Arctic Gold

5

Airport Hilton Heathrow Airport, London 0815 hours GMT

THE POUNDING ON THE DOOR woke him.

Tommy Karr was on his feet next to the bed before he was fully awake. It took a moment for him to remember where he was. London. He was in London. The pretty flight attendant had agreed to have dinner with him, and they’d spent a pleasant evening chatting over espressos in a coffee shop. What was her name? Julie. Yeah, Julie… something.

“Hey, Karr!” a voice called from the hallway. The pounding sounded again. “We’ve got to get moving!”

He went to the door and peered through the spy hole. It was Payne, one of the FBI agents, blue suit, sunglasses, ear wire, and all. Karr opened the door partway. “Yeah?”

“Get dressed, lover boy. We’re rolling in ten.”

“Be right there.”

Minutes later, shrugging into his sport coat, Karr walked through the hotel lobby at Dr. Spencer’s side. Agents Payne and Delgado were with them. Agent Rogers was bringing the rental car around to the parking garage pickup.

“I trust you had a… pleasant night?” Delgado said, smirking.

Karr considered several ribald replies but then simply shrugged. “I slept okay.”

He knew the three Federal agents were about as thrilled to have him along as he was to be there. There’d been, Karr understood, quite a squawk out of the FBI overseas department when they’d learned the National Security Agency wanted to include an agent on Spencer’s security team. Karr’s presence implied that someone higher up the totem pole didn’t think the FBI could handle the job… or, possibly, it was just another inside-the-Beltway turf war. The Bureau’s director had finally agreed, but only on condition that the FBI agents-the real agents-had operational control and final responsibility for Spencer’s security… meaning, among other things, that Delgado, Payne, and Rogers would be solely responsible for Spencer’s safety at the hotel, sharing shifts in his suite.

Which was how Karr had found himself at a posh airport hotel with an evening free for socializing with a pretty flight attendant. He smiled to himself. Maybe the three Bureau suits were just jealous.

In the hotel lobby, a woman sat on one of the overstuffed leather sofas, watching from behind a copy of The Sun. As the four men-including her date from the evening before-strode across the polished marble floor twenty feet away, she felt a delicious shiver of excitement. Those men, she’d been told, were Russian spies posing as Americans, and MI5 had recruited her, her, Julie Henshaw, to help in the surveillance.

The young man, Tommy, had been engaging, charming, and smart, not at all the image of your typical Russian spy. He’d actually seemed quite nice.

But as the four walked through the double glass doors into the hotel garage, she reached into her handbag and extracted a cell phone. Punching out a memorized number, she held it to her ear. “They’re on their way.”

And she replaced the phone, mission accomplished.

According to the itinerary, Spencer was scheduled to give his talk at Greater London’s City Hall, in the speaker’s hall popularly known as London’s Living Room. He was one of a number of speakers attending the European Summit on Global Warming, a prestigious event sponsored by the Royal Society. London City Hall was located on the south bank of the Thames close by the Tower Bridge, a straight-line distance of just sixteen miles, but a considerably longer and more indirect drive by way of London’s tangled roads and highways.

“Okay, George, this is Gordon,” Karr said, using the communicator hidden in his collar. George and Gordon were handles sometimes used by the Art Room and agents in the field; they came from the name of the Civil War officer who’d given his name to Fort Meade-General George Gordon Meade. “We’re on our way to the garage. How are we doing?”

Marie Telach’s voice came back in Karr’s ear. “We’ve got you, Tommy. We’re picking up feeds from the hotel security camera. Wave!”

Karr glanced up and saw the small security camera mounted up near the ceiling and grinned… but decided not to wave as well. They were supposed to be keeping a low profile, after all.

“Switching to the camera in the parking garage,” Telach told him. “All clear outside the doors.”

Through the lobby, down some steps, and out through two sets of glass doors to the parking garage, where Karr spotted the second camera.

This, he knew, was the reason Desk Three had been roped in on a simple security detail. The National Security Agency possessed a remarkable asset in its ability to monitor electronic links of all kinds virtually worldwide: Any place where security cameras existed-like that one mounted atop the garage attendant’s shack across the driveway-the Agency’s signal-monitoring staff could trace the feed, duplicate the signal, and essentially peer over the security system personnel’s shoulders. It provided an extra layer of security for high-risk targets such as Dr. Spencer.

Karr still wasn’t sure why Spencer was considered so important but had by this time reconciled himself to the fact that someone thought him to be worth Desk Three’s time, attention, and resources. He felt he’d gotten off to a bad start with Spencer yesterday and hoped he could smooth things out this morning.

A few minutes later, Rogers drove the rented black Lincoln up to the door and the three climbed in, Delgado in front with Rogers, and Payne and Karr in the back, to either side of Spencer. Karr was momentarily startled to see the driver seated on the right, then remembered where he was.

“Okay,” Karr said as they pulled out of the garage. He glanced at the surrounding traffic, checking for possible tails. “We’re rolling.”

“Give us some video, will you?”

He pulled a small device from his jacket pocket, the size of a thimble, with a glassy lens on the narrow end. He stuck the base against the seat in front of them.

“Smile, Doc!” he said conversationally. “You’re on Candid Camera!”

“Very funny,” Spencer replied. “Are these melodramatic measures really necessary?” He sounded somewhat scornful.

“Beats me,” Karr replied cheerfully. “If we’re lucky, we won’t find out.”

The car pulled out onto the street, made several turns, and picked up the M25, heading north.

“Seriously, Doc,” Karr said after a few moments. “I’m sorry if I rubbed you wrong yesterday. I really am interested in what you have to say.”

Spencer was going through some papers in his briefcase, which he had open on his lap. “Will you be at my presentation?”

“Of course.”

“Then you’ll hear what I have to say then.”

“Yeah, well, I’m curious, though. My… people have been having some communications problems lately, y’know? And they were blaming sunspots. I wondered if that was what you were talking about, you know, with this solar model theory of yours.”

Spencer studied Karr for a moment over the top of his glasses, as though considering whether the agent was serious or setting him up for some kind of practical joke. “The solar model,” he said finally, “is simply an updated and extremely detailed computer simulation, which incorporates far more data than climatologists have had access to before. It demonstrates once and for all that humans really have very little impact on such a large and complex system as global climate. And… No, the oil companies are not paying me for my opinion.”

“Look, I was out of line with that crack, Doc. And I apologize.”

Spencer seemed somewhat mollified. “Accepted.”

“So, this theory of yours. You’re saying global warming is from the sun becoming more active?”

“Essentially. You may know that the sun goes through an eleven-year cycle which oscillates between more and less activity. We’re coming up on the next solar maximum in the next year or two, and so there has been an increase in sunspots, which do cause interference with communications here on Earth.

“However, what I’ve been looking at are cycles of much greater magnitude… hundreds, even thousands of years. According to the computer model I’ve developed, the warming we are experiencing now is perfectly natural, and not a product of human carbon dioxide production through industry or fossil fuel emissions. In fact, it demonstrates that much of the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past century is due to warming temperatures, which release CO₂ from the oceans.”

“So… the rising CO₂ levels are caused by global warming, but global warming is not caused by rising CO₂…”

“Precisely.”

The car swung around a gentle curve, threading its way through a major junction to pick up the M4 near Thorny, heading east toward the city. It was a gloriously clear late-spring day in apparent defiance of the tradition that British weather was always cold and wet.

Karr and Spencer chatted amiably for the next ten miles, discussing global climate change. Occasionally Karr turned in his seat, checking the traffic behind. There was one vehicle, a white Mazda, that was nagging at his awareness.

“So, global warming might be a good thing?” Karr asked.

“I know,” Spencer said. He chuckled. “Absolute heresy. People committed to the gloom-and-doom scenario really don’t like to hear about that part. But higher levels of carbon dioxide mean accelerated plant growth, worldwide. Bigger crops. Expanding forests. Longer growing seasons. Canada and Siberia, especially, could begin producing bumper crops of corn and wheat. But, somehow, the news media doesn’t seem to feel that good news is worth broadcasting.”

“Tommy?” Marie Telach’s voice said in his head. “This is George.”

“ ’Scuse me,” Karr said, holding his left hand up to touch his ear. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “Gotta take a call.”

“I didn’t hear it ring.”

“ ’S on vibrate. George?… Go ahead.” He held the cell phone to his ear, pretending to talk on the phone. It was a useful fiction that avoided unnecessary explanations about high-tech and high-secret gadgetry.

“You seen the white car on your tail?” Telach asked.

“The one that picked us up in the front of the hotel?” Karr replied. The vehicle, a white Mazda, double-parked in front of the hotel entrance, had dropped in on the Lincoln’s tail as they’d pulled out of the parking garage. “Yeah. I’ve been watching him.”

“Think you can give us a close-up?”

Karr glanced back. Traffic was growing heavy as they entered the outskirts of Greater London. On the M4, the other vehicle had fallen back to a comfortable distance, but now, as they skirted a traffic circle and plunged into West London, the Mazda was following closer, only about thirty feet off their back bumper.

“Sure thing.” He turned and aimed the cell phone over the back of the Lincoln’s rear seat. The unit appeared to be an ordinary camera phone, but when he adjusted the lens and pressed the imaging key, the picture that came up on the phone’s display was far sharper, with a much higher resolution, than ordinary commercial cell phone cameras. Karr touched another button on the keypad, and the image grew brighter, with higher contrast. The sky and the surrounding buildings were washed out in the glare, but the people in the Mazda were clearly visible.

“What are you doing?” Spencer asked.

“Getting some snaps for the family back home.”

He touched another key, and the camera zoomed in for a close-up-tight enough that he could image the individual faces of each of the four people in the car, three men and a woman.

“Hold it steady a sec,” Telach told him as the phone transmitted video in real time via satellite back to the Art Room. “Can you adjust to get a better angle on the guy in the back? Okay. Got ’ em all. Have they made any threatening moves?”

“Nah.” Karr turned the camera slightly, studying the man in the left-hand front passenger seat. He was young, dark complexioned, and serious looking, and he was holding a cell phone against his ear.

Karr brought the phone back to his ear. “Who are they?” he asked.

“Don’t know. But we’ll run the video through our database and see if we can pick up some matches.”

“Looks like the guy in front’s talking to a friend.”

“That woman in the back isn’t your, um, little friend from last night, is she?”

Karr felt himself flush. He’d thought he’d disconnected from the Art Room channel before they’d figured out he was spending the night with someone. His night with Julie hadn’t been against regulations, exactly-the FBI agents had been responsible for Spencer’s safety in his hotel room-but there were some back at the Puzzle Palace who might see last evening as an unprofessional mingling of business and pleasure.

“No,” he said at last. He couldn’t see her well, since she was partly blocked by the driver, but Julie was blond while this woman was a brunette. “She’s not.”

“Just checking,” Telach told him. “Your secret is safe with me.”

Yeah… and five or six others who were pulling Art Room duty last night, Karr thought. “Okay. Bye.” He snapped the phone shut and pocketed it.

“I take it we’re being followed?” Spencer asked. Payne started at that, then turned to look through the back window.

“Possibly.”

Spencer looked disgusted. “That’s what I just don’t understand about this. Who would want to kill me?”

“Your work is pretty controversial, isn’t it, Doc?”

“Yes, certainly. The Royal Society is going to have a fit when I give my talk today, because they’ve bought so completely into the gloom-and-doom scenario. And plenty of others in the field hate my guts because I’m threatening their grants. But this is science, damn it! Scientists don’t go around killing each other when they disagree!”

“Gives a whole new spin to the idea of peer review, doesn’t it?” Karr glanced back again. The Mazda had dropped back a little but was still on their tail as they continued east on the Great West Road, now the A4. The Thames River was just a block to the south. They glimpsed stretches of it from time to time through factories, row houses, and commercial properties.

“We’re honestly not sure, Doc,” Karr said. “But the word on the street over here is that someone wants you dead… one of the environmentalist groups.”

“That’s ridiculous. Who? Greenpeace?”

“Almost. Ever hear of a group called Greenworld?”

“Certainly. A militant-activist spin-off from Greenpeace. Started in… I don’t know. Oh-five?”

“Two thousand six, actually.”

Karr didn’t say more. The NSA had a long history of tangling with Greenpeace. Back in July of 2001, Greenpeace protestors had stormed the NSA station at Men-with Hill, in Yorkshire. Later, the NSA had supposedly eavesdropped on Greenpeace members while looking for international terror links… and ended up in an involved lawsuit with the ACLU over domestic spying and abuse of power. The court case eventually had been settled in the Agency’s favor, but there was no love lost between the two organizations. In 2006, some of the more vocal members of Greenpeace had split off to form their own organization-a far-left environmentalist group called Greenworld that embraced the lunatic-activist fringe too violent and extremist for the original Greenpeace.

“Are you saying Greenworld wants me dead?”

“Those blog death threats were by individuals with a Greenworld connection,” Karr said. “And the e-mail of some of the Greenworld members we’ve been keeping tabs on indicates they were very interested in your itinerary.”

“Are you saying the FBI has been reading their electronic mail? Isn’t that… I don’t know, illegal?”

“Like some of your work, Doc, some of it is… controversial.”

Karr didn’t want to open that particular can of worms, not here, not now.

For now, it was enough to get Spencer where he needed to go, without interference from the people in the Mazda behind them.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0405 hours EDT

With a five-hour time difference, nine in the morning Greenwich Mean Time was four in the morning in Maryland. Marie Telach leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. God, she was tired…

Telach was, in fact, the Art Room supervisor, answering only to William Rubens himself when it came to directing missions in the field from the Deep Black ops chamber. Rank doth have its privileges, and she wasn’t required to stand night duty.

Tonight, she’d chosen to stay on. Things had been insanely busy since yesterday afternoon, with not one but two major ops going down simultaneously-Sunny Weather and Magpie. Of the two, Sunny Weather was, so far, completely routine. No one really expected any problem there until later today, if then.

But Magpie had gone seriously wrong. Communications had failed, two field agents had come that close to getting caught or killed, and the F-22 deployed to fill in the communications gap had been spotted and downed. Telach had worked through the evening processing data coming through from Lia in St. Pete, trying to identify one of the gunmen she’d met, then helped coordinate the search for Ghost Blue. She’d finally sent Rubens home around eleven-all but ordering him to go home and get some sleep-but elected to stay on herself, working through the night. A little after three in the morning, Tommy Karr had checked in from London, and she’d been running him as he rode in a rented car into the heart of London.

She’d spotted the car following Spencer’s vehicle through the video bug Karr had planted on the seat. Karr had transmitted a series of still and video images from his cell phone, which Telach had in turn relayed to the Vault.

Now, however, she found herself staring at a new window opened on her computer screen. The Vault had come through.

The Vault was Deep Black’s database, containing an enormous volume of information-much of it video or still photos, together with police records, surveillance reports, and debriefing notes-all gleaned from a variety of sources all over the world. Despite the name, which sounded like something completely passive, a storage space, perhaps, the Vault was a far-flung computer network that maintained active links with other criminal and terrorist data banks, including those run by the FBI, Interpol, and Mossad. In fact, the Vault’s very first international link some years ago had been with Komissar, the huge computer network at Wiesbaden run by what then had been the West German police.

Of course, the Germans hadn’t realized at the time that they were sharing all of that data on international terrorists with the National Security Agency.

The Vault operations center, located down the steel-paneled passageway from the Art Room, possessed, like the Art Room itself, deeply buried fiber-optic links with the Tordella Supercomputer Facility half a mile northeast of the NSA headquarters building. Telach had submitted the best of Karr’s photographs of the four people in the car following him. For almost thirty minutes, the Tordella super-Cray computers had crunched through the images, comparing hundreds of separate elements-the distance between eyes, the shapes of noses and chins, the angles of cheek bones, the arcane geometry of facial planes and their relationships with one another-looking for matches among the hundreds of thousands of photographs in the NSA’s memory stacks and, when necessary, those of other military and police networks worldwide.

She clicked on the window and saw the results of the search.

Damn…

She checked the time again-0410 hours, just past four in the morning. She didn’t want to wake him… but Rubens was going to want to know about this.

She reached for the secure phone.

Tooley Street Approaching London City Hall London 0912 hours GMT

“What the hell is going on up there?” Rogers said from behind the Lincoln’s wheel. “A parade?”

“Uh-uh,” Karr said, leaning forward so he could see through the windshield in front. “Looks to me like some kind of protest.”

After cutting through West London on the A4, they’d picked up the Strand in front of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, crossed to the south side of the Thames over the Waterloo Bridge, and, with only one missed turn, made their way across Southwark to Duke Street Hill, close by the London Bridge, picking up Tooley near the London Bridge City Pier. According to the GPS mapping program in the car, they were a block south of the Thames and within a hundred yards of the entrance to the underground parking for City Hall.

The street, however, was clogged with protestors.

It looked, Karr thought, like a bad flashback to the street protests of the sixties. Hundreds of people, most of them young, but including folks old enough to have protested against the Vietnam War, surged along Tooley and gathered in massed crowds along the sidewalks. Several buildings appeared to have been taken over wholesale; American flags, flying upside down, were much in evidence, as were a variety of handheld signs. “Independence from America!” was a popular bit of signage. So were “Global Warming Is Real” and “Save Our Planet.” Some of the marchers carried Greenpeace signs or placards bearing the Greenpeace logo. Some were awkwardly dressed in bulky costumes meant to represent factory smokestacks or oil-drilling rigs.

“All of this for you, Doc?” Karr asked.

“I shouldn’t think so,” Spencer replied. “I’m hardly the only voice of sanity at the symposium.”

“Yes, but you were the voice singled out on that blog for silencing,” Karr pointed out.

The London Environmental Symposium, he knew, had attracted a lot of attention in the world press. The United States was under increasing international pressure to ratify the Kyoto Accords, which required signatory nations to accept mandatory limits to greenhouse gas emissions-carbon dioxide, in particular-in order to halt or slow global warming.

Of course, putting caps on such emissions would also put a cap on the economies of member nations. Billions of dollars were at stake, along with industrial growth, employment levels, and the very standards of living for first-world nations such as the United States and Great Britain. Britain had signed and ratified the Protocols; the United States had signed them, but that signing had been a purely symbolic gesture, since they carried no weight until they were ratified by Congress.

Dr. Spencer was spokesman for a point of view seen as heretical by the environmentalists, that global warming and cooling were functions of solar output, and human activity affected climate little, if at all.

“I don’t see any Greenworld signs,” Payne said.

“I don’t think they’re that much into peaceful demonstration,” Karr said. “But you can bet they’re here.” Turning in his seat, he glanced at the vehicles behind. Odd. The white Mazda had turned off somewhere within the past block or two, after staying on their tail all the way from the airport.

“Doc, I suggest you get down on the floor.”

“Mr. Karr! Really! I-”

“Do what he says,” Payne said. The FBI man sounded nervous. “Get down and out of sight.”

Grumbling, Spencer complied. The back of the Lincoln was roomy enough-just-for him to find enough space to scrunch down on his knees, his head between Payne and Karr and below the level of the windows.

Rogers leaned on the horn, then pounded on it. Reluctantly, people in the crowd parted ahead, allowing the Lincoln to move slowly forward. Embattled London bobbies helped; several were visible in the crowd, trying to get the people off the street. One pointed at the Lincoln and waved them ahead.

“There’s the entrance,” Payne said. “Thank God.”

They turned left off of Tooley Street and descended a ramp leading to the garage. Before vanishing underground, Karr had a glimpse of London City Hall.

It was one of the oddest buildings Karr had ever seen, like a black-glass and steel egg tilted backward from its perch above the river.

Karr had read about the thing as part of his mission briefing. Opened in 2002 as a part of the More London development of the area near the Tower Bridge, it had originally been intended to be an immense sphere suspended above the Thames, but later design changes opted for a more conventional anchoring on solid ground instead. Native Londoners referred to it as Darth Vader’s helmet, a misshapen egg, or a titanic human scrotum, and the Mayor of London himself had called it a glass testicle. The design, Karr had read, was supposed to be make the building energy-efficient by reducing its surface area, and at some point in the future, the London Climate Change Agency was supposed to attach solar cells to the exterior.

Inside the structure were housed the offices of the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority, or GLA. A spiraling walkway circled all the way up the building’s ten stories just inside the darkened transparency of its curving surface, giving access to the top-floor meeting and exhibition space known as London’s Living Room.

From this angle, Karr thought as the garage entrance blocked the structure from view, the building seemed a dark and forbidding presence and not living room-like at all.

Behind them, someone with a megaphone was leading a chant: “USA, CO₂! USA, CO₂…”

And the crowd’s mood, Karr thought, was damned ugly.

“Gordon, this is George,” Telach’s voice sounded in his ear.

“Go ahead,” he replied. He knew from the sound of her voice that he wasn’t going to like this.