"Thank you kindly. Who sprung me?"

"Hello, Comrade Slavin."

"You." The kid spat the word. He remembered clearly how Vyacheslav Klimov had pushed him to admit his crimes and relations with the Red Army of Bedoan with threats of life in the dreaded labor camps. He had broken down and confessed, giving him the name of that Liberian nobody just to appease this officer. If only his father knew of his fate, but then he remembered that Ivan Slavin had already disowned after he strayed from the path of the Communist Party. The only good thing that had come out of what he had done was that he had been brought to the Lavrenty Beria City Jail for "temporary incarceration," while his fellow militants had been thrown into the Josef Stalin Regional Labor Camp.

"What do you want from me now?" Vilen Slavin asked.

"Oh, nothing," replied Klimov in an off-hand tone, "just wanted to ask you about the Ural-4320 truck with license plate number BRG-221 registered to your name."

"I've done my part of the deal," Slavin replied defiantly. "I'm telling you nothing."

"Is that so?" Klimov took Slavin's shoulder and led him out of the jail. "Comrade Slavin, Comrade Slavin," he said, shaking his head and feigning disappointment, "you have broken my heart. I really thought that you had what it takes to clean up your act and return to the free world a changed man. But it seems that I am mistaken. Now, have you heard of the Leonid Brezhnev National Labor Camp?"

"Not that camp!" moaned Slavin.

"Yes, it's that camp, Comrade Slavin. The gulag where all the sex offenders are sent. It is said that the most dangerous men there are the senile old farts that resemble Leonid Il'ych. I hear that they're very interested in young new arrivals. I've used my power to send you here. I can use that power again to send you there."

"No, Mr. Klimov, please!" shouted Slavin. "I'll do anything for you. Just don't send me to the Brezhnev gulag!"

"It's good to know that you still have some common sense, Comrade Slavin. Now, kindly follow me into my car."

Another man appeared from the car that Klimov had pointed at and motioned for Slavin to get inside. He was forced into the middle when both men entered from opposite sides. "Take us to Great Patriotic War Avenue," Klimov ordered the driver.

"Da, tovarishch," replied a female voice.

"Tell us where your truck is located," ordered Klimov.

"Drive all the way to Romanov Prospect. Then take Kursk Street to the outskirts."

"You may want to talk lightly to the women," said Klimov with a hint of distaste. "They're State Security."

"The Sword and the Shield of the Party, comrades," said the other woman sitting in the front passenger seat.

"Get me Kodudov."

"I am sorry, Governor," replied Kodudov's secretary, "but the Vice Governor is not here."

Damn, thought Tarenin. "Where is he now?"

"He's currently accompanying General Beykurovich to a private talk with some of the rebels."

"Are you sure that we can pull this off?"

"Don't worry, Nikolai," replied Zimyat Kodudov, Vice Governor of the Chechen Republic. "I've covered the both of us so much that I'm choking underneath it."

"But what of our contacts to our employers?" asked Major General Nikolai Beykurovich, commander-in-chief of the Chechen Provisional Armed Forces.

"We have no need for them now. Our operation is now self-sufficient, and it will take a very deep penetration agent to uncover our involvement in the Third Chechen War."

"Or a single person with a change of heart."

"By the time the world will know of our treachery, Nikolai, it will be too late for them to stop us."

"If the man knows how to do his job," Beykurovich told nobody.

"Meetings between the rebels and the Red Army of Bedoan usually take place before dawn, but I've heard that there will be one tonight, though."

"You're doing a good job, Vilen," said Klimov. "You've cleared your name for the sake of Mother Russia."

"What's with all this talk about rebel cells?" Carter asked Rosie. "What do they mean?"

"That's how the rebels operate," she replied. "Chechnya is divided into divisions, which are further divided into the cells they're talking about. For example, the Groznyy rebel district is divided into over a hundred cells. A cell's size ranges from two men to fifty men, so that means there's between two hundred and five thousand rebels within Groznyy alone."

"Speaking of rebels, how many of them are in the Romanov Prospect cell, if there's such a cell?"

"Five as of the Krakozhians' last count."

"Heads up, they're here," said Slavin, pointing towards a plain black van that had stopped in the middle of the field they were watching.

"Good thing the moon is behind us," said Carter, taking pictures of the members of the Romanov Prospect cell. She had picked up a liking for photography during one of her many missions for the PPP, and therefore knew that moonlight had almost the same effect as sunlight.

"The men from the Red Army should be coming right now," said Slavin. As soon as he finished the sentence, another set of lights appeared, and it materialized into a Russian jeep. The driver got out and opened the rear doors. Two men got out, one dressed in a crisp suit and tie, and another dressed in the olive-green uniform of the Russian Army.

"I think I've seen the man in black before," said Carter. "Do you know him?" she asked everyone else.

"That's Vice Governor Kodudov," replied Rosie.

"Kodudov?" asked Lev Arigov. "What's he doing here?"

"Lev, look at the Army guy!" said Klimov. "Isn't that Beykurovich?"

"Who?" asked Carter.

"Oh, but of course," she heard Arigov sneer. "Who else but Major General Nikolai Beykurovich, commander-in-chief of the Chechen Provisional Armed Forces, one-time Hero of the Russian Federation, recipient of the Order of Lenin, the Order of Suvorov, the Order of Kutuzov, and the Order of the Red Banner, could be colluding with the rebels alongside Vice Governor Kodudov? He's certainly a good man worthy of his honors."

"If they're such righteous people," said Carter, "then what are they doing here, shaking hands and greeting the rebels like their blood brothers?"

"Hey!" said Slavin. "Looks like something's going down." In the field, Kodudov handed over a cream-colored brick to one of the rebels. The four zoomed in using their binoculars and camera. "American C-6 explosive," muttered Arigov. "These guys like to blow things up."

After a few minutes of transferring the C-6 to the rebels, the two sides broke up and headed for different directions. Arigov, Klimov, and Slavin decided to follow Kodudov and Beykurovich, leaving Carter and Rosie to tail the rebels. They took a winding path to their ultimate destination, an abandoned warehouse smack in the middle of the prospect. The two women parked their car a few blocks away and returned to the warehouse on foot. Climbing the local version of a Dumpster, they peered inside.

Two rebels were repainting the truck in a camouflage pattern, while another two were loading the C-6 into the back of the truck. Their leader, meanwhile, was preparing the equipment that would transform the Ural-4320 into a bomb truck. A spray-on tag bearing Cyrillic writing and new plates were present around the truck.

"The Bezzavetno Shipping Company," said Rosie, reading the writing on the truck. "What an apt name."

"Yeah, well, I just want to finish this and get out of here," said Carter. After taking a few more photographs, the two got off the Dumpster and disappeared into the night.