Reynolds glanced inside the brochure and saw a photograph of a large blended-wing aircraft with obvious stealth features. It bore clear similarities to speculative media and Pentagon illustrations of Russia’s rumored PAK-DA strategic bomber. But there were also significant differences. For one thing, the images she had seen all showed an aircraft with raised winglets at the outer edge of each wing. According to analysts, these winglets would reduce turbulence, but they would also increase the hypothetical stealth bomber’s radar cross-section. Their presence had seemed to suggest Russia’s aeronautical engineers hadn’t yet fully solved the stability problems inherent to any tailless flying wing design.

If so, it was clear that this was no longer the case. This photo showed a plane without winglets, one very similar to America’s B-2 Spirit and B-21 Raider stealth aircraft. More important, it showed the bomber prototype in flight, with a twin-tailed fighter close by to provide a sense of scale. The image was clear enough to provide U.S. intelligence analysts with a wealth of new data. Carefully, she refolded the brochure and slipped it into her purse. “Reasonably interesting, indeed.” She turned her apparent attention back to the sculpture of the old woman. “And your price for more?”

He smiled gently. “Not so much, compared to its value. Shall we say, something on the order of what your government routinely spends in just four or five hours in a single day?”

Reynolds arched one of her finely sculpted eyebrows in sheer incredulity. That would put the price tag at well over two billion dollars—20 percent of the CIA’s current operating budget and close to 3 percent of what the U.S. government spent annually on its entire alphabet soup tangle of civilian and military intelligence organizations. She sniffed in disgust. “For images, specifications, and data we might be able to obtain ourselves through other means? Or that could easily be faked? You must be joking.”

Without waiting to hear more, she started to turn away. Whether she’d been lured to Prague by a con artist or a lunatic was relatively unimportant. Her first priority was to cover her tracks fast and get out on the earliest possible flight to the States. If her rivals inside the agency found out she’d been wasting her time playing Jane Bond, amateur field agent, they’d have all the ammunition they needed to pull her down.

“You misunderstand me, Ms. Reynolds,” the young man said soothingly, holding up a hand. “My patron proposes providing you with something far more tangible for your scientists and aviation engineers to examine—perhaps even something on the order of the Hakodate Incident of 1976.”

Hakodate Incident? What the hell was he talking about? Hurriedly, Reynolds ransacked her knowledge of intelligence history. She knew there was something, some sort of massive intelligence coup linked to that phrase, which sounded vaguely Japanese. Something about a plane, she thought. A Russian plane. And then, when she made the connection, her eyes widened involuntarily.

In September 1976, a Soviet pilot, Lieutenant Viktor Belenko, had flown his MiG-25P Foxbat fighter to Hokkaido’s Hakodate Airport and announced his intention to defect. The U.S. and its Japanese allies had eventually returned the MiG-25 to the USSR, but not before they’d stripped the Soviet jet down to its constituent parts—gathering incredibly valuable data about Soviet aircraft design, electronics, and manufacturing techniques in the process.