Stephen Coonts: Arctic Gold

“Young man…,” Spencer began.

“Tommy.”

“Eh?”

“Call me Tommy. All my friends do.”

Spencer frowned at him in a way suggesting that he most assuredly did not consider Karr to be a friend. “Young man,” he repeated. “If the oil companies were paying me, perhaps I could afford to buy their product. Secondly, global warming is not nonsense. It is real. All too real. My solar model simply demonstrates that human activities have little effect on the world’s climate.”

“Sure,” Karr agreed. “So people can drive gas-guzzling SUVs all they want and not melt the ice caps, right?”

“Tell me,” Spencer said, glaring at him over the top of his glasses. “Are all FBI agents as irritating as you?”

“Well-”

But Spencer had produced a copy of American Scientist he’d purchased at a kiosk inside the JFK terminal, and made a production of opening it and beginning to read.

“Jeez, Tommy!” a voice boomed inside his head. “Lay off the poor guy, how ’bout it?”

Karr chuckled in answer but didn’t say anything out loud. Spencer glanced at him suspiciously, then returned to his magazine. Like all Deep Black field operatives, Karr had a minute speaker surgically implanted in his skull just behind his left ear, and he also had a microphone sewn into the collar of his pastel blue shirt. The transmitter hidden inside his belt linked him via satellite with the Deep Black nerve center deep beneath Fort Meade, Maryland, the Deep Black command center within OPS 2 known as the Art Room, to be precise.

“Everything look okay at your end?” the voice continued.

Karr glanced around the first-class cabin. Three other men in plain, dark suits had taken their seats, along with the other first-class passengers. FBI, all three of them, though all were taking care not to meet one another’s eyes. The economy-class passengers were filing past, now. The agents surreptitiously watched each as he or she entered the plane and walked down the aisle.

“Mm-mm,” Karr grunted the affirmative. It wouldn’t do to have Spencer or the other passengers hearing him talk to himself.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” the voice said. The speaker was Jeff Rockman.

The last of the passengers, a frazzled-looking woman with two small and screaming children, herded her charges past Karr and into the aft section of the plane. The attractive blond flight attendant Karr had flirted with stood at the front, preparing to go into her spiel about oxygen masks and flotation cushions. She began with the usual admonition to turn off all electronic devices during the takeoff portion of the flight.

“Okay, we’re gonna sign off for a while,” Rockman told him. “Wouldn’t do to get in trouble with the FAA.”

“Mm-mm.”

“And for the love of God, stop annoying Doc Spencer! He’s not the enemy!”

Karr didn’t reply, of course, but the statement brought a renewal of recurring questions. Just who was the enemy? Why would anyone want to kill Earnest Spencer and, perhaps more to the point, why was the threat serious enough that the NSA and Desk Three were involved? It was a waste of time, money, and vital personnel assets, having him here, pretending to be an FBI agent while babysitting an Ivy League professor type from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Well, at least he was off the Art Room ’s radar for a precious few moments. Aircraft navigation systems could be thrown off by signals from a field op’s comm unit, hence the injunction to turn off all electronic gear during takeoff and landing. If anyone was going to try something stupid, this would be the time to try it, with the Art Room effectively out of the picture.

But save for the somewhat too-obvious watchfulness of the FBI guys, everyone in first class appeared to be acting with complete indifference both to him and to Spencer.

Karr caught the pretty attendant’s glance as she chattered on into her microphone about wing exits and emergency landings, and winked.

He wondered if he would be able to get a phone number from her before they reached London.

DeFrancesaOperation MagpieWaterfront, St. Petersburg0024 hours

Lia DeFrancesca took a moment to run the palm-sized lock scanner along the entire perimeter of the door and around the lock itself, its powerful magnetic field probing for wiring or other signs of hidden electronic devices. The digital readout remained unchanging, indicating the presence of iron and steel but not of electric currents.

Slipping the scanner into a thigh pocket in her black field ops suit, she produced a set of lock picks and began to work at the ancient padlock securing the door’s hasp.

“Hurry; hurry,” her partner whispered with fierce urgency. “If we’re found…”

“Patience, Sergei,” she replied. “We don’t want to rush this.”

She was having more trouble with the rust than with the padlock’s mechanism. With a click, the lock snapped open, and she pulled it off the hasp.

A foghorn mourned in the damp night air. The warehouse loomed above the waterfront, overlooking Kozhevennaya Liniya to one side, the oily black waters of the southern mouth of the Lena River on the other. A chill and dripping fog shrouded their surroundings, muffling sound. Carefully she edged the sliding door open, but stopped after moving it only a couple of inches.

“What is it?” her companion asked. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer immediately, but pocketing the lock tools, she pulled out a cell phone and a length of flexible tubing, as thick as a soda straw. One end of the tubing attached to the cell phone; the other she inserted into the partly opened door to the warehouse, turning the fiber-optic cable this way and that to let her peer around the corners. On the phone’s screen, an image painted in blacks, greens, and yellows shifted and slid with the movements of her hand, giving her an infrared image of what lay beyond the door. She saw large open spaces… piles of crates… a trash can near the door… discarded junk… but no glow from warm-blooded humans lying in wait.

“Okay,” Lia said at last. “It’s clear.”

Sergei Alekseev rolled the door far enough aside that they could enter. He was scared. Lia could almost smell his fear, could feel it in the way he stared and started at shadows, the way he moved, hunched over and rigid. Replacing the IR viewer, on the ground beside the door she placed a motion sensor, like several dozen button-sized devices she’d already dropped around the area. Only then did she extract a small flashlight and switch it on. “Which way?”

“Over here,” Alekseev said, pointing. “I think.”

“You’d better know.”

“ Da. This way.”

Before moving deeper into the darkness, Lia tried her communicator again. “ Verona,” she said aloud. “This is Juliet.”

A burst of static sounded in her ear, loud enough to make her wince. She thought she heard a voice somewhere behind the audio snow, but couldn’t make out the words.

It would help if Romeo were here. Where the hell was he, anyway? With a small satellite dish on top of one of the surrounding buildings, they might have a chance of punching through this interference.

“ Verona,” she said again. “Juliet. Initiating Magpie!”

Again, static.

Damn…

The Art RoomNSA HeadquartersFort Meade, Maryland1624 hours EDT

“What do you mean, we’ve lost her?” William Rubens demanded.

“We’re just getting fragments, sir,” Sarah Cassidy replied from her console. “Her signal is intermittent. It might be the sunspots.”