“Pleased to meet you,” Dean said, shaking her hand. “What language?”
“Russian, at the moment,” she told him.
“She’s heading up our Russian desk right now,” Evans said. “But she’s also our best Japanese linguist.”
That told Dean something about Menwith’s electronic reach. Apparently they weren’t limited to Europe after all.
“We’ve been putting together some intercepts from the other day,” she told him. “Randy here thought you should hear this.”
She led them back into her cubicle and entered a string of characters into her workstation. “This is from four days ago,” she said. “A satellite phone exchange, apparently originating from within a few meters of the GLA building a few minutes after the riot in which your friend was killed broke out. The conversation was encrypted, but we’ve known this particular encryption key for some time.”
“Rodina,” a voice said from a speaker.
Carolyn translated. “‘Motherland.’We think that was a code word, identifying the speaker.”
Another voice replied, also in Russian, as Carolyn provided a running translation.
“‘We’re watching BBC Two. Excellent work.’
“‘One of our agents still lives. I cannot get a clear shot, however.’
“‘She knows nothing. We don’t want to reveal your presence. That might tell the opposition too much.’
“‘That was my thought. . . . Perhaps it is time to activate Cold War. The two . . . incidents should take place close together, for maximum effect.’
“‘We agree. A ticket and new identity papers are waiting for you at the embassy. You fly out tonight.’
“‘Good. Until tonight, then.’”
The connection was broken.
“Braslov,” Dean said. “The fourth man in the car that tailed Tommy from Heathrow.”
“We think so,” Carolyn agreed. “We’ve recorded some other communications previously with voiceprints that match this one, and which we suspected were Sergei Braslov. We can’t prove it yet, but we believe that he’s our man.”
“Who is he speaking with?”
“Grigor Kotenko.”
“Ah,” Dean said. “The Tambov Gang.”
“At the time of this conversation,” Carolyn told them, “Kotenko was at his personal dacha on the Black Sea. We have quite an extensive voice-intercept file on him now.”
“The agent he mentions,” Dean said. “That must be the woman Tommy shot during the GLA attack. What was her name?”
“Yvonne Fischer,” Evans said. “We have her under close arrest at Barts—that’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, back in London. She hasn’t regained consciousness as yet. Still listed as critical.”
“Sounds like the bad guys aren’t concerned about her giving us anything useful.”
“That would be a typical op for GRU or KGB back in the bad old Soviet days,” Lia put in. “Use some poor schmuck you recruit off the street, don’t tell him jack, program him to do a dirty deed that can’t be traced back to you.”
“Might’ve been a false-flag recruitment,” Dean said. False-flag was spook-speak for recruiting agents by convincing them that you worked for someone else, someone of whom they approved.
“Any idea where Braslov is now?”
“We know he caught an Aeroflot flight out of Heathrow that night. Pulkovo.”
“St. Petersburg,” Lia said.
“And there he caught a Sakha Avia flight out of Pulkovo to Yakutsk.”
“Yakutsk? That’s out in the middle of Siberia.”
“Right the first time,” Carolyn said. “Unfortunately, we have no one on the ground there and Misawa hasn’t picked up any relevant intercepts, as yet.” Misawa was an NSA listening station in Japan, one of the largest Echelon bases, in fact, in the world. “We think he had another destination after that, but we don’t know where.”
“What is that ‘Cold War’ Braslov mentioned?” Dean asked. “The way he said it, it sounded like a secret operation of some kind.”
“We may have another piece of that puzzle,” Carolyn told them. She typed at her keyboard for a moment, queuing up another intercept. “This came out of Misawa four days ago, about four hours after the GLA attack. After picking up the intercept from Kotenko, we put an electronic tracer on him that would flag any call with that particular encryption key. Here it is.”
“Rodina,” a voice said, Kotenko’s.
Another voice responded in Russian. “‘Well, it’s been a long time, Grigor,’” Carolyn translated. “‘We thought you’d forgotten us.’
“‘Never, my friend. You are far too important for our plans. Cold War has commenced.’
“‘Has it, then? That’s good news.’
“‘Osprey is on his way to you. He should be there within—’”
A blast of static interrupted the conversation.
“We can’t make out what came next,” Carolyn said. “Communications have been erratic of late, and the speaker’s location is at an extremely high latitude. What we have is only a fragment.”
“Osprey,” Dean said. He looked at Evans. “Braslov, do you think?”
“It’s possible.”
“So who is Kotenko speaking with?”
For answer, Carolyn typed at her keyboard again, bringing up a file on her screen. A photograph showed a ruggedly good-looking man, blue-eyed, blond-haired. Dean could just make out a piece of a tattoo on his chest.
“Another Russian mafioso?” he asked.
“His name,” Carolyn told him, “is Feodor Golytsin. Formerly Soviet Navy—specifically their submarine services. He was court-martialed in 1986 for speaking out against Soviet military policies in Afghanistan. He spent four years in a gulag, where, yes, we believe he made connections with the Organizatsiya. However, in 1995 he took a job with Gazprom.”
“Gazprom?” Dean asked. “That’s natural gas?”
“Gazprom,” Carolyn told him, “is the largest natural gas company in Russia . . . and by some measures the third-largest corporation in the world. With its oil-producing subsidiary Gazprom Neft, it’s also the third-largest producer of petroleum in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Iran. It started off under the Soviets as a state-owned subsidiary, of course, but has been operating as an independent corporation since the mid-nineties. Today, a dozen Eastern European nations all depend on Gazprom for natural gas. The European Union gets twenty-five percent of its natural gas from them.”
“But there are concerns that the Russian Mafiya is trying to take over the Russian petroleum industry,” Dean said. “So if what you say is true, that means Gazprom.”
“There’ve been a number of corruption scandals involving Gazprom in the past. Our Russian desk believes that Golytsin is part of what we think of as a Mafiya beachhead within the corporation.”
“An ex-submariner,” Dean mused. “That suggests some interesting possibilities.”
Arctic oil exploration would almost certainly require submarines.
He was beginning to think he knew where Braslov had gone out of Yakutsk.
Executive Cafe
K Street NW, Washington, D.C.
1225 hours EDT
It was two days after his unsatisfactory interview with Wehrum.
Rubens sat at a small table set up outside of a popular Washington sidewalk café, waiting for Barbara. She was late. She’d promised to meet him for lunch at noon, but so far only strangers had passed on the sidewalk or on the other side of the street, through McPherson Square.
He enjoyed watching people, and the table gave him the perfect vantage point. A few had been quite exotic—including one silver-goateed individual with a black and red cape streaming from his shoulders, plus any number of people in saris, turbans, caftans, or other foreign dress. Washington was truly the international city, with Embassy Row only a few blocks to the north, and hordes of international tourists descending on the Mall, the White House, and the monuments. It was a gorgeous spring day, and the
tourists were certainly out in force.
The White House was an easy six blocks away, down Vermont Avenue and past Lafayette Square. He wondered what was keeping her . . . then decided the question was nonsense. He knew what Barbara’s schedule was like these days. And he expected that the e-mail he’d sent her yesterday afternoon had stirred things up a bit there.
There she was, cutting across McPherson Square and breaking into a near jog across K Street, as fast as her platform heels would permit her. Barbara Stahl was an attractive woman in her forties, with PhDs in both international studies and economics. She was the senior Russian specialist currently serving on the National Security Council.
He stood up as she neared the table. “Hello, Barbara.”
“Hi, Bill. Sorry I’m late.”
“Not at all. Waiter!”
“Get for yourself, not me. I have to get right back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Coffee, perhaps?”
“Thank you.” She took a seat. “Things are not so quietly going nuts back there. Full-blown crisis mode. But I did need to see you.”
He sat down opposite her. The waiter came up and Rubens ordered coffee for the two of them. “Your e sounded stressed.”
“Mm. And your e-mail has stirred up a hornet’s nest.”
“I was afraid it might.”
“I’m not on the eyes list for Powerhouse intercepts,” she told him. “Why the hell did you do it? Damn it, Bill, are you begging to get canned?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad? Twenty years in federal prison and up to half a million dollars in fines? You don’t call that bad?”
“As Deputy Director of the NSA, I have some leeway,” he told her. “Not a lot, but some.”
“Are you saying you make the rules, so you can break them?”
“No. But I reviewed your security clearances and made sure you were cleared for Powerhouse-level documents before I sent that e.”
“If Dr. Bing finds out, she could have those clearances revoked. And God only knows what they’ll do to you.”
“Barbara, overclassification of sensitive material is as dangerous in this job as underclassifying it, maybe more so. The whole point of intelligence is making sure the people who need to see something actually do see it. You won’t get in trouble with your boss over your level of security; trust me on this. As for me, well, they can play those games with me later. Right now, it is important, imperative, that the President knows what’s going on up in the Arctic. Those intercepts went to Langley, but I don’t trust them to see the whole picture. Or to put it into the pickle.”
“The pickle” was D.C. insider-speak for the President’s Intelligence Checklist, a daily ten-page newsletter prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence for the President on overnight developments of five or six items of immediate presidential concern. CIA headquarters at Langley was sometimes called “the pickle factory” for that reason.
“You’re just pissed that you don’t have POTUS access through George Haddad anymore.”
That hurt. He frowned, sitting back.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said, seeing his expression. “I shouldn’t have said that. But you’ve got to know that every time you try working through the back doors in this city, you’re stepping on toes. Powerful toes.”
“And sometimes working through back doors and stepping on toes is the only way to get anything done. Look . . . did you do as I asked?”
“Yes. I was in on the briefing on the Arctic situation this morning, and I brought up the intercepts. I have to tell you, though, both Bing and Collins were there, and they were furious.”
“I can imagine.”
Presidential briefings tended to be carefully scripted affairs, with no digressions from the planned agenda. Rubens had asked Barbara to interject a new issue into the session, bringing up the Powerhouse intercepts as hot new intel just received from the NSA . . . which was true, as far as it went. But to bring up something not already on the agreed upon list of topics was a serious breach of protocol.
“I didn’t say where the message had come from. I just said ‘a highly placed intelligence source.’”
“They’ll guess. It’s okay. I was expecting that. Did it get you into trouble, departing from the agenda like that?”
“No. Not yet, anyway, though Dr. Bing did tell me she wants to have a chat with me.” She grimaced. “First, though . . . the President wants to hear those intercepts for himself.”
“Good.”
“This afternoon.”
Rubens’ eyebrows went up at that. “That was fast.”
“Do you have them?”
He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a small, flat case, half the size of a credit card and a little thicker, a data storage device similar to an iPod, but with more memory and the ability to link into computer networks. He handed it to her, and she slipped it into her handbag.
“So what’s the word on the Russian ice-grab as of now?” he asked her.
“Canada and Denmark are both screaming bloody murder. They’re dispatching warships.”
“That bad?”
She nodded. “That bad. The President has decided to send a couple of subs into the region as well. The Ohio and the Pittsburgh.”
That news startled Rubens. It represented a major, and very serious, escalation in the growing crisis.
The Ohio was a relatively new addition to the U.S. special ops arsenal. She’d started out as a ballistic missile submarine, a “boomer” in naval parlance, but with the end of the Cold War, she and several other SSBNs had been targeted for decommissioning in order to adhere to treaties requiring a reduction in ICBM platforms in the post-Soviet drawdown.
Instead of being scrapped, however, four excess boomers had been converted into SSGNs, guided-missile submarines equipped to carry out covert Special Forces operations. The Ohio and her sister boats could carry over sixty SEALs or other special ops troops, as well as over 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles with either conventional or nuclear warheads.
The other sub, the Pittsburgh, was a Los Angeles–class attack boat and would be operating under the Arctic ice as the Ohio’s escort. The deployment was an indication of just how sharply the situation up there had deteriorated over the past week.
The waiter returned with their coffee. Rubens thought about what this new wrinkle might mean for the NSA and Desk Three.
“You and your people are still in rather bad odor in the White House basement,” she told him. “Collins has been pushing to take over Desk Three.”
He smiled. “Nothing new there.” Debra Collins could be a most . . . determined woman.
“The President put his foot down this morning,” Stahl continued. “There will be no talk of another reorganization within the intelligence community until after the crisis is resolved, one way or another. And the investigation of the F-22 shoot-down incident is on hold.”
Rubens’ heart quickened a bit at that. President Marcke had always been a staunch supporter of Desk Three. And why not? The team had produced good results in the past. And Marcke’s administrative philosophy tended to run along the lines of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
For the past few weeks, though, Rubens had been cut off from presidential access.
“I’m glad to hear that,” he told her. “But what do you—?”
“Listen, Bill,” she said, interrupting. “You have friends in the Administration, at the Pentagon, and in the NSC, and they all know that Collins and Bing are using the situation to pull off a fast hatchet job. But those two will be talking to their friends on the Hill, and that could be bad for you. Even the President won’t be able to help you if this ends up in front of a Senate Investigations Committee.”
“I understand that.” Even if things were to go well, a congressional investigation could prove disastrous. Neither Rubens nor the NSA worked well under the spotlight of publicity. He could win the battle and find he’d lost the war if some de
tails of Deep Black and Desk Three became public.
“The President wants you to get solid intel on what the hell is going on in the Arctic,” she told him. “Do that and maybe he can derail Bing and Collins on the F-22 thing.”
“We’ve been passing the relevant SIGINT up the chain right along,” Rubens said. “Our Alaskan listening post, especially, has been picking up a lot, despite the bad atmospheric conditions lately.”
“So why did you send it to me?”
He shrugged. “Like I said. The President needed to know.”
“Have you seen an analysis of this stuff?”
“No. Remember, we just collect. Other agencies do the analysis.”
“Give me a break, Bill. We both know it’s not that clear-cut. If it were, Desk Three would be totally useless.”
That was true enough, at least as far as it went. The NSA by design gathered and decoded electronic intelligence—SIGINT—and distributed it to agencies and departments that needed it: the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council. For the most part, though, they did not analyze it, again by design. A cell phone intercept from a known terrorist leader, data on an electronic funds transfer in Lebanon, and the recording of a landline conversation between Paris and Beirut might all be reported to the CIA, but it was not the job of the NSA to put together the jigsaw pieces and predict a terrorist attack against American tourists in France . . . a situation that the NSA’s signals intercepts had helped prevent just last year.
But, as Barbara had pointed out, things weren’t that simple in reality. The NSA gathered such a huge volume of electronic information in the course of a single day that a certain amount of analysis was necessary just to determine what was important and what was garbage. And once Desk Three had come online and begun operating all over the world, it made more sense to pull hard data out of the NSA’s own networks than it did to wait for the CIA or the State Department to crunch the numbers and return the SIGINT in usable form.
Operation Magpie was a good example of this. A CIA request for help in tracking a possible theft of contaminated beryllium in Rybinsk had gotten things rolling, but NSA signals intercepts had picked up details of a sale to Iran, of Grigor Kotenko’s involvement, of the use of a Liberian freighter to make the transfer, and on the location of the beryllium in a St. Petersburg warehouse. While all of that information had been passed on up the intelligence distribution network, as always, Desk Three’s own analysts had worked on it as well, assembling the complete picture that had allowed Rubens to send Akulinin and DeFrancesca to St. Petersburg in order to find the beryllium shipment and plant the tracking device.
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 18
