Arctic Gold

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 Room, 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.”