Note: Ekaterinburg/Yekaterinburg was named after Empress Catherine (Ekaterina), wife of Tsar Peter the Great. It was also the site of the Ipatiev House and thus the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and servants. His wife, Empress Alexandra (aka Body No. 7) was a descendant of Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), to whom the quote is attributed, and who herself was executed. It's a great big circle of death!

Cathedral-On-The-Blood is built on the site of the Ipatiev House and commemorates the death of the imperial family.


Kat banked the Hawk over Cathedral-On-The-Blood - its gold domes and bronze statue all lit up for nighttime viewing - and did her best not to think about why it was called that.

Ekaterinburg had some dark secrets in its past; dark and deadly. It also had a long-gone heyday as a booming Soviet industrial center. Now it was one of many Siberian cities struggling to survive in a brave new capitalist democracy.

Ivan Vostok had once controlled it and everything else from Novgorod to Vladivostok, but since a Muscovite gangster was casually using it as a storage room, it looked like ol' Ivan had finally hit retirement age.

"Funny, isn't it," Dragonelle said from the backseat as Kat found the address. Her tone implied humor, but of a razored, nasty kind. "How we ended up in Ekaterinburg."

"Oh yeah, it's hilarious." She set the Hawk down and studied the terrain for a minute.

A row of warehouses, with their target the second one in line. Leftovers from the big communist dream: Huge, abandoned, mostly rust. The pavement she'd landed on was deeply cracked and grass was starting to take over. The Rossiyskaya Federatsiya dream.

Kat slid back the canopy - but manually locked the rear harness at the same time. This meant she was able to climb out, pull her backpack on, and stand on the wing while Dragonelle, pinned in place, simply glared.

"Nice," Dragonelle spat. She was plainly furious, but there was an undercurrent of satisfaction that Kat really didn't like.

"Once bitten," Kat said. She winked, then reached in and cuffed the dragon's hands to the center of the harness. "Stay," she ordered, grabbed the katana, closed the canopy, and hopped down.

There was no way she was reconoitering with Dragonelle at her side. That was a total death wish, and the point of this mission was to avoid the death thing.

She ran across the open pavement and hugged the side of the warehouse, waiting to see if she'd tripped security. Nothing happened, so she cautiously made her way around the corner to the nearest door. A window would've been better, but there didn't seem to be any.

The door was unlocked and she eased it open. N-Tek agents went unarmed for the bulk of their assignments, which made the katana in her hand a nice bonus. Not that she was as good with swords as she was with other weapons.

Inside, the warehouse was a study in pitch black ink. She caught a strong smell of old industry. Burnt metal and oil, among other things. Great. How many toxic chemicals am I sucking into my lungs?

She shut the door silently and was contemplating turning on her penlight when there was a loud, echoing clank and the whole warehouse lit up like noon.

It was blinding after the darkness outside and Kat shut her eyes despite herself. She opened them almost instantly and squinted into the bright light - which was good, because there was someone standing in front of her now.

Someone she recognized. "You," she said, furious.

"Agent Ryan," Jean Mairot said in his soft French accent. "How very... unexpected."

Mairot and the two DREAD soldiers with him marched Kat out to the stealth-moded Hawk. The gun pressed into her spine convinced her to open the canopy and unlock Dragonelle's handcuffs, but it didn't convince her that she was glad to see her old spymaster.

Mairot looked pretty good for someone who was allegedly deceased. The fire that had melted Dread's face had only singed him - a few scars on his neck, a slight stiffness to his walk. Other than that, he was the picture of health.

"Traitor," she shot in his direction as they all marched back inside.

He shrugged, unfazed. "These things happen."

Kat snorted. She was still angry enough to kill, but they'd taken the katana away from her, along with all the goodies in her pockets, so that wasn't really an option. Maybe later.

With all the lights on, it was easy to see that the warehouse was holding more than John Dread's Last Stand. Metal drums were stacked up halfway to the hundred-foot ceiling, all labeled in Cyrillic letters, which Kat couldn't read - but those international BIOHAZARD and FLAMMABLE pictures helped her figure out the contents pretty fast. Smaller canisters with pressure valves (and more red FLAMMABLE campfires) were clustered around the floor.

"Gonna go out in a blaze of glory? Again?" she asked the villains at large. They ignored her.

"He'd better be alive," Dragonelle said to Mairot, hard-edged.

Mairot stopped at the base of a rickety metal staircase. Being blown up must increase one's Zen factor, because Jean was definitely not feeling pressure from any quarter these days. "He is," he said calmly. "I can't assure you, however, that that will remain the case."

He climbed up the stairs with Dragonelle hot on his heels and Kat right behind her. The gun-toting soldiers brought up the rear. They clomped up to an office space that overhung the main warehouse floor. It was pretty big, stretching most of the way across the end wall. The windows had been covered over and the door was suspiciously reinforced.

Mairot waved his hand over a scanner set into the door and it opened with a pneumatic hiss. He cordially stepped aside to let Dragonelle go in first.

There wasn't much inside. A few partitions, some security equipment - banks of monitors showing different views of the warehouse, DREAD energy rifles, shock-sticks. Three battered army cots and a rudimentary kitchen were visible beyond one partition..

The center of the space had been walled off and reinforced again. There was one door and no windows, and this door's lock required a retina scan and voiceprint. Mairot did the honors once again and the door clicked open.

As spartan as the rest of the living quarters were, this room was even worse. A hospital bed filled most of it, but that was all. No chairs, no lights, no nothing. Just a boxy square room with a bed - and in the bed, a man whose primary indicator of life was an extremely unhealthy rattle when he breathed. The door spilled in some light, but not enough to reach his face.

"John Dread, I presume," Kat said. She was still in cyncism overdrive: She wanted hard proof before she would admit, even to herself, that this was Dread.

Dragonelle whirled on her with a sharp and vicious, "Shut up. Or bleed. Your choice." The business end of the katana was suddenly at her throat, and the gold plate on the dragon's forehead looked abruptly menacing instead of stupid.

Kat took the hint and said nothing further.

"Where's the doctor?" Dragonelle demanded of Mairot. Now the sword was in his face, and the deadliness of her tone went up a few notches. "The medical equipment? Do you want him to die?"

"No," Mairot said, full of Zen. "But I believe that he does. These arrangements were his idea."

That took the wind out of the dragon's sails. She visibly shrank and turned, sword lowering itself uncertainly, to the man on the bed. "Mr. Dread?" she asked. Softly. Like a child waking her father.

"Dragonelle. I wondered... when you would arrive," came the faint response. Weak but lucid. And definitely, without a doubt, the man himself.

John Dread.

Kat didn't have time to bask in her victory. She didn't even have time to go up and gloat to the man in person. Mairot immediately and forcibly pulled her out of the room without so much as a "beg your pardon".

He said something in Russian to the two soldiers and they nodded crisply before leaving the office altogether. Mairot waited in silence until the clattering footsteps had vanished down the stairs. Then he drew a silver CD out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her.

"Since we went underground I've been unable to contact Jefferson by the usual means," he said in a low, unruffled voice. "This is all the data I've gathered on DREAD's current international operations. You must give it to him, and no one else, as soon as you return to Del Oro Bay."

Kat stared. One eyebrow hiked up against her will. "Excuse me? I'm supposed to give the boss your double-agent mystery disc ASAP, no questions?"

A thin smile flickered across his face. "I am a double agent," he said. "Only not in the way the world was led to believe."

It made sense; if Sergei could sweep out the moles in his organization, for sure Jeff could. Jeff was the best. And what better way to get the inside scoop on DREAD than to have a totally trusted spy as the right-hand man? Obviously Mairot had made himself indispensible.

But...

She held up the disc, cocked her wrist like it might be a teeny silver Frisbee. "I wanna know what it says."

Mairot nodded, not really happy but not really surprised. "Fine." He took the disc, stuck it in the nearest computer, opened it, and let her skim the contents. She whistled softly. Forget John Dread's habeas corpus. Mairot had the real goods, open-mouthed-CIA-drooling stuff, and, quite delightedly, she realized she had a far better - not to mention more portable - bargaining chip than she'd expected.

Unbelievable - I could get six generators for this info, she thought. Definitely going to re-negotiate. She ejected the CD and carefully slipped it into an inner pocket of the leather jacket.

Her French host gestured impatiently. "Now, quickly. Things are coming to an end."

He gave her the contents of her pockets back. She fingered the headset, the third (just in case) pair of handcuffs, and the extra little gizmo Berto'd given her before she left Orlando. She found the catch, flipped it open, and depressed the button within.

"Things are coming to an end." Yeah - you have no idea, Jean.

"Come," Mairot said, nudging her towards the deathwatch room. Kat wasn't keen on a return visit, but she went. They stood in the doorway for a minute and watched Dragonelle try to cajole her boss into living.

"John, no. What will happen?" she was saying. She sounded panicked and tearful and suddenly very young, and she was squeezing the heck out of his hand. Not exactly a diabolical villainess. "What will happen to the plan? To the better world? How can we make the future if you're not here?"

It hit Kat suddenly, like the punch in the gut she'd given Sergei: Dragonelle believed. It wasn't about being evil. It was about breaking eggs to make an omelet. DREAD and Dread had a plan for the future that its operatives believed in, and if that plan didn't sound sane to the rest of the world, well, it made perfect sense to them.

"Quiet, my dear," Dread said in the shadows, the words strained but still audible. Deathbed or not, he hadn't lost any of his authority. " 'In my end is my beginning.' "

Dragonelle made a choked noise and lowered her head, a kind of subservient bow. Her eyes were closed and her back was to Kat and Mairot.

Mairot leaned over and whispered to Kat, "Go now and you will not be stopped."

She glanced at the door, back at the hospital-bed tableau, then decided that was good advice. Quietly, she edged over to the door; quietly, she opened it; quietly, she stepped out onto the staircase. And there was no quiet way to get down the stairs, so she just ran.

Downstairs, there was no sign of the soldiers, but the mountain of BIOHAZARD FLAMMABLE had some new additions: Beeping little things with red LCD lights. Kat paused in her flight just long enough to look down and read what one display was saying.

00:59, 00:58, 00:57...

"Oh, perfect," she said.

Then she really ran.

There was absolutely no way she could put enough distance between herself and the explosion that was about to happen. That much fuel would leave a charred crater; that much fuel would create an inferno that firefighters couldn't even approach, much less knock down.

But she had to try - she had Mairot's disc and Josh's life in her pocket.

She cleared the warehouse door and sprinted for the far edge of the pavement, right past the Hawk - write that off as a loss - all those vigilant hours with no sleep tugging at her, slowing her down - that a plane taking off? - breath burning - had to have been fifty seconds by now -

BOOM.

The world went white and her senses were flattened for a moment. The blast wave picked her up and tossed her several yards forward. She landed on her side, slid and skidded another yard or so, and oh yeah, she was gonna bruise tomorrow, but the leather jacket and denim blue jeans did their job and kept her skin intact.

She covered her head and stayed flat for a minute to avoid any huge fireballs or flaming debris. A smaller explosion nearby told her the Hawk was, indeed, toast. It left her without a ride, but she wasn't worried yet. The fact that her rubber-soled sneakers were starting to sizzle from the distant heat ranked a little higher.

When nothing hit her, she scrambled up and moved farther away, to a relatively safer distance. No doubt about it - the warehouse had gone up in a blaze of glory. And billowing, noxious black smoke. The real impressive thing would be if Dread and friends had gone up with it.

She squinted, but couldn't see a jet. Just a white smudge of contrail star-lit against the great black yonder.

"Only the good die young," she said, disgusted. And the same trick twice - that was just lazy.

She watched the fire rage on. Sirens began wailing in the distance right about the time a black military helicopter set down near her.

The CIA, running late. As usual.

She tsked. After the careful instructions Berto had given them when she hit Berlin, including the Hawk's specific GPS data, after the no-frills point A-point B piloting she'd done, after the confirmation signal she'd sent out over their frequency - the schmucks still couldn't find her before things went kablooey. No wonder the UN had created N-Tek.

A chubby middle-aged guy in a boring suit got out of the helicopter and gestured impatiently for her to join them.

Kat held up a hand to let Bob know he was gonna wait.

She dug the silver headseat out of her pocket - Mairot's disc was still in there too, intact - and slipped it on. "Berto! You there? I'm done and my ride's here."

There was a moment of static silence, and then Berto's voice said, "Good. We're in Del Oro now."

Something cold and unwelcome skittered through her heart. "Del Oro?"

"Jeff sent Behemoth for us." Berto paused again. "I told him everything. Josh too. I hope you have what they want, Kat. It's only gotten worse. If the generator isn't working in the next twelve hours, Josh isn't going to make it."