Roth gave Lance the address of a hockey rink in Alexandria for their meeting. He told him to use all precautions, and Lance spent two hours getting there, backtracking, covering his tracks, making sure he wasn’t being tailed. There was a game going on between two local teams and the crowd provided plenty of cover.

He waited outside the rink and when Roth arrived, Lance watched for an extra twenty minutes to make sure no one was following him.

When he got inside, Roth was sipping coffee by the concession stand. Lance ordered one for himself.

“What took you so long?” Roth said. “I was beginning to worry.”

“I was making sure you were clean.”

Roth nodded.

“Did you bring the passports?” Lance said.

Roth had a black briefcase with him and he slid it toward Lance. “There are some clean papers in there for you. Nothing from the group’s files.”

“Nothing traceable on your internal system?”

“No,” Roth said.

He looked dejected. It wasn’t a look Lance had seen too often.

“How bad is this hack?” Lance said.

Roth shrugged. “There’s talk of shutting me down.”

“Over this?”

“Yes, over this. I’m supposed to be completely under the radar. That’s the point of the group.”

“How much did they get?”

Roth shrugged. “My guys are still looking into it. But it’s bad.”

“How did they get in?”

“How do you think?”

Lance shook his head. “A rat?”

Roth nodded, almost imperceptibly, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “It’s beginning to look that way. They’ve been a step ahead of us for weeks. I thought they were just lucky. I didn’t dare think I’d been breached.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Roth said. “One thing’s for certain. Serious shit is about to go down.”

Lance leaned back in his seat. “Do they know about me?”

Roth leaned back next to Lance and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Until I know the full extent of the breach, I think we have to assume the worst.”

“That they know everything?”

Roth nodded. “How was your trip to New Jersey?”

“He gave me a name.”

“What was it?”

“Timokhin.”

Roth leaned in closer. “Timokhin,” he repeated.

“You know him?”

Roth nodded. “GRU. Top floor.”

“Makes sense,” Lance said. “If they have a rat, someone on the top floor would have to run him.”

Roth nodded, but Lance could tell something else was bothering him.

“What is it?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Roth.”

Roth sighed. “If I tell you this.”

“Just tell me,” Lance said.

Roth looked at him. “Timokhin’s not just top floor, Lance.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s Dead Hand. He answers directly to our old friend, Evgraf Davidov.”

Lance nodded slowly. That was very bad news. And Davidov? That was personal.