Rossky saw the peso at once, lying innocuously under the receptionist's desk on the right side of the room. The two employees who were unpacking equipment stopped to look at him. He motioned them to keep talking. They continued discussing a soccer match as Rossky studied the coin. He circled it like a snake girdling its prey, never touching it and afraid to breathe on it. A glitch might have triggered the alarm in Glinka's headset, and the peso might be exactly what it seemed to be. But he hadn't survived twenty years in the special forces by taking anything for granted.

He saw that the peso was well-worn, as though it had been in circulation for years. The 1982 date seemed appropriate to its condition. He looked at the sides of the coin, at the faded ridges, at the dirt wedged between them. It all seemed very authentic. But the eye could be fooled. Pulling a long black hair from the back of his head, he held it near the coin. The hair dipped like a divining rod. Touching his index finger to the tip of his tongue, he gently dabbed the top of the coin with saliva. He looked closely at his finger and saw traces of dust; where he'd touched the coin, it was clean.

Static electricity had attracted both dust and the hair, which meant that something inside the coin was generating an electrostatic field. His lips tight with anger, Rossky stood and returned to the Operations Center. The transmitter in the peso wasn't very powerful. Whoever was listening through it had to be within a few hundred yards of the museum. The security cameras would tell Rossky who that might be, and then the spy would be dealt with.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sunday, 9:00 A.M.,

Washington, D.C.

Mike Rodgers passed buoyantly through the keypad entry on the ground floor of Op-Center. After greeting the armed guards seated behind the lexan, who provided him with the day's password, Rodgers hurried through the first-floor administrative level, where the top officials had offices in the old evacuation-team headquarters. Like Paul Hood, Rodgers preferred to be downstairs, in the new underground area where the real business of Op-Center was conducted.

Another armed guard was stationed by the elevator, and after giving her the password Rodgers was admitted to the elevator. The anachronistic and less expensive "Who goes there?" sentry system had been chosen for Op-Center instead of the more elaborate hi-tech systems used at the other agencies, where fingerprint IDs had been compromised by computer-printed, laser-etched gloves, and voice identification systems had been fooled by synthesizers. Though Rodgers had seen the guard nearly every day for six months, and knew the names of her husband and children, he wouldn't have been admitted if he didn't have the password. If he'd tried to enter, he would have been arrested. If he resisted, he might have been shot. In Op-Center, precision, competency, and patriotism came before friendship.