The word Kremlin came from the word for fortress, and the complex in central Moscow was one of the most formidable on the planet. It’s two miles of defensive walls were over sixty feet high and over twenty feet thick.

The walls enclosed four cathedrals, five palaces, museums, gardens, and the president’s senate building, which housed the most secretive security organization in Russia, the Dead Hand.

The precise location of the senate building was a triangular-shaped area between the former presidium site, the arsenal, and the Kremlin wall behind Red Square. It was widely regarded as one of the most securely protected, and difficult to infiltrate, patches of land anywhere on earth.

Breaking in had been compared in complexity to breaking into the Pope’s private offices in the Vatican, or the section of the Louvre that housed the Mona Lisa.

That wasn’t to say it couldn’t be done.

Because it could, and had.

The Mongols did it.

Four hundred years later, the Poles did it.

And in 1812, Napoleon did it.

Napoleon actually ordered the entire fortress to be demolished on his retreat. The dynamite was laid, the charges were set, and for days, the site was ravaged by explosions. But the vast complex proved itself practically immune to Napoleon’s explosives, and the damage was quickly repaired.

All those infiltrations had one thing in common. They’d been performed before the Soviet Union’s security upgrade program turned the entire Kremlin into a technological, as well as a physical, fortress.

The senate building in particular was regarded as a difficult target.

Lenin had made it his official residence in 1918.

After his death, Stalin occupied it from 1924 until his own death in 1953.

While it was still the official seat of presidential and executive power in Russia, the current president didn’t actually live there, but spent most of his time on the Novo-Ogaryovo estate west of the city.

And that was the one thing Lance and Laurel had going for them. Since the president’s move to the estate, the senate building’s electronic security system had fallen down the list of upgrade priorities.

It meant Lance and Laurel, from their hotel room overlooking Red Square, and with the aid of a plethora of highly advanced communications and infiltration equipment they’d been able to gather from Roth’s safe houses, were able to hack the senate building’s secure network and disable most of the sensors.

Lance was examining the Kremlin walls through the lace curtains of the hotel room window.

“A sniper rifle, Lance? Come on.”

“This scope is some real space age shit.”

“What if someone sees you?”

Through the multispectral scope, he could see the roof of the senate behind the walls. Slight variations in the surface temperature of the roof showed him where power lines ran, and where cameras and other motion sensors were set up.