"Excuse me," a third voice said. Both CIA officers looked up to see a uniformed police officer, a pistol sitting in its holster on his Sam Browne belt.

"Hello," John said with a smile. "A pleasant morning, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," the policeman replied. "Is Tokyo very different from America?"

"It is also very different from Moscow this time of year."

"Moscow?"

Clark reached into his coat and pulled out his passport. "We are Russian journalists."

The cop examined the booklet and handed it back. "Much colder in Moscow this time of year?"

"Much," Clark confirmed with a nod. The officer moved off, having handled his curiosity attack for the day.

"Not so sure, Ivan Sergeyevich," Ding observed when he'd gone. "It can get pretty cold here, too."

"I suppose you can always get another job."

"And miss all this fun?" Both men rose and walked toward their parked car. There was a map in the glove box.

The Russian Air Force personnel at Verino had a natural curiosity of their own, but the Americans weren't helping matters. There were now over a hundred American personnel on their base, barracked in the best accommodations. The three helicopters and two vehicular trailers had been rolled into hangars originally built for MiG-25 fighters. The transport aircraft were too large for that, but had been rolled inside as much as their dimensions allowed, with the tails sticking out in the open, but they could as easily have been mistaken for IL-86s, which occasionally stopped off here. The Russian ground crewmen established a secure perimeter, which denied contact of any sort between the two sets of air-force personnel, a disappointment for the Russians.

The two trailers inside the easternmost hangar were electronically linked with a thick black coaxial cable. Another cable ran outside to a portable satellite link that was similarly guarded.

"Okay, let's rotate it," a sergeant said. A Russian officer was watching—protocol demanded that the Americans let someone in; this one was surely an intelligence officer—as the birdcage image on the computer screen turned about as though on a phonograph. Next the image moved through a vertical axis, as if it were flying over the stick image. "That's got it," the sergeant observed, closing the window on the computer screen and punching UPLOAD to transmit it to the three idle helicopters.

"What did you just do? May I ask?" the Russian inquired.

"Sir, we just taught the computers what to look for." The answer made no sense to the Russian, true though it was.