Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  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.

  6

  Rubens’ Office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0525 hours EDT

  WILLIAM RUBENS EMERGED from the elevator on the ninth floor of the NSA headquarters building and walked down Mahogany Row, past the Agency’s executive offices. At the far end, behind a blue door set into a blue wall displaying the Agency’s shield, was Room 9A197-though of course it was not marked as such-the offices of DIRNSA, the Director of the NSA.

  Next to the DIRNSA suite was Rubens’ smaller office. He slipped his key card into the lock to his suite, put his hand inside the shrouded keypad to type in a code entry, and opened the door. Five swift strides took him through his secretary’s office-she wasn’t in, yet, the lucky bitch-and up to his office door.

  Inside, he pressed a control to reduce the polarization of the large window that made up one wall of his office. The window was double paned, not for reasons of energy efficiency, but to foil certain high-tech eavesdropping equipment that used laser beams to translate vibrations on window glass into intelligible conversations.

  The window looked west across the still night-shadowed Maryland countryside. Traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Beltway was light but picking up with the beginnings of rush hour. Beyond, streetlights illuminated the parking lots within an industrial park housing a number of businesses and defense contractors-every one of them connected via various black budget links with the NSA.

  It was, Rubens thought, an enormous and endlessly complex empire. Sitting down behind the desk, he pressed his thumb against a reader, then booted up his computer.

  He’d spent the past twenty minutes going through the mandatory security checks at multiple stations on his way up, but these last few security measures were second nature. Rubens himself had ordered the implementation of several of them and would sooner have broken an arm than the protocol of NSA security procedures.

  After a moment, his screen display lit up with the NSA logo-an American eagle, a flag-bedecked shield on its chest and on a blue background, grasping a la
rge key in both sets of talons. Above was the legend “National Security Agency” and below, the words “United States of America.”

  Rubens yawned. He’d not gotten much sleep before Telach had phoned him at home. The information she had was classified level red… which meant that it was not to leave the confines of NSA headquarters. He could have had her transmit the data to his home computer-there was a secure dedicated line for just that purpose-but… protocol.

  An icon was winking at the bottom of his screen, indicating a waiting live message.

  He touched a key. “Yes?”

  Marie Telach’s face appeared in a window on the display. “Mr. Rubens?”

  “Yes, Ms. Telach. God… you look terrible. Up all night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded. She’d said something about staying over when she’d unceremoniously shooed him out of the Art Room last night.

  “So… what’s up?”

  “I thought you would want to see these, sir,” Telach told him.

  A second window opened on his screen. Faces stared out at him from simulated file folders on the display.

  There were four people in all, three men and a woman, each with his or her own electronic dossier.

  “Sunny Weather picked up a tail when they left the hotel at Heathrow,” Telach told Rubens. “That was about two hours ago. Agent Karr managed to transmit high-res images of the driver and three passengers. We ran them through the Vault and, well, this is what popped up.”

  Rubens clicked on the top file, opening it on his screen. There were a number of photographs inside, most of them obviously candids, a long PDF file with pages of text, and a brief video. Among the photos were the full-face and side images of police mug shots.

  “‘Jacques Mallet,’” he said, reading the introduction of the text file. “‘French. Joined Greenpeace in 1993. Arrested by the Sureté, ’94, for trespassing during protests outside a French nuke submarine base… and again in ’95 for trespassing at Muruoa.’” The French had conducted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests at Muruoa, in French Polynesia, over a thirty-year period that ended, finally, in 1996. Greenpeace had been active in protesting those tests.

  He kept reading. “‘Co-founded Greenworld in 2005 after a split with the Greenpeace committee…’”

  There was more, lots more, but he clicked to the second file. “‘Yvonne Fischer. English. Greenpeace in ’98. Arrested in 2001 for her part in the protests at Menwith Hill. Greenworld, ’06.’” One surveillance photo showed her perched precariously atop a chain-link fence, waving a Greenpeace flag. Several of the huge, white golf ball radomes of Menwith Hill were visible in the landscape behind her.

  He clicked again. “‘Kurt Berger. Germany. Recruited straight into Greenworld, 2007. No police record, but surveillance photos have placed him repeatedly with hard-core Greenworld agents.’” Click. “And… ‘Sergei Braslov. Russian.’” His eyebrows arched high on his forehead. “Well, well, well…”

  “I thought you’d be interested in Braslov, sir,” Telach said.

  “Soviet Army in the eighties,” Rubens said, skimming the PDF file’s intro. “Rank of major. Served in Afghanistan, wounded twice, won the Order of Lenin… as well as the Order for Service to the Homeland in the Armed Forces, Second Class. In ’87, he moved to the GRU… more awards and decorations, promotion to colonel… then transferred to the MVD in ’91.”

  Rubens stared at the file for a long moment, his forefinger tapping absently on the mouse as he scanned through the document. “It says he joined Greenpeace in December of ’98…” He glanced at Telach’s face, waiting patiently in the other window on the screen. “But under the name Johann Ernst. False ID and papers.”

  “We think he was a plant, sir,” Telach said.

  “Of course. An agent provocateur. Why else would a high-ranking member of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Internal Affairs join an international organization like Greenpeace?”

  The Soviets might be gone, but the dark labyrinth of Russian power politics continued to churn as it had since the days of the czars.

  Greenpeace International, so far as Rubens was concerned, was a gadfly, though a well-meaning one. They’d racked up some impressive environmentalist victories worldwide… in the campaign to reduce unnecessary whaling, for instance. If they were an annoyance for the industrial West, however, with their protests against nuclear power and industrial pollution, they were doubly so within the borders of the former Soviet Union. There, the nation’s disintegration had left a festering morass of environmental problems-toxic waste spills and dumps, radioactive zones, dying seas and rivers, and abandoned rust-belt factory complexes, a situation driven to crisis proportions by a fast-disintegrating infrastructure, the breakdown of authority, local wars, and rampant corruption.

  Greenpeace International had opened an office in Moscow in 1989. Since that time, Greenpeace Russia had conducted a number of protests within the country-against the resumption of nuclear testing on Novaya Zemlya, against a pipeline near Lake Baikal, against the illegal timber trade with Finland. With a long tradition of nonviolent protest and confrontation, the organization had for almost twenty years struggled to call world attention to the fast-worsening environmental situation within the Russian Federation.

  And they’d scored some important successes with their David-and-Goliath tactics. For the most part, however, the Russian authorities maintained the same gray, grim, and stolidly monolithic presentation of absolute control as their Soviet predecessors. News reports and photos only rarely made it out of the country or had much of an impact among native Russians.

  In 2006, some of the more radical elements within Greenpeace had split off to form a new group.

  Greenworld was smaller than Greenpeace, more secretive, more elusive, but at the same time, more confrontational. During the past couple of years, they’d staged several massive protests in Great Britain, Belgium, and Russia, grabbing a lot of media attention with flashy banners, hurled rocks and bottles, and mass arrests. Where Greenpeace insisted on using purely nonviolent means to get its message across, Greenworld was not quite so fastidious. Several of its members had been arrested for sabotaging an oil refinery in England, and in 2007 the car-bomb death of a German industrialist had been blamed on the group, though no arrests had been made. The NSA had been maintaining a file on the group, which appeared ready and willing to use terrorist tactics, unlike its parent organization.

  One week ago, a routine NSA electronic intercept had picked up a blogger’s page that talked about assassinating Dr. Spencer at the Environmental Symposium in London. The blogger was a London teenager… but the kid had a police record. He’d been arrested for his part in the Men-with Hill affair and, five years later, had joined Greenworld.

  The tidbit had been passed up the bureaucratic totem pole inside the Washington Beltway and ultimately trickled back down to Rubens’ desk. The State Department was taking seriously the possibility that Greenworld was going to try to kill Spencer.

  As a result, Rubens had initiated Operation Sunny Weather, assigning Tommy Karr to the FBI team escorting Spencer to London and back.

  “Braslov,” Rubens said, reading further, “was one of Greenworld’s founders?”

  “We think so, sir,” Telach told him. “We don’t have much intelligence on Greenworld’s inner workings, but we know that ‘Johann Ernst’ was a close associate with Peter Strauss and Emily Lockyear, who were the official founders.”

  “And here he is tailing Sunny Weather.” Rubens considered this for a moment. “Have you passed this tidbit on to Karr yet?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “Let him know who he’s dealing with. I-” Rubens stopped in mid-sentence. “Uh-oh.”

  “Sir?”

  Rubens had been leafing through the electronic pages of Braslov’s file. He’d come to a photo of the man, grainy and poorly focused, obviously a surveillance photo taken of Braslov at long range, but clear enough to show a ragged
scar on the left side of his face. He appeared to be standing on a beach, laughing. With him were a pretty, bare-breasted blonde in red bikini briefs and an older man with a bushy mustache. Both men wore swim trunks and short-sleeved shirts, both shirts open enough to reveal a number of tattoos on their torsos as well as their upper arms.

  “Who is this?” Rubens asked, clicking and dragging a square over the second man. “Do we have a positive ID?”

  Telach’s eyes shifted as she studied her own monitor, then typed in a command at her desk. A new window opened on Rubens’ display, filling up with text and photos.

  “Yes, sir. Grigor Kotenko.”

  “That,” Rubens said slowly, nodding, “is what I was afraid of. And these tattoos on Braslov’s chest?”

  Telach nodded. “I ran those through the Vault as well. It’s difficult to make out details, of course. But it looks like both men are sporting eight-pointed stars on their chests in blue ink.”

  Mafiya, then… the Organizatsiya. The Russian mafia made extensive use of tattoos to convey a wealth of data about a person’s rank, reliability, and criminal history. Often the tattoos were acquired in prison or within the Russian gulag, where the rubber heels of shoes were melted down and mixed with soot and urine to produce a characteristic blue ink. The eight-pointed star indicated a very high rank within certain Mafiya groups.

  This was not good. Not good at all.

  The Green Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0912 hours EDT

  Individual rooms and corridors within the Puzzle Palace might not be outwardly named or numbered, but human nature being what it was, unofficial names continued to arise as needed. The Art Room was one such necessity; the Green Room was another, one of a hotel’s worth of meeting rooms, briefing rooms, and auditoriums where face-to-face business within Crypto City could be conducted.

  Dean took a seat at a long oval table that was already fairly well occupied. The walls-painted a pale shade of hospital green, hence the name-were hung with photographs of presidents and NSA directors past and present, and an American flag and a flag bearing the NSA seal flanked a large flat-panel wall screen at the head of the room.