Arctic Gold

pulling on to Rochenbach Road and accelerating toward the towering structure visible on the wooded Maryland horizon ahead. He had to show his ID at a gate-even inside the far-flung confines of Fort Meade, security gates and checkpoints kept casual civilians and Army personnel out of the ultra-secure zone set aside for the NSA complex.

In a way, the NSA was the tail wagging the dog. Fort Meade sprawled across over some six thousand acres of the Maryland countryside between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. About nine thousand active-duty military personnel were stationed here, along with about six thousand civilian dependents in base housing, but the NSA employed over thirty thousand civilians. In fact, the Army post at Fort Meade had been scheduled for closure in the 1990s and ultimately had remained active solely to support the NSA’s activities. That huge complex ahead, the large, pale ocher office building, the two black-glass, ultra-modern monoliths behind it, and the tangle of smaller buildings in between, was called the Puzzle Palace, a moniker once applied to the Pentagon but now reserved solely for the NSA’s headquarters.

“Rockman?” Dean called over his radio. “I’m en route. Anything new?”

There was a worrisome pause. Then, “We’re back in touch with them,” Rockman said. Dean felt a surge of relief, but the feeling was overturned almost immediately by Rockman’s next words. “She’s in a firefight. Wait one…”

Dean fumed and pressed down harder on the accelerator. He turned left onto Canine Road, which put the towering ten-story monolith of the NSA’s headquarters building on his right, beyond several acres’ worth of parking lots.

A gunfight was the worst possible news. No matter what Hollywood cared to depict in the way of James Bond and other fictional spooks, in Lia and Dean’s line of work, firefights rarely took place. In fact, a firefight could only mean that something had gone seriously and drastically wrong. He hadn’t been briefed on her mission-such operations were kept tightly compartmentalized and shared strictly on a need-to-know basis-but he knew she was in Russia and that her op involved going in, planting something, and leaving again, all without alerting the locals.

If there was shooting, the op had been compromised.

Another turn, and Dean arrived at a parking lot outside a nondescript building sheathed in metal, almost in the shadow of the titanic edifice of the headquarters building itself. Inside was another security check… and an elevator ride, plunging deep into the bedrock beneath the facility, and two more security checkpoints after that, both requiring handprint, voiceprint, and retinal scans.

One curious feature about the NSA facility at Fort Meade: there were no visible room numbers, no corridor names, nothing to help any visitor who didn’t know exactly where he was going.

They didn’t make it easy to access the Art Room.

And with very good reason.

Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0037 hours

The second gunman ducked behind the corner of the shed, then emerged to trigger another burst of full-auto fire at Akulinin. He was almost invisible against shadows unrelieved by the pale light from the lone street lamp on Kozhevennaya. Akulinin waited, aiming at the point where he’d seen him last; two seconds dragged past, and then he saw movement, a dark shape as the Russian half-emerged from cover once again.

Akulinin squeezed the trigger again and the dark mass vanished. “Art Room!” he whispered. “Did I get him?”

“Both targets are down,” Rockman’s voice replied in his head. “They’re not moving. Can’t tell if they’re KIA or not.”

The sensors scattered by Lia around the building early in the op could pick up remarkably faint noises- breathing, footsteps, even heartbeats at a close enough range. The NSA computers would keep painting the targets where the devices sensed them, only letting the icons fade away some minutes after all motion and sound from the target ceased.

They would have to chance it. “C’mon, Lia!”

He kept his weapon trained on the corner of the shed as Lia scrambled to her feet and dashed for cover. As she reached his position, several more armed men began spilling out of the warehouse through the main door.

There was no time for carefully aimed bursts. He thumbed his weapon’s selector switch to full-auto and mashed down the trigger, sending a second-long volley into the gaping door.

One Russian crumpled on the spot as the others pulled back and bullets banged into the sheet-metal sliding door. Then Akulinin’s weapon ran dry, the slide locking open as the final spent cartridge spun away into the darkness and clinked against the wall to his right.

“You okay?” he asked.

Lia nodded. She was rubbing her arm. “A little scraped up…”

“C’mon. Before these clowns get themselves organized!” Taking her elbow, he guided her past a tangle of discarded and rusted machinery, leading her back toward the alley through which he’d approached the waterfront a few minutes before.

“How about it, Jeff?” he asked aloud. They stopped just short of the alley as Akulinin pocketed the empty clip from his weapon and snapped in a fresh magazine. “Anybody waiting for us around the corner?”

“We’re not picking up any movement in the alley or near the car,” Rockman’s voice replied. “Hostiles are coming out of the warehouse now… but cautiously.”

They ducked into the entrance to the alley and made their way northeast, emerging again on Kozhevennaya Liniya. After a careful look up and down the street and at the staring, empty windows of the buildings towering around them, they crossed the street at a casual stroll to the parked white Citroen. Lia climbed into the back while Akulinin slid in behind the wheel.

“Damn!” he said.

“What’s the matter?” Rockman and Lia answered in almost perfect unison.

“My toolbox,” he said, glancing back across the street. “I left it back there.”

“Leave it,” Lia told him. “The opposition is going to be all over that waterfront.”

“What’s left in the tool kit?” Rockman asked.

“The OVGN6,” he said. “Some rope and climbing gear. Some spare mags for the H and K. Some ground sensors.” He hesitated. “And the satcom.”

That last was not good. The AN/PSC-12 com terminal with its two-foot folded satellite dish was a compact and extremely secret unit small enough to be carried in a small briefcase-or a workman’s toolbox. The black box attached to the terminal contained computer chips and encryption codes that the National Security Agency emphatically did not want to fall into unfriendly hands.

Stupid! Akulinin told himself. Careless, sloppy, and stupid!…

“We’ve alerted your support team,” Rockman’s voice said. “They’ll try to make a recovery when things quiet down.”

“What the hell kept you anyway, Ilya?” she demanded as he started the ignition and pulled out into the street.

“Traffic inspector,” Akulinin replied. “He flagged me over just before the Exchange Bridge and demanded to see my papers. The bastard kept me there cooling my heels for half an hour before he finally agreed to accept a five- hundred-ruble fine for my, ah, violation.”

“Five hundred rubles,” Lia said. “About what… twenty dollars at the current rate? I didn’t realize the local cops were such cheap dates.”

Akulinin drove slowly up the road, passing the warehouse that had been the focus of Operation Magpie. A number of shadowy figures were visible in the parking lot… more than he’d seen originally exit the two cars on the wharf. An open-bed truck was parked on the road in front of the warehouse, suggesting that reinforcements had arrived. How many goons had he and Lia been facing, anyway?

He kept his eyes on the road ahead, not looking at them, and they, apparently, didn’t connect passing traffic on the street with their quarry. By deliberately driving at a sedate and unhurried pace toward, then past the hunters, rather than pulling a U-turn in the middle of the street and rushing off in the opposite direction, Akulinin might throw off any would-be pursuit.