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changing batteries turned out to be a major day of excitement for her. True, they weren’t just any batteries, and true, she’d have to illegally cross an international border to do it, but still. Battery-changing day.
    She’d been distracted by the scent of Malone still lingering in her car when she hopped in that morning, and her mind kept flickering back to the previous night—the way he’d spoken to her, the humor in his eyes, then the roof…It wasn’t until she’d gotten firm with herself and opened the window to let the eau de Malone go that she got her head back in the game. By the time she arrived at the orphanage, she’d actually figured out a plan to change the batteries without getting caught: It was a wonderful day to play with the kids in the adjacent field. Brigda would be suspicious, but she wouldn’t be able to see them.
    Under Brigda’s disapproving eye, Abby maneuvered all the children into their tiny coats and led them single file into the fields just beyond sight of the farmhouse. They looked adorable all holding hands following one after the other, all bundled up against the crisp morning.
    She taught them “I’m a Little Teapot” in English while she turned on the handheld locator that would help her find the ground sensors that needed their batteries changed. The display showed three in the vicinity.
    “Keep going,” she told the children as they giggled each time they bent over to pour the tea. She had to roll Lana onto her stomach so she could get back on her feet with the bulk of her puffy coat.
    Within ten minutes, she’d located and dug for the three ground sensors, then changed their batteries. She’d been told that they lasted for twelve months, but one of her colleagues had warned her before she left for the Ukraine that the cold sometimes made the batteries less effective. It hadn’t been that cold since she’d arrived, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
    The sensors would alert her, and Langley, to anyone crossing the border—which was just a hedge in this part of the country. And then it was her job, and her job alone, to ascertain who had breached the border. Cows, a farmer, or the tanks of the Russian army. And if it was the latter and Abby could officially identify them, then NATO forces would take over. No one wanted World War III, but if it was going to happen, Abby was damned sure it wouldn’t be because of an old battery.
    With three more to find, she put her bag down and played for a while, letting the children run and jump over her while she was getting her butt wet in the morning dew. Dmitri and Karlov were big enough now to make her “oomph” when they jumped on her, which of course made them want to do it over and over. She laughed, wishing for the simplicity of being a child. Although that wasn’t to say these children had had it particularly good in their short lives, but they were luckier than most to have Tanoff and Brigda looking after them.
    She lay back with two of the children weaving long, thin reeds through her hair and wondered if Brigda was a threat. Abby had no idea why the woman was so against her being there, except for the perceived threat of having an American so close to the Russian border. But Abby would only be a threat if Brigda ratted her out…
    She moved the boys and girls on to the next field, still out of view of the farmhouse, and switched the locator back on. The last three of these sensors abutted the hedge in a V shape. There were still others lining the fields that shared an open border with Russia, but those batteries had been changed when she had first arrived.
    After having taught the kids “Oranges and Lemons”—a rather brutal nursery rhyme that one of her stepmothers had taught her that involved two kids forming an arch while the others tried to walk through fast enough to not get caught as the arch’s arms came down at the last line of the song—she went to find the other sensors.
      
    Oranges and lemons, say