"Yuri Andreevich, what . . . ?" he glanced up, glaring at Eva. "I see you've met one of our American guests."

"American?" Androv stopped, then looked at her, puzzled.

Better make this fast, she told herself. In about five seconds Comrade Karanova's going to take this Soviet hero's head off.

"Listen, you bastard." She was storming the desk. "If you so much as lay a finger on Michael or me, either one of us, the National Security Agency is going to close you down so fast you'll think an H-bomb hit this fucking place. I want to see the American ambassador, and I want my belongings returned."

"Everything is being taken care of, Dr. Borodin." Vera Karanova answered from the doorway. Eva glanced back and saw a platoon of eight _Mino-guchi kobun_, Mino's personal bodyguards, all with automatics.

"You will come with us."

Androv was staring blankly at her now, his swagger melting like springtime Georgian snow. "You're American? National Security?"

"They kidnapped us. In London. They're going to screw you, everybody.

We found out--"

"We?"

"My name is Eva Borodin. I'm director of Soviet SIGINT for the National Security Agency in Washington. And Mike Vance, CIA, is here too. God knows what these criminals are doing to him right now. But they're about to take you apart too, hotshot. So have a nice day. And while you're at it--"

"Tovarisch Androv, you have just done a very foolish thing." Vera's voice was frigid. "I don't think you realize how foolish."

"Dr. Borodin," Mino finally spoke, "you are even more resourceful than I'd expected. Resourcefulness, however, is not prudence. Dr. Vance is currently . . . reviewing a proposal I made him. You should be hoping he will accept. As for the National Security Agency, they believe you are still on holiday. After tomorrow, it will not matter. Nothing you can do will interfere with our schedule."

"We'll see about that."

"Trust me," he smiled. Then his look turned grave and shifted. "Major Androv, you will kindly remain after they have taken her away."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Friday 1:17 A.M.

The room was cold. Just cold. That was the first thing he'd noticed when they shoved him in. It still was. For nine hours he'd been sitting on a hard, canvas-covered Soviet cot, shivering.

The place was no larger than a small cell, with a tile floor, ice gray concrete walls, and two bare fluorescent bulbs for lighting. No heat.

There was a slight vibration--it seemed to be part of the room itself-- emanating from the walls and floor. He'd tracked it to a large wall duct.

Ventilation system could use adjusting, he'd thought, fan housing's loose somewhere. They also could turn up the damned heat.

He was wearing only what he'd had on in London, and this definitely was not London. Hokkaido was a much colder part of the planet.

The room had the feeling of a quick, slapped-together job. But it also looked like it could withstand a medium-sized nuclear detonation. One thing was sure, though: It wasn't built with comfort in mind. The door was steel, the same dull hue as the rest. It was bolted from the outside, naturally.

But if isolation and cold were Tanzan Mino's idea of how to break his spirit, to see how tough he was, the man was in for some disappointment.

What the Mino Industries CEO had unwittingly accomplished by moving him here, however, was to enlighten him about the layout of the place. As he was being escorted down the crowded facility corridors by the three leather-jacketed _kobun_, he'd passed a projection video screen suspended over the center of a main intersection. The location seemed to be some sort of central checkpoint, and the screen displayed a schematic of the whole facility.

He'd faked a stumble and used the recovery time to quickly scan its essential features.

He leaned back on the cot and ran through one more time what he'd seen on the screen, trying to imprint it in his memory.

Insight number one: the facility was organized into four main quadrants, with a layout like a large X. Some of the writing was Japanese, but mostly it was Russian Cyrillic characters. He massaged his temples and visualized it again.

The first thing he'd focused on was something called the North Quadrant, whose Russian designation was Komendant. It looked to be the command center, with a red-colored area labeled in both Japanese and Russian. Next to that were a lot of little rooms, probably living quarters or barracks. Kanji ideograms identified those, so that section was probably where the Japanese staffers bivouacked.

That command section, he'd realized, was where he and Eva had been.

They'd been quartered in a part of Tanzan Mino's private suites, the belly of the beast.

It got even more interesting. The other three quadrants were where the real work was going on. On the right side of the screen was East Quadrant, whose label was _Komputer/ Kommunekatseon, _ which meant it contained the computers and communications set-up. Flight Control. And the South Quadrant, the _Assamblaya_, consisted of a lot of large open bays, probably where the two prototypes had been assembled. Those bays connected directly to a massive sector labeled _Angar_, the hangar. But the bays also had separate access to the runway, probably for delivery of prefabricated sections from somewhere else.

The West Quadrant appeared to house test facilities; the one label he could read was _Laboratoraya_. Probably materials labs, next to a configuration that could have been a large wind tunnel. Made sense.

That quadrant also had more small rooms with Russian labels. He'd studied the screen a second longer and . . .

Bingo. He'd realized he was being moved into the Soviet sector, probably the barracks and laboratory area.

This had to be the least used location in the facility now, he told himself. All the wind tunnel testing of sections and the materials research was probably wrapped up, meaning this area was history.

Yesterday's news. So the CEO had shunted him to this obscure lock-up in the West Quadrant, the Soviet section. What better spot to discreetly dispose of somebody for a while?

Time to brush up your Russian.

Problem was--he grimaced at the realization--there wasn't a heck of a lot left to brush. He'd had a year at Yale, just enough to let him struggle along with a dictionary and squeak around some standard language requirement. That was it. He'd never given it a second thought afterward. Instead he'd gone on to his real love--ancient Greek. Then later, in CIA days, the action had been Asia. At one time he'd ended up doing some consulting for Langley's Far Eastern INTEL desk, helping coordinate American and Japanese fieldwork.

He could swing the Japanese, but the Russian . . .

Tanzan Mino probably knew that, yet another reason why he'd decided on this transfer. There'd be fewer people here to communicate with. Smart.

The labyrinth of King Minos, brainchild of Daedalus, that's what he felt trapped in. But Theseus, the Greek prince who killed the monster, got some help from Minos's daughter, Ariadne. A ball of string to help him find his way out of the maze. This time around, though, where was help going to come from? Maybe the first job here was to kill the monster, then worry about what came next.

Partly to generate a little body heat, he turned and braced himself at an angle against the door, starting some half push-ups. With his hands on the door, he also could sense some of the activity in the hallway outside. He figured it had to be after midnight by now, but there were still random comings and goings. Activity, but nothing . . .

He felt a tremor, then heard a loud scraping and the sound of a bolt being slid aside.

He quickly wheeled and flattened himself against the wall, looking futilely for something to use as a weapon. Aside from the cot, though, there was nothing.