one in the bag on the table. Evans raised his eyebrows but said nothing as Dean switched it on and began passing it over each of the bags of Karr’s effects. Several LEDs lit up as he passed it over the package containing the phone, mike, and cameras.
“ ’Ere,” the morgue attendant said. “What’s that?”
Dean didn’t reply but continued moving the PDA above Karr’s things. When Dean passed it over the bag containing the blood-soaked shirt and jacket, the LEDs flashed again. “Hello there,” Dean said, half-aloud. “That’s interesting.”
“What do you have?” Evans asked.
“Not sure yet.” Setting the device on the table, Dean pulled the plastic wrapping open, giving him access to the clothing inside. Picking up the device again, he checked, the shirt first and, when nothing happened, began checking the jacket.
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
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
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 Guantanamo 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.
