Charon was an extraordinary man, for sure, with, perhaps, merely a single flaw.

The guy was guilty of treason.

Back up a bit. As was common knowledge, over half the staff of the Soviet embassy in Washington were intelligence agents under direct control of the KGB. One of these agents, a medium-ranker named Tuholske who worked in the legal counsel's office, had secretly defected years earlier.

Though hardly privy to everything that went through the embassy, he was occasionally able to answer on some interesting tidbits for the U.S. Not twelve hours earlier, Tuholske had reported to his control that he had encoded a message to the Kremlin reporting one Frederick Donald Charon offering to sell some unspecified but highly classified defense information for a great deal of-money. Was Moscow interested? Probably. Washington sure as hell was.

The fact that the intelligence was, in fact, three weeks old was unfortunate but unavoidable.

Tuholske was under strict orders to make contact only on a rigidly randomized monthly schedule, as a precaution against his being discovered. What made things more difficult, more urgent, was that Charon's present whereabouts were unknown, and inquiries through normal channels had been uniformly stonewalled by DonCo personnel.

This softprobe, therefore, had two purposes.

One was to secure hard evidence of Charon's evident treason. The other was to discover his whereabouts, hopefully in time for a regular field agent to interdict the scientist before he could carry through on his offer to the Russians. And the key to both goals was behind that locked door.