He didn’t want it back.

But who was that man?

He had other things to worry about. As much as he hated Nudstrumov, the doctor had readily supplied the serum he needed. Who would do that now?

They would. Or he would hunt them down. Maybe he should start on that now.

The Black Wolf’s cell phone beeped with a second message. It indicated a new website.

This one was German, a listing of art shows. There was a phone number he had to call, using a prepaid cell phone.

It was best not to make the call from the house. He went out to the barn and got his motorcycle.

He’d seen the black man somewhere. But where?

A half hour later, sitting at the top of a hill ten miles from the house, the Black Wolf made the call to the number in the listing.

“The assignment has changed,” said a computerized voice in English. “You will go to Prague. A new team is being prepared. Further instructions will be provided. Leave immediately.”

The Black Wolf looked down at the phone. He pressed the 1 digit to show that he understood. Then he hung up.

31

Northeastern Moldova

Rather than waiting for the morning and the iffy connections north, Danny, Nuri, and Flash took two cars and drove up in the direction of the farm. Given that his visit to the cemetery might have tipped someone off, Danny decided they would bypass the town where he’d stayed as well as the old athletic facility and cemetery. That meant a more circuitous route, swinging farther west before turning back toward the farm from the north.

Nuri and Flash took one car; Danny drove alone. He spent much of the ride brooding about Stoner and the past.

If things had gone differently following the mission, Dreamland itself could have sent a team to check the wreck. But Dreamland had been going through its own transition. Colonel Bastian was being replaced.

Dog wouldn’t have left Stoner behind if he could have helped it. He’d blow up half the world getting one of his people back home.

They didn’t make them like Colonel Bastian anymore. He was a balls-to-the-wall SOB to anyone that crossed him. If you were one of his, however, he didn’t just have your back, he had your soul. He didn’t command you, he cared about you. He made you a better soldier. And a better person.

Dog.

Danny felt his eyes welling up, thinking about his old commander, Breanna’s dad. He reached over and turned on the radio, hunting for some music to get his mind off the past.

Hell, Danny, you’re making me into some kind of cardboard saint. You know that’s not me.

Danny felt a shudder through his body. He knew the voice was just the product of his over-tired imagination, but he was so spooked he turned the radio off and drove in silence for the next two hours.

“Magnetic field, fifty meters,” said Nuri, reading the screen on the MY-PID unit. “Runs all along the far side of the stream.”

Danny focused the night glasses, then swept slowly along the creek. These were big glasses, the size of binoculars, and besides being able to pick up the thermal image of a mouse at two hundred yards, they could accept data from MY-PID, superimposing it to create what the scientists called an “enriched and interpreted image.”

Notes from the computer. Imagine what a school kid could do with that.

“Show magnetic field,” he told the computer.

A blue wall appeared on the other side of the stream. It stretched all the way to the road, a good kilometer away, and ran into the hills on the south. It encircled the entire farm. The perimeter measured nearly thirteen kilometers.

“It has to be some sort of detection field,” said Nuri.

“Like a force field?” asked Flash.

“It’s not going to zap us, if that’s what you mean,” said Nuri. “But I’d guess that anything that moves through it would be detected.”

“As long as it’s metal?” asked Flash.

“It may be pretty sensitive,” said Danny. “Anything that could conduct electricity could set it off. There’s something similar at Dreamland. You can’t breach it without it being detected.”

He slipped back from the trees. Someone had spent a lot of money to set up the perimeter.

Clearly, they had the right place. Or at least one of them.

The property consisted of three gently rolling hills, spread out over land that included two streams and bordered a third. Woods formed an inner ring around a border of open fields, an arrangement that Danny surmised was intentional—the woods would provide cover for defenders. Warned of anyone attempting to approach them, they could slip into the trees and pick them off as they came.

The next ring consisted of farm fields, nearly all idle. At the center were a number of farm buildings and one large house.

The house looked like a nineteenth-century Moldovan manor house, a three-story masonry structure with a sharply pitched roof. Two wings extended off the back, giving the building a U-shape. MY-PID calculated there was just over 8,000 square feet of space inside, not counting the basement.

There were three buildings a short distance away. One was an old barn, in an architectural style similar to the house. A six-bay garage sat next to it, at the end of the driveway. Flat-roofed and skinned with pale concrete stucco, it was somewhat newer, probably built sometime around World War II.

The third building was made of steel and didn’t look to be more than four or five years old. It reminded Danny of the gym he’d seen at the training center, though it would have fit nicely in any industrial park across the world. It was large, 92 feet by just over 280. You couldn’t quite get a football field inside, but it would be close.

It was also heated—the glasses showed that the exterior walls were warmer than the garage’s. The heat was uniform, and the walls apparently well-insulated enough to prevent the night glasses from picking up details from the interior.

Unusual for a warehouse, especially one that appeared empty.

A perfect place to set up a training exercise, Danny thought darkly. You could rehearse a dozen killings inside, run two or three teams and not have them bump into each other.

“No guards on the interior roads,” said Nuri, watching the feed on the laptop from a Predator V. The aircraft had flown from Germany, and would be assigned to Whiplash for as long as they needed it. A second was on its way; both would operate out of Ukraine. They were CIA assets, controlled from a site on Cyprus.

“Two video cameras in the front woods,” said Nuri. “They’re focusing on the road coming up to the house. And there’s a mine system.”

The Predator was reading electric currents as well as heat. The mines were wired; a belt ten meters wide surrounded the house. There were also patches in different areas where trees or bushes provided cover to approach the center of the compound.

“Parachute drop might work,” said Nuri. “Get right past the defenses.”

“We got to land on the roof?” asked Flash. There was the slightest tremor in his voice—though he had jumped often, Flash did not like parachuting. “If their ground defenses are that elaborate, you don’t think they’d have something to protect against airplanes?”

“You think they have SAMs in the barn?” asked Danny.