"Jesus, girl, how ec.u.menical are we supposed to get?" the DCI demanded.

"Sergey Nikolay'ch thinks we owe him one. And you know . . ."

He had to nod at that. "Yeah, well, maybe we do, I guess. This has to go up the line, though."

"It ought to give Jack a chuckle," the Deputy Director (Operations) thought.

s.h.i.t," Ryan said in the Oval Office, when Ellen Sumter handed him the fax from Langley. Then he looked up. "Oh, excuse me, Ellen."

She smiled like a mother to a precocious son. "Yes, Mr. President."

"Got one I can . . . ?"

Mrs. Sumter had taken to wearing dresses with large slash pockets. From the left one, she fished out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims and offered it to her President, who took one out and lit it from the butane lighter also tucked in the box.

"Well, ain't this something?"

"You know this man, don't you?" Mrs. Sumter asked.

"Golovko? Yeah." Ryan smiled crookedly, again remembering the pistol in his face as the VC-137 thundered down the runway at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport all those years before. He could smile now. At the time, it hadn't seemed all that funny. "Oh, yeah, Sergey and I are old friends."

As a Presidential secretary, Ellen Sumter was cleared for just about everything, even the fact that President Ryan b.u.mmed the occasional smoke, but there were some things she didn't and would never know. She was smart enough to have curiosity, but also smart enough not to ask.

"If you say so, Mr. President."

"Thanks, Ellen." Ryan sat back down in his chair and took a long puff on the slender cigarette. Why was it that stress of any sort made him gravitate back to these d.a.m.ned things that made him cough? The good news was that they also made him dizzy. So, that meant he wasn't a smoker, not really, POTUS told himself. He read over the fax again. It had two pages. One was the original fax from Sergey Nikolay'ch to Langley-unsurprisingly, he had Mary Pat's direct fax line, and wanted to show off that fact-and the second was the recommendation from Edward Foley, his CIA director.

For all the official baggage, it was pretty simple stuff. Golovko didn't even have to explain why America had to accede to his request. The Foleys and Jack Ryan would know that KGB had a.s.sisted the CIA and the American government in two very sensitive and important missions, and the fact that both of them had also served Russian interests was beside the point. Thus Ryan had no alternative. He lifted the phone and punched a speed-dial b.u.t.ton.

"Foley," the male voice at the other end said.

"Ryan," Jack said in turn. He then heard the guy at the other end sit up straighter in his chair. "Got the fax."

"And?" the DCI asked.

"And what the h.e.l.l else can we do?"

"I agree." Foley could have said that he personally liked Sergey Golovko. Ryan did, too, as he knew. But this wasn't about like or don't-like. They were making government policy here, and that was bigger than personal factors. Russia had helped the United States of America, and now Russia was asking the United States of America for help in return. In the regular intercourse among nations, such requests, if they had precedents, had to be granted. The principle was the same as lending your neighbor a rake after he had lent you a hose the previous day, just that at this level, people occasionally got killed from such favors. "You handle it or do I?"

"The request came to Langley. You do the reply. Find out what the parameters are. We don't want to compromise Rainbow, do we?"

"No, Jack, but there's not much chance of that. Europe's quieted down quite a bit. The Rainbow troopers are mainly exercising and punching holes in paper. That news story that ran-well, we might actually want to thank the putz who broke it." The DCI rarely said anything favorable about the press. And in this case some government puke had talked far too much about something he knew, but the net effect of the story had had the desired effect, even though the press account had been replete with errors, which was hardly surprising. But some of the errors had made Rainbow appear quite superhuman, which appealed to their egos and gave their potential enemies pause. And so, terrorism in Europe had slowed down to a crawl after its brief (and somewhat artificial, they knew now) rebirth. The Men of Black were just too scary to mess with. Muggers, after all, went after the little old ladies who'd just cashed their Social Security checks, not the armed cop on the corner. In this, criminals were just being rational. A little old lady can't resist a mugger very effectively, but a cop carries a gun.

"I expect our Russian friends will keep a lid on it."

"I think we can depend on that, Jack," Ed Foley agreed.

"Any reason not to do it?"

Ryan could hear the DCI shift in his seat. "I never have been keen on giving 'methods' away to anybody, but this isn't an intelligence operation per se, and most of it they could get from reading the right books. So, I guess we can allow it."

"Approved," the President said.

Ryan imagined he could see the nod at the other end. "Okay, the reply will go out today."

With a copy to Hereford, of course. It arrived on John's desk before closing time. He summoned Al Stanley and handed it to him.

"I suppose we're becoming famous, John."

"Makes you feel good, doesn't it?" Clark asked distastefully. Both were former clandestine operators, and if there had been a way to keep their own supervisors from knowing their names and activities, they would have found it long before.

"I presume you will go yourself. Whom will you take to Moscow with you?"

"Ding and Team-2. Ding and I have been there before. We've both met Sergey Nikolay'ch. At least this way he doesn't see all that many new faces."

"Yes, and your Russian, as I recall, is first-rate."

"The language school at Monterey is pretty good," John said, with a nod.

"How long do you expect to be gone?"

Clark looked back down at the fax and thought it over for a few seconds. "Oh, not more than . . . three weeks," he said aloud. "Their Spetsnaz people aren't bad. We'll set up a training group for them, and after a while, we can probably invite them here, can't we?"

Stanley didn't have to point out that the SAS in particular, and the British Ministry of Defense in general, would have a conniption fit over that one, but in the end they'd have to go along with it. It was called diplomacy, and its principles set policy for most of the governments in the world, whether they liked it or not.

"I suppose we'll have to, John," Stanley said, already hearing the screams, shouts, and moans from the rest of the camp, and Whitehall.

Clark lifted his phone and hit the b.u.t.ton for his secretary, Helen Montgomery. "Helen, could you please call Ding and ask him to come over? Thank you."

"His Russian is also good, as I recall."

"We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern."

"And yours?"

"Leningrad-well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?"

Stanley took a seat. "John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it's been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate."

Clark nodded. "I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out."

"Hey, John," a familiar voice called from the door. "Hi, Al."

"Come in and take a seat, my boy."

Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the "my boy" part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. "Kid" was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark's desk and took the offered sheets of paper.

"Moscow?" he asked.

"Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it."

"Super," Chavez observed. "Well, it's been a while since we met Mr. Golovko. I suppose the vodka's still good."

"It's one of the things they do well," John agreed.

"And they want us to teach them to do some other things?"

"Looks that way."

"Take the wives with us?"

"No." Clark shook his head. "This one's all business."

"When?"

"Have to work that out. Probably a week or so."

"Fair enough."

"How's the little guy?"

A grin. "Still crawling. Last night he started pulling himself up, standing, like. Imagine he'll start walking in a few days."

"Domingo, you spend the first year getting them to walk and talk. The next twenty years you spend getting them to sit down and shut up," Clark warned.

"Hey, Pop, the little guy sleeps all the way through the night, and he wakes up with a smile. d.a.m.ned sight better than I can say for myself, y'know?" Which made sense. When Domingo woke up, all he had to look forward to was the usual exercises and a five-mile run, which was both strenuous and, after a while, boring.

Clark had to nod at that. It was one of the great mysteries of life, how infants always woke up in a good mood. He wondered where, in the course of years, one lost that.

"The whole team?" Chavez asked.

"Yeah, probably. Including BIG BIRD," RAINBOW Six added.

"Did he clean your clock today, too?" Ding asked.

"Next time I shoot against that son of a b.i.t.c.h, I want it right after the morning run, when he's a little shaky," Clark said crossly. He just didn't like to lose at much of anything, and certainly not something so much a part of his ident.i.ty as shooting a handgun.

"Mr. C, Ettore just isn't human. With the MP, he's good, but not spectacular, but with that Beretta, he's like Tiger Woods with a pitching wedge. He just lays 'em dead."

"I didn't believe it until today. I think maybe I ought to have eaten lunch over at the Green Dragon."

"I hear you, John," Chavez agreed, deciding not to comment on his father-in-law's waist. "Hey, I'm pretty good with a pistol, too, remember. Ettore blew my a.s.s away by three whole points."

"The b.a.s.t.a.r.d took me by one," John told his Team-2 commander. "First man-on-man match I've lost since Third SOG." And that was thirty years in the past, against his command-master-chief, for beers. He'd lost by two points, but beat the master-chief three straight after that, Clark remembered with pride.

Is that him?" Provalov asked.

"We don't have a photograph," his sergeant reminded him. "But he fits the general description." And he was walking to the right car. Several cameras would be snapping now to provide the photos.

They were both in a van parked half a block from the apartment building they were surveilling. Both men were using binoculars, green, rubber-coated military-issue.

The guy looked about right. He'd come off the building's elevator, and had left the right floor. It had been established earlier in the evening that one Ivan Yurievich Koniev lived on the eighth floor of this upscale apartment building. There had not been time to question his neighbors, which had to be done carefully, in any case. There was more than the offchance that this Koniev/Suvorov's neighbors were, as he was reputed to be, former KGB, and thus asking them questions could mean alerting the subject of their investigation. This was not an ordinary subject, Provalov kept reminding himself.

The car the man got into was a rental. There was a private automobile registered to one Koniev, Ian Yurievich, at this address, a Mercedes C-cla.s.s, and who was to say what other cars he might own under another ident.i.ty? Provalov was sure he'd have more of those, and they'd all be very carefully crafted. The Koniev ID certainly was. KGB had trained its people thoroughly.

The sergeant in the driver's seat started up the van's motor and got on the radio. Two other police cars were in the immediate vicinity, both manned by pairs of experienced investigators.

"Our friend is moving. The blue rental car," Provalov said over the radio. Both of his cars radioed acknowledgments.

The rental car was a Fiat-a real one made in Turin rather than the Russian copy made at Togliattistad, one of the few special economic projects of the Soviet Union that had actually worked, after a fashion. Had it been selected for its agility, Provalov wondered, or just because it was a cheap car to rent? There was no knowing that right now. Koniev/Suvorov pulled out, and the first tail car formed up with him, half a block behind, while the second was half a block in front, because even a KGB-trained intelligence officer rarely looked for a tail in front of himself. A little more time and they might have placed a tracking device on the Fiat, but they hadn't had it, nor the darkness required. If he returned to his apartment, they'd do it late tonight, say about four in the morning. A radio beeper with a magnet to hold it onto the inside of the rear b.u.mper; its antenna would hang down like a mouse's tail, virtually invisible. Some of the available technology Provalov was using had originally been used to track suspected foreign spies around Moscow, and that meant it was pretty good, at least by Russian standards.

Following the car was easier than he'd expected. Three trail cars helped. Spotting a single-car tail was not overly demanding. Two could also be identified, since the same two would switch off every few minutes. But three shadow cars broke up the pattern nicely, and, KGB-trained or not, Koniev/Suvorov was not superhuman. His real defense lay in concealing his ident.i.ty, and cracking that had been a combination of good investigation and luck-but cops knew about luck. KGB, on the other hand, didn't. In their mania for organization, their training program had left it out, perhaps because trusting to luck was a weakness that could lead to disaster in the field. That told Provalov that Koniev/Suvorov hadn't spent that much time in field operations. In the real world of working the street, you learned such things in a hurry.

The tailing was conducted at extreme range, over a block, and the city blocks were large ones here. The van had been specially equipped for it. The license-plate holders were triangular in cross-section, and at the flip of a switch one could switch from among three separate pairs of tags. The lights on the front of the vehicle were paired as well, and so one could change the light pattern, which was what a skilled adversary would look for at night. Switch them once or twice when out of sight of his rearview mirror, and he'd have to be a genius to catch on. The most difficult job went with the car doing the front-tail, since it was hard to read Koniev/Suvorov's mind, and when he made an unexpected turn, the lead car then had to scurry about under the guidance of the trailing shadow cars to regain its leading position. All of the militiamen on this detail, however, were experienced homicide investigators who'd learned how to track the most dangerous game on the planet: human beings who'd displayed the willingness to take another life. Even the stupid murderers could have animal cunning, and they learned a lot about police operations just from watching television. That made some of his investigations more difficult than they ought to have been, but in a case like this, the additional difficulty had served to train his men more thoroughly than any academy training would have done.

"Turning right," his driver said into his radio. "Van takes the lead." The leading trail car would proceed to the next right turn, make it, and then race to resume its leading position. The trailing car would drop behind the van, falling off the table for a few minutes before resuming its position. The trail car was a Fiat-clone from Togliattistad, by far the most common private-pa.s.senger auto in Russia, and therefore fairly anonymous, with its dirty off-white paint job.

"If that's his only attempt at throwing us off, he's very confident of himself."

"True," Provalov agreed. "Let's see what else he does."

The "what else" took place four minutes later. The Fiat took another right turn, this one not onto a cross-street, but into the underpa.s.s of another apartment building, one that straddled an entire block. Fortunately, the lead trail car was already on the far side of the building, trying to catch up with the Fiat, and had the good fortune to see Koniev/Suvorov appear thirty meters in front.

"We have him," the radio crackled. "We'll back off somewhat."

"Go!" Provalov told his driver, who accelerated the van to the next corner. Along the way, he toggled the switch to flip the license plates and change the headlight pattern, converting the van into what at night would seem a new vehicle entirely.

"He is confident," Provalov observed five minutes later. The van was now in close-trail, with the lead trail car behind the van, and the other surveillance vehicle close behind that one. Wherever he was going, they were on him. He'd run his evasion maneuver, and a clever one it had been, but only one. Perhaps he thought that one such SDR-surveillance-detection run-was enough, that if he were being trailed it would only be a single vehicle, and so he'd run that underpa.s.s, eyes on the rearview mirror, and spotted nothing. Very good, the militia lieutenant thought. It was a pity he didn't have his American FBI friend along. The FBI could scarcely have done this better, even with its vast resources. It didn't hurt that his men knew the streets of Moscow and its suburbs as well as any taxi driver.

"He's getting dinner and a drink somewhere," Provalov's driver observed. "He'll pull over in the next kilometer."

"We shall see," the lieutenant said, thinking his driver right. This area had ten or eleven upscale eateries. Which would his quarry choose . . . ?

It turned out to be the Prince Michael of Kiev, a Ukrainian establishment specializing in chicken and fish, known also for its fine bar. Koniev/Suvorov pulled over and allowed the restaurant's valet to park his vehicle, then walked in.

"Who's the best dressed among us?" Provalov asked over the radio.

"You are, Comrade Lieutenant." His other two teams were attired as working-cla.s.s people, and that wouldn't fly here. Half of the Prince Michael of Kiev's clientele were foreigners, and you had to dress well around such people-the restaurant saw to that. Provalov jumped out half a block away and walked briskly to the canopied entrance. The doorman admitted him after a look-in the new Russia, clothing made the man more than in most European nations. He could have flashed his police ID, but that might not be a good move. Koniev/Suvorov might well have some of the restaurant staff reporting to him. That was when he had a flash of imagination. Provalov immediately entered the men's lavatory and pulled out his cellular phone.

"h.e.l.lo?" a familiar voice said on picking up the receiver.

"Mishka?"

"Oleg?" Reilly asked. "What can I do for you?"

"Do you know a restaurant called the Prince Michael of Kiev?"

"Yeah, sure. Why?"