“Okay,” Lia said at last. “It’s clear.”

Sergei Alekseev rolled the door far enough aside that they could enter. He was scared. Lia could almost smell his fear, could feel it in the way he stared and started at shadows, the way he moved, hunched over and rigid. Replacing the IR viewer, on the ground beside the door she placed a motion sensor, like several dozen button-sized devices she’d already dropped around the area. Only then did she extract a small flashlight and switch it on. “Which way?”

“Over here,” Alekseev said, pointing. “I think.”

“You’d better know.”

“Da. This way.”

Before moving deeper into the darkness, Lia tried her communicator again. “ Verona,” she said aloud. “This is Juliet.”

A burst of static sounded in her ear, loud enough to make her wince. She thought she heard a voice somewhere behind the audio snow, but couldn’t make out the words.

It would help if Romeo were here. Where the hell was he, anyway? With a small satellite dish on top of one of the surrounding buildings, they might have a chance of punching through this interference.

“ Verona,” she said again. “Juliet. Initiating Magpie!”

Again, static.

Damn…

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade , Maryland 1624 hours EDT

“What do you mean, we’ve lost her?” William Rubens demanded.

“We’re just getting fragments, sir,” Sarah Cassidy replied from her console. “Her signal is intermittent. It might be the sunspots.”

Rubens bit back a most unprofessional word. Sunspots…

Desk Three’s communications system depended upon a necklace of military comm satellites parked in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the equator. Lia currently was working pretty far north-at sixty degrees north, in fact, the same latitude as the southern tip of Greenland. That meant that in the city of St. Petersburg, the comsats hung low in the southern sky, subject to interference from buildings, transmission lines, and any other horizon-blocking obstacles.