Of course, the Germans hadn’t realized at the time that they were sharing all of that data on international terrorists with the National Security Agency.
The Vault operations center, located down the steel-paneled passageway from the Art Room, possessed, like the Art Room itself, deeply buried fiber-optic links with the Tordella Supercomputer Facility half a mile northeast of the NSA headquarters building. Telach had submitted the best of Karr’s photographs of the four people in the car following him. For almost thirty minutes, the Tordella super-Cray computers had crunched through the images, comparing hundreds of separate elements-the distance between eyes, the shapes of noses and chins, the angles of cheek bones, the arcane geometry of facial planes and their relationships with one another-looking for matches among the hundreds of thousands of photographs in the NSA’s memory stacks and, when necessary, those of other military and police networks worldwide.
She clicked on the window and saw the results of the search.
Damn…
She checked the time again-0410 hours, just past four in the morning. She didn’t want to wake him… but Rubens was going to want to know about this.
She reached for the secure phone.
Tooley Street Approaching London City Hall London 0912 hours GMT
“What the hell is going on up there?” Rogers said from behind the Lincoln’s wheel. “A parade?”
“Uh-uh,” Karr said, leaning forward so he could see through the windshield in front. “Looks to me like some kind of protest.”
After cutting through West London on the A4, they’d picked up the Strand in front of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, crossed to the south side of the Thames over the Waterloo Bridge, and, with only one missed turn, made their way across Southwark to Duke Street Hill, close by the London Bridge, picking up Tooley near the London Bridge City Pier. According to the GPS mapping program in the car, they were a block south of the Thames and within a hundred yards of the entrance to the underground parking for City Hall.
The street, however, was clogged with protestors.
It looked, Karr thought, like a bad flashback to the street protests of the sixties. Hundreds of people, most of them young, but including folks old enough to have protested against the Vietnam War, surged along Tooley and gathered in massed crowds along the sidewalks. Several buildings appeared to have been taken over wholesale; American flags, flying upside down, were much in evidence, as were a variety of handheld signs. “Independence from America!” was a popular bit of signage. So were “Global Warming Is Real” and “Save Our Planet.” Some of the marchers carried Greenpeace signs or placards bearing the Greenpeace logo. Some were awkwardly dressed in bulky costumes meant to represent factory smokestacks or oil-drilling rigs.
“All of this for you, Doc?” Karr asked.
“I shouldn’t think so,” Spencer replied. “I’m hardly the only voice of sanity at the symposium.”
“Yes, but you were the voice singled out on that blog for silencing,” Karr pointed out.
The London Environmental Symposium, he knew, had attracted a lot of attention in the world press. The United States was under increasing international pressure to ratify the Kyoto Accords, which required signatory nations to accept mandatory limits to greenhouse gas emissions-carbon dioxide, in particular-in order to halt or slow global warming.
Of course, putting caps on such emissions would also put a cap on the economies of member nations. Billions of dollars were at stake, along with industrial growth, employment levels, and the very standards of living for first-world nations such as the United States and Great Britain. Britain had signed and ratified the Protocols; the United States had signed them, but that signing had been a purely symbolic gesture, since they carried no weight until they were ratified by Congress.
Dr. Spencer was spokesman for a point of view seen as heretical by the environmentalists, that global warming and cooling were functions of solar output, and human activity affected climate little, if at all.
“I don’t see any Greenworld signs,” Payne said.
“I don’t think they’re that much into peaceful demonstration,” Karr said. “But you can bet they’re here.” Turning in his seat, he glanced at the vehicles behind. Odd. The white Mazda had turned off somewhere within the past block or two, after staying on their tail all the way from the airport.
“Doc, I suggest you get down on the floor.”
“Mr. Karr! Really! I-”
“Do what he says,” Payne said. The FBI man sounded nervous. “Get down and out of sight.”
Grumbling, Spencer complied. The back of the Lincoln was roomy enough-just-for him to find enough space to scrunch down on his knees, his head between Payne and Karr and below the level of the windows.
Rogers leaned on the horn, then pounded on it. Reluctantly, people in the crowd parted ahead, allowing the Lincoln to move slowly forward. Embattled London bobbies helped; several were visible in the crowd, trying to get the people off the street. One pointed at the Lincoln and waved them ahead.
“There’s the entrance,” Payne said. “Thank God.”
They turned left off of Tooley Street and descended a ramp leading to the garage. Before vanishing underground, Karr had a glimpse of London City Hall.
It was one of the oddest buildings Karr had ever seen, like a black-glass and steel egg tilted backward from its perch above the river.
Karr had read about the thing as part of his mission briefing. Opened in 2002 as a part of the More London development of the area near the Tower Bridge, it had originally been intended to be an immense sphere suspended above the Thames, but later design changes opted for a more conventional anchoring on solid ground instead. Native Londoners referred to it as Darth Vader’s helmet, a misshapen egg, or a titanic human scrotum, and the Mayor of London himself had called it a glass testicle. The design, Karr had read, was supposed to be make the building energy-efficient by reducing its surface area, and at some point in the future, the London Climate Change Agency was supposed to attach solar cells to the exterior.
Inside the structure were housed the offices of the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority, or GLA. A spiraling walkway circled all the way up the building’s ten stories just inside the darkened transparency of its curving surface, giving access to the top-floor meeting and exhibition space known as London’s Living Room.
From this angle, Karr thought as the garage entrance blocked the structure from view, the building seemed a dark and forbidding presence and not living room-like at all.
Behind them, someone with a megaphone was leading a chant: “USA, CO2! USA, CO2…”
And the crowd’s mood, Karr thought, was damned ugly.
“Gordon, this is George,” Telach’s voice sounded in his ear.
“Go ahead,” he replied. He knew from the sound of her voice that he wasn’t going to like this.