This was his nerve center, crammed with state-of-the-art electronics. The feeds from all the surveillance cameras were monitored here; all outgoing calls of a sensitive nature were routed through here for scrambling. Milos had spent a fortune on this room so he could stay in the Hamptons and still run his operations with security. But tonight none of it had helped.

Sometimes for effect he acted like a madman, as he’d done in the GEM conference room yesterday. But tonight was no act. He stalked back and forth, red-faced, punching the air, screaming his rage at these men for allowing this to happen. He knew it was not their fault, but he felt he had to loose this pressure inside him or explode into a thousand bleeding, twitching pieces.

Finally he wound down. He stood staring at his silent, white-faced men. He knew what they were thinking: would he make an example of one of them as he had in the past?

Nothing Milos would have liked better—make someone the fall guy and shoot him dead right here. But that would be a waste of a good man, and if he was going to find out who did this, he’d need every one of them.

“Does anyone have anything to say?” he said when the silence had stretched to the breaking point.

More silence.

“Have any of you noticed anyone strange hanging around, anyone snowing unusual interest? You, Vuk.” He singled out an ex-corporal from the Yugoslav army who liked to bleach his hair. The man blinked but otherwise remained calm. “You’ve been on patrol this week. You see anyone paying too much attention to the house?”

“No, sir,” he said. “Ivo and I ran off a man and his wife yesterday, but they were just walking on the beach. When they stopped to look, we moved them on. The wife didn’t want to go, but the man gave us no trouble.”

Milos nodded. “What is on the security cameras?” he said to Dositej, the surveillance man.

Dositej jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the half-dozen monitor screens in the surveillance booth. “I’ve been checking last week’s tapes, sir. Haven’t found anything yet.”

“Nothing?” Milos said, feeling his anger rising again. “Nothing?”

Just then a phone rang. Dositej, anxious to duck the spotlight, hurried to answer it.

“It’s Kim,” he said after listening a few seconds. “Says you’ve got a call.”

“I told him no interruptions!”

“He says it’s from someone who wants to know if you got any old tires you care to part with.”

Everyone started talking at once. Milos felt a sudden calm. He didn’t have to search out the enemy; the enemy was coming to him.

Grabbing the phone from Dositej, he pointed to Mihailo, his balding, bespectacled communications man. ‘Trace the call.” Then he spoke to Kim upstairs. “Put him through.”

A crisp, WASP-inflected voice that sounded like a cross between George Plimpton and William F. Buckley came on the line. “Mr. Dragovic? Is that you?”