“Maybe that’s the link,” he said after a moment. “The Russians have been trying to stake a claim to half of the Arctic Ocean since 2007, claiming their territorial waters extend all the way to the North Pole. Greenworld and the other environmentalist groups would raise one hell of a stink if the Russians started sinking oil wells and building pipelines up there.”

“True,” Lia said. “But the Russians wouldn’t be able to do that. Put oil wells in the Arctic, I mean.”

“Why not? It’d be simpler than building an offshore drilling platform. Just build your tower, drill through the ice, then extend your cutting head through water and into the sea floor, just like they do in the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea.”

“No, Dean. Absolutely impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because the Arctic ice is moving, dummy,” she told him, smiling to rob the words of their sting. Then she realized he probably couldn’t see the smile, so she let her hand glide down his torso, gently stroking him. “It drifts with wind and current. I don’t know how fast, but the whole ice cap moves. Build an oil rig on the ice, send the drill head down to the sea floor… and in a few days or weeks or whatever… snap! ”

“Oh. Yeah. I think I remember reading about that somewhere.”

“If the Russians want to look for oil in the Arctic Ocean, they’re going to have to wait for the ice cap to melt.”

He chuckled. “You think global warming is that bad?”

“The ice cap is getting smaller and thinner every year,” she told him. “Last I heard, if things proceed at the same rate they’ve been going over the past couple of decades, all of the Arctic ice will be gone-it’ll all be open ocean-by 2060.”

“Huh. I had no idea.”

“Most people don’t. The whole global-warming thing has become so politicized that it’s tough to know what’s real and what’s hype.”

“The Russians are known for thinking pretty far out into the future,” Dean said, thoughtful. “I could see them planning for when they could build conventional offshore drilling rigs after the ice is gone. Still, fifty-some years? That’s kind of a long shot. And right now no one can agree if global warming is real or just a temporary fad, if humans are causing it or it’s part of a natural cycle. I can’t see the mafia gambling on something like that.”

“And they wouldn’t give a damn about the environmentalists half a century out, either,” Lia said. “If the mafia is behind it, that suggests a short-term goal as well. Those guys don’t wait fifty years for a return on their investment, you know?”

“Even governments don’t think that far ahead,” Dean admitted. “So what’s the answer, do you think?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. The Art Room said Ilya and I were going to be on hold for a while. There’s some sort of political crisis on back at the Palace. You know anything about it?”

“Not much. An F-22 was shot down over the Gulf of Finland in support of your op. Did you hear about that?”

“A little. Did they find the pilot?”

“Not that I’ve heard. But the scuttlebutt at Fort Meade was that Desk Three might get into trouble for losing an F-22 instead of a UAV.”

“‘Scuttlebutt’?”

“Sorry. Marine and Navy slang. Means rumor or gossip.”

“I like it. Damn, the Russian op just went to hell, didn’t it?”

“They didn’t tell me much. What happened?”

“Our contact turned on us. There was an ambush… and a firefight. Ilya lost his kit, including some rather sensitive black ops gear.”

“Shit!”

“There’s a sanitizing team in there now, trying to recover it. The two of us got clear of the operational area, then almost got picked up by the MVD.” She shook her head slightly. “I’ve had the… I don’t know, the feeling that we’ve been set up right along, that the opposition was always a step or two ahead of us the whole way.”

“I can’t imagine the Russian mafia deliberately playing games with the NSA,” Dean said. “I mean… they’re just criminals.”

“Yeah, and it’s dangerous to underestimate them, Charlie,” she told him. “A lot of them were KGB and GRU before the Communists lost power. They had some pretty specialized knowledge and equipment, and it all went to the highest bidder.”

“Kind of like all the jokes about out-of-work Russian nuclear scientists. ‘Will sell nuclear secrets for food.’”

“Exactly. And the gang leaders themselves, even if they’re not tied in with Russian intelligence or the military, well, they had to be damned tough and smart, and they had to have some pretty good connections just to survive under the Soviets, to say nothing of building an underground criminal empire. They’re also… I don’t know how to say it. Less constrained than the Soviet government was.”

“How do you mean?”

“The Soviet government had a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the planet.”

“So did we.”

“Right. But neither we nor the Soviets used that arsenal, because no one can win a nuclear war. Okay?”

“There were a few people who thought we could,” Dean put in. “But MAD-Mutual Assured Destruction-worked as a deterrent, sure.”

“The Soviets were as careful as we were to make sure nukes didn’t get into the wrong hands, because if they screwed up, it would come back to bite them in the ass.”

“Okay…”

“Don’t you see? The Russian mafia doesn’t care! Oh, they don’t want to see the world blown to bits. That would be bad for business. But they don’t have the obligation to provide for their country’s welfare that the Soviets had. You can see that in the way the mobs are strangling the Russian economy today. Capitalism doesn’t stand a chance so long as the mobs are bleeding businesses over there dry.”

“So… you’re saying the mafia is more likely to do crazy stuff.”

“Exactly. During the Cold War, we were worried about Soviet adventurism, about all those times they played brinksmanship games and created international crises. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The invasion of Czechoslovakia. The invasion of Afghanistan. Those were the times when things were dangerous, when the missiles might have flown. The Tambov Gang, the Blues, all the other Russian mobs… all they want is money, power, and to come out on top of the heap. If Colombian drug lords get their very own submarine, if a reactor melts down in the Urals and wipes out a city, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and obliterates Israel, what’s it to them? They may not even care if Russia’s economy tanks, because they’ve been going international lately in a big way. Ask Ilya about the Mafiya in Brighton sometime.”

“Brighton?”

“He’s American. His parents were immigrants. Brighton Beach is near Brooklyn, in New York, and it’s where a lot of Russian émigrés settled. They call it Little Odessa. For ten, fifteen years, the Mafiya has been moving in there, big-time. They’re everywhere.”

“Somehow, I never thought of Desk Three as being crime fighters,” Dean said.

“In some ways the Russian mobs are as much of a threat as al-Qaeda,” she told him. “Maybe more.”

“Are you sure you’re not just making it personal?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I can hear the anger in your voice. Like you want to go back over there and kill them all. For Tommy.”

“No,” she told him. “I am going back… one way or another. But when I do, it will be for me.”

She drew him closer then, trying to lose herself in his arms. “C’mere, Marine,” she told him. “I’m going to scuttle your butt. Again.”