Arctic Gold

6

Rubens’ Office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0525 hours EDT

WILLIAM RUBENS EMERGED from the elevator on the ninth floor of the NSA headquarters building and walked down Mahogany Row, past the Agency’s executive offices. At the far end, behind a blue door set into a blue wall displaying the Agency’s shield, was Room 9A197-though of course it was not marked as such-the offices of DIRNSA, the Director of the NSA.

Next to the DIRNSA suite was Rubens’ smaller office. He slipped his key card into the lock to his suite, put his hand inside the shrouded keypad to type in a code entry, and opened the door. Five swift strides took him through his secretary’s office-she wasn’t in, yet, the lucky bitch-and up to his office door.

Inside, he pressed a control to reduce the polarization of the large window that made up one wall of his office. The window was double paned, not for reasons of energy efficiency, but to foil certain high-tech eavesdropping equipment that used laser beams to translate vibrations on window glass into intelligible conversations.

The window looked west across the still night-shadowed Maryland countryside. Traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Beltway was light but picking up with the begi

It was, Rubens thought, an enormous and endlessly complex empire. Sitting down behind the desk, he pressed his thumb against a reader, then booted up his computer.

He’d spent the past twenty minutes going through the mandatory security checks at multiple stations on his way up, but these last few security measures were second nature. Rubens himself had ordered the implementation of several of them and would sooner have broken an arm than the protocol of NSA security procedures.

After a moment, his screen display lit up with the NSA logo-an American eagle, a flag-bedecked shield on its chest and on a blue background, grasping a large key in both sets of talons. Above was the legend “National Security Agency” and below, the words “United States of America.”

Rubens yawned. He’d not gotten much sleep before Telach had phoned him at home. The information she had was classified level red… which meant that it was not to leave the confines of NSA headquarters. He could have had her transmit the data to his home computer-there was a secure dedicated line for just that purpose-but… protocol.

An icon was winking at the bottom of his screen, indicating a waiting live message.

He touched a key. “Yes?”

Marie Telach’s face appeared in a window on the display. “Mr. Rubens?”

“Yes, Ms. Telach. God… you look terrible. Up all night?”

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded. She’d said something about staying over when she’d unceremoniously shooed him out of the Art Room last night.

“So… what’s up?”

“I thought you would want to see these, sir,” Telach told him.

A second window opened on his screen. Faces stared out at him from simulated file folders on the display.

There were four people in all, three men and a woman, each with his or her own electronic dossier.

“Su

Rubens clicked on the top file, opening it on his screen. There were a number of photographs inside, most of them obviously candids, a long PDF file with pages of text, and a brief video. Among the photos were the full-face and side images of police mug shots.

“‘Jacques Mallet,’” he said, reading the introduction of the text file. “‘French. Joined Greenpeace in 1993. Arrested by the Sureté, ’94, for trespassing during protests outside a French nuke submarine base… and again in ’95 for trespassing at Muruoa.’” The French had conducted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests at Muruoa, in French Polynesia, over a thirty-year period that ended, finally, in 1996. Greenpeace had been active in protesting those tests.

He kept reading. “‘Co-founded Greenworld in 2005 after a split with the Greenpeace committee…’”

There was more, lots more, but he clicked to the second file. “‘Yvo

He clicked again. “‘Kurt Berger. Germany. Recruited straight into Greenworld, 2007. No police record, but surveillance photos have placed him repeatedly with hard-core Greenworld agents.’” Click. “And… ‘Sergei Braslov. Russian.’” His eyebrows arched high on his forehead. “Well, well, well…”

“I thought you’d be interested in Braslov, sir,” Telach said.

“Soviet Army in the eighties,” Rubens said, skimming the PDF file’s intro. “Rank of major. Served in Afghanistan, wounded twice, won the Order of Lenin… as well as the Order for Service to the Homeland in the Armed Forces, Second Class. In ’87, he moved to the GRU… more awards and decorations, promotion to colonel… then transferred to the MVD in ’91.”

Rubens stared at the file for a long moment, his forefinger tapping absently on the mouse as he sca

“We think he was a plant, sir,” Telach said.

“Of course. An agent provocateur. Why else would a high-ranking member of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Internal Affairs join an international organization like Greenpeace?”

The Soviets might be gone, but the dark labyrinth of Russian power politics continued to churn as it had since the days of the czars.

Greenpeace International, so far as Rubens was concerned, was a gadfly, though a well-meaning one. They’d racked up some impressive environmentalist victories worldwide… in the campaign to reduce u

Greenpeace International had opened an office in Moscow in 1989. Since that time, Greenpeace Russia had conducted a number of protests within the country-against the resumption of nuclear testing on Novaya Zemlya, against a pipeline near Lake Baikal, against the illegal timber trade with Finland. With a long tradition of nonviolent protest and confrontation, the organization had for almost twenty years struggled to call world attention to the fast-worsening environmental situation within the Russian Federation.

And they’d scored some important successes with their David-and-Goliath tactics. For the most part, however, the Russian authorities maintained the same gray, grim, and stolidly monolithic presentation of absolute control as their Soviet predecessors. News reports and photos only rarely made it out of the country or had much of an impact among native Russians.