Mosher nodded and glanced at Grafton to see if he had any questions. He didn’t. Mosher thanked the techs, and they gathered their stuff in their arms and left, closing the door behind them.

“That ALQ-199 is quite a gadget,” Mosher said.

“It is until someone steals the software and sells or gives it to the Russians,” Grafton remarked. “After your attack on Syria, I have a sneaking suspicion that acquiring an operable ALQ-199 or the software that drives it became the number one priority of the Russians.”

“And the Iranians…” Dag Mosher mused.

“And the North Koreans and Chinese. We could make a list.”

“So how are we going to get them one?”

A smile flitted across Jake Grafton’s face. “I am sure you and I can think of something,” he murmured.

A week after the destruction of the Syrian reactor, a tall, lean man in an expensive suit stepped out of a hotel in Tehran and, despite the severe air pollution, lit a cigarette. He had only had a few puffs, however, when a black limousine pulled up in front of the hotel. A man got out of the right front seat and held open the rear passenger door. The tall man flipped his cigarette onto the sidewalk and climbed in.

The tall man was Janos Ilin, and he was a very senior officer in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki), the bureaucratic successor to the First Chief Directorate of the Soviet-era KGB.

After an hour’s creep through horrendous traffic, the limo eased to a stop in front of the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense. The man on the curb who opened the door was in his late twenties and clean-shaven and wore a suit without a tie. Ilin noticed a bulge under his left armpit.