Their rented wooden fishing trawler had left Khabarovsk at sunset and cruised some forty kilometers down-river through the gathering dusk, its half-century-old Kermath engines clanking and wheezing, the running lights at its bow gleaming like tiny red eyes in the mist and drizzle. It had been stripped to the handrails of all gear. There was no crew aboard. Its cubbyhole cockpit had room enough for just a single occupant, a Nanai wheelman who spoke little Russian and had been told to remain on deck as a strict condition of his payment.

Now, moored in the black offshore waters flowing past the village landings, the stout little vessel’s engine was silent. Behind the clamped door of the hold, its passengers sat on transom seats that had been set down along the bulkhead, bracing uncomfortably against the heave and sway of the boat.

All but one of them were men. The Russians, Romual Possad and Yuri Vostov, had arrived on separate commercial flights from Moscow earlier that day. Teng Chou had traveled a slower, more exhausting route, flying from Beijing to the airfield in Harbin, then riding through the night in the backseat of a military jeep. Having reached Fuyuan at 7 A.M., he’d gone directly to the river station and taken the hydrofoil to Khabarovsk on the Russian side of the Amur, where he had been met by members of the Chinese consulate three hours later. The little sleep he’d gotten in their guest quarters had hardly refreshed him.

Seated opposite him, Gilea Nastik, the only woman in the group, silently cursed the chill and dampness. In this part of the world, she thought with disgust, there were no seasonal transitions—it was summer one day, and winter the next. Her wiry, desert-tanned body had not been bred for such a miserable climate.

“Well, it’s up to you,” she said in Russian, tiring of Possad’s indecisiveness. He hadn’t uttered a word in almost ten minutes. “Will you obtain the approval of your superiors in the ministry, or are we wasting our time?”

He gnawed on his bottom lip.

“It depends,” he said. “Make no mistake, I see how it could work, providing we have the money. And a reliable network of contacts.”

She stared at him, the skin tightening over her cheekbones, giving her face a sharp, almost predatory appearance. Then she looked down at her hands, shaking her head.

“I have already guaranteed unlimited funding. And the necessary materials,” Teng Chou said in a clipped tone. “You should know I am as good as my word.”

Possad swung his gaze over his shoulder to Vostov.

“Your people in the United States... you’re certain they can be trusted?”