– I don't get it," Ruthra said, raising his eyebrows upward.

– Nobody knows how they do it. I mean, some homegrown terrorists could not, for example, organize serious terrorist attacks. You understand that for the average person they can bypass our service, but only a highly organized special service can really stand up to us. And so people live, work, rest, plan something and at some point they learn that a ship has been seized and is carrying chemical weapons. Let's say the ship arrived in port today. What will start happening there when people learn that there is a threat of explosion and contamination? Fuss, panic, flight of capital, flight of people. What happens to the stock market in this country? It will start to fall, the economy will collapse. What are the consequences? The country will become poorer, will not be able, for example, to finance scientific research and, as a consequence, in ten years it will fall hopelessly behind. And if someone prepared in advance, i.e. organized to make the shares get cheaper, then he can buy up half of the country. I'm exaggerating a little bit. But you know what I mean, don't you? There used to be total opposition. If a country's power was undermined, it was by direct "undermining." Simply put, it used to be a real bomb, now it's an information bomb. Of course, I am exaggerating a bit, but the general mechanism is as follows. But the most interesting and the most secret is not this information, not how it is obtained, not even the center itself and its existence at all!

Yuri Vasilyevich fell silent and looked at Rutra carefully.

– Why? – Ruthra asked, running through a hundred options in his head.

Yuri Vasilyevich took Rutra by the edge of his collar and quietly, as if it were an incantation, said:

– All this information comes here officially, openly. We don't spy on anyone, we don't infiltrate anywhere, we don't bribe anyone, we don't break ciphers and codes, we don't steal anything. Everything is handed over to us voluntarily. This is a center for tracking those who are tracking everyone according to their structural purpose. In this center, all intelligence and intelligence agencies are united. Only they don't know it themselves. They don't know that the information they gather comes here. They do not know that there is a center where information from all the world's services is processed, whether they are secret spy services or official civilian services. As our German colleague likes to say, "from the maternity hospital to the funeral parlor." Everything, everything, everything. You see why no one can know about us? And I'll tell you something else. This will come as a surprise to you.

The colonel fell silent again.

– What?" Ruthra asked quietly.

– We are supranational. We are not subordinate to the Russian government. We are not subordinate to anyone at all and could be in any country. Everyone is subordinate to us. Our center is the control center of all significant intelligence services, globally, and through them all governments. All the top leaders of intelligence agencies and secret governments are one group. The center has many branches and representative offices. The main ones are the official secret agencies of the countries themselves. That, my friend, is how our glorious world works now. Information no longer has to be mined and stolen. You can just negotiate. And someone's already done it.

– And who is this "someone"?

– You will learn a lot more. You'll realize what kind of world we live in," Vasilyevich answered, shaking his head. – Now tell me, whose family are you going to be?