Arctic Gold

Within the shadows of the Russian underworld, the wounded, the weak, the indecisive were shown no mercy.

“Mr. Antonov,” Kotenko said as Andre straightened up and gave the signal indicating that the visitor was clean. “So good to see you again. What is it you have for me?”

“Something most interesting, Mr. Kotenko. Ah, one of your people took it from me downstairs…”

Antonov was a small, nervous individual with a goatee and a receding hairline that gave him a passing resemblance to Vladimir Lenin. He did not, Kotenko knew, have Lenin’s strength of purpose, or his sheer force of will. Antonov did, however, know how to follow orders.

“Yes, yes,” Kotenko said. “Security, you understand?”

Dmitry, one of Kotenko’s personal assistants, walked in carrying a capacious metal toolbox. Antonov had brought it with him from St. Petersburg, surrendering it to Kotenko’s trusted people outside for a careful search.

“This is the box?” Kotenko asked.

“Yes, sir. We found it close to where one of the assassins was hiding. We believe he forgot it as he fled the scene.”

Carefully Kotenko took the toolbox and began removing its contents. There wasn’t much… a length of climbing rope tightly bundled and tied; some devices obviously designed to slip over a person’s boots or hands with protruding spikes to help him or her climb walls or telephone poles; some cinches, straps, and buckles that likely were rappelling gear; five thirty-round magazines manufactured by Heckler & Koch, loaded with 9mm ammunition. Of more interest was a set of low-light binoculars with a single light-gathering tube, obviously of military manufacture.

And a communications terminal complete with folded satellite antenna, battery, and encryption box.

“Have our people in St. Petersburg looked at these?” Kotenko asked, examining the binoculars. They might be worth fifteen thousand rubles on the open market. They were certainly much better than anything in the Russian military’s inventory.

“Yes, sir,” Antonov said as Kotenko set aside the binoculars and began looking at the satcom gear. “They say it is obviously CIA issue. The communications equipment is something called an AN/PSC-12 com terminal, I’m told. Our friends in China might be quite interested in purchasing it.”

“Indeed.” Kotenko picked up the encryption device, a black box the size of a pack of cigarettes. He knew little about the technology-one employed others to do the knowing with complicated gadgets like this-but he did understand the price of technology. The satellite terminal itself might be worth some hundreds of thousands of rubles to governments that might from time to time find themselves the target of American intelligence-China, yes, but also Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea, Venezuela… oh, the list of America’s enemies was quite long.

But the true treasure here was this small and seemingly innocuous black box. There would be codes stored within the computer chips inside, codes that would allow the owner of the box to turn it on its makers and listen in on their secret communications.

And that bit of technology was almost beyond price.

Almost. Grigor Kotenko made his very comfortable living by acquiring priceless items, putting a price on them, and finding people able and willing to pay. Normally, these days, he trafficked in corporations and in the future of Russian oil and gas production, but he traded in military hardware as well.

There was also a danger, however. He examined the case of the device closely, searching for any words, logos, or imprints at all. He didn’t expect to find them…

“Dmitry!”

“Yes, sir!”

“This device has been screened for radio emissions?”

“Yes, sir. There are no transmissions. Everything in the tool kit, and the case itself, is dead.”

Devices such as this frequently included global positioning trackers and transmitters. Its manufacturers might also have placed very tiny listening devices or other intelligence-gathering sensors inside the case, and there was always the possibility that the tool kit had been deliberately abandoned at the warehouse, in order to lead its owners straight to him. In the world of espionage, nothing was ever quite what it seemed.

So long as it was not actively transmitting to the Americans, it was probably safe, however.

Probably…

He set the device back inside the tool kit along with the other items he’d removed, closed it, and signaled to Dmitry.

“Put this in the safe.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kotenko’s safe was a heavy walk-in downstairs, with walls three inches thick. If the device did start transmitting, the signals could not possibly penetrate those walls.

“They checked the box and everything in it for RF transmissions in St. Petersburg, sir,” Antonov said as Dmitry walked out of the room with the tool kit. “The devices all are inert.”

“I don’t pretend to know how these devices work, Mr. Antonov,” Kotenko said. Turning, he walked toward the large double doors leading out onto the western deck. “But I do know there are devices called transponders that will patiently wait to send out a signal, but which do so only when they receive a signal. Until then, the device could well be, as you say, inert.”

He pushed open the doors and walked outside, with Antonov and the ever-watchful Andre following behind. It was mid-afternoon, and the westering sun glared from the broad expanse of the Black Sea. Laughter, male and female, sounded from somewhere nearby.

Kotenko walked to the railing. The back deck overlooked his large pool two stories below, where six of his girls were entertaining two senior officers of Gazprom and a member of the Duma, all of whom had been invited to the Sochi dacha for a working weekend.

At the moment, it appeared to be most enjoyable work. Swimsuits had been discarded some time ago, and shrill feminine laughter chimed from the patio. Expressionless servants silently came and went with bottles of vodka, the vital lubricant of all Russian business meetings.

“In any case,” Kotenko continued, watching the pleasant scene below from the railing, “I intend to take no chances. I suspect that the communications equipment is from the American NSA… possibly on loan to the CIA, but not necessarily.”

“The NSA?” Antonov asked. “What is that?”

“An even larger, more secretive, and more powerful American spy agency than the CIA. The fact that many people have never even heard the name proves how good they are. Did our people carefully check the St. Petersburg shipment for tracking devices planted by the intruders?”

“Yes, sir. Every square centimeter!”

“And it was clean?”

“Some slight radioactivity, but no radio signals of any sort.”

“Hmm.” Kotenko chewed for a moment on one end of his bushy mustache, thinking hard. “Those… intruders on the waterfront,” he said after a moment, “were American. The equipment they carried proved that.” If the break-in at the warehouse had been engineered by one of the rival gangs of the Organizatsiya, they would have been using Russian, German, or Japanese devices… or less highly advanced American equipment, the sort of stuff in current use by the American military. That might include the light-intensification binoculars-he was pretty sure that such devices were in common use by American Special Forces like the SEALs and the Army Rangers-but the satellite communications equipment was not in widespread use, he was certain. Not yet.

CIA? Or NSA?

The CIA was the organization most likely to carry out covert operations-“black ops” he thought was the American term-in foreign countries. The NSA primarily handled electronic eavesdropping, employing a variety of listening devices both on the ground, in aircraft, and in spy satellites. Still, there were persistent rumors that the NSA also ran covert operations like their CIA brothers.

In the long run it didn’t matter which organization was behind the operation. He did want to know, however, if only because Grigor Kotenko liked to know exactly who his