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
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.
He didn’t like these gatherings. Once, Rubens had tried to keep them small and informal. Things went a lot faster that way. Cleaner. More efficient. Lately, though, these sessions had begun resembling the dog-and-pony shows put on at the Pentagon, with staffers, officers, and assistants all trying to grab face time with the Deputy Director. There was even an Air Force general at the table this morning, a man named Blakeslee, who was a Pentagon liaison because of the presence of the F- 22 in Operation Magpie. Several of the people present, Dean knew, were lawyers, there solely to present opinions on any legal risks the Agency might be facing.
Black ops, espionage, electronic eavesdropping. Hell,
A number of low-voiced conversations were taking place as people continued trickling into the Green Room and taking their seats. Voices in the chamber took on an oddly muffled quality. Like similar spaces within the CIA headquarters at Langley and in the Pentagon subbasements, the room was electronically isolated from the outside, with armor plating thick enough to shield the occupants from a near miss by a small tactical nuke.
“Before we begin,” Rubens said, standing at the head of the table, “I have some news. We’ve confirmed that Ghost Blue went down in the Gulf of Finland last night as a result of enemy action. We believe the pilot ejected, but so far, search efforts have been unsuccessful. We’re continuing the search through the daylight hours over there, of course, but as of oh-three hundred this morning, the pilot has been logged as missing, presumed dead.”
Dean leaned back in his chair, a sigh escaping as he sagged.
“Has there been any word from the Russians?” Greg Paulson asked. He was chief of staff for the current Director of the NSA and would be especially sensitive to possible political repercussions.
“I gather a protest was filed this morning with our embassy in Moscow,” Rubens told him. “I’ll be going in to talk with… people about the situation later this afternoon.”
“People,” Dean thought, meant either the National Security Advisor or the President himself. There would be brutal questions, perhaps a formal investigation. Dean did not envy his boss.
“We can always blame UFOs again,” John Jacobin, one of the lawyers, pointed out.
There was a subdued chuckle from several of the men and women seated at the table. More than once, going back to the years of the Cold War, NSA and CIA incursions over Russian territory had been spotted but remained unidentified. The long-running popular mania over supposed alien spacecraft in the airspace of both the United
