Ricci sat alone in the silence of the trailer that served as his personal quarters outside the Cosmodrome, looking over some maps of the area, liking his situation, and particularly his Russian hosts, less and less with every minute that passed. Expecting them to keep a promise of cooperation was like thinking you could hire some degenerate pedophile as a camp counselor and accept his absolute guarantee that he'd keep his hands to himself. Their original agreement to put the launch center's security under Ricci's full direction had, in the last twenty-four hours, been qualified and ultimately redefined so that he was now in charge only of perimeter defense, with the VKS space cops, or whatever they were called, assuming control of the facility's interior grounds protection, even prohibiting access of Sword personnel to some of its buildings. And there already had been clashes of authority at the outer checkpoints that were supposed to be his team's areas of patrol.

The duplicity had been pure borscht, reminding him of what had happened in Yugoslavia after the bombing war back in the '90s, when Moscow had no sooner cut a deal with NATO not to enter Kosovo than it had ordered a military occupation force into one of Pristina's key strategic airports. Back then, they'd had a President who'd looked and acted like a huge leech pickled in vodka to blame for the supposed confusion ... but what sort of excuses were they making now?

Ricci shook his head gravely. He knew Roger Gordian had been in repeated contact with Yuri Petrov, trying to persuade him to stick to his original commitments. But Ricci's own last conversation with Gordian had taken place twelve hours ago, at which point he'd been told to sit tight and await further news. Gordian hadn't sounded optimistic, though, and there had been nothing from him since--a clear indication that Petrov had fallen victim to the hereditary Russian breast-beating reflex and would keep thumping away until he keeled over backward. In other words, negotiations were stalled indefinitely and Ricci's curtailed functions would continue to be the status quo until after the ISS launch was history.

Assuming it occurred without disaster striking first.