Arctic Gold (18 page)

It was snowing harder now as he raced back to the main building.

Help! Everyone, help! Murder! Help!

Deep Black 7 - Arctic Gold

11

City Morgue

London

1045 hours GMT

CHARLIE DEAN FOLLOWED EVANS and the morgue attendant deeper into the chill of the morgue. Fluorescent lights hung overhead, and the green- painted concrete block walls added a depressing air to the place. The attendant walked up to one of the stainless- steel doors in one wall, checked his clipboard, then opened the vault and hauled the steel slab into the room.

They already had Karr in a black body bag, the zipper halfway open, the man eyes staring up at the lighting fixtures overhead. Some cold inner part of Dean was operating on pure automatic, letting him note the woundsa number of deeply purpled bruises around half a dozen holes in his friend chest and upper abdomen, and a terrible gash that had opened the left side of his throat from jaw to collarbone.

Christ.

That him, Dean said simply. He looked up at the attendant. I’d like to see his effects, too, if I may.

The morgue attendant shrugged and nodded. Sure thing. He seemed to be nothing so much as bored and was he chewing gum

?

Friend of yours? Evans asked as Karr body slid soundlessly back into the recesses of the locker.

Yeah.

I’m sorry. He seemed like a good chap.

What the hell is that? Dean demanded. British understatement?

I only met him a few moments before the attack, Evans said. His mouth twisted unpleasantly. The two of us were joking about the Boston Tea Party.

Dean drew a deep breath. Evans had met him at the airport and driven him into London late last night, putting him up in a hotel a short walk from the Tower of London and just across the river from the bizarre black egg of a building where Tommy Karr had been killed. However much Dean wanted to lash out at someone, it wasn’t Evans’ fault that Tommy was lying dead on a morgue slab.

I’m sorry, Dean said. Didn’t mean to snap.

Not a problem. I know what it like to lose a mate.

Yes, I imagine you probably do, Dean thought, but he said nothing. As one of the senior British officers at the Menwith Hill listening station, Evans had been on the front lines of European SIGINT for a good many years. Listening in on other people radio and telephone conversations didn’t seem like a dangerous occupation, but over the years there had

been all too many incidents.

People had died. Good people, like Tommy.

‘Ere his kit, sir, the attendant said around the wad of gum. He gestured toward a table with several plastic- wrapped packages on it. We bagged it and tagged it, like we was told.

Thank you. Dean sorted through the packages, wondering what he was looking for. Karr shoulder holster and Beretta were in one bag, his wallet, a set of house

keys, two pens, some loose change in another, wristwatch and sunglasses in a separate bag. Same for his passport, an airline weapons permit, an FBI ID card, a driver license, and a number of pocketed receipts. Karr, Dean knew, never wore jewelry, rings, or other accoutrements unless they were needed for a particular legend on an op. One bag held a small collection of technological odds and ends a cell phone; a fiber- optic lead; what appeared to be a PDA; a couple of button- sized objects that Dean recognized as small, sticky- backed surveillance cameras; the clip- on microphone Karr would have been wearing beneath his shirt collar, a part of his personal communications hookup with the Art Room.

A few of the tools of the trade.

His clothing made up a rather larger bundle. Slacks, coiled- up belt, shoes, socks, underwear. Shirt, tie, and jacket, all of them soaked with dark blood.

Keeping his emotions firmly in check, Dean reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a PDA identical to the 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 effects. Several LEDs lit up as he passed it over the package containing the phone, mike, and cameras.

‘Ere, the morgue attendant said. What that?

Dean didn’t reply but continued moving the PDA above Karr 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 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 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 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 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 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 jacket proved that.

So what did they

have to gain from the attack?

Dean didn’t know, but he was determined to find out.

Dean arranged for the packages of Karr 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 big

way then, Evans told him with a wry smile.

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 othersat Bad Aibling, Germany; at Misawa Air Base in Japan; at Akrotiri, Cyprus; at GuantIAnamo 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 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 Siberiamost 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.

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