Arctic Gold (28 page)

eastern side of the property, they could look down on the house and its grounds, which were spread out for their inspection, well lit and apparently well guarded. Lia held a set of electronic binoculars to her eyes and studied the scene. Okay, people, she said quietly. Everybody online? Gordon, do you copy?

We copy, the voice of Jeff Rockman said in her ear from a workstation back at Fort Meade. Good voice. Good picture.

Dragon, do you copy?

Copy, Lia, Llewellyn voice said an instant later. We can see and hear just fine. Llewellyn and Vasily, with the handle Dragon, had parked the van beneath some trees a quarter of a mile up the road and were linked in through the vehicle satellite communications suite. Both the team in the van and the runners back in the Art Room could see the scene transmitted from Lia binoculars, as well as hear the two of them through the mikes mounted on the collars of their combat blacks.

Let have a closer look at that gate, Rockman said.

Here you are. Lia pressed the zoom function on the camera, and the scene expanded, centering on the main gate where a paved driveway entered the property. A blond man in civilian clothes, but holding an AKM assault rifle, stood guard. Nearby, another armed guard followed the inside of the perimeter wall, a German Shepherd tugging at the leash in his hand. The gate was open and, as Lia watched, a car drove up and stopped beside the guard, who spoke briefly with the driver before waving him through.

A security camera watched it all from a telephone pole beside the driveway.

I see two dogs, Akulinin said, peering through his own binoculars. The other one at the far side of the property, above the cliff.

We see him, Rockman said. Let have a look at the party in the back.

From the hillside above the east side of the mansion, the two agents could see about half of the back deck, which extended from the west side of the house almost all the way to the cliff above the sea. The swimming pool was brightly lit, the blue light shimmering and wavering as it reflected off trees and walls. A dozen people or so were visible, engaged in laughing conversation. Most were casually dressed, though the people sculling in the pool or lounging in the hot tub were nude.

I don’t see Kotenko, Lia said. Gordon, are you getting IDs on these people?

The bald guy talking with the tall blond is Vladymir Malyshkin, Rockman said. He runs the exploratory division of Gazprom oil subsidiary. The guy with thick glasses and his arm around the brunette over by the diving board is Sergei Poroskov, a member of the St. Petersburg Duma, and a major shareholder in Gazprom. There was a hesitation as Rockman called up more data on his monitor back in the Art Room. Yeah all of the men are movers and shakers, either with the Russian government or in the Russian oil and gas industries. The guy skinny- dipping with the two chicks in the pool is CEO of a major construction company.

What about the women? Akulinin asked.

I think they’re the floor show, Lia said.

Kotenko owns a string of gentlemen clubs in half a dozen cities, Rockman said, and he also into producing, um, adult films. Like Lia says, they’re probably part of the entertainment.

Well, as long as they’re very

entertaining, Lia said, and keep it on the back deck, we should have clear sailing inside. Ilya? Break out the dragonfly.

Akulinin pulled off his backpack and extracted a plastic

case the size of an encyclopedia. He opened it, revealing a delicate device, mostly wire and gauze but with a core the size of a pencil. He switched it on and the filmy wings unfolded, quivering in the slight breeze. How about it, James? he said. You have a signal?

That affirmative, Llewellyn replied. We’re good to go.

Right then. Here goes. Akulinin raised his hand and gave the device a gentle shove, lofting it into the air like a paper airplane. The gauze wings caught the breeze and the device soared higher, circling out into the darkness above the dacha with a faint rasping flutter of its wings.

Okay, Llewellyn said. We’ve got good signal, good picture.

We have positive control, Rockman put in.

The flier faded into shadowy invisibility against the night. Lia and Akulinin stayed hunkered down on the dark and brush- covered hillside as the team in the Art Room flew the probe from the other side of the Earth, guided by real- time imagery transmitted from the tiny camera in the dragonfly nose.

The Art Room

NSA Headquarters

Fort Meade, Maryland

1625 hours EDT

Chris Palatino had been hired by the National Security Agency for one reason. He was very

good at playing video games.

The winner of the Extreme Gamer competition at the Origins gaming convention two years before, he’d been approached by a recruiter for a defense- related corporation. Only later, after Palatino had passed the security clearances, was the true nature of the job made clear: he

would have to move from central Michigan to Laurel, Maryland, and take a job with the NSA. The money was less than he might have made writing software for a major corporation, but money wasn’t Palatino major interest.

He called it the gamer ultimate fantasy, and he was living itan overweight twenty- seven- year- old geek getting paid to remote- pilot micro- UAVs on missions halfway around the world.

Good hands, Chris, Jeff Rockman told him. Half a dozen members of the Art Room team were standing behind his workstation, watching as Palatino jockied two joysticks on the console before him, eyes fixed on the large flat- screen monitor on the wall in front of him.

I know, man, Palatino replied, though his voice had that dreamy, off- in- another- world vagueness it usually acquired when he was on a mission. Watch and learn, watch and son

of a bitch!

Fifty- five hundred miles awaymeasured along a great circle route that skimmed south of the top of Greenland and north of the Shetland Islandsthe eight- ounce flier had caught a heavy updraft along the side of the mountain that threatened to sweep it into the trees. Palatino gave the device an extra burst of power, flying into a downdraft and using the descent to pick up speed. A moment later he was clear, skimming above the tree tops toward the mansion.

The UAV had been designed to operate on software modeled on the sculling motions of a fly wings. The wings themselves went rigid with the application of a low- voltage trickle of current, twisting and turning to put out some ten beats per second. That was about a twentieth of the beat frequency for a housefly, but these wings were larger in comparison to the size of the body driving them, and included the ability to glide for long distances. Once clear of the downdraft, Palatino canted the wings into a

rigid- locked configuration and, twitching gently at one of the joysticks, nudged the device into a gentle glide that carried it across the back deck twenty feet up.

Any of the party guests who chanced to look up might have glimpsed a dark shape reflecting the light from the pool and dismissed it as a large moth or even a bat. The UAV circled the deck area twice as the Art Room team located and counted guests, staff, and guards.

Okay, Lia, Rockman said after the second pass. Still no sign of Kotenko, so he may be inside. We’ve identified twelve guests, five people who are probably staff, and four guards, not counting the two on perimeter patrol with dogs, or the guy at the front gate. It looks like they’re pretty well set out there, not much traffic in and out of the house.

Copy that, Lia voice came back over a wall speaker. Let get this over with, okay? She sounded tense, on edge.

Rockman pointed at the screen. The security camera is there, he said. On top of that pole.

I see it; I see it, Palatino said. Gimme a sec.

He flipped the UAV wings out of their locked position, and with a soft rattle of sound the device streaked across the roof of the house, angling toward a solitary pole rising just inside the fence encircling the property, not far from the main gate and driveway. Hunched over the controllers, tongue sticking out in an unconscious expression of pure concentration, Palatino brought the tiny UAV to a near hover a foot from the top of the pole, dropping the body into a vertical orientation at the same moment that he extended four wire- slender and hook- tipped legs. An instant later, the device touched the creosote- blackened wood, and the scene displayed on the monitor became still, an extreme close- up of the pole weathered wood surface. The flier was now resting on the pole, a few inches behind the target camera.

The NSA possessed the technology to hijack security camera networks anywhere in the world, but doing so required gaining access. Many networks used the Internet for their security cam systems, which made the NSA eavesdropper task simplicity itself.

The security cameras at Kotenko dacha, however, were on their own, private network, with no outside connections and, apparently, no computers to sort, clean up, or channel the data. That made tapping into the network more difficult. They also used universal cable connections rather than wireless LAN or Ethernet connections and that, too, made stealing the signal harder.

But not

impossible.

The camera, a small black box with a sunshade extended over the barrel of the lens, was set up to scan the entrance to the property twenty feet below. On the display, the cable emerged from the back of the camera, ran down the side of the pole a few inches to where it was stapled to the wood, then extended out into the night in the direction of the house.

Damned primitive crapola, Palatino muttered. Haven’t these people heard of wireless networks?

That okay, Rockman told him. That why the dragonfly has a sting. Go ahead. Take a bite.

On the pole behind the camera field of view, the remote- operated flier edged a couple of careful sideways steps, bringing it to rest directly above the cable. Targeting brackets appeared on the big wall display, centering on and closing around the cable, and flashing when the device had locked onto the target. There was a tiny whine of servomotors, and a slender needle, like a mosquito sucking proboscis, extended down from the device head, delicately piercing the cable.

Okay, Rockman said, looking at another monitor. We have a signal.

At Palatino touch, a second needle bit the cable just below the first. A window opened in the lower left- hand portion of the big screen, showing the grainy, low- light black- and- white image currently being transmitted by the camera.

The remote dragonfly probe was now wired into the dacha security camera system.

We’re recording, another Art Room technician reported.

Okay, Rockman said. Nothing happening. Get about a twenty- second loop.

The seconds passed. Got it. Ready to repeat.

Good. Okay, Lia, Ilya. We’re hooked into the network. You can proceed.

Moving, Lia replied.

Kotenko Dacha

Sochi, Russia

2340 hours, GMT + 3

Lia led the way as the two agents scrambled down the slope, making their way toward the dacha property. Both of them wore black head- to- toe, with light- intensifier goggles over their faces, which gave them the look of curious four- limbed insects.

For this op, they were going in semi- sterile, which meant that with one key exception, all of their equipment, everything except their communications implants, anyway, was available through commercial European markets or low- security military sources. The exception was the satchel Lia carried at her hip, which carried the bugging devices they intended to plant inside the dacha.

Once they disposed of those, they would have nothing on their persons that would identify them, if the worst happened, as agents of an American intelligence organization.

They reached the base of the hill and worked their way to a point close to the property entrance. Black figures crouching against black shadows, they waited for long minutes, watching the solitary guard at the gate. He looked bored and not particularly attentive, but Lia wanted to wait for the best opportunity.

Gordon, are you ready to transmit?

We’re ready here, Lia, Rockman replied. Waiting on your word.

Copy.

That opportunity came ten minutes later, as the headlights of a car swung across the driveway, illuminating the guard and the open gate in a glare immediately stopped down by the automatic filters inside their LI goggles. The car pulled up alongside the guard, who leaned over to look inside, then stepped back and saluted. The car, a long, black sedan, eased past the guard and onto the drive. Now, Lia whispered.

The two figures separated from the shadows and slipped into the clear- cut zone outside the wall, angling toward the gate.

The Art Room

NSA Headquarters

Fort Meade, Maryland

1654 hours EDT

Now, Lia voice said from the speaker.