“You seen the white car on your tail?” Telach asked.

“The one that picked us up in the front of the hotel?” Karr replied. The vehicle, a white Mazda, double-parked in front of the hotel entrance, had dropped in on the Lincoln’s tail as they’d pulled out of the parking garage. “Yeah. I’ve been watching him.”

“Think you can give us a close-up?”

Karr glanced back. Traffic was growing heavy as they entered the outskirts of Greater London. On the M4, the other vehicle had fallen back to a comfortable distance, but now, as they skirted a traffic circle and plunged into West London, the Mazda was following closer, only about thirty feet off their back bumper.

“Sure thing.” He turned and aimed the cell phone over the back of the Lincoln’s rear seat. The unit appeared to be an ordinary camera phone, but when he adjusted the lens and pressed the imaging key, the picture that came up on the phone’s display was far sharper, with a much higher resolution, than ordinary commercial cell phone cameras. Karr touched another button on the keypad, and the image grew brighter, with higher contrast. The sky and the surrounding buildings were washed out in the glare, but the people in the Mazda were clearly visible.

“What are you doing?” Spencer asked.

“Getting some snaps for the family back home.”

He touched another key, and the camera zoomed in for a close-up-tight enough that he could image the individual faces of each of the four people in the car, three men and a woman.

“Hold it steady a sec,” Telach told him as the phone transmitted video in real time via satellite back to the Art Room. “Can you adjust to get a better angle on the guy in the back? Okay. Got ’ em all. Have they made any threatening moves?”

“Nah.” Karr turned the camera slightly, studying the man in the left-hand front passenger seat. He was young, dark complexioned, and serious looking, and he was holding a cell phone against his ear.

Karr brought the phone back to his ear. “Who are they?” he asked.

“Don’t know. But we’ll run the video through our database and see if we can pick up some matches.”

“Looks like the guy in front’s talking to a friend.”

“That woman in the back isn’t your, um, little friend from last night, is she?”

Karr felt himself flush. He’d thought he’d disconnected from the Art Room channel before they’d figured out he was spending the night with someone. His night with Julie hadn’t been against regulations, exactly-the FBI agents had been responsible for Spencer’s safety in his hotel room-but there were some back at the Puzzle Palace who might see last evening as an unprofessional mingling of business and pleasure.

“No,” he said at last. He couldn’t see her well, since she was partly blocked by the driver, but Julie was blond while this woman was a brunette. “She’s not.”

“Just checking,” Telach told him. “Your secret is safe with me.”

Yeah… and five or six others who were pulling Art Room duty last night, Karr thought. “Okay. Bye.” He snapped the phone shut and pocketed it.

“I take it we’re being followed?” Spencer asked. Payne started at that, then turned to look through the back window.

“Possibly.”

Spencer looked disgusted. “That’s what I just don’t understand about this. Who would want to kill me?”

“Your work is pretty controversial, isn’t it, Doc?”

“Yes, certainly. The Royal Society is going to have a fit when I give my talk today, because they’ve bought so completely into the gloom-and-doom scenario. And plenty of others in the field hate my guts because I’m threatening their grants. But this is science, damn it! Scientists don’t go around killing each other when they disagree!”

“Gives a whole new spin to the idea of peer review, doesn’t it?” Karr glanced back again. The Mazda had dropped back a little but was still on their tail as they continued east on the Great West Road, now the A4. The Thames River was just a block to the south. They glimpsed stretches of it from time to time through factories, row houses, and commercial properties.

“We’re honestly not sure, Doc,” Karr said. “But the word on the street over here is that someone wants you dead… one of the environmentalist groups.”

“That’s ridiculous. Who? Greenpeace?”

“Almost. Ever hear of a group called Greenworld?”

“Certainly. A militant-activist spin-off from Greenpeace. Started in… I don’t know. Oh-five?”

“Two thousand six, actually.”

Karr didn’t say more. The NSA had a long history of tangling with Greenpeace. Back in July of 2001, Greenpeace protestors had stormed the NSA station at Men-with Hill, in Yorkshire. Later, the NSA had supposedly eavesdropped on Greenpeace members while looking for international terror links… and ended up in an involved lawsuit with the ACLU over domestic spying and abuse of power. The court case eventually had been settled in the Agency’s favor, but there was no love lost between the two organizations. In 2006, some of the more vocal members of Greenpeace had split off to form their own organization-a far-left environmentalist group called Greenworld that embraced the lunatic-activist fringe too violent and extremist for the original Greenpeace.

“Are you saying Greenworld wants me dead?”

“Those blog death threats were by individuals with a Greenworld connection,” Karr said. “And the e-mail of some of the Greenworld members we’ve been keeping tabs on indicates they were very interested in your itinerary.”

“Are you saying the FBI has been reading their electronic mail? Isn’t that… I don’t know, illegal?”

“Like some of your work, Doc, some of it is… controversial.”

Karr didn’t want to open that particular can of worms, not here, not now.

For now, it was enough to get Spencer where he needed to go, without interference from the people in the Mazda behind them.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 0405 hours EDT

With a five-hour time difference, nine in the morning Greenwich Mean Time was four in the morning in Maryland. Marie Telach leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. God, she was tired…

Telach was, in fact, the Art Room supervisor, answering only to William Rubens himself when it came to directing missions in the field from the Deep Black ops chamber. Rank doth have its privileges, and she wasn’t required to stand night duty.

Tonight, she’d chosen to stay on. Things had been insanely busy since yesterday afternoon, with not one but two major ops going down simultaneously-Sunny Weather and Magpie. Of the two, Sunny Weather was, so far, completely routine. No one really expected any problem there until later today, if then.

But Magpie had gone seriously wrong. Communications had failed, two field agents had come that close to getting caught or killed, and the F-22 deployed to fill in the communications gap had been spotted and downed. Telach had worked through the evening processing data coming through from Lia in St. Pete, trying to identify one of the gunmen she’d met, then helped coordinate the search for Ghost Blue. She’d finally sent Rubens home around eleven-all but ordering him to go home and get some sleep-but elected to stay on herself, working through the night. A little after three in the morning, Tommy Karr had checked in from London, and she’d been running him as he rode in a rented car into the heart of London.

She’d spotted the car following Spencer’s vehicle through the video bug Karr had planted on the seat. Karr had transmitted a series of still and video images from his cell phone, which Telach had in turn relayed to the Vault.

Now, however, she found herself staring at a new window opened on her computer screen. The Vault had come through.

The Vault was Deep Black’s database, containing an enormous volume of information-much of it video or still photos, together with police records, surveillance reports, and debriefing notes-all gleaned from a variety of sources all over the world. Despite the name, which sounded like something completely passive, a storage space, perhaps, the Vault was a far-flung computer network that maintained active links with other criminal and terrorist data banks, including those run by the FBI, Interpol, and Mossad. In fact, the Vault’s very first international link some years ago had been with Komissar, the huge computer network at Wiesbaden run by what then had been the West German police.