Arctic Gold

11

City Morgue London 1045 hours GMT

CHARLIE DEAN FOLLOWED EVANS and the morgue attendant deeper into the chill of the morgue. Fluorescent lights hung overhead, and the green-painted concrete block walls added a depressing air to the place. The attendant walked up to one of the stainless-steel doors in one wall, checked his clipboard, then opened the vault and hauled the steel slab into the room.

They already had Karr in a black body bag, the zipper halfway open, the man’s eyes staring up at the lighting fixtures overhead. Some cold inner part of Dean was operating on pure automatic, letting him note the wounds-a number of deeply purpled bruises around half a dozen holes in his friend’s chest and upper abdomen, and a terrible gash that had opened the left side of his throat from jaw to collarbone.

Christ…

“That’s him,” Dean said simply. He looked up at the attendant. “I’d like to see his effects, too, if I may.”

The morgue attendant shrugged and nodded. “Sure thing.” He seemed to be nothing so much as bored and… was he chewing gum?

“Friend of yours?” Evans asked as Karr’s body slid soundlessly back into the recesses of the locker.

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. He seemed like a good chap.”

“What the hell is that?” Dean demanded. “British understatement?”

“I only met him a few moments before the attack,” Evans said. His mouth twisted unpleasantly. “The two of us were joking about the Boston Tea Party.”

Dean drew a deep breath. Evans had met him at the airport and driven him into London late last night, putting him up in a hotel a short walk from the Tower of London and just across the river from the bizarre black egg of a building where Tommy Karr had been killed. However much Dean wanted to lash out at someone, it wasn’t Evans’ fault that Tommy was lying dead on a morgue slab.

“I’m… sorry,” Dean said. “Didn’t mean to snap.”

“Not a problem. I know what it’s like to lose a mate.”

Yes, I imagine you probably do, Dean thought, but he said nothing. As one of the senior British officers at the Menwith Hill listening station, Evans had been on the front lines of European SIGINT for a good many years. Listening in on other people’s radio and telephone conversations didn’t seem like a dangerous occupation, but over the years there had been all too many incidents.

People had died. Good people, like Tommy.

“ ’Ere’s his kit, sir,” the attendant said around the wad of gum. He gestured toward a table with several plastic-wrapped packages on it. “We bagged it and tagged it, like we was told.”

“Thank you.” Dean sorted through the packages, wondering what he was looking for. Karr’s shoulder holster and Beretta were in one bag, his wallet, a set of house keys, two pens, some loose change in another, wristwatch and sunglasses in a separate bag. Same for his passport, an airline weapons permit, an FBI ID card, a driver’s license, and a number of pocketed receipts. Karr, Dean knew, never wore jewelry, rings, or other accoutrements unless they were needed for a particular legend on an op. One bag held a small collection of technological odds and ends… a cell phone; a fiber-optic lead; what appeared to be a PDA; a couple of button-sized objects that Dean recognized as small, sticky-backed surveillance cameras; the clip-on microphone Karr would have been wearing beneath his shirt collar, a part of his personal communications hookup with the Art Room.

A few of the tools of the trade.

His clothing made up a rather larger bundle. Slacks, coiled-up belt, shoes, socks, underwear. Shirt, tie, and jacket, all of them soaked with dark blood.

Keeping his emotions firmly in check, Dean reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a PDA identical to the one in the bag on the table. Evans raised his eyebrows but said nothing as Dean switched it on and began passing it over each of the bags of Karr’s effects. Several LEDs lit up as he passed it over the package containing the phone, mike, and cameras.

“ ’Ere,” the morgue attendant said. “What’s that?”

Dean didn’t reply but continued moving the PDA above Karr’s things. When Dean passed it over the bag containing the blood-soaked shirt and jacket, the LEDs flashed again. “Hello there,” Dean said, half-aloud. “That’s interesting.”

“What do you have?” Evans asked.

“Not sure yet.” Setting the device on the table, Dean pulled the plastic wrapping open, giving him access to the clothing inside. Picking up the device again, he checked, the shirt first and, when nothing happened, began checking the jacket.

He got a strong signal there… strongest at the back of the collar.

Dean bent closer. This part of the jacket was saturated with blood, but he rolled the collar up, peering closely at it, trying to ignore the sticky-sweet smell. A moment later, he straightened up, holding between thumb and forefinger what appeared to be a black pin with a round head.

The pin set off the LEDs when he tested it; the jacket now gave no response.

“Circuit checker?” Evans asked.

Dean nodded. “Puts out enough of a magnetic field to get a signal back from an electronic circuit. Someone slipped this into Karr’s jacket. He was bugged.”

“His date from the night before?”

“I’d put money on it,” Dean replied. He was thinking fast. His talk with Julie on board the British Airways jetliner had been disappointingly unproductive. The young woman had indeed remembered Karr on her last flight but had point-blank refused to admit meeting with him later. That in itself wasn’t suspicious, of course. Even when Dean had flashed an ID badge identifying him as FBI, she’d had no reason to go into intimate details about her having spent the evening with the tall, blond passenger she’d met that afternoon.

But at some point between his having caught that flight out of JFK and being picked up by a tail near Heathrow, someone had slipped that pin invisibly into the fabric of Karr’s sport coat, inserting it beneath the collar where it could not be seen. The pin, Dean was certain, would prove to be a short-range transponder, a tracking device that allowed someone to follow him through city traffic.

He was also certain that a microscopic examination of the device would identify it as of Russian manufacture. The KGB had used such devices twenty years ago; presumably the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, Russia’s modern Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, still did. Desk Three had similar devices, even smaller and more surreptitious.

Pulling a small specimen bag out of his jacket, Dean deposited the pin and returned it to his pocket. He would take no chances with this piece of evidence being lost.

“We need to pick up Julie Henshaw,” Dean said. “Flight attendant on British Airways Two-one-one-two, JFK to Heathrow. She was the last person to be with Karr before he left for the GLA building with Spencer.”

“You think she’s in on this?”

Dean shrugged. “We know Karr had dinner with her the night before he was killed. We know he walked out of the hotel with three FBI agents and Spencer and there was a car double-parked outside the hotel, waiting for them. They follow them closely, then vanish in downtown London. But a few hours later, three of the people in that car show up at the GLA building with weapons.”

“She slipped that pin into his clothes?”

Dean nodded. “Maybe she pretended to adjust his collar, or something.”

“I’ll pass the word to MI Five then.” He shook his head. “Not sure if we’ll get any action, though. Things have been crazy since the attack.”

“I can imagine.”

At the hotel last night, Dean had switched on the TV and found nothing but special news reports on the terrorist attack at the Greater London Authority, complete with endlessly recycled film clips of the huge green banner unfurling from the observation deck overlooking the Thames and several maddeningly jerky and motion-blurred segments from news cameramen in the crowd on the deck itself.

Desk Three, he knew, was going through all of those film clips frame by frame, hoping to find more clues. So far, though, all they had was the testimonies of some badly shaken eyewitnesses, two dead and one critically wounded tangos, one dead FBI agent, and the body and effects of Tommy Karr.

Greenworld already was being indicted by commentators on both sides of the Atlantic for embracing assassination as a tool for global activism. Whoever had decided to try to kill Spencer had made a serious mistake; where Greenpeace was notorious for its Gandhi-esque program of peaceful confrontation, Greenworld was now known worldwide as the organization that sent young people armed with Uzis and handguns after politically unpopular scientists.

What the hell had they been thinking?

Dean was beginning to suspect that he was seeing some kind of double cross and an intricate game of multiple layers. The Russians had their hand in it, were probably the major players. Sergei Braslov and the presence of the pin-shaped tracking device in Karr’s jacket proved that.

So what did they have to gain from the attack?

Dean didn’t know, but he was determined to find out.

Dean arranged for the packages of Karr’s clothing and other effects to be sent by special courier straight back to Fort Meade. His body would be flown out aboard an Air Force transport to Dover, Delaware. If possible, Dean planned to be on that flight, to accompany Tommy back to the States.

First, though, Dean had other business here in England. “I think we’re done here,” he told Evans after he’d signed the last form arranging for the flight to Dover.

“Right then,” Evans said. “Care for a flight up to Yorkshire?”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Dean told him. “I’ve never been to Menwith Hill.”

“I hope you like golf in a big way then,” Evans told him with a wry smile.

He didn’t find out what Evans meant until some hours later.

Rubens’ Office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0915 hours EDT

The National Security Agency maintains listening posts all over the world.

The largest are those at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England, and at Pine Gap, in central Australia, but there are many others-at Bad Aibling, Germany; at Misawa Air Base in Japan; at Akrotiri, Cyprus; at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A world-girdling network of extraordinarily sensitive electronic ears, teasing radio whispers out of the static of the sky and processing them into intelligible data.

At Point Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost tip of the United States, a station called POW-Main broods over the cold, gray waters and ice floes to the north. Originally part of America’s Distant Early Warning system, or DEW Line, the center had been refurbished in recent years, with part of the base turned over to the NSA for use as a SIGINT-gathering site. Now, instead of watching for the appearance of Russian ICBMs rising above the cold horizon, some of those antennas, at least, were set to gather radio signals emerging from Siberia-most especially from the Russian air bases at Mys Shmidta, Anadyr, and Provideniya.

There’d been a lot of radio traffic bouncing off the ionosphere lately, and all of it had been duly recorded at POW-Main, then relayed via satellite to Fort Meade. Most was destined for Langley and the Pentagon, but some of it had looked interesting enough for the Desk Three analysts to take a first look. Intelligence coming in from this site was given the distribution code “Powerhouse.”

Two Powerhouse transcripts had just arrived on Rubens’ desk. One, originally in a Russian Air Force cipher easily decrypted, had come from Mys Shmidta. The other, transmitted in the clear and in English, had come from a tiny and remote climate-monitoring station on the Arctic ice cap. Both intercepts would be routed according to standard protocols, the military intercept to the Pentagon, the other to the State Department, and both to CIA headquarters at Langley. However, there was someone else who he felt should see these.

What he was about to do was highly irregular… and might even be interpreted as a breach of security. The current political situation, however, left him few options.

Turning to his computer, he began composing an e-mail.

Menwith Hill Echelon Facility Yorkshire, England 1510 hours GMT

Two hundred miles north of London, eight miles west of the city of Harrowgate, lies the NSA listening station at Menwith Hill. Dean and Evans had boarded an RAF helicopter, a venerable Westland Wessex Mk. 2, at London City Airport for a bumpy and noisy three-hour flight to what once had been RAF Yeadon and was now Leeds Bradford International Airport. A car and driver had been waiting for them as the helicopter lifted off once more on its way to the big RAF base at Dishworth, farther north.

From there, it was a twelve-mile drive over winding roads through rolling Yorkshire cow pastures and farmland, passing through tiny English towns along the way with names such as Otley, Farnley, Bland Hill, and, Dean’s favorite, Pool-in-Wharfedale. They were driving north on the B6451 and were just topping a rise at the intersection with Bedlam Lane when the Menwith Hill Echelon Facility first came into view.

Golf balls. Titanic golf balls…

The place looked utterly alien, completely otherworldly set among the gentle green hills of Yorkshire. Dean had shrugged off Evans’ comment about golf earlier but got the joke now. The immense dimpled white spheres were simply radomes, lightweight shells that masked the dish antennas within, protecting them from the weather and preventing casual observers outside from knowing exactly where the antennas happened to be pointed. Two identical structures, a big one and a little one both painted gray, crowned the south wing of the HQ support building at Fort Meade just above Herczog Road, and there was a solitary white one on the ground half a mile away, not far from the HQ satellite uplink facility. But here the huge white golf balls grew in abundant profusion, appearing, then vanishing again behind folds in the moor, then rising once again. Dean counted twenty-five of the things, the largest well over one hundred feet across, but there might have been more. He’d seen photographs of the place and thought he’d known what to expect, but the reality was absolutely breathtaking.

Technically, Menwith Hill was an RAF base, but in fact the 560-acre complex had been taken over by the NSA in 1966. Also known as NSA field station F83, it was home to the GCHQ, the British counterpart of the NSA, and a number of Brits, like Evans, worked there. By far the largest population at the base, however, was American, most of them civilians-mathematicians, engineers, computer programmers, technicians, linguists, and analysts-with the NSA.

Desk Three, Dean knew, maintained a suite of offices here, somewhere within the vast warren of underground chambers and facilities hidden beneath the looming white golf balls.

Past a long stretch of chain-link fence topped by curls of razor wire and patrolled by armed men with dogs, they turned right into the sandbagged main gate, where unsmiling British soldiers scrutinized their IDs, checked files displayed on computer monitors, and made phone calls to the main security office before finally waving them through. They passed two more security checkpoints on their way to the underground part of the facility, with backscatter X-ray scans, handprint readers, and, finally, retinal scans. Only then did they receive badges. Security here was at least as tight as it was back at Fort Meade.

Ilya Akulinin and Lia DeFrancesca were already there, waiting for them in a basement conference room.

“Dean!” Lia cried, jumping up from her chair and rushing to meet him.

Her presence startled him. He’d known he would be meeting them here but hadn’t been told they’d already been brought out of Russia. He was torn by pleasure at the sight of her… and the sudden memory of what he needed to tell her.

Dean took her in his arms and squeezed her close. “Hello, Lia.” God, she smelled good, felt good…

She pulled back, sensing something in his mood, and searched his face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

He glanced at Akulinin, who was standing nearby, uncertain. Dean didn’t know the new kid very well, but he’d been in the field with Lia, and that counted for something.

“Do you two need some time alone?” Evans asked.

“No,” Dean said, deciding. “It’s just… Lia, I have some bad news. Tommy is dead.”

Her eyes widened. “No…”

“There was a protest yesterday at a conference in London where he was escorting an American scientist. We think the Russians-possibly the Russian mob-infiltrated the protestors and started a riot in order to carry out an assassination. Tommy saved the scientist, but…”

“The Russian mob?” Lia repeated. “Why-”

“Who’s Tommy?” Akulinin asked.

“Another Desk Three agent,” Dean told him. “And a friend.”

“God. I’m sorry to hear that.” Akulinin came closer, reaching out to put a hand on Lia’s shoulder. “Were you guys close?”

Dean felt a stab of jealousy as the kid touched her. Totally irrational, he knew, but totally human as well. He swallowed it.

“We were friends,” Lia said, pulling back a step to face Akulinin. Tears glistened in her eyes. “We worked together in the field quite a few times.” Grief was already hardening in her face into something else, Dean noted. Determination. And anger.

“Well,” Akulinin said, “that just sucks rocks.”

Lia ignored the comment. “Why would the Russian mafia want to kill Tommy?”

“We’re not sure they did,” Dean told her. “Like I said, they were trying to kill an American scientist, a Dr. Spencer. He was a Department of Energy climatologist speaking on global warming. There’d been some death threats, I gather, and Rubens assigned Tommy to help escort him to London and back.”

“That makes no sense. Since when did Desk Three begin providing bodyguard service? Why not a U.S. marshal? Or the FBI?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what does the Russian mob have to do with global warming, anyway?”

“We think the Russian mafia is trying to discredit Greenworld, and maybe some of the other environmental groups as well,” Evans put in. “Greenpeace. The Sierra Club. The Russian MVD might be trying to make them look like terrorist groups.”

“We don’t know why,” Dean added. “Yet.”

“Not Tommy…,” Lia said, shaking her head. She moved back into Dean’s embrace. “Not Tommy…”

“Maybe these two should have some time alone,” Akulinin told Evans.

“Sure,” the British agent said. “C’mon. I’ll buy you coffee.”

“They have coffee in England?”

“Menwith Hill,” Evans replied, opening the door, “is not England.”

Hours later, Lia and Dean lay in each other’s arms, in bed. After a light dinner at the station’s cafeteria, Evans had escorted them to three adjoining rooms in the base housing block reserved for short-term visitors to Menwith Hill, but Lia had come to Dean’s room as soon as Evans had said good night and departed.

It had been such a long time…

Their lovemaking had carried an urgent, almost desperate edge to it, however. Lia did not want to believe that Tommy was gone.

She’d not cried. She would not cry, though she admitted to herself that she might, later. For now, she needed to know every detail of Tommy Karr’s death.

“I honestly don’t know that much,” Dean told her, his face just visible in the darkness next to hers. “Rubens called me while I was at Friendship, waiting for a flight out to meet you in Russia. Apparently it’s all over the news here, but I haven’t had a chance to catch it.”

“I wonder which mafia group was behind it,” she said.

“We could call the Art Room, easily enough.”

She thought about the mikes and transmitters, currently switched off and discarded with their clothing on the other side of the room. “No,” she decided, snuggling closer. “Tomorrow.”

Restlessly his hand caressed her bare hip. “Evans has scheduled a briefing for us tomorrow morning,” he told her. “Maybe we’ll learn more then.”

“Assuming they know anything back at the Puzzle Palace,” she replied. “I’m wondering if it’s the Tambov group, though. We’re pretty sure that’s who we were up against in St. Petersburg. They’re coming down a lot more aggressively than in the past. Big schemes. Wild, high-risk, high-gain operations… like selling radiation shielding to Iran.”

“I went through a briefing on the Russian mob the other day,” Dean said. “The protestors who killed Tommy were working with a Russian MVD colonel named Braslov. And he’s been linked with the Tambov organization.” He looked at her in the dark. “Are you thinking your op and Tommy’s were up against the same people?”

“It could be. I don’t see the connection, but it could be.”

“Selling beryllium plating to Iran’s nuclear program and assassinating climate scientists. I don’t see a link.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, what has Washington in a dither right now is the fact that the Tambov group is also supposedly trying to corner Russia’s petroleum industry. There’s a lot of oil and natural gas prospecting going on in Siberia right now… and speculation about untapped energy reserves in the Arctic.” He broke off, silent for a moment. She could almost hear him gnawing on the problem.

“Maybe that’s the link,” he said after a moment. “The Russians have been trying to stake a claim to half of the Arctic Ocean since 2007, claiming their territorial waters extend all the way to the North Pole. Greenworld and the other environmentalist groups would raise one hell of a stink if the Russians started sinking oil wells and building pipelines up there.”

“True,” Lia said. “But the Russians wouldn’t be able to do that. Put oil wells in the Arctic, I mean.”

“Why not? It’d be simpler than building an offshore drilling platform. Just build your tower, drill through the ice, then extend your cutting head through water and into the sea floor, just like they do in the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea.”

“No, Dean. Absolutely impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because the Arctic ice is moving, dummy,” she told him, smiling to rob the words of their sting. Then she realized he probably couldn’t see the smile, so she let her hand glide down his torso, gently stroking him. “It drifts with wind and current. I don’t know how fast, but the whole ice cap moves. Build an oil rig on the ice, send the drill head down to the sea floor… and in a few days or weeks or whatever… snap! ”

“Oh. Yeah. I think I remember reading about that somewhere.”

“If the Russians want to look for oil in the Arctic Ocean, they’re going to have to wait for the ice cap to melt.”

He chuckled. “You think global warming is that bad?”

“The ice cap is getting smaller and thinner every year,” she told him. “Last I heard, if things proceed at the same rate they’ve been going over the past couple of decades, all of the Arctic ice will be gone-it’ll all be open ocean-by 2060.”

“Huh. I had no idea.”

“Most people don’t. The whole global-warming thing has become so politicized that it’s tough to know what’s real and what’s hype.”

“The Russians are known for thinking pretty far out into the future,” Dean said, thoughtful. “I could see them planning for when they could build conventional offshore drilling rigs after the ice is gone. Still, fifty-some years? That’s kind of a long shot. And right now no one can agree if global warming is real or just a temporary fad, if humans are causing it or it’s part of a natural cycle. I can’t see the mafia gambling on something like that.”

“And they wouldn’t give a damn about the environmentalists half a century out, either,” Lia said. “If the mafia is behind it, that suggests a short-term goal as well. Those guys don’t wait fifty years for a return on their investment, you know?”

“Even governments don’t think that far ahead,” Dean admitted. “So what’s the answer, do you think?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. The Art Room said Ilya and I were going to be on hold for a while. There’s some sort of political crisis on back at the Palace. You know anything about it?”

“Not much. An F-22 was shot down over the Gulf of Finland in support of your op. Did you hear about that?”

“A little. Did they find the pilot?”

“Not that I’ve heard. But the scuttlebutt at Fort Meade was that Desk Three might get into trouble for losing an F-22 instead of a UAV.”

“‘Scuttlebutt’?”

“Sorry. Marine and Navy slang. Means rumor or gossip.”

“I like it. Damn, the Russian op just went to hell, didn’t it?”

“They didn’t tell me much. What happened?”

“Our contact turned on us. There was an ambush… and a firefight. Ilya lost his kit, including some rather sensitive black ops gear.”

“Shit!”

“There’s a sanitizing team in there now, trying to recover it. The two of us got clear of the operational area, then almost got picked up by the MVD.” She shook her head slightly. “I’ve had the… I don’t know, the feeling that we’ve been set up right along, that the opposition was always a step or two ahead of us the whole way.”

“I can’t imagine the Russian mafia deliberately playing games with the NSA,” Dean said. “I mean… they’re just criminals.”

“Yeah, and it’s dangerous to underestimate them, Charlie,” she told him. “A lot of them were KGB and GRU before the Communists lost power. They had some pretty specialized knowledge and equipment, and it all went to the highest bidder.”

“Kind of like all the jokes about out-of-work Russian nuclear scientists. ‘Will sell nuclear secrets for food.’”

“Exactly. And the gang leaders themselves, even if they’re not tied in with Russian intelligence or the military, well, they had to be damned tough and smart, and they had to have some pretty good connections just to survive under the Soviets, to say nothing of building an underground criminal empire. They’re also… I don’t know how to say it. Less constrained than the Soviet government was.”

“How do you mean?”

“The Soviet government had a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the planet.”

“So did we.”

“Right. But neither we nor the Soviets used that arsenal, because no one can win a nuclear war. Okay?”

“There were a few people who thought we could,” Dean put in. “But MAD-Mutual Assured Destruction-worked as a deterrent, sure.”

“The Soviets were as careful as we were to make sure nukes didn’t get into the wrong hands, because if they screwed up, it would come back to bite them in the ass.”

“Okay…”

“Don’t you see? The Russian mafia doesn’t care! Oh, they don’t want to see the world blown to bits. That would be bad for business. But they don’t have the obligation to provide for their country’s welfare that the Soviets had. You can see that in the way the mobs are strangling the Russian economy today. Capitalism doesn’t stand a chance so long as the mobs are bleeding businesses over there dry.”

“So… you’re saying the mafia is more likely to do crazy stuff.”

“Exactly. During the Cold War, we were worried about Soviet adventurism, about all those times they played brinksmanship games and created international crises. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The invasion of Czechoslovakia. The invasion of Afghanistan. Those were the times when things were dangerous, when the missiles might have flown. The Tambov Gang, the Blues, all the other Russian mobs… all they want is money, power, and to come out on top of the heap. If Colombian drug lords get their very own submarine, if a reactor melts down in the Urals and wipes out a city, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and obliterates Israel, what’s it to them? They may not even care if Russia’s economy tanks, because they’ve been going international lately in a big way. Ask Ilya about the Mafiya in Brighton sometime.”

“Brighton?”

“He’s American. His parents were immigrants. Brighton Beach is near Brooklyn, in New York, and it’s where a lot of Russian émigrés settled. They call it Little Odessa. For ten, fifteen years, the Mafiya has been moving in there, big-time. They’re everywhere.”

“Somehow, I never thought of Desk Three as being crime fighters,” Dean said.

“In some ways the Russian mobs are as much of a threat as al-Qaeda,” she told him. “Maybe more.”

“Are you sure you’re not just making it personal?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I can hear the anger in your voice. Like you want to go back over there and kill them all. For Tommy.”

“No,” she told him. “I am going back… one way or another. But when I do, it will be for me.”

She drew him closer then, trying to lose herself in his arms. “C’mere, Marine,” she told him. “I’m going to scuttle your butt. Again.”