Arctic Gold (13 page)

Quickly.

Hands up, she stumbled forward.

Just possibly, she thought, they were about to see the Toy Shop up close after all, without any high- tech help from the Orca.

Rubens’ Office

NSA Headquarters

Fort Meade, Maryland

1035 hours EDT

Rubens sat alone in his office, staring out across the Maryland countryside. The morning rush hour was long since past, and traffic on the Baltimore- Washington Parkway was light and brisk. All those people, he thought. All those people with no idea that we’re at war.

From William Rubens’ perspective, that war had little to do with terrorism, or with oil, or with specific geographical locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It was, instead, a war between the forces of civilization and the barbarian night, a last- ditch stand against the ultimate night that had been clawing at the light of culture and rationality and science for as long as such concepts had been understood. The storming, dark passions of National Socialism; the stolid gray and monolithic rigidity of the Soviets; the shrill sloganeering, the witch hunts, and the petty sabotage of the more ignorant branches of political activism; the mindless embrace of God will as excuse for any act of bloodshed, stupidity, or bigotry all were, in Rubens’ mind, aspects of the same darkness, the same ancient and abyssal evil that threatened to tear down all that Humankind had built, all that was decent and civilized and safe.

It was a war the National Security Agency had been fighting since 1953 and Desk Three since its inception only a few years before.

And it was a war in which good men and women died.

In the early years of the Cold War there’d been no satellites, no huge and ultra- sensitive listening stations, no means of eavesdropping on the Soviets short of actually flying up to or even across their borders in deliberate

acts of trespass intended to get them to turn off their defense radars and other electronic networks and record the results. It had been a deadly game, one played across decades, and there had been casualties. A still- classified number of unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been shot down, some inside the borders of the Soviet Union, others well outside, over international waters.

And now, even with satellites and high- tech sensors and all of the toys and gadgets meant to make covert ops foolproof, sterile, and safe, good men and women died. Despite all the acts of Congress, all the black programs of the military, there simply was no way to get the job done without risk.

As at the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, there was a wall downstairs in the NSA tower, a wall set with gold stars, some with names, many without a star for every NSA employee to be killed in the line of duty.

Tommy Karr dead? It didn’t seem possible.

There would be a memorial service, of course but later. For now, the rest of them had to carry on.

For now, the information would be kept tightly compartmentalized. Dean knew, but he would be carrying out the investigation in England now. Rubens had already arranged for Dean flight to Russia to be canceled and put him on a flight to London insteadthe same flight, in fact, that Karr had taken. What the hell? It was worth a shot.

Rubens also had transmitted orders to have Lia and Akulinin meet Dean in London, but they would be kept out of the loop on Karr death for now. Need- to- know and Lia, especially, would be emotionally sensitive to the news. Rubens didn’t want to break it to her while she was still, in effect, inside enemy territory.

Several facts had become clear already. Desk Three knew who the killers were. Randolph Evans, a GCHQ

operative who’d been nearby when Karr was killed, had flashed digital photographs of the three terrorists back to the Art Room.

Right now, three digital photographs were displayed on Rubens’ monitor. The three had been positively identified as Jacques Mallet, Kurt Berger, and Yvonne Fischer, the three Greenworlders Karr had spotted and photographed on the trip in from Heathrow. Malletthe one with the overcoat and the assault rifleand Berger both were dead. Fischer was on her way to a London hospital with multiple gunshot wounds; she might live. If she did, she was going to have a visit from Dean. Rubens wanted answers.

Another fact, and a worrisome one. The Russians were behind the Greenworld strike in London. Their motives weren’t clear yetmaybe Dean could come up with something therebut Sergei Braslov had been photographed with the Greenworld killers that morning. A careful search of TV broadcasts and security camera shots of the protest mob outside the London City Hall, using feature- matching software to pick faces out of crowds, had so far failed to turn up an image of Braslov. That didn’t mean he wasn’t there, but it did suggest he’d remained back and out of sight.

It felt like Braslov had been running the three assassins, sending them in to kill Spencer while the local security forces were occupied with the Greenworlders putting up their silly banner. Rubens had flashed a strongly worded request to GCHQ: find Braslov.

The Russian was the key to what had just happened on the observation deck outside London Living Room.

A question remained, though: assuming Braslov had put them up to it, why had three political activists agreed to go on what amounted to a suicide mission? Dean had already had the files pulled on all three, and it didn’t

make sense. Fischer, Berger, and Mallet were upper- middle- class college graduates. All three had been employed, and Berger had a family back in Germany.

The Frenchman, Mallet, reportedly had a passionate hatred of all things American, and he also had a drug problemheroin. Those might have offered handles by which Braslov had maneuvered the man, but had they been enough to make him commit suicide by bodyguard? Berger was a confirmed socialist, but he appeared to be a hanger- on, a follower, not someone who would risk being shot over a difference in ideologies.

The woman, so far as could be told from her arrest record, was a passionate neosocialist ideologue who despised oil companies, global conglomerates, and capitalism. She saw herself as a freedom fighter at the barricades, joining the downtrodden masses in their righteous struggle against the robber- baron overlords of the planet, a worldview helped along by the fact that she was carrying sixty thousand pounds of credit card debt.

According to the bank records pulled in through the NSA far- flung computer nets, both Berger and Mallet were deep in debt as well. Might that be the common link, the handle Braslov had used? Their bank records didn’t show any large deposits, but money might have been placed in new accounts under false names, or even into Swiss accounts.

The fact remained, the three assassins had launched an attack that had all but guaranteed their deaths or, at the very least, arrests for murder. Money, even lots of money, wasn’t much of an inducement if you couldn’t enjoy it. The three weren’t fanatic jihadists seeking eternal life. What in hell had Braslov promised them in order to get them to attack Spencer?

Dean felt like he was juggling, and he was beginning to lose the rhythm. Russia, England, plus the administrative and political threat here at home to Desk Three, with the loss of that F-22 and

the death of a Desk Three agent.

And of course it all had to hit at once.

Rubens checked his watch and sighed. Soon it would be time for him to head inside the Beltway for his three o’clock appointment with Wehrum. Damn.

He wasn’t looking forward to this.

CFS Akademik Petr Lebedev

Arctic Ice Cap

82a! 34’ N, 177a! 26’ E

2215 hours, GMT12

Kathy McMillan sat on the narrow bunk in a ship cabin, waiting.

They’d brought her here several hours ago, she thought, though she wasn’t sure of the time. They’d taken her watch, along with her boots, parka, and other cold weather gear, and most of her clothing, and unceremoniously shoved her in here. Through the single tiny, round porthole, she could see the ice outside; at this time of the year, however, the sun never set but circled endlessly above the horizon.

How long before they miss us back at the camp?

she wondered.

She tried not to think of the corollary that even when they missed the three- person team, what would the rest of the expedition be able to do about it?

Their captors had hustled them across the ice to one of the helicopters and flown them across the ice to a large ship with the name Akademik Petr Lebedev picked out in Cyrillic letters on the bow. A civilian ship, then, probably one of the fleet of exploration and science vessels the Russians used for Arctic surveys and research. Two other ships were visible nearby, an icebreaker and what was

probably a transport of some kind. She only had a glimpse of the activity on the ice around the three ships, but the Russians appeared to have constructed a small base and there were stockpiles of supplies and carefully shrouded equipment everywhere.

The Toy Shop indeed. What the hell were they building?

Once on board the ship, they’d herded the three Americans belowdecks, taking their things and putting them in three separate cabins. McMillan had tried pounding on the door and shouting, but after a while her voice was raw and her hands sore, so she’d been waiting quietly ever since.

She heard a rattle at the door and came to her feet. Half a dozen ill- formed plans flitted through her thoughtsof knocking down whoever was coming inside and racing for the deckbut common sense won out. Where the hell could she go, barefoot, wearing nothing but a T- shirt and panties?

The door swung open, and a tall, blond, rugged- looking man stepped inside. Behind him, she could see a guard, a man in a Russian naval uniform, holding an AKM assault rifle.

Good morning, the man said in almost faultless English. How are we doing?

We are demanding to be allowed to talk to an American consul, she said. We

are protesting being captured and dragged here by your goons! We were engaged in a scientific

We were spying, darling, the man said evenly. The captain of our submarine got excellent video footage of you scuttling your equipment on the ice. What was it an unmanned undersea rover? A robot submarine?

I am part of a NOAA survey expedition, she told him. We are mapping and measuring the thinning of the ice cap, and monitoring ice drift.

Indeed. And you seem to have drifted into Russian territory.

Russian territory. McMillan bit back a harsh laugh. I hate to break it to you, Ivan. These are still

international waters.

The Russian claim was utter nonsense, of course sheer political posturing and muscle flexing. The NOAA ice station had been deliberately, almost ostentatiously, constructed on the ice over international waters. Over the past month, however, the ice cap normal clockwise driftas much as twenty- five or thirty miles in a single day, depending on winds and currentshad carried the station across the antemeridian, the 180-degree longitude line, and, according to the latest Russian claims, at any rate, into Russian territorial waters.

No one was taking the Russians very seriously, of course. In the summer of 2007, they’d pulled a kind of high- tech publicity stunt, sending a couple of their Mir three- man minisubs to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole, some twelve thousand feet beneath the ice. They’d planted a large titanium Russian flag at the bottom and operated a kind of ultra- exclusive tourist service, ferrying several people able to pay the eighty- thousand- dollar fare to what they were calling the real

North Pole.

The flag planting was solely symbolic, of course but the Russians were trying to make something more of it. According to the way they read the map, their territorial waters, by international treaty, extended two hundred miles from their continental shelf. They were trying to make a case for the undersea Lomonosov Ridge, which extended out from the Siberian landmass almost all the way to Greenland, as a part of their continental shelf, a declaration that allowed them to claim fully half of the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole and as far over

the top of the world as the 180th meridian, as their sovereign territorial waters.

The whole matter was due to be adjudicated by the United Nations within the next couple of years, but in the meantime, the Russians had been doing a lot of saber rattling.

And the West had been rattling back. Canada and Denmark, especially, weren’t about to let the Russian claim go unchallenged, and the United States was weighing in as well. As barren and cold as the ice cap was, various geological surveys conducted by both the United States and several other nations suggested that fully 25 percent of the world as- yet- undiscovered oil and gas reserves might lie beneath the floor of the Arctic Ocean, a staggering bonanza of fossil fuels that might power the industrial nations for another century or more. If the Arctic Ocean remained for the most part international waters, anyone with the technological know- how could tap those petroleum reserves. Russia wanted to grab the bear share of that treasure for herself, a move that could revitalize their creaking post- Soviet economy and make Mother Russia once again a major force in the modern world.