He got a strong signal there… strongest at the back of the collar.
Dean bent closer. This part of the jacket was saturated with blood, but he rolled the collar up, peering closely at it, trying to ignore the sticky-sweet smell. A moment later, he straightened up, holding between thumb and forefinger what appeared to be a black pin with a round head.
The pin set off the LEDs when he tested it; the jacket now gave no response.
“Circuit checker?” Evans asked.
Dean nodded. “Puts out enough of a magnetic field to get a signal back from an electronic circuit. Someone slipped this into Karr’s jacket. He was bugged.”
“His date from the night before?”
“I’d put money on it,” Dean replied. He was thinking fast. His talk with Julie on board the British Airways jetliner had been disappointingly unproductive. The young woman had indeed remembered Karr on her last flight but had point-blank refused to admit meeting with him later. That in itself wasn’t suspicious, of course. Even when Dean had flashed an ID badge identifying him as FBI, she’d had no reason to go into intimate details about her having spent the evening with the tall, blond passenger she’d met that afternoon.
But at some point between his having caught that flight out of JFK and being picked up by a tail near Heathrow, someone had slipped that pin invisibly into the fabric of Karr’s sport coat, inserting it beneath the collar where it could not be seen. The pin, Dean was certain, would prove to be a short-range transponder, a tracking device that allowed someone to follow him through city traffic.
He was also certain that a microscopic examination of the device would identify it as of Russian manufacture. The KGB had used such devices twenty years ago; presumably the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, Russia’s modern Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, still did. Desk Three had similar devices, even smaller and more surreptitious.
Pulling a small specimen bag out of his jacket, Dean deposited the pin and returned it to his pocket. He would take no chances with this piece of evidence being lost.
“We need to pick up Julie Henshaw,” Dean said. “Flight attendant on British Airways Two-one-one-two, JFK to Heathrow. She was the last person to be with Karr before he left for the GLA building with Spencer.”
“You think she’s in on this?”
Dean shrugged. “We know Karr had dinner with her the night before he was killed. We know he walked out of the hotel with three FBI agents and Spencer and there was a car double-parked outside the hotel, waiting for them. They follow them closely, then vanish in downtown London. But a few hours later, three of the people in that car show up at the GLA building with weapons.”
“She slipped that pin into his clothes?”
Dean nodded. “Maybe she pretended to adjust his collar, or something.”
“I’ll pass the word to MI Five then.” He shook his head. “Not sure if we’ll get any action, though. Things have been crazy since the attack.”
“I can imagine.”
At the hotel last night, Dean had switched on the TV and found nothing but special news reports on the terrorist attack at the Greater London Authority, complete with endlessly recycled film clips of the huge green banner unfurling from the observation deck overlooking the Thames and several maddeningly jerky and motion-blurred segments from news cameramen in the crowd on the deck itself.
Desk Three, he knew, was going through all of those film clips frame by frame, hoping to find more clues. So far, though, all they had was the testimonies of some badly shaken eyewitnesses, two dead and one critically wounded tangos, one dead FBI agent, and the body and effects of Tommy Karr.
Greenworld already was being indicted by commentators on both sides of the Atlantic for embracing assassination as a tool for global activism. Whoever had decided to try to kill Spencer had made a serious mistake; where Greenpeace was notorious for its Gandhi-esque program of peaceful confrontation, Greenworld was now known worldwide as the organization that sent young people armed with Uzis and handguns after politically unpopular scientists.
What the hell had they been thinking?
Dean was beginning to suspect that he was seeing some kind of double cross and an intricate game of multiple layers. The Russians had their hand in it, were probably the major players. Sergei Braslov and the presence of the pin-shaped tracking device in Karr’s jacket proved that.
So what did they have to gain from the attack?
Dean didn’t know, but he was determined to find out.
Dean arranged for the packages of Karr’s clothing and other effects to be sent by special courier straight back to Fort Meade. His body would be flown out aboard an Air Force transport to Dover, Delaware. If possible, Dean planned to be on that flight, to accompany Tommy back to the States.
First, though, Dean had other business here in England. “I think we’re done here,” he told Evans after he’d signed the last form arranging for the flight to Dover.
“Right then,” Evans said. “Care for a flight up to Yorkshire?”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Dean told him. “I’ve never been to Menwith Hill.”
“I hope you like golf in a big way then,” Evans told him with a wry smile.
He didn’t find out what Evans meant until some hours later.
Rubens’ Office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0915 hours EDT
The National Security Agency maintains listening posts all over the world.
The largest are those at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England, and at Pine Gap, in central Australia, but there are many others-at Bad Aibling, Germany; at Misawa Air Base in Japan; at Akrotiri, Cyprus; at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A world-girdling network of extraordinarily sensitive electronic ears, teasing radio whispers out of the static of the sky and processing them into intelligible data.
At Point Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost tip of the United States, a station called POW-Main broods over the cold, gray waters and ice floes to the north. Originally part of America’s Distant Early Warning system, or DEW Line, the center had been refurbished in recent years, with part of the base turned over to the NSA for use as a SIGINT-gathering site. Now, instead of watching for the appearance of Russian ICBMs rising above the cold horizon, some of those antennas, at least, were set to gather radio signals emerging from Siberia-most especially from the Russian air bases at Mys Shmidta, Anadyr, and Provideniya.
There’d been a lot of radio traffic bouncing off the ionosphere lately, and all of it had been duly recorded at POW-Main, then relayed via satellite to Fort Meade. Most was destined for Langley and the Pentagon, but some of it had looked interesting enough for the Desk Three analysts to take a first look. Intelligence coming in from this site was given the distribution code “Powerhouse.”
Two Powerhouse transcripts had just arrived on Rubens’ desk. One, originally in a Russian Air Force cipher easily decrypted, had come from Mys Shmidta. The other, transmitted in the clear and in English, had come from a tiny and remote climate-monitoring station on the Arctic ice cap. Both intercepts would be routed according to standard protocols, the military intercept to the Pentagon, the other to the State Department, and both to CIA headquarters at Langley. However, there was someone else who he felt should see these.
What he was about to do was highly irregular… and might even be interpreted as a breach of security. The current political situation, however, left him few options.
Turning to his computer, he began composing an e-mail.
Menwith Hill Echelon Facility Yorkshire, England 1510 hours GMT
Two hundred miles north of London, eight miles west of the city of Harrowgate, lies the NSA listening station at Menwith Hill. Dean and Evans had boarded an RAF helicopter, a venerable Westland Wessex Mk. 2, at London City Airport for a bumpy and noisy three-hour flight to what once had been RAF Yeadon and was now Leeds Bradford International Airport. A car and driver had been waiting for them as the helicopter lifted off once more on its way to the big RAF base at Dishworth, farther north.
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From there, it was a twelve-mile drive over winding roads through rolling Yorkshire cow pastures and farmland, passing through tiny English towns along the way with names such as Otley, Farnley, Bland Hill, and, Dean’s favorite, Pool-in-Wharfedale. They were driving north on the B6451 and were just topping a rise at the intersection with Bedlam Lane when the Menwith Hill Echelon Facility first came into view.
Golf balls. Titanic golf balls…
The place looked utterly alien, completely otherworldly set among the gentle green hills of Yorkshire. Dean had shrugged off Evans’ comment about golf earlier but got the joke now. The immense dimpled white spheres were simply radomes, lightweight shells that masked the dish antennas within, protecting them from the weather and preventing casual observers outside from knowing exactly where the antennas happened to be pointed. Two identical structures, a big one and a little one both painted gray, crowned the south wing of the HQ support building at Fort Meade just above Herczog Road, and there was a solitary white one on the ground half a mile away, not far from the HQ satellite uplink facility. But here the huge white golf balls grew in abundant profusion, appearing, then vanishing again behind folds in the moor, then rising once again. Dean counted twenty-five of the things, the largest well over one hundred feet across, but there might have been more. He’d seen photographs of the place and thought he’d known what to expect, but the reality was absolutely breathtaking.
Technically, Menwith Hill was an RAF base, but in fact the 560-acre complex had been taken over by the NSA in 1966. Also known as NSA field station F83, it was home to the GCHQ, the British counterpart of the NSA, and a number of Brits, like Evans, worked there. By far the largest population at the base, however, was American, most of them civilians-mathematicians, engineers, computer programmers, technicians, linguists, and analysts-with the NSA.
Desk Three, Dean knew, maintained a suite of offices here, somewhere within the vast warren of underground chambers and facilities hidden beneath the looming white golf balls.
Past a long stretch of chain-link fence topped by curls of razor wire and patrolled by armed men with dogs, they turned right into the sandbagged main gate, where unsmiling British soldiers scrutinized their IDs, checked files displayed on computer monitors, and made phone calls to the main security office before finally waving them through. They passed two more security checkpoints on their way to the underground part of the facility, with backscatter X-ray scans, handprint readers, and, finally, retinal scans. Only then did they receive badges. Security here was at least as tight as it was back at Fort Meade.
Ilya Akulinin and Lia DeFrancesca were already there, waiting for them in a basement conference room.
“Dean!” Lia cried, jumping up from her chair and rushing to meet him.
Her presence startled him. He’d known he would be meeting them here but hadn’t been told they’d already been brought out of Russia. He was torn by pleasure at the sight of her… and the sudden memory of what he needed to tell her.
Dean took her in his arms and squeezed her close. “Hello, Lia.” God, she smelled good, felt good…
She pulled back, sensing something in his mood, and searched his face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
He glanced at Akulinin, who was standing nearby, uncertain. Dean didn’t know the new kid very well, but he’d been in the field with Lia, and that counted for something.
“Do you two need some time alone?” Evans asked.
“No,” Dean said, deciding. “It’s just… Lia, I have some bad news. Tommy is dead.”
Her eyes widened. “No…”
“There was a protest yesterday at a conference in London where he was escorting an American scientist. We think the Russians-possibly the Russian mob-infiltrated the protestors and started a riot in order to carry out an assassination. Tommy saved the scientist, but…”
“The Russian mob?” Lia repeated. “Why-”
“Who’s Tommy?” Akulinin asked.
“Another Desk Three agent,” Dean told him. “And a friend.”
“God. I’m sorry to hear that.” Akulinin came closer, reaching out to put a hand on Lia’s shoulder. “Were you guys close?”
Dean felt a stab of jealousy as the kid touched her. Totally irrational, he knew, but totally human as well. He swallowed it.
“We were friends,” Lia said, pulling back a step to face Akulinin. Tears glistened in her eyes. “We worked together in the field quite a few times.” Grief was already hardening in her face into something else, Dean noted. Determination. And anger.
“Well,” Akulinin said, “that just sucks rocks.”
Lia ignored the comment. “Why would the Russian mafia want to kill Tommy?”
“We’re not sure they did,” Dean told her. “Like I said, they were trying to kill an American scientist, a Dr. Spencer. He was a Department of Energy climatologist speaking on global warming. There’d been some death threats, I gather, and Rubens assigned Tommy to help escort him to London and back.”
“That makes no sense. Since when did Desk Three begin providing bodyguard service? Why not a U.S. marshal? Or the FBI?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what does the Russian mob have to do with global warming, anyway?”
“We think the Russian mafia is trying to discredit Greenworld, and maybe some of the other environmental groups as well,” Evans put in. “Greenpeace. The Sierra Club. The Russian MVD might be trying to make them look like terrorist groups.”
“We don’t know why,” Dean added. “Yet.”
“Not Tommy…,” Lia said, shaking her head. She moved back into Dean’s embrace. “Not Tommy…”
“Maybe these two should have some time alone,” Akulinin told Evans.
“Sure,” the British agent said. “C’mon. I’ll buy you coffee.”
“They have coffee in England?”
“Menwith Hill,” Evans replied, opening the door, “is not England.”
Hours later, Lia and Dean lay in each other’s arms, in bed. After a light dinner at the station’s cafeteria, Evans had escorted them to three adjoining rooms in the base housing block reserved for short-term visitors to Menwith Hill, but Lia had come to Dean’s room as soon as Evans had said good night and departed.
It had been such a long time…
Their lovemaking had carried an urgent, almost desperate edge to it, however. Lia did not want to believe that Tommy was gone.
She’d not cried. She would not cry, though she admitted to herself that she might, later. For now, she needed to know every detail of Tommy Karr’s death.
“I honestly don’t know that much,” Dean told her, his face just visible in the darkness next to hers. “Rubens called me while I was at Friendship, waiting for a flight out to meet you in Russia. Apparently it’s all over the news here, but I haven’t had a chance to catch it.”
“I wonder which mafia group was behind it,” she said.
“We could call the Art Room, easily enough.”
She thought about the mikes and transmitters, currently switched off and discarded with their clothing on the other side of the room. “No,” she decided, snuggling closer. “Tomorrow.”
Restlessly his hand caressed her bare hip. “Evans has scheduled a briefing for us tomorrow morning,” he told her. “Maybe we’ll learn more then.”
“Assuming they know anything back at the Puzzle Palace,” she replied. “I’m wondering if it’s the Tambov group, though. We’re pretty sure that’s who we were up against in St. Petersburg. They’re coming down a lot more aggressively than in the past. Big schemes. Wild, high-risk, high-gain operations… like selling radiation shielding to Iran.”
“I went through a briefing on the Russian mob the other day,” Dean said. “The protestors who killed Tommy were working with a Russian MVD colonel named Braslov. And he’s been linked with the Tambov organization.” He looked at her in the dark. “Are you thinking your op and Tommy’s were up against the same people?”
“It could be. I don’t see the connection, but it could be.”
“Selling beryllium plating to Iran’s nuclear program and assassinating climate scientists. I don’t see a link.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, what has Washington in a dither right now is the fact that the Tambov group is also supposedly trying to corner Russia’s petroleum industry. There’s a lot of oil and natural gas prospecting going on in Siberia right now… and speculation about untapped energy reserves in the Arctic.” He broke off, silent for a moment. She could almost hear him gnawing on the problem.
“Maybe that’s the link,” he said after a moment. “The Russians have been trying to stake a claim to half of the Arctic Ocean since 2007, claiming their territorial waters extend all the way to the North Pole. Greenworld and the other environmentalist groups would raise one hell of a stink if the Russians started sinking oil wells and building pipelines up there.”
“True,” Lia said. “But the Russians wouldn’t be able to do that. Put oil wells in the Arctic, I mean.”
“Why not? It’d be simpler than building an offshore drilling platform. Just build your tower, drill through the ice, then extend your cutting head through water and into the sea floor, just like they do in the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea.”
“No, Dean. Absolutely impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because the Arctic ice is moving, dummy,” she told him, smiling to rob the words of their sting. Then she realized he probably couldn’t see the smile, so she let her hand glide down his torso, gently stroking him. “It drifts with wind and current. I don’t know how fast, but the whole ice cap moves. Build an oil rig on the ice, send the drill head down to the sea floor… and in a few days or weeks or whatever… snap! ”
“Oh. Yeah. I think I remember reading about that somewhere.”
“If the Russians want to look for oil in the Arctic Ocean, they’re going to have to wait for the ice cap to melt.”
Arctic Gold Page 16