The shredding ceased at once. Baranov passed from desk to desk, picking up random papers, studying them. He dashed off instructions to one of his deputies, who immediately began gathering all the papers together.

Baranov had found a receipt that interested him. "And what business do you have with the Banque Prive de Geneve et Lausanne?" he asked, holding the paper in his hand with a victorious smile.

"A private matter. Nothing to concern so august an office as your own."

"We shall see."

Baranov spent another minute or two examining the shredders, digging his hands into the basket and coming up with wads of slivered paper. "We will take this, too. I know some people who can reconstruct these documents."

"All yours," said Kirov munificently. He was beginning to sweat. He could only pray that the most secret of his documents had already been shredded. Reconstructing them would take a year's time. A year! Anything could happen by then.

"Now, I wish to go to your IT center," said Baranov.

"Do you mind if I ask what it is exactly you want?"

"You know damned well what I want. Now let's go. I believe it's on this floor, just down the corridor."

"If you know your way around so well, I'll allow you to find it yourself." Kirov had no intention of helping Baranov do his job. He had opened the barricade when requested. He had greeted the man cordially. No charges could be brought for obstructing justice. The rest the prosecutor could do on his own. Fuck him!

Baranov left one of his deputies behind in the accounting office and hurried into the long, airy corridor. Kirov followed. A few offices were open, windows raised to let in the warm afternoon breeze. From outside came the sound of car doors slamming, voices shouting, and footsteps entering the building.

Finally!

Kirov hastened to a window. A delegation of ten young spies from the FIS had confronted the OMON troops outside. Their leader was a handsome blond man in business attire. His deputies were similarly dressed, but were less handsome and had exchanged neckties in favor of Kalashnikov assault rifles. Shoving broke out between the two groups. One FIS man fell to the ground, pistol-whipped. Then it was the OMON's turn, losing a storm trooper to more conventional means: a well-aimed kick to the balls. Voices rose, then fell.

"Good boy, Leonid," said Kirov softly.

"What is it?" demanded Baranov, bustling alongside.

"See for yourself."

Baranov looked down at the sparking confrontation. "Leave them," he called to his men. "There is to be no fighting. We are all comrades. Let them be." He stormed out of the office, looking this way and that before getting his bearings. He arrived at the entry to the data center as the delegation from Yasenevo poured out from the elevator nearby. Trying the handle, he found it locked. "Konstantin Romanovich, I demand you open the door."

Kirov checked his watch. Fifteen seconds until the files were deleted. He took a breath, rummaging in his pockets for a key. "Ah, here it is." He managed another delay fitting the key into the lock. "There."

Kirov opened the door.

The tech in the red Adidas shirt sat at his desk, studying a manual. "Ah, Mr. Kirov. I have bad news," he said, springing to his feet, his clever eyes taking in Baranov and his deputies. "Terrible, really."

"What?"

"A bug has hit our computers. I'm afraid we have lost all our data."

Baranov stared first at Kirov, then at the technician, and then at Kirov again. Without a word, he turned and left the room.

Kirov found Janusz Rosen waiting for him in his office.

"Yes, Janusz, what is it?"

"Good news, sir. Great news, even. I found him."

After standing by impotently as Yuri Baranov had carted off two dozen boxes full of Mercury Broadband's financial records, Kirov needed some good news. "Who?"

" 'Who?' " Rosen registered a look of gross disappointment, his glasses falling to the tip of his nose. "Why… him."

"Him," of course, was the Private Eye-PO. "About time. What is his name? Where does he live?"

"His name is Raymond J. Luca. An American, naturally. A resident of Delray Beach, Florida. I found him trawling the web early this morning. Another investor invited him into a private chat room and I was able to sneak in."

"Don't look so proud of yourself," said Kirov. "That's what I pay you for, remember?"

Minutes later, Kirov stood alone in his office, phone to his ear. He had banished Rosen with a handshake and the promise of more shares in the Mercury IPO. He had told his secretary to hold all calls. The room was silent, a quiet compounded by the absence of sirens and army boots.

"Damn it, girl, answer."

Five rings. Six.

"Da? Allo."

"Tatiana, you don't know how happy I am to hear your voice. I hope you haven't any pressing plans for the evening."

"Konstantin? Is this you? I am tired. I have had a long day. What is it, please?"

Rude, wasn't she? Sometimes he found it hard to believe she was a convent girl. Then again, he hadn't hired her for her good manners.

"Tatiana, I have a trip in mind for you. A junket abroad, actually. Tell me, my little bird, how do you feel about Florida?"

25

Ray Luca was in the zone.

Perched on the edge of his secondhand office chair inside his four-by-four-foot cubicle on the floor of Cornerstone Trading in downtown Delray Beach, Luca was a model of concentration. All of him- his eyes, his ears, his mind, his square, compact hands with the nicely buffed fingernails, even the downy black hairs on the back of his neck- was dialed into the cascade of information spewing from the twin columns stacked on the desk in front of him.

Ten inches from his all-seeing brown eyes, the wall of color super-VGA displays broadcast a blinking, stuttering, ever-changing array of graphs, bar charts, and streaming price quotations advertising real-time fluctuations of the twenty-seven stocks he was currently following. The setup was called a Level II quotation system, and it allowed him not only to see markets being made in each of these stocks but to directly place a buy or sell an order via an electronic communications network, or ECN. One hour after he'd glued his bottom to the chair, he was finally where he needed to be: deep in "the zone," the Zen-like fusion of focus, mental agility, and intuition necessary to master the godless art of day trading.

It was in this church of unbiased information that Raymond J. Luca, five-foot-five-inch native of Worcester, Massachusetts, and Florida transplant, one-hundred-forty-pound washout from the United States Marine Corps and the Catholic faith, chronic sufferer of duodenal ulcers and incurable myopic, divorced father of three wonderful daughters and Ph.D. from M.I.T., ex-altar boy, ex-tycoon, ex-con, and soon to be ex-day trader, also known as the Private Eye-PO, took his daily communion, a high mass beginning at 9:30 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time and ending at 4 in the afternoon, every day of the year save weekends, holidays, and the running of the Flamingo Stakes at Hialeah.

Luca had five open positions at the moment, all buys: Nokia, Solectron, Merck, Juniper, and Amgen. He didn't care what they marketed, manufactured, or sold, who ran them or whether they had a chance in hell of making a decent return over the long run. It didn't matter where they traded- Nasdaq, Amex, or the Big Board- only that they were high-volume stocks that bounced around like a kid on a pogo stick. Volatility was the name of the game.

At the moment he was concentrating on Solectron (symbol SLR), a box maker that after years of double-digit growth and the accompanying rise in share price had suffered a violent tumble to earth. He'd bought eight thousand shares of the stock a few minutes earlier, just after it had made a "double bottom," meaning that twice in the last thirty minutes it had tested its lows and rebounded. Classically, a stock exhibiting this behavior goes on to break through its earlier intraday high. Watching the market makers enter their orders, he noted a couple of things: One, buyers were pouring into the market (also reacting to the double bottom). And two, sellers were few and far between. The stock was set to pop.