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By Root 358 0

of his car, the other two climbing in the back. Beyond them, the Russian saw her partner's Volvo swing onto the Esplanade, alerted by the bark. They had agreed beforehand that he would follow the car to see where it went, then come back for her: she wanted to remain behind and make sure no one else popped out of this wing of the Palace. Having lost two agents, they might take unusual precautions to protect more. Some countries did that as a matter of course: five years before, when she first joined the spetsnaz intelligence bureau, her superior had been stung by a fake English operation covering the real one, and he took his life after being dismissed in disgrace. Valya Saparov had no intention of letting that happen to her.

She continued to stroll along the steps of the embankment, listening to the tranquil waters lap against the stone and into the drainpipes, watching the few cars and even fewer pedestrians that came and went along the thoroughfare.

And then she saw something that brought a smile to her lips: two people leaving the Presidential Palace, people who looked suspiciously like the ones who had departed with the officer shortly before

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Tuesday, 1:08 A.M., St. Petersburg

When he was making regular trips into space, General Orlov was accustomed to having his days and nights carefully regulated: when he would eat, sleep, work, shower, and exercise. When he began training others, he held to a tightly controlled regimen because it worked for him.

In the two years he'd been attached to the Operations Center, his regimen had deteriorated because of the demands on his time. He didn't exercise quite as much as he wanted, and that made him unhappy. In the last few weeks, as the on-line hour drew near, he hadn't slept as much either, and that made him even more cranky.

He had expected to be up late today, helping to iron out any problems with the various systems, though there were surprisingly few. And he had even been prepared, if necessary, to run an urgent counterintelligence operation using Rossky's spetsnaz intelligence operatives based in nearby Pushkin. Fortunately, word had reached Rossky that Ministry of Security agents had found and arrested the waiter who'd been working with the British spy, and were bringing him to St. Petersburg. No doubt he could be persuaded to help them ferret out other spies-- a more effective tack than Rossky's ham-fisted handling of those two operatives. Orlov didn't believe for a moment that the British agent had taken his own life, and he was sorry they hadn't had the opportunity to interrogate him.

Disappointment and the ability to adapt were part of any job, and Orlov remained focused and alert. But he hated waiting for anything-- especially missing pieces of a puzzle. In space, whenever he had to troubleshoot, there was a checklist. Here, there was nothing to do but sit and keep busy while awaiting information.

The message came from Valya Saparov at 1:09 in the morning-- just after midnight in Helsinki. Because she hadn't wanted to carry secure radio gear, she placed a straight-forward international call from a phone booth in Helsinki to a number at the St. Petersburg telephone exchange. There, an Operations Center employee routed the call to the intelligence base, where someone in the radio room picked up. In this way, telephone calls couldn't be traced to or from the Operations Center.

Calls from agents over unsecured lines were in the form of personal messages to friends, relatives, or roommates. If the operative didn't preface the message by asking to speak to someone in particular, the Center knew to disregard the contents. Messages were sometimes sent this way to confuse eavesdroppers who might be tracking a spy and trying to make sense of what they were reporting. When the operative said something about the weather, the listener knew that that was when the message proper began.

Valya asked for Uncle Boris, her name for Colonel Rossky, and he was notified by an operator at one of the nine computers linked to the phone and radio lines. He