Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  “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 R
oom, 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.

  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, str
eetlights 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 large 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.