First, a shave and a shower.
Though the room was one of a block that the Agency had under constant surveillance, he checked for bugs. Satisfied that it was clean, he went into the bathroom and started the shower. Hot steam billowing around him, he lathered up and began to shave.
He was about halfway through when his sat phone rang.
"Stoner," he said, answering it.
"What are you doing for dinner?"
It was Sorina Viorica.
"I don't know," he told her. "What do you suggest?" "You could meet me. There's a good restaurant I know. It's near the Bibloteque Antique." "Sure," he said.
"It is not so easy to tell you where they are," Sorina Viorica told him as they waited for their dinners. "You will kill them. Not you, but the army."
There was no sense lying to her. Stoner didn't answer.
"They were once good people. Now… " She shook her head. "War changed everything."
"Maybe you don't need to be at war. Maybe you have more in common with this government than you think. It's a democracy."
"In name only."
"In more than name."
She drank her wine. The short hair sharpened her features. She was pretty — he'd known that from the moment he saw her, but here in the soft light of the small restaurant, he realized it again. She'd gone out and gotten herself some clothes — obviously she had money stashed away, wasn't as poor as he'd thought. She wore a top that gave a peek at her cleavage, showing just a glimpse of her breasts. When they left the restaurant, he noticed how the red skirt she wore emphasized the shape of her hips.
They went near the Sutu Palace, once the home of kings, now a historical museum. It was a cold night and they had the street to themselves. Except for the bright lights that flooded the pavement, they could have been in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, royal visitors come to see the prince.
They walked in silence for a while. He knew she was thinking about what to do, how far to go with it. Eventually, he thought, she'd cooperate. She'd tell him everything she knew about the guerrilla operations.
But maybe none of it would help him fulfill his mission.
"So you come back to Bucharest often?" he asked.
"Not in two years."
"You seem to know your way around." "Do you forget the places you've been?" "I'd like to. Some of them." She laughed.
"Do you go back and forth a lot?" he asked her. "I have been in Moldova for the past year. And on a few missions."
Stoner wanted information about the missions, but didn't press. It had grown colder, and the chill was getting to her. He pulled off his jacket, wrapped it around her.
"Are you married, Stoner?"
"No."
"Would you like to be?"
"I never really thought about it," he lied.
"Are men really that different from women?" "How's that?"
She stopped and looked at him. "I can't believe you never thought about getting married."
Stoner suddenly felt embarrassed to be caught in such a simple lie. He was working here, getting close to her — and yet felt ashamed of himself for not telling the truth.
They walked some more. He asked about the missions, but she turned the questions aside and began talking about being a girl and visiting Bucharest. He tried gently to steer the conversation toward the guerrillas, but she remained personal, talking about herself and occasionally asking him questions about where he'd grown up. He gave vague answers, always aiming to slip the conversation back toward her.
After an hour they stopped in a small club, where a band played Euro-electro pop. Sorina Viorica had half a glass of wine, then abruptly rose and said she wanted to go to bed.
Stoner wasn't sure whether it was an invitation, and he debated what to do as they walked back to the apartment. Sleeping with her might help him get more information. On the other hand, it felt wrong in a way he couldn't explain to himself.
She kissed him on the cheek as they reached the door of the apartment, then slipped inside, alone. He was glad, and disappointed at the same time.
Colonel Bastian sat down at the communications desk in the Dreamland Mobile Command Center and pulled on a headset. He typed his passwords into the console, then leaned back in the seat, preparing to do something he hadn't had to do in quite a while — give an operational status report to his immediate superior.
The fact that he didn't much like General Samson ought to be besides the point, he told himself. In the course of his career, he'd had to work for many men — and one or two women — whom he didn't particularly like. It wasn't just their personality clashes, though. The truth was, he'd had this command, and now he didn't. Even having known that Dreamland would either be closed or taken over by a general, he still resented his successor.
The best thing for him to do — and the best thing for Dreamland — was to move on. As long as he was here, the friction between him and Samson would be detrimental to the unit and its mission.
"Colonel Bastian, good morning," Captain Jake Lewis, on duty in the base control center, said to him through the headset.
"It's pretty late at night here," said Dog. "Twenty-one hundred hours."
"Yes, sir. You're ten hours ahead of us. Soon your today will be our tomorrow."
Dog frowned. Somehow, the captain's joke seemed more like a metaphor of his career situation.
"Would you like to speak to General Samson?" asked the captain.
"Absolutely," lied Dog.
"Stand by, Colonel."
Dog expected Samson to be connected via the special phone up in his office. But instead the general's face flashed on the screen. Obviously he'd been in the command center, waiting for Dog to check in.
You couldn't blame him for that, Dog decided. He would have done the same thing. A lot of what Samson did, he would have done.
Differently. But what was bugging him was the fact that it was Samson doing it, not him.
Jealousy. Yes. He had to admit it.
"This is Samson. What's going on over there, Bastian?"
"Good morning, General. We've completed our first day of working with Romanian ground soldiers. There were some language glitches, but all in all it went well."
"What kind of glitches?"
"Nothing critical. A little hard sometimes to understand what they're saying, and I imagine vice versa."
"That's it?"
"No. I wanted to alert you to something that should be passed on to Jed Barclay and the White House."
Samson's scowl made it clear that he'd be the judge of that.
"While we were up, a flight of Russian MiGs flew over the Black Sea and part of the Ukraine. I believe they were shadowing us. They appear to have been working with one of their Elint planes to get an idea of where we were. I took a hard turn toward them and they vamoosed. I'm not positive, of course, but—"
"What do you mean, you took a hard turn toward them? You went into Moldova?"
"No, General, I didn't. I stayed inside the country's boundaries and flew in the direction of the Black Sea. But they were watching me closely, and it seems to me they didn't want to be noticed."
"Don't overanalyze it. What sort of planes?"
"Two MiG-29s, configured for air-to-air intercept. There was a Tu-135 just beyond them. We were too far to get comprehensive details. I didn't want to go out of Romanian airspace."
Dog watched Samson step over to one of the nearby consoles in the command center, consulting with one of the men there. Finally he looked back in the direction of the video camera attop the main screen in the front of the room.
"What else do you have?" asked Samson.