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course, it all depends on his ability to get some very stubborn people to talk."
    "I'm sure Daniel will be on one of the first flights out of Germany tomorrow."
    "A lot of highly placed, extremely anxious government officials in D.C. are counting on that very same assessment."
    "Daniel never disappoints."
    "No. He doesn't. Good luck, Jessica," Sanderson said, and the call disconnected.
    She placed the phone on the cold granite countertop and glanced at a two-thirds empty bottle of last night's Malbec standing next to the sink. Was nine-thirty in the morning too early for a glass of wine? Probably. Plus, she needed something stronger to deal with the anxiety stirred up from talking to Sanderson. He'd ruined their lives for his own selfish gain, though the entire situation was certainly more complex. Without the general's new initiative, who knows what the world might have faced in the upcoming weeks. The limited reports streaming out of Russia painted an extremely bleak picture. Without Daniel, the world may never have discovered the truth about what happened in Monchegorsk. She felt her mind spinning again and glanced at the bottle of wine. Still not a good idea. Maybe a little closer to eleven o'clock.
     

Chapter 4
    7:38 PM
    Gallusviertel District "Gallus"
    Frankfurt, Germany
     
    "We stick out like a sore thumb around here," Daniel muttered from the rear bench row of their Ford Transit van.
    "At least nobody will call the cops," Konrad Hubner said.
    "That's because we look like the cops," Daniel said.
    "We're fine. This isn't a high crime area. The immigrants take care of this place," Reinhard Klinkman said.
    Klinkman had met them in Hamburg, after they had travelled separately by car through Sweden and Denmark. Thanks to the Schengen Agreement, neither of their cars was subjected to more than a visual check at reduced speed, at either the Danish or German border. Introduced in 1985, the Schengen Agreement gradually abolished border controls throughout the European Union, making it possible to drive from Stockholm to Spain without ever displaying a passport or enduring customs searches. If you held a passport from a non-Schengen Area country, all you had to do was gain admittance to the European continent, legally or illegally, and you could travel freely without question or fear of discovery.
    Once Petrovich's team landed in Stockholm a few days earlier, they were more or less guaranteed access to the rest of Europe. Of course, the matter of their involvement in a running gun battle on the streets of Stockholm had the potential to complicate this freedom, but once they escaped the city, they saw no sign of an enhanced security presence in any part of Sweden.
    Klinkman had arranged for them to return their rental cars in Hamburg and take possession of two used vans, which they drove to Frankfurt. One van, with darkened rear windows, would be used by the assault team. The windowless, second van gave Sanderson's Electronic Warfare (EW) team a private cargo area to turn the van into a mobile electronics suite.
    Three members of this newly formed group had joined them in Frankfort, having arrived from various parts of Europe. Utilizing laptop equipment and wireless technology worth five times the amount of their van, they had easily hacked into Frankfurt's Deutsche BioMedizinische (DBM) database, sending the data to the CIA. Although theoretically unnecessary in this case, since most of the cyber work could be done from the U.S., Sanderson wanted to put this team in the field alongside the clandestine operatives. Apparently, Berg hadn't argued with the idea, since it would provide one more layer of separation between his agency and German authorities should the unthinkable transpire. Berg seemed to be all about these layers, which Petrovich could appreciate. All of his own layers had been peeled away recently, leaving him completely exposed.
    The electronic warfare team had another goal that had been cautiously revealed by