Those days with the Mir and Salyut space stations, he thought, smiling. Years of working with Kizim, Solovyev, Titov, Manarov, and the other cosmonauts who spent weeks and months in space. Enjoying the sterile beauty of the Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft, of the Kvant astronomy module that allowed them to explore the universe. Experiencing the sound and fury of the mighty Energia rockets sending payloads skyward. He missed it all. But eleven months before, the space program was broke and in near collapse, and the forty-nine-year-old officer had agreed to command this place, a hi-tech operations center that was being designed to spy on friends and foes abroad and at home. Ministry of Security Chief Cherkassov had told him he had the calm but detail-oriented nature that was perfect for running a high-pressure intelligence facility like this-- though Orlov couldn't help but feel he was being demoted. He'd gone from touching the vault of heaven to being cast underground into hell, and he'd been spoiled by the many humanitarian scientists he had worked with at the Yuri Garaging Space Center outside Moscow. As the Manchu had understood, progress and power should be used to ennoble people, encourage them to make sacrifices, not control and herd them.

But Masha agreed with Cherkassov. She told her husband it was better for someone with his temperament to run the Operations Center instead of someone like Rossky, and she was right about that. Neither the Colonel nor his new best friend, Interior Minister Dogin, seemed to know where the interests of Russia ended and their personal ambitions began.

As Orlov walked briskly along the broad boulevard, the bag lunch and bag dinner his wife had prepared tucked under his arm, he gazed across the river at the Frunze Naval College that housed the dozen soldiers of the Center's special operations force Molot, Hammer.

Masha had been right about Rossky as well. After he told her who his second-in-cornmand was to be-- the man who had been involved with their son, Nikita, in the incident in Moscow-- Masha told him not to allow Dogin to force Rossky on him. She knew they would clash, while he thought that working on a common project, in such close quarters, would force them to trust and maybe respect one another.

Now reckoning seemed inevitable. What made his wife so smart… and him so naive?