“Are you sure you’re not just making it personal?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I can hear the anger in your voice. Like you want to go back over there and kill them all. For Tommy.”
“No,” she told him. “I
She drew him closer then, trying to lose herself in his arms. “C’mere, Marine,” she told him. “I’m going to scuttle your butt. Again.”
12
Menwith Hill Echelon Facility Yorkshire, England 0930 hours GMT
THE NEXT MORNING, DEAN and Lia were in Menwith’s Deep Centre, a high-tech underground chamber that was the equivalent of the National Security Agency’s Black Chamber or the Art Room. After having breakfast with the two Americans in Menwith Hill’s cafeteria, Evans had led them through several checkpoints and down into the sanctum sanctorum, a steel-and-concrete-reinforced cavern that, its designers believed, would have withstood a near-direct hit on the surface eighty meters above by a fair-sized nuclear weapon.
The facility had much in common with the Art Room, Dean decided, right down to the banks of computer workstations and consoles and the ranks of monitors, though the large screen dominating one wall was absent.
Echelon II was the code name for the current NSA/GCHQ program to collect electronic signals out of the air worldwide, process them, and send them on for analyses. Menwith Hill, in particular, was tasked with eavesdropping on all of Europe, as far east as the Urals.
Local legend had it that Menwith Echelon scooped up
But there were no aliens so far as Dean could discover.
“I’d like you two to meet someone,” Evans told them, leading them to a particular cubicle in a room filled with cubicles off the main control room. An attractive young woman stepped out to join them. “Charlie, Lia, this is Carolyn Howorth-‘CJ’ to her friends. She’s one of our best linguists down here.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Dean said, shaking her hand. “What language?”
“Russian, at the moment,” she told him.
“She’s heading up our Russian desk right now,” Evans said. “But she’s also our best Japanese linguist.”
That told Dean something about Menwith’s electronic reach. Apparently they weren’t limited to Europe after all.
“We’ve been putting together some intercepts from the other day,” she told him. “Randy here thought you should hear this.”
She led them back into her cubicle and entered a string of characters into her workstation. “This is from four days ago,” she said. “A satellite phone exchange, apparently originating from within a few meters of the GLA building a few minutes after the riot in which your friend was killed broke out. The conversation was encrypted, but we’ve known this particular encryption key for some time.”
“Rodina,” a voice said from a speaker.
Carolyn translated. “‘Motherland.’We think that was a code word, identifying the speaker.”
Another voice replied, also in Russian, as Carolyn provided a running translation.
“‘We’re watching BBC Two. Excellent work.’
“‘One of our agents still lives. I cannot get a clear shot, however.’
“‘She knows nothing. We don’t want to reveal your presence. That might tell the opposition too much.’
“‘That was my thought… Perhaps it is time to activate Cold War. The two… incidents should take place close together, for maximum effect.’
“‘We agree. A ticket and new identity papers are waiting for you at the embassy. You fly out tonight.’
“‘Good. Until tonight, then.’”
The connection was broken.
“Braslov,” Dean said. “The fourth man in the car that tailed Tommy from Heathrow.”
“We think so,” Carolyn agreed. “We’ve recorded some other communications previously with voiceprints that match this one, and which we suspected were Sergei Braslov. We can’t prove it yet, but we believe that he’s our man.”
“Who is he speaking with?”
“Grigor Kotenko.”
“Ah,” Dean said. “The Tambov Gang.”
“At the time of this conversation,” Carolyn told them, “Kotenko was at his personal dacha on the Black Sea. We have quite an extensive voice-intercept file on him now.”
“The agent he mentions,” Dean said. “That must be the woman Tommy shot during the GLA attack. What was her name?”
“Yvonne Fischer,” Evans said. “We have her under close arrest at Barts-that’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, back in London. She hasn’t regained consciousness as yet. Still listed as critical.”
“Sounds like the bad guys aren’t concerned about her giving us anything useful.”
“That would be a typical op for GRU or KGB back in the bad old Soviet days,” Lia put in. “Use some poor schmuck you recruit off the street, don’t tell him jack, program him to do a dirty deed that can’t be traced back to you.”
“Might’ve been a false-flag recruitment,” Dean said. False-flag was spook-speak for recruiting agents by convincing them that you worked for someone else, someone of whom they approved.
“Any idea where Braslov is now?”
“We know he caught an Aeroflot flight out of Heathrow that night. Pulkovo.”
“St. Petersburg,” Lia said.
“And there he caught a Sakha Avia flight out of Pulkovo to Yakutsk.”
“Yakutsk? That’s out in the middle of Siberia.”
“Right the first time,” Carolyn said. “Unfortunately, we have no one on the ground there and Misawa hasn’t picked up any relevant intercepts, as yet.” Misawa was an NSA listening station in Japan, one of the largest Echelon bases, in fact, in the world. “We think he had another destination after that, but we don’t know where.”
“What is that ‘Cold War’ Braslov mentioned?” Dean asked. “The way he said it, it sounded like a secret operation of some kind.”
“We may have another piece of that puzzle,” Carolyn told them. She typed at her keyboard for a moment, queuing up another intercept. “This came out of Misawa four days ago, about four hours after the GLA attack. After picking up the intercept from Kotenko, we put an electronic tracer on him that would flag any call with that particular encryption key. Here it is.”
“Rodina,” a voice said, Kotenko’s.
Another voice responded in Russian. “‘Well, it’s been a long time, Grigor,’” Carolyn translated. “‘We thought you’d forgotten us.’
“‘Never, my friend. You are far too important for our plans. Cold War has commenced.’
“‘Has it, then? That’s good news.’
“‘Osprey is on his way to you. He should be there within-’”
A blast of static interrupted the conversation.
“We can’t make out what came next,” Carolyn said. “Communications have been erratic of late, and the speaker’s location is at an extremely high latitude. What we have is only a fragment.”
