He wondered if he would be able to get a phone number from her before they reached London.

DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0024 hours

Lia DeFrancesca took a moment to run the palm-sized lock scanner along the entire perimeter of the door and around the lock itself, its powerful magnetic field probing for wiring or other signs of hidden electronic devices. The digital readout remained unchanging, indicating the presence of iron and steel but not of electric currents.

Slipping the scanner into a thigh pocket in her black field ops suit, she produced a set of lock picks and began to work at the ancient padlock securing the door’s hasp.

“Hurry; hurry,” her partner whispered with fierce urgency. “If we’re found…”

“Patience, Sergei,” she replied. “We don’t want to rush this.”

She was having more trouble with the rust than with the padlock’s mechanism. With a click, the lock snapped open, and she pulled it off the hasp.

A foghorn mourned in the damp night air. The warehouse loomed above the waterfront, overlooking Kozhevennaya Liniya to one side, the oily black waters of the southern mouth of the Lena River on the other. A chill and dripping fog shrouded their surroundings, muffling sound. Carefully she edged the sliding door open, but stopped after moving it only a couple of inches.

“What is it?” her companion asked. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer immediately, but pocketing the lock tools, she pulled out a cell phone and a length of flexible tubing, as thick as a soda straw. One end of the tubing attached to the cell phone; the other she inserted into the partly opened door to the warehouse, turning the fiber-optic cable this way and that to let her peer around the corners. On the phone’s screen, an image painted in blacks, greens, and yellows shifted and slid with the movements of her hand, giving her an infrared image of what lay beyond the door. She saw large open spaces… piles of crates… a trash can near the door… discarded junk… but no glow from warm-blooded humans lying in wait.