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.
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,
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.
“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
“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
“Menwith Hill,” Evans replied, opening the door, “is
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
“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
