"Tell the Air Force to have another G go over to Warsaw in case Scott has to fly to Moscow on the sly."

"Not a bad idea. They'll probably park it at some air force base or something." Van Damm went off to make the phone call.

"Anything else, Ellen?" Ryan asked his secretary.

"Need one?"

"Yeah, before Cathy and I wing off into the sunset." Actually, they were heading east, but Mrs. Sumter understood. She handed Ryan his last cigarette of the day.

"d.a.m.n," Ryan breathed with his first puff. He'd be getting a call from Moscow sure as h.e.l.l-wouldn't he? That depended on how quickly they digested the information, or maybe Sergey would wait for the morning to show it to President Grushavoy. Would he? In Washington, something that hot would be graded CRITIC and shoved under the President's nose inside twenty minutes, but different countries had different rules, and he didn't know what the Russians did. For d.a.m.ned sure he'd be hearing from one of them before he stepped off the plane at Warsaw. But for now . . . He stubbed the smoke out, reached inside his desk for the breath spray, and zapped his mouth with the acidic stuff before leaving the office and heading outside-the West Wing and the White House proper are not connected by an indoor corridor, due to some architectural oversight. In any case, inside six minutes he was on the residential level, watching the ushers organize his bags. Cathy was there, trying to supervise, under the eyes of the Secret Service as well, who acted as though they worried about having a bomb slipped in. But paranoia was their job. Ryan walked over to his wife. "You need to talk to Andrea."

"What for?"

"Stomach trouble, she says."

"Uh-oh." Cathy had suffered from queasiness with Sally, but that was ages ago, and it hadn't been severe. "Not really much you can do about it, you know."

"So much for medical progress," Jack commented. "She probably could use some girl-girl support anyway."

Cathy smiled. "Oh, sure, womanly solidarity. So, you're going to bond with Pat?"

Jack grinned back at her. "Yeah, maybe he'll teach me to shoot a pistol better."

"Super," SURGEON observed dryly.

"Which dress for the big dinner?" POTUS asked FLOTUS.

"The light-blue one."

"Slinky," Jack said, touching her arm.

The kids showed up then, shepherded up to the bedroom level by their various detail leaders, except for Kyle, who was carried by one of his lionesses. Leaving the kids was never particularly easy, though all concerned were somewhat accustomed to it. The usual kisses and hugs took place, and then Jack took his wife's hand and led her to the elevator.

It let them off at the ground level, with a straight walk out to the helicopter pad. The VH-3 was there, with Colonel Malloy at the controls. The Marines saluted, as they always did. The President and First Lady climbed inside and buckled into the comfortable seats, under the watchful eyes of a Marine sergeant, who then went forward to report to the pilot in the right-front seat.

Cathy enjoyed helicopter flight more than her husband did, since she flew in one twice a day. Jack was no longer afraid of it, but he did prefer driving a car, which he hadn't been allowed to do in months. The Sikorsky lifted up gently, pivoted in the air, and headed off to Andrews. The flight took about ten minutes. The helicopter alighted close to the VC-25A, the Air Force's version of the Boeing 747; it was just a few seconds to the stairs, with the usual TV cameras to mark the event.

"Turn and wave, honey," Jack told Cathy at the top of the steps. "We might make the evening news."

"Again?" Cathy grumped. Then she waved and smiled, not at people, but at cameras. With this task completed, they went inside the aircraft and forward to the presidential compartment. There they buckled in, and were observed to do so by an Air Force NCO, who then told the pilot it was okay to spool up the engines and taxi to the end of Runway Zero-one-right. Everything after that was ordinary, including the speech from the pilot, followed by the usual, stately takeoff roll of the big Boeing, and the climb out to thirty-eight thousand feet. Aft, Ryan was sure, everyone was comfortable, because the worst seat on this aircraft was as good as the best first-cla.s.s seat on any airline in the world. On the whole this seemed a serious waste of the taxpayers' money, but to the best of his knowledge no taxpayer had ever complained very loudly.

The expected happened off the coast of Maine.

"Mr. President?" a female voice asked.

"Yeah, Sarge?"

"Call for you, sir, on the STU. Where do you want to take it?"

Ryan stood. "Topside."

The sergeant nodded and waved. "This way, sir."

"Who is it?"

"The DCI."

Ryan figured that made sense. "Let's get Secretary Adler in on this, too."

"Yes, sir," she said as he started up the spiral stairs.

Upstairs, Ryan settled into a working-type seat vacated for him by an Air Force NCO who handed him the proper phone. "Ed?"

"Yeah, Jack. Sergey called."

"Saying what?"

"He thinks it's a good idea you coming to Poland. He requests a high-level meeting, on the sly if possible."

Adler took the chair next to Ryan and caught the comment.

"Scott, feel like a hop to Moscow?"

"Can we do it quietly?" SecState asked.

"Probably."

"Then, yes. Ed, did you field the NATO suggestion?"

"Not my turf to try that, Scott," the Director of Central Intelligence replied.

"Fair enough. Think they'll spring for it?"

"Three-to-one, yes."

"I'll agree with that," Ryan concurred. "Golovko will like it, too."

"Yeah, he will, once he gets over the shock," Adler observed, with irony in his voice.

"Okay, Ed, tell Sergey that we are amenable to a covert meeting. SecState flying into Moscow for consultations. Let us know what develops."

"Will do."

"Okay, out." Ryan set the handset down and turned to Adler. "Well?"

"Well, if they spring for it, China will have something to think about." This statement was delivered with a dollop of hope.

The problem, Ryan thought once again as he stood, is that Klingons don't think quite the same way we do.

The bugs had them all smirking. Suvorov/Koniev had picked up another expensive hooker that night, and her acting abilities had played out in the proper noises at the proper moments. Or maybe he was really that good in bed, Provalov wondered aloud, to the general skepticism of the others in the surveillance van. No, the others thought, this girl was too much of a professional to allow herself to get into it that much. They all thought that was rather sad, lovely as she was to look at. But they knew something their subject didn't know. This girl had been a "dangle," prebriefed to meet Suvorov/Koniev.

Finally the noise subsided, and they heard the distinctive snap of an American Zippo lighter, and the usual post-s.e.x silence of a sated man and a (simulatedly) satisfied woman.

"So, what sort of work do you do, Vanya?" the female voice asked, showing the expected professional interest of an expensive hooker in a wealthy man she might wish to entertain again.

"Business" was the answer.

"What sort?" Again, just the right amount of interest. The good news, Provalov thought, was that she didn't need coaching. The Sparrow School must have been fairly easy to operate, he realized. Women did this sort of thing from instinct.

"I take care of special needs for special people," the enemy spy answered. His revelation was followed by a feminine laugh.

"I do that, too, Vanya."

"There are foreigners who need special services which I was trained to handle under the old regime."

"You were KGB? Really?" Excitement in her voice. This girl was good.

"Yes, one of many. Nothing special about it."

"To you, perhaps, but not to me. Was there really a school for women like me? Did KGB train women to . . . to take care of the needs of men?"

A man's laugh this time: "Oh, yes, my dear. There was such a school. You would have done well there."

Now the laugh was coquettish. "As well as I do now?"

"No, not at what you charge."

"But am I worth it?" she asked.

"Easily" was the satisfied answer.

"Would you like to see me again, Vanya?" Real hope, or beautifully simulated hope, in the question.

"Da, I would like that very much, Maria."

"So, you take care of people with special needs. What needs are those?" She could get away with this because men so enjoyed to be found fascinating by beautiful women. It was part of their act of worship at this particular altar, and men always went for it.

"Not unlike what I was trained to do, Maria, but the details need not concern you."

Disappointment: "Men always say that," she grumped. "Why do the most interesting men have to be so mysterious?"

"In that is our fascination, woman," he explained. "Would you prefer that I drove a truck?"

"Truck drivers don't have your. . . your manly abilities," she replied, as if she'd learned the difference.

"A man could get hard just listening to this b.i.t.c.h," one of the FSS officers observed.

"That's the idea," Provalov agreed. "Why do you think she can charge so much?"

"A real man need not pay for it."

"Was I that good?" Suvorov/Koniev asked in their headphones.

"Any better and I would have to pay you, Vanya," she replied, with joy in her voice. Probably a kiss went along with the proclamation.

"No more questions, Maria. Let it lie for now," Oleg Gregoriyevich urged to the air. She must have heard him.

"You know how to make a man feel like a man," the spy/a.s.sa.s.sin told her. "Where did you learn this skill?"

"It just comes naturally to a woman," she cooed.

"To some women, perhaps." Then the talking stopped, and in ten minutes, the snoring began.

"Well, that's more interesting than our normal cases," the FSS officer told the others.

"You have people checking out the bench?"

"Hourly." There was no telling how many people delivered messages to the dead-drop, and they probably weren't all Chinese nationals. No, there'd be a rat-line in this chain, probably not a long one, but enough to offer some insulation to Suvorov's handler. That would be good fieldcraft, and they had to expect it. So, the bench and its dead-drop would be checked out regularly, and in that surveillance van would be a key custom-made to fit the lock on the drop-box, and a photocopier to make a duplicate of the message inside. The FSS had also stepped up surveillance of the Chinese Emba.s.sy. Nearly every employee who came outside had a shadow now. To do this properly meant curtailing other counterespionage operations in Moscow, but this case had a.s.sumed priority over everything else. It would soon become even more important, but they didn't know that yet.

How many engineers do we have available?" Bondarenko asked Aliyev in the east Siberian dawn.

"Two regiments not involved with the road-building," the operations officer answered.

"Good. Get them all down here immediately to work on the camouflage on these bunkers, and to set up false ones on the other side of these hills. Immediately, Andrey."

"Yes, General, I'll get them right on it."

"I love the dawn, the most peaceful time of day."

"Except when the other fellow uses it for his attack." Dawn was the universal time for a major offensive, so that one had all the light of the day to pursue it.

"If they come, it will be right up this valley."

"Yes, it will."

"They will shoot up the first line of defenses-what they think they are, that is," Bondarenko predicted, pointing. The first line was composed of seemingly real bunkers, made of rebarred concrete, but the gun tubes sticking out of them were fake. Whatever engineer had laid out these fortifications had been born with an eye for terrain worthy of Alexander of Macedon. They appeared to be beautifully sited, but a little too much so. Their positioning was a little too predictable, and they were visible, if barely so, to the other side, and something barely visible would be the first target hit. There were even pyrotechnic charges in the false bunkers, so that after a few direct hits they'd explode, and really make the enemy feel fine for having hit them. Whoever had come up with that idea had been a genius of a military engineer.

But the real defenses on the front of the hills were tiny observation posts whose buried phone lines led back to the real bunkers, and beyond them to artillery positions ten or more kilometers back. Some of these were old, also pre-sited, but the rockets they launched were just as deadly today as they'd been in the 1940s, design progeny of the Katushka artillery rockets the Germans had learned to hate. Then came the direct-fire weapons. The first rank of these were the turrets of old German tanks. The sights and the ammunition still worked, and the crewmen knew how to use them, and they had escape tunnels leading to vehicles that would probably allow them to survive a determined attack. The engineers who had laid this line out were probably all dead now, and General Bondarenko hoped they'd been buried honorably, as soldiers deserved. This line wouldn't stop a determined attack-no fixed line of defenses could accomplish that-but it would be enough to make an enemy wish he'd gone somewhere else.

But the camouflage needed work, and that work would be done at night. A high-flying aircraft tracing over the border with a side-looking camera could see far into his country and take thousands of useful, pretty pictures, and the Chinese probably had a goodly collection of such pictures, plus whatever they could get from their own satellites, or from the commercial birds that anyone could employ now for money- "Andrey, tell intelligence to see if we can determine if the Chinese have accessed commercial photo satellites."

"Why bother? Don't they have their own-"

"We don't know how good their reconsats are, but we do know that the new French ones are as good as anything the Americans had up until 1975 or so, and that's good enough for most purposes."

"Yes, General." Aliyev paused. "You think something is going to happen here?"

Bondarenko paused, frowning as he stared south over the river. He could see into China from this hilltop. The ground looked no different, but for political reasons it was alien land, and though the inhabitants of that land were no different ethnically from the people native to his land, the political differences were enough to make the sight of them a thing of concern, even fear, for him. He shook his head.