Arctic Gold

In 2006, some of the more radical elements within Greenpeace had split off to form a new group.

Greenworld was smaller than Greenpeace, more secretive, more elusive, but at the same time, more confrontational. During the past couple of years, they’d staged several massive protests in Great Britain, Belgium, and Russia, grabbing a lot of media attention with flashy ba

One week ago, a routine NSA electronic intercept had picked up a blogger’s page that talked about assassinating Dr. Spencer at the Environmental Symposium in London. The blogger was a London teenager… but the kid had a police record. He’d been arrested for his part in the Men-with Hill affair and, five years later, had joined Greenworld.

The tidbit had been passed up the bureaucratic totem pole inside the Washington Beltway and ultimately trickled back down to Rubens’ desk. The State Department was taking seriously the possibility that Greenworld was going to try to kill Spencer.

As a result, Rubens had initiated Operation Su

“Braslov,” Rubens said, reading further, “was one of Greenworld’s founders?”

“We think so, sir,” Telach told him. “We don’t have much intelligence on Greenworld’s i

“And here he is tailing Su

She shook her head. “No, sir.”

“Let him know who he’s dealing with. I-” Rubens stopped in mid-sentence. “Uh-oh.”

“Sir?”

Rubens had been leafing through the electronic pages of Braslov’s file. He’d come to a photo of the man, grainy and poorly focused, obviously a surveillance photo taken of Braslov at long range, but clear enough to show a ragged scar on the left side of his face. He appeared to be standing on a beach, laughing. With him were a pretty, bare-breasted blonde in red bikini briefs and an older man with a bushy mustache. Both men wore swim trunks and short-sleeved shirts, both shirts open enough to reveal a number of tattoos on their torsos as well as their upper arms.

“Who is this?” Rubens asked, clicking and dragging a square over the second man. “Do we have a positive ID?”

Telach’s eyes shifted as she studied her own monitor, then typed in a command at her desk. A new window opened on Rubens’ display, filling up with text and photos.

“Yes, sir. Grigor Kotenko.”

“That,” Rubens said slowly, nodding, “is what I was afraid of. And these tattoos on Braslov’s chest?”

Telach nodded. “I ran those through the Vault as well. It’s difficult to make out details, of course. But it looks like both men are sporting eight-pointed stars on their chests in blue ink.”

Mafiya, then… the Organizatsiya. The Russian mafia made extensive use of tattoos to convey a wealth of data about a person’s rank, reliability, and criminal history. Often the tattoos were acquired in prison or within the Russian gulag, where the rubber heels of shoes were melted down and mixed with soot and urine to produce a characteristic blue ink. The eight-pointed star indicated a very high rank within certain Mafiya groups.

This was not good. Not good at all.

The Green Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0912 hours EDT

Individual rooms and corridors within the Puzzle Palace might not be outwardly named or numbered, but human nature being what it was, unofficial names continued to arise as needed. The Art Room was one such necessity; the Green Room was another, one of a hotel’s worth of meeting rooms, briefing rooms, and auditoriums where face-to-face business within Crypto City could be conducted.

Dean took a seat at a long oval table that was already fairly well occupied. The walls-painted a pale shade of hospital green, hence the name-were hung with photographs of presidents and NSA directors past and present, and an American flag and a flag bearing the NSA seal flanked a large flat-panel wall screen at the head of the room.

He didn’t like these gatherings. Once, Rubens had tried to keep them small and informal. Things went a lot faster that way. Cleaner. More efficient. Lately, though, these sessions had begun resembling the dog-and-pony shows put on at the Pentagon, with staffers, officers, and assistants all trying to grab face time with the Deputy Director. There was even an Air Force general at the table this morning, a man named Blakeslee, who was a Pentagon liaison because of the presence of the F- 22 in Operation Magpie. Several of the people present, Dean knew, were lawyers, there solely to present opinions on any legal risks the Agency might be facing.

Black ops, espionage, electronic eavesdropping. Hell, everything Desk Three did was illegal in one sense of the word or another. What was the point of having lawyers at a briefing, for Christ’s sake?

A number of low-voiced conversations were taking place as people continued trickling into the Green Room and taking their seats. Voices in the chamber took on an oddly muffled quality. Like similar spaces within the CIA headquarters at Langley and in the Pentagon subbasements, the room was electronically isolated from the outside, with armor plating thick enough to shield the occupants from a near miss by a small tactical nuke.

“Before we begin,” Rubens said, standing at the head of the table, “I have some news. We’ve confirmed that Ghost Blue went down in the Gulf of Finland last night as a result of enemy action. We believe the pilot ejected, but so far, search efforts have been unsuccessful. We’re continuing the search through the daylight hours over there, of course, but as of oh-three hundred this morning, the pilot has been logged as missing, presumed dead.”

Dean leaned back in his chair, a sigh escaping as he sagged. Damn…

“Has there been any word from the Russians?” Greg Paulson asked. He was chief of staff for the current Director of the NSA and would be especially sensitive to possible political repercussions.

“I gather a protest was filed this morning with our embassy in Moscow,” Rubens told him. “I’ll be going in to talk with… people about the situation later this afternoon.”

“People,” Dean thought, meant either the National Security Advisor or the President himself. There would be brutal questions, perhaps a formal investigation. Dean did not envy his boss.

“We can always blame UFOs again,” John Jacobin, one of the lawyers, pointed out.

There was a subdued chuckle from several of the men and women seated at the table. More than once, going back to the years of the Cold War, NSA and CIA incursions over Russian territory had been spotted but remained unidentified. The long-ru

“We don’t yet know if the opposition got a good look at our aircraft,” Rubens said mildly. “It’s not really important, one way or another.”

But Dean knew it was important. A critical failure on an intelligence op inside Russia would inevitably spawn serious interagency trouble down the line. The CIA, especially, didn’t like the fact that the NSA was trespassing on what it considered its turf, its particular area of responsibility. Hell, they’d been trying to shut down Desk Three or get it transferred to their Directorate of Operations ever since its inception.