Sergei Golitsin, deputy director of the KGB, glowered and cracked another knuckle. He cared less for what this idiot thought. "Tell me you've finally found where Yeltsin's money's coming from."

"Okay. We have."

"About time. Where?"

"It's a little hard to believe."

"I'll believe anything these days. Try me."

"Alex Konevitch."

The deputy director gave him a mean look. After a full year of shrugged shoulders, wasted effort, and lame excuses, the triumphant tone in his aide's voice annoyed him. "And am I supposed to know this name?" he snapped.

"Well, no… you're not… really."

"Then tell me about… what's this name?"

"Alex Konevitch." Yutskoi stuffed his nose into the thick folder, shuffled a few papers, and withdrew and fixated on one typed sheet. "Young. Only twenty-two. Born and raised in an obscure village in the Ural Mountains you've never heard of. Both parents are educators, mother dead, father formerly the head of a small, unimportant college. Alex was a physics student at Moscow University."

Yutskoi paused for the reaction he knew was coming. "Only twenty two," his boss commented with a furious scowl. "He ran circles around you idiots."

"I've got photographs," said Yutskoi, ignoring that outburst. He withdrew a few blown-up eight-by-ten color photos from his thick file and splayed them like a deck of cards before his boss. Golitsin walked across the room, bent forward, adjusted his rimless glasses, and squinted.

The shots were taken, close up, by a breathtakingly attractive female agent who had entered Konevitch's office only the day before on the pretext of looking for a job. Olga's specialty was honeypot operations, the luring of victims into the sack for entrapment or the value of their pillow talk. She could do shy Japanese schoolgirls, a kittenish vixen, the frosty teacher in need of a role reversal, a doctor, a nurse, a wild cowgirl-whatever men lusted after in their most flamboyant yearnings, Olga could be it, and then some.