submarine.
In the hard, blue sky overhead, a pair of Russian helicopters circled, apparently searching for other trespassers. One of them was gentling toward the ice ahead.
A sailor behind her nudged her hard with the muzzle of his rifle.
Hands up, she stumbled forward.
Just possibly, she thought, they were about to see the Toy Shop up close after all, without any high-tech help from the Orca.
Rubens’ Office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1035 hours EDT
Rubens sat alone in his office, staring out across the Maryland countryside. The morning rush hour was long since past, and traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway was light and brisk.
From William Rubens’ perspective, that war had little to do with terrorism, or with oil, or with specific geographical locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It was, instead, a war between the forces of civilization and the barbarian night, a last-ditch stand against the ultimate night that had been clawing at the light of culture and rationality and science for as long as such concepts had been understood. The storming, dark passions of National Socialism; the stolid gray and monolithic rigidity of the Soviets; the shrill sloganeering, the witch hunts, and the petty sabotage of the more ignorant branches of political activism; the mindless embrace of God’s will as excuse for any act of bloodshed, stupidity, or bigotry… all were, in Rubens’ mind, aspects of the same darkness, the same ancient and abyssal evil that threatened to tear down all that Humankind had built, all that was decent and civilized and safe.
It was a war the National Security Agency had been fighting since 1953… and Desk Three since its inception only a few years before.
And it was a war in which good men and women died.
In the early years of the Cold War there’d been no satellites, no huge and ultra-sensitive listening stations, no means of eavesdropping on the Soviets short of actually flying up to or even across their borders in deliberate acts of trespass intended to get them to turn off their defense radars and other electronic networks and record the results. It had been a deadly game, one played across decades, and there had been casualties. A still-classified number of unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been shot down, some inside the borders of the Soviet Union, others well outside, over international waters.
And now, even with satellites and high-tech sensors and all of the toys and gadgets meant to make covert ops foolproof, sterile, and safe, good men and women died. Despite all the acts of Congress, all the black programs of the military, there simply was no way to get the job done without risk.
As at the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, there was a wall downstairs in the NSA tower, a wall set with gold stars, some with names, many without… a star for every NSA employee to be killed in the line of duty.
Tommy Karr dead? It didn’t seem possible.
There would be a memorial service, of course… but later. For now, the rest of them had to carry on.
For now, the information would be kept tightly compartmentalized. Dean knew, but he would be carrying out the investigation in England now. Rubens had already arranged for Dean’s flight to Russia to be canceled and put him on a flight to London instead-the same flight, in fact, that Karr had taken. What the hell? It was worth a shot.
Rubens also had transmitted orders to have Lia and Akulinin meet Dean in London, but they would be kept out of the loop on Karr’s death for now. Need-to-know… and Lia, especially, would be emotionally sensitive to the news. Rubens didn’t want to break it to her while she was still, in effect, inside enemy territory.
Several facts had become clear already. Desk Three knew who the killers were. Randolph Evans, a GCHQ operative who’d been nearby when Karr was killed, had flashed digital photographs of the three terrorists back to the Art Room.
Right now, three digital photographs were displayed on Rubens’ monitor. The three had been positively identified as Jacques Mallet, Kurt Berger, and Yvonne Fischer, the three Greenworlders Karr had spotted and photographed on the trip in from Heathrow. Mallet-the one with the overcoat and the assault rifle-and Berger both were dead. Fischer was on her way to a London hospital with multiple gunshot wounds; she might live. If she did, she was going to have a visit from Dean. Rubens wanted answers.
Another fact, and a worrisome one. The Russians were behind the Greenworld strike in London. Their motives weren’t clear yet-maybe Dean could come up with something there-but Sergei Braslov had been photographed with the Greenworld killers that morning. A careful search of TV broadcasts and security camera shots of the protest mob outside the London City Hall, using feature-matching software to pick faces out of crowds, had so far failed to turn up an image of Braslov. That didn’t mean he wasn’t there, but it did suggest he’d remained back and out of sight.
It felt like Braslov had been running the three assassins, sending them in to kill Spencer while the local security forces were occupied with the Greenworlders putting up their silly banner. Rubens had flashed a strongly worded request to GCHQ:
A question remained, though: assuming Braslov had put them up to it, why had three political activists agreed to go on what amounted to a suicide mission? Dean had already had the files pulled on all three, and it didn’t make sense. Fischer, Berger, and Mallet were upper-middle-class college graduates. All three had been employed, and Berger had a family back in Germany.
The Frenchman, Mallet, reportedly had a passionate hatred of all things American, and he also had a drug problem-heroin. Those might have offered handles by which Braslov had maneuvered the man, but had they been enough to make him commit suicide by bodyguard? Berger was a confirmed socialist, but he appeared to be a hanger-on, a follower, not someone who would risk being shot over a difference in ideologies.
The woman, so far as could be told from her arrest record, was a passionate neosocialist ideologue who despised oil companies, global conglomerates, and capitalism. She saw herself as a freedom fighter at the barricades, joining the downtrodden masses in their righteous struggle against the robber-baron overlords of the planet, a worldview helped along by the fact that she was carrying sixty thousand pounds of credit card debt.
According to the bank records pulled in through the NSA’s far-flung computer nets, both Berger and Mallet were deep in debt as well. Might that be the common link, the handle Braslov had used? Their bank records didn’t show any large deposits, but money might have been placed in new accounts under false names, or even into Swiss accounts.
The fact remained, the three assassins had launched an attack that had all but guaranteed their deaths or, at the very least, arrests for murder. Money, even lots of money, wasn’t much of an inducement if you couldn’t enjoy it. The three weren’t fanatic jihadists seeking eternal life. What in hell had Braslov promised them in order to get them to attack Spencer?
Dean felt like he was juggling, and he was beginning to lose the rhythm. Russia, England, plus the administrative and political threat here at home to Desk Three, with the loss of that F-22
And of course it all had to hit at once.
Rubens checked his watch and sighed. Soon it would be time for him to head inside the Beltway for his three o’clock appointment with Wehrum.
He wasn’t looking forward to this.
CFS
Kathy McMillan sat on the narrow bunk in a ship’s cabin, waiting.
They’d brought her here several hours ago, she thought, though she wasn’t sure of the time. They’d taken her watch, along with her boots, parka, and other cold weather gear, and most of her clothing, and unceremoniously shoved her in here. Through the single tiny, round porthole, she could see the ice outside; at this time of the year, however, the sun never set but circled endlessly above the horizon.
