The Disposable Man

Chapter 19

Georgi Padzhev smiled at me.

“Joseph Gunther-that I can recall without difficulty. Rarig and Corbin-Teich feel strange on the tongue. Dimitri, whatever possessed you to use Lew Corbin-Teich? It is so distinctly odd. I thought the idea was to come up with something out of the melting pot-something to help you disappear.”

Lew didn’t answer. Rarig glared at Padzhev and said, “Save it, Georgi. What’re we doing here?”

But Padzhev apparently needed to dominate us a bit more, which, considering we were all tied to our chairs, seemed a little superfluous. “John Rarig I like. It is not so peculiar. It looked good in that New York Times article-very masculine. Much better than Philip Petty. I’m assuming that was fictitious, also?”

Rarig merely sighed, seeing the futility of a response.

We were in a motel room, somewhere between Shelburne and South Burlington-the three of us plus Sam and Willy-all with our hands and feet secured with coat hangers-crude, effective, and very uncomfortable. Padzhev was flanked by two silent men with guns. A couple more were outside. A television set, its volume muted, was tuned to a local news program. Images of Middlebury, pulsating with the red and blue lights of emergency vehicles, played over and over again.

We’d driven here in three cars, including Sam’s, and had entered the room without formalities, indicating it had been rented beforehand. It was one of many cheap motels lining Route 7, which was interspersed with the shopping malls, car lots, and fast-food franchises that give the area its anonymous identity. In a state as small as Vermont, where newcomers-foreigners especially-tend to stick out, this spot was almost unique with its urban tendency to not notice or care. Padzhev had chosen well, at least for the short term.

He sat at the end of one of two beds, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped before him, looking at us contemplatively. “What are you doing here? This is a good question. Do you have any idea of what has been going on?”

“Starting with Antonov?” I asked.

He shook his head slightly. “Antonov came over here because I wanted to speak with John Rarig-an old man’s silly interest in the past, as it turned out. A folly. I meant the rest of it.”

I wanted to draw him out-have him paint the picture for us. Rarig, his old cold warrior juices stirred, obviously thought otherwise.

“Edvard Kyrov took advantage of that folly to get you out from behind your defenses, knowing you wouldn’t leave Antonov unavenged.”

Padzhev nodded appreciatively. “Did you hide his body to protect me, John?”

Rarig’s face hardened. “More to spare myself some grief.”

I moved to defuse the tension slightly. “He was afraid Antonov had been dumped on his front lawn as some kind of warning, or a threat,” I explained in a neutral voice.

Padzhev straightened, cupping his cheek in his palm. “There is a good deal of paranoia among people like us. It was an understandable reaction.”

He rose and began pacing the floor. “Fortunately, it served both ends. Kyrov laid his plans carefully and well. Had it not been for your unintentional meddling,” here he looked at Rarig, “I and my men would have been dead long ago, ambushed as we appeared at your inn to inquire about poor Antonov. Sad to say, that piece of good luck has not been enough. Certain elements have been conspiring simultaneously against me back in Russia, resulting in my having to confront them here, or not at all.”

“You’re talking about a showdown with Kyrov,” Rarig challenged, his eyes bright.

Padzhev stopped pacing. “Yes. If I do not face him here, I will never survive the trip back, as you said, behind my defenses. That door has been shut tight.”

I thought back to the countless conversations I’d had trying to root out this simple story-through all the complexities that had continuously blocked my way.

“So it was Kyrov who framed me?” I blurted. “To keep me out of the way and distract everyone from the Antonov case?” Despite the lies I’d been fed, I was still hoping I’d recognize the truth when I finally heard it.

Padzhev looked at me almost pitifully. “No. That was me. A couple of my men bypassed your home’s security system, placed the gem in your pocket, staged the burglary, and let your colleagues leap to conclusions, helped, I must admit, by a small donation to Henri Alonzo’s bank account, in exchange for some theatrical raving. I needed breathing room as much as Kyrov.”

He suddenly looked amused. “Although you almost upset the applecart, pulling out your gun in the middle of the street and waving it around. You scared poor Nicolai half to death.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

He studied my expression for a moment, and then asked, “Why did you do that, incidentally? He was only tailing you. It seemed like such an overreaction.”

I closed my eyes-no wonder he’d vanished without a trace. “What about the attempt on my life in Washington?” I asked.

Now he was the one looking confused. “What attempt? That would not have served me in any way.”

“Nicolai didn’t try to kill me there?”

“No. He’s never been to Washington. He was tailing you home so he could plant the brooch later.”

“Snowden arranged the hit on you,” Rarig stated flatly.

But Padzhev gave him a quizzical look. “There’s a name from the past. Why would he?”

“Stop it,” I shouted in frustration, sensing the same fruitless cycle starting over again. “What’re you going to do with us? Why’re we being held?”

Padzhev sat back down. “Yes, well, that is pertinent enough. I need your help.”

For the first time, Willy stirred. He laughed sharply and said, “Right-that’s pretty fucking likely.”

Georgi Padzhev smiled again. “It might be. Lieutenant Gunther, I gather you have a particular friend named Gail. Isn’t that correct?”

“You son of a bitch,” I said softly.

“Perhaps,” he only partially agreed. “But I need to be extremely practical at the moment. As you might imagine, I have much to lose right now, so I’m inclined to be quite ruthless. Your friend Gail hasn’t a hope of living unless you lend me a hand. That goes for all of you.”

“I don’t think so,” Willy said. “She may be his big squeeze. She means squat to me.”

Padzhev didn’t even look at him. “Quite. So, Lieutenant, do we proceed?”

“Doing what?” I asked. “I’m not in a position to help anyone do anything.”

“There you are mistaken. You have access to information, to manpower, to equipment. You also have a knowledge of the local terrain and its occupants. For outsiders like myself and my companions, those are significant assets. And it is my belief that so long as I control Ms. Zigman, you and your colleagues-regardless of any belligerent outbursts-will be of assistance.”

Sammie finally broke her long silence. “How do we know you have her?”

Padzhev nodded to one of his men, who stepped out of the room, leaving the door barely ajar. Moments later, the man I’d pulled my gun on in traffic stepped inside. In the bright light, the similarity between him and my supposed Washington mugger was vague at best. But I no longer cared. Next to him was Gail, her hands tied behind her back, her mouth covered with tape. They filled the doorway long enough for us to recognize her, and then they vanished. Only the memory of her eyes boring into mine remained.

The effect of this on me at first was too big to handle. Seeing Gail trussed up, her eyes filled with desperate appeal, I knew her panicky memories, like mine, were filled with images of past violence and impotence. It went beyond anger, frustration, or shock. Combined with the psychological beating I’d already taken, it felt like a confirmation of doom.

But only for a moment.

During the next few minutes, like the survivor of a presumed lethal fall, I began feeling the initial, choking upsurge of fear draining out of me, to be replaced by a numb single-mindedness. The legal and moral complexities that had once all but stopped me cold faded next to my need to help Gail. With one move, Georgi Padzhev had suddenly simplified my life. It occurred to me, in one of those odd asides one often makes amid crisis, that he must have been quite good at his job.

“What would you like me to do?” I asked him, surprised at the steadiness of my voice.

He smiled at his success. “I need more than just you, Lieutenant.” He eyed Sammie and Willy behind me.

Sammie didn’t hesitate. “I’m in,” she said, sounding stronger than I knew she felt.

“You can go fuck yourself,” was Willy’s response.

Padzhev’s pleasure merely increased. “Excellent. I will share with you a little of my predicament, so you can see for yourselves what I need.”

He resumed his restless pacing. “I am, as they say, a stranger in a strange land-land that Edvard Kyrov chose well before my arrival. I am hoping that advantage has also made him overconfident.”

He paused to look at me directly. “He has been whittling away at my forces from the moment I arrived, and I think he may be about to launch a final assault, which he will no doubt do as soon as he learns of my precise whereabouts. What I hope to do is to use that momentum to his disadvantage-to select a site, attract him into it, and eliminate him using means he won’t suspect I have.”

“And which you’re hoping we’ll supply,” I suggested.

He bowed in appreciation. “Exactly. What I’m looking for is the type of device your police forces use to track your opponents, along with the expertise to operate it.”

Willy burst out laughing. “A bug? You want us to bug the guys who’re after you? You been watching too many movies.”

“Actually,” I quickly added, and I hoped diplomatically, “what you’re referring to is usually only available to larger departments. We’ve never had anything like that.”

Padzhev gave us a long appraising look, obviously reassessing our usefulness.

I tried to buy us a little time. “What did you have in mind, anyway? How were you thinking of planting them on Kyrov’s people?”

He frowned and waved his hand idly. “Oh, we have a fairly good idea where a couple of them are, from time to time. Our numbers aren’t great enough to turn that to any tactical advantage, but if we could get close enough to attach such a device to even one of their vehicles, then we might use it to find the others until, eventually, they all could be either tagged or eliminated.”

He was rubbing his chin with one of his knuckles, lost in his own thoughts. The unlikeliness of his scheme suggested the limitation of his options-a point belied by his calm manner-and it occurred to me that if, in fact, we did turn out to be useless to him, our lives were basically forfeit. He was struggling to stay alive-not to win some abstract advantage over his enemy-which, as ironies had it, meant it was up to us to supply him with hope.

Luckily, Sammie did just that. “I have an idea,” she said, the nervousness in her voice showing she’d reached the same conclusion I had.

Padzhev looked up at her. “Yes?”

“There is a way to track people using satellites. It’s called the Global Positioning System, or GPS-”

Padzhev scowled. “We are fully aware of what it is, Miss. It is not my interest to know where I am on a map. I wish to know where they are.”

“I know, I know,” Sammie protested. “Let me finish. It’s not hard to turn that around-to plant a GPS transmitter on someone, and then receive that signal off a satellite to find out where he is. Biologists do it to track migration patterns.”

Padzhev’s expression cleared. “The collars they put on animals. Of course. And you have access to that equipment?”

Again, Willy laughed, but Sammie protested loudly. “Yes, we do. It’s not connected to our department, but I know where to get it.”

I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about. She had recently been involved in helping the Brattleboro selectmen establish new “no-fire zones” within the town borders, to limit the possibility of firearms accidents in and out of hunting season, but that had involved mapmaking, not GPS.

“How do you plan to do this?” Padzhev asked her.

She shook her head. “I tell you, you won’t need us anymore.”

His eyes narrowed. “I told you I needed your expertise as well.”

“And I don’t trust you farther than I could spit.”

He pursed his lips. When he spoke again, the tension in him was easier to see. “I don’t have time to negotiate. If you wish to die right now, fine. If you wish to live a little longer, then go get what you need. It is your choice to believe me or not, but I will tell you that if I make it out of your country alive, you will be set free. What I’m asking you to do will be in the best interests of all of us. Edvard Kyrov and his people will not be so inclined. It is your choice.”

“I want the Lieutenant with me,” Sammie said.

Padzhev didn’t hesitate. “Fine, but I keep all the others, and I give you an escort.” He leaned forward and cocked his head toward the TV set. “And keep this in mind: there are no guarantees. Kyrov is no longer the only person looking for us. Everything depends on your speediness. The more time you take, the more imperiled we all become, and I will not hesitate to eliminate your friends if I feel either Kyrov or the police are too close.”

I saw Sammie’s jaw harden as she stared back at him. “We’re wasting time.”

We drove back to Brattleboro in one of Padzhev’s cars, with Sammie and me in front and one of the Russian gunmen in the back. He didn’t say a word the entire trip, but neither of us assumed he couldn’t speak English. Not that we cared anyway. Our course had been chosen for us.

Which naturally made me think of how other people were faring.

“Does anyone in the department know you went up to Middlebury?” I asked.

I watched her in the dim glow of the dashboard. It wasn’t quite dawn, and we’d all been through the wringer. She was strained with fatigue and tension, and I wondered how much longer she could function on nerves alone.

“Ron was supposed to be faking things for us,” she said. “He refused not to play some part, and we thought we’d be back before he got into trouble. Considering the shootout, though, I think we can kiss that idea good-bye. Plus, not only did Willy abandon his vehicle when he smacked that other car’s rear end, but he identified himself when he called for backup. The chief may’ve been playing silent partner to our little escapade, but he’s going to have a tough time covering for this one.”

“I am sorry,” I murmured.

Sammie’s voice took on a false heartiness. “Nothing to apologize for. You’ve been shafted from the start. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still doing my job.”

“That might not hold up in court.”

“Yeah, well… ” She turned toward me suddenly. “You’re going to have to keep a low profile when we hit town. Coffin made sure your picture’s plastered all over the place, like a regular Jesse James.”

“What’s the plan, by the way?” I asked. “Or does present company make that a bad question?”

For the first time in too long, she smiled broadly. “Hell, no. In fact, the more the merrier.” She looked up into the rearview mirror and said loudly, “Hey, Vladimir. You speak English? ’Cause you better be a part of this if you want your boss’s plan to work.”

The man’s response was slow and heavily accented. “My name is Anatoly.”

“Good. Pay attention. We’re going to hit up an outfit called Cartographic Technologies for what we need. They’re civilians-high-tech mapmakers. Came in on the wave of the computer revolution. They use mapping to piggyback other data-demographics, vegetation distribution, political affiliations, watersheds, even 911 addresses. They work in the same building we do, upstairs, and they got computers and printers and fancy Internet connections up the wazoo. What I’m thinking is, we approach them like this whole thing is a super secret, high-security undercover job-that all this publicity about Joe has been a smoke screen to get the drop on some bad guys. We can make ’em Russian and pretend you’re an adviser from the feds. You understand?”

Anatoly merely nodded.

“What makes you think they’ll have what we need?” I asked.

“They were the ones who documented the no-fire zones. We got friendly, since I like all that gadgetry, and they showed me a lot of the other stuff they do. That’s when I saw one of those transmitters.”

I was doubtful, but I kept it to myself. Whether she believed in her own plan or not, Sammie had bought us time, and right now that was good enough. If Padzhev was heading for the kind of fight he described, anything was possible, including our being able to get Gail and the others out of harm’s way.

It was still dark when we reached Brattleboro, and drizzling slightly-that predawn hour when, from my days as a young patrolman, I’d always envisioned the buildings and empty avenues as parts of an abandoned, life-size train set-an image enhanced by the traffic lights endlessly, quietly blinking, cautioning no one-blurry washes of red or yellow flashing dully on the scarred shiny surface of the streets.

Sammie headed toward Grove Street-and the entrance to the Municipal Building’s parking lot-but passed it by, pulling onto Williston just beyond-a rarely traveled, narrow, one-way street, which, after she’d killed our lights, turned as black as any urban back alley.

We moved silently on foot across the front of the intervening State Office Building to the edge of our parking lot, pausing in the gloom of the bordering trees to watch for any activity. Given the police department’s location on the ground floor, it seemed to me an enormous risk to use the rear entrance, even assuming the usual skeleton crew was hunkered down over coffee or filling out reports.

But that wasn’t Sammie’s intention. She led us not to the rear but to the side of the building and a broad metal fire escape leading up to a locked steel door on the second floor. There she paused, extracted a set of keys from her pocket, fitted one to the lock, and let us in.

She smiled at me as she quietly pulled the door to, explaining the unauthorized key. “Thought it might come in handy someday.”

The second floor was dimly lighted and as still as a tomb. The three of us walked halfway down its length before ducking into a dead-end alcove, stoppered by a glass-paned door marked “Cartographic Technologies.”

Sammie tried the knob, found it locked, and dug a wallet out of her back pocket. From it, she extracted a thin piece of rigid steel wire with a hook on the end. I wondered if she and Willy weren’t spending too much time together.

Instead of picking the lock, however-a movie stunt I’d never seen work in real life-she slipped the wire between the door and the jamb, searching for the lock’s button release mounted along the edge. There was a distinct snap; Sammie straightened, turned the knob, and ushered us across the threshold. Anatoly remained silent throughout, but I caught him giving Sammie an admiring glance.

We entered a single, large, high-ceilinged room, ghostly pale from the streetlights below filtering through a long wall of tall windows. The room’s center was occupied by a large table, strewn with dimly perceived papers, and all around the periphery, squatting like toadstools on every available flat surface, was a tight row of softly contoured, mismatched computers, monitors, printers, scanners, fax machines, and other things I couldn’t identify, all dark and silent except for a scattering of green and amber operational pilot lights that took us in like the eyes of patient beasts. There was a quiet, steady hum in the room and the faint odor of warm plastic.

“Now what?” I asked, still looking around.

“We wait till they show up,” Sammie answered. “There’s an old vault in the far corner there-they use it for storage-but it’d be a good place to stash ourselves, just in case someone else walks in.”

We carefully followed the direction she’d indicated, found the room-sized vault, and borrowed three office chairs to make ourselves comfortable, surrounded by piles of boxed documents and rank upon rank of rolled-up maps.

Three hours later, only Anatoly was left sitting in a chair. Sam and I had made beds of the boxes and were fast asleep when our silent companion shook us awake, his finger to his lips. We could hear outside the vault, now tainted with the pallor of early morning light, people entering the outer room, laughing, talking, and moving things around.

Sammie sat up, rubbed her eyes, and moved her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “Christ,” she whispered. “Wish I could brush my teeth.”

Yawning, she stood up, stretched, and added, “Let me go in first. Might cut down on the heart attacks.”

With her departure, Anatoly exhibited the first signs of nervousness I’d witnessed so far. He sidled up to the doorway, his face tense and his right hand under the flap of his jacket, resting, I was sure, on the butt of a gun.

After a small outburst of surprised chatter and a few laughs, Sammie stuck her head back into sight and invited us out.

Standing in the middle of the room were two very tall, slim women, both with bright red hair and freckles. I’d seen them before in the corridor-God knows they were hard to miss-but never realized they worked here.

Sammie made the introductions: “This is Abby and Judy Coven-the sister act of Cartographic Technologies. My boss, Joe Gunther, and our colleague Anatoly, who’s playing a little coy with his real identity.”

Abby, the one with the most hair-a flaming bush that almost engulfed her head-raised her eyebrows. “Ooh, that sounds interesting.”

Judy, a little shorter, and with straight hair in a pageboy, looked at me and added, “Especially in the company of the most wanted man in Windham County.” Her expression was considerably less appreciative than her sister’s.

Sammie scratched her cheek. “Yeah, well, that’s what we’d like to talk to you about. You expecting anybody this early? Any meetings or anything?”

Judy shook her head. “No, why?”

Sammie walked over to the front door, which was shielded from view by a freestanding room panel. “I was wondering if it would be all right to lock the door, just while we’re talking.”

Judy didn’t answer, but Abby was obviously intrigued. “Sure. We have a clean slate till eleven.”

We heard the lock snap shut, and Sammie reappeared, wearing her most affable smile. “Why don’t we all sit down?”

We ended up in a circle, parked on a variety of desk chairs, including the three we rescued from the vault. The arrangement reminded me of a therapy session.

Sammie cleared her throat. “The reason for all the cloak-and-dagger is that we’re working undercover-probably the biggest case any of us has ever been on. That’s why all the cock-and-bull about Joe. We had to make it look like he was on the run.”

“You did a pretty convincing job,” Judy said flatly.

“That was the point. If we hadn’t, he couldn’t’ve gotten in tight with the gang we’re after.”

Judy, like me, seemed to be trying to recall which television show this came from. “I hadn’t heard about any gangs,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have,” I spoke up. “We’re not talking about street thugs wearing colors. This is bigger, and more dangerous.” I jerked a thumb at Anatoly. “I don’t want to go into too many details, but since we’re asking for a favor, it’s the Russian Mafia. Anatoly brought it to our attention. Vermont isn’t great pickings for them, but it is a perfect place to lie low. And that’s something we want to stop.”

Judy still looked totally unconvinced. Her sister was smiling ear-to-ear. “This is great. What do you want from us?”

Sammie leaned forward in her chair. “Remember that GPS thing you showed me a while back-the satellite transmitter? We were hoping to use a few of those to track this gang’s cars.”

Judy surprised me by bursting out laughing. “This must be legit. Only the Brattleboro cops would think of bugging a car with a caribou collar. How in God’s name were you going to attach the thing? Wrap it around the bumper?”

Sammie was taken aback, but I took hope from Judy’s first show of interest. “Couldn’t we hide it in the trunk, or somehow attach it underneath?”

“You could, but it wouldn’t work. Those transmitters are line-of-sight devices. Their antennas have to be visible to the satellite for their signal to be picked up. They’d only work if you glued them to the roof.” She paused and added, “Which might actually work if they’re driving eighteen-wheelers, or some other tall truck.”

There was a disappointed silence in the room until I asked, “You said, ‘those’ transmitters. Did that imply there’re others?”

Abby smiled broadly, and before her sister could stop her, she blurted out, “Sure there are. We’ve got eight of them right here-”

Judy held up her hand. “Hold it. Hold it. How do we know what’s going on here? We can’t just give you a bunch of stuff and wave you out the door. Abby’s talking about cutting-edge equipment-the hardware equivalent of Beta copies-samples. Companies lend them to us so we can work out the kinks. If they get into the wrong hands, we’re in serious trouble.”

“By ‘wrong hands,’ you mean competitors, right?” I asked. “That wouldn’t be a problem here. These are crooks, not patent thieves.”

“And,” Sammie added, “we’ll draw up a document right here and now, assuming total liability.” I resisted knocking her on the head for that one, nodding in agreement instead.

Abby got to her feet. “Come on, Judy. Lighten up. You know darn well we’re expected to beat the shit out of those units-and lose ’em, too, if it comes to that. That’s why we got ’em in the first place, and we signed a waiver.”

She crossed the room to one of the cabinets, unlocked the top drawer, and returned with a plastic box. She opened it, extracted what looked like three small wafers, and laid one in each of our hands. “Latest technology. Designed to track birds in flight.”

I cradled it in my palm, barely feeling its weight. “This talks to a satellite?”

Abby looked pleased at my incredulity. “Yup. And-what’s better-it’s more powerful than the collar we showed Sammie. I can’t say we’ve ever put it in a car trunk, but the makers say it should work. We’ve only had ’em for a week or so.”

I held it up to the light and examined it more closely. I then fixed Judy Coven eye-to-eye. “They would be perfect.”

Judy bit her upper lip thoughtfully. “Abby’s right,” she finally admitted. “We’re not at risk as much as I said. I would like that document, though, in case things do go sour. Companies like ours are plowed under all the time by one lawsuit or another, and I don’t feel like joining them, especially over some deal you won’t tell us anything about.”

Sammie rolled her chair over to one of the desks and grabbed a sheet of paper. “Done.”

I turned the wafer over to Abby Coven. “How do they work, exactly?”

She dropped it back into the plastic box. “The tradeoff is the power supply. The larger units can emit pretty much a continuous signal, so the satellite can track it around the clock. Depending on the size and configuration of the battery, the unit will work from a few days to several months. These little guys can’t do that. They talk to the satellite periodically. The less they talk, the more the power source lasts. We heard they’ve used units kind of like these on monarch butterflies. ’Course, those emitted only once every few days, so they’d last for weeks. In any case, the rate of frequency can be programmed in.”

“And how are they picked up by you?”

This time, it was Judy who rolled her chair across the floor, stopping before one of the computers, which she switched on. “The technology is called GIS, for Geographical Information System. Just as an example, here’s a grid of downtown Brattleboro.” She tapped on the keyboard a few times, and brought up a colorful, slightly fuzzy version of a topo map, with the elevations marked in earth-colored hues, complete with a shadowing effect that made the screen look three-dimensional. I instantly recognized the confluence of the West and Connecticut Rivers, with the looming mass of Mount Wantastiquet hovering on the New Hampshire border.

“What we receive from the sending unit-via the satellite-,” Judy continued, “are the coordinates for latitude and longitude. Those are logged into the computer and appear on the screen as a single white blinking dot.”

A dot like what she’d just described magically presented itself. “I’m cheating here,” she said. “The units aren’t activated, so I just entered in some data. The fastest those wafers can work is once every ten minutes, so every ten minutes you’d get a new dot on the screen, assuming the unit was moved.”

“How long will the battery last at that rate?” I asked.

Judy looked up at me. “I don’t remember. We haven’t really fooled with these much.”

“A week,” said Abby from behind us. “That long enough?”

It wasn’t a question that bore much thought. “Should be,” I said.

I tapped the screen with my fingernail. “You can call up all of Vermont, just like you did Brattleboro?”

“Yup.”

I pointed to several small boxes containing numbers. “These are the coordinates?”

Judy hesitated. “That’s where they’d show up. This is fake, though-I mean, I wrote them in. Real data looks different. It fluctuates a lot. The Department of Defense corrupts all satellite-linked GPS readings somewhat-some kind of paranoid antimissile hangover from the Cold War. They call it ‘selective availability.’ Part of the program here corrects for that, though, so it’s nothing much to worry about.”

Anatoly spoke for the first time, slowly and carefully. “This is legal, outside the military?”

I laughed, thinking of how improbable that would seem to a lifelong resident of the old Soviet Union. “Yeah-pretty neat, huh?”

I turned back to both Coven sisters, suddenly concerned, and pointed at the oversize computer. “The problem is, though, that all this only works if you’ve got one of those and know how to work it. Isn’t that right?”

Judy’s hands fell from the keyboard and she looked at the screen in a new light. “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

“Where’re you going to be operating from?” Abby asked.

Sammie and I glanced at each other and then at Anatoly, who gave a barely perceptible shrug. “We don’t know yet. It might be dangerous, though. You couldn’t be there, if that’s what you were thinking.”

Abby smiled. “I like a good time, but I’m not that interested. Maybe we could manage it all from here and send you the results.”

That piqued Sammie’s interest. “How?”

“Simplest way would be over the Net-as e-mail. It would be slow, but unless you have the right equipment and a trained operator, I don’t see how else it would work. This way, all you’d need was a laptop with a modem and access to a phone line.”

“And you two at the other end,” I added. “I don’t know how that part would work. If things got hairy, you could be spending a lot of time in that chair.”

The Covens exchanged looks.

Anatoly pulled at my sleeve and whispered, “This is not good.”

I got up and walked with him to another part of the room, keeping my voice low. “Maybe not, but it’s all we got. You can stay here with them, babysit us, or tell your boss you canceled the whole idea on your own.”

He didn’t answer, his choice already clear.

“Could be good publicity,” Sammie was coaxing the two sisters.

I was amazed at her callousness. In point of fact, these women could also end up with their reputations and business ruined. But I added, almost instantaneously, “And maybe some compensation. I know better than to speak for the chief on financial matters, but we’ve found money before for emergencies like this.”

After a telling silence, Judy finally nodded. “Okay, what the hell. I’m assuming you don’t have a laptop?”

We all shook our heads.

“We’ll set you up with everything, then. Just make sure a full inventory is added to that document you drew up.”

Sammie laughed at the pure absurdity of the suggestion. “You got it.”