to the cadmium batteries that powered digital watches.
The disruption sounded a beep that overrode other information coming into the earphones of Operations Center Security Director Glinka. Though he wasn't an alarmist, Colonel Rossky was-- especially with zero hour a little over a day away and a rumor that someone from the outside had been watching what was going on for the past few days.
He checked with the receptionist, who said that no one had come or gone. Thanking her, the short, muscular man slid his headset off, handed it to his aide, got up from his seat, and walked down the narrow corridor to the Colonel's cubicle.
He looked for any excuse to stretch his legs, having spent nine hours doing nothing but test open bugs in dozens