The FBI had all the ins with the black marketeers who were running Russia and the Bureau didn't like to share information or contacts with the CIA. There wouldn't be anything to do in Moscow but debrief bored aparatchiks who had nothing to say except that they missed the old days and could they please get a visa to anywhere west of the Danube?

Battat looked out over the tall grasses at the dark waters of the Bay of Baku, which led to the Caspian Sea.

He raised his digital camera and studied the Rachel through the telephoto lens. There was no activity on the deck of the sixty-one-foot motor yacht. A few lights were on below deck. They must be waiting. He lowered the camera. He wondered if the passengers were as impatient as he was.

Probably, he decided. Terrorists were always edgy but focused. It was an unusual combination, and one way that security forces zeroed in on potential troublemakers in crowds.

Battat looked at his watch again. Now they were five minutes late.

Maybe it was just as well. It gave him a chance to get a handle on the adrenaline, to concentrate on the job. It was difficult.

Battat had not been in the field for nearly fifteen years.

In the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, he had been a CIA liaison with the Mujahideen guerrilla fighters.

He had reported from the front on Soviet troop strength, arms, deployment, tactics, and other battlefield details. Anything the military might need to know if the United States ever fought Soviet or Soviet-trained soldiers.

That was back when the United States still had people on the ground collecting solid, firsthand intelligence instead of satellites gathering pictures and audio transmissions, which teams of experts then had to interpret.

Former operatives like Battat who had been trained in HUMINT-human intelligence-called those experts "educated lucky guessers," since they were wrong just as often as they were right.

Now, dressed in black boots, blue jeans, leather gloves, a black turtleneck, and a black baseball cap, Battat was watching for a possible new enemy. One of those satellites Battat hated had picked up a communication during a test run in Moscow. For reasons as yet unknown, a group known as "Dover Street" was meeting on the Rachel, presumably a boat, to pick up "the Harpooner." If this was the same Harpooner the CIA had missed grabbing in Beirut and Saudi Arabia, they wanted him.