When he pointed a semiautomatic pistol at her face, Marla screamed and tried to flee. She managed only to stand before the fourth man slammed her back down on the couch. Her next scream was cut off by a bullet.
“Sit down,” he now ordered Brian, “next to your wife.”
Marla lay on her side, hair redder than before.
Brian shook his head. The ringing in his ears returned, louder than in the garage. He wished he’d listened to the warning. He wished he’d run for help. He wished—
“Your girls, the little loves of your life? Shall we bring them out here?”
Resigned and roiling with fear, Brian couldn’t move. He looked frozen.
“Let him hear one of them,” the short man yelled down the hall.
The door to the twins’ room opened. Eva screamed, “Daddy!”
It was the last word he ever heard.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
Lana Elkins settled back in her office chair, basking in the scent of the narcissus that she’d just arranged in a crystal vase. The fragrance was so penetrating it felt narcotic. The narcissus had been waiting for her when she walked in the door of CyberFortress, her cybersecurity firm. They were the flower of the week. NSA Deputy Director Robert Holmes had sent her a bouquet every Monday since she returned to work four months ago. He’d vowed to start her week in similar fashion for as long as he lived. His first card had explained why: “Just a small token of my deep gratitude for all the exemplary work you performed during the greatest crisis of the modern age.” Signed simply, “Bob.”
Such an elegant term, “modern age.” Who talked that way anymore? No one but Holmes, and while others in the intelligence community viewed him as a dinosaur from the dark days of the Cold War for his attitudes, if not his expertise, Lana felt certain he was precisely the kind of cybergeneral you wanted in place when a crisis threatened to become a catastrophe.
So while she’d made a perfunctory effort to stop his weekly offering — cut flowers often carried large carbon footprints, depending on their point of origin — she’d relaxed and accepted his gifts, knowing “Thank you” was as much a part of his moral code as never flinching in the face of adversity. Even as Lana suspected her own principles were grayer — more tinged by the times — she appreciated the man’s spine, and, of course, the intoxicating scent of those elegant flowers with their white petals and yellow pistils.
She indulged herself with the aroma for a few seconds, thinking how much her fifteen-year-old daughter Emma would love a few of the flowers for her bedroom, before Holmes’s first encrypted communication of the week arrived. He wanted to draw her attention to a pair of Russian icebreakers and a cable-laying ship in the Arctic, and provided a link to satellite surveillance of the vessels. “If possible,” he wanted “CF” to intercept and relay to him all communications between the ships and their “masters in Moscow.”
If possible. In Holmes-speak, that was a command, and one Lana would do her utmost to fulfill. Her success at obtaining these sorts of intercepts had kept her company at the forefront of the intelligence world since she had left the NSA more than a decade ago to start her own firm.
Still, Holmes’s “masters in Moscow” line reminded her that he was a great fan of John le Carré, and always on the alert for moles and sleeper agents. Once a Cold War warrior always one, she figured of the deputy director. During the crisis last year that had all but brought the U.S. to its knees — and from which the country, indeed, the world was still recovering — Russian hackers, along with their devious counterparts in China, North Korea, Iran, and a host of other countries, had been immediate suspects in the massive cyberwar launched against the United States.
Remembering the real “masters” of all that mayhem still made her teeth grind, as did flashbacks of the harrowing events that finally led to their defeat. Well, it wasn’t the Russians, in any case. And despite the missive from Holmes on her screen, she doubted the great irascible bear of the north was up to anything more than its usual posturing over the Arctic. But then she immediately reminded herself that Russia’s aggressive actions in the Ukraine made any of its blustering deeply worrisome these days.
Climatologists were constantly noting that the northern region was heating up two to three times faster than the average rate for the rest of the world. Five fossil-fuel powers bordered the Arctic: the U.S.; Canada; Russia; Denmark, which included Greenland in its kingdom; and Norway. All were looking hungrily at what geologists said might be the last of the world’s great untapped reserves of natural gas and oil. In theory, those five countries were peaceably negotiating over mineral rights. In reality, most were also busy building icebreakers and other naval hardware in case words proved weak in ensuring both national sovereignty and prosperity.
Already an increasing number of commercial tankers were carrying gas and oil from Siberia through Russia’s Northern Sea Route, a more direct voyage for that nation and the vessels of other countries than the Northwest Passage through Canadian-claimed waters. In either case, the supertankers and container ships now plying those seas each saved many days and upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars per trip over the longer runs through the Panama or Suez Canals. And on those northern routes the captains needn’t concern themselves with desperate Somali pirates. Or hijackers of any stripe, though it was amusing for Lana to conceive of a Canadian pirate party seizing a Russian ship (“Beauty, eh?”).
In actuality, the Canucks were assembling Arctic-worthy warships at an unprecedented pace. But if they were really smart, she thought they’d also be building ports capable of catering to the needs of those massive boats — as the Russians were already doing along their portion of the route.
At least the Canadians were moving ahead forcefully. The U.S. maintained little more than the homely presence of the Coast Guard in the Arctic with two—Count ’em—icebreaking ships in its entire fleet. The U.S. Navy was stretched so thin elsewhere that it didn’t expect to have much of a presence up there until the middle of the next decade, and that would happen only if Congress ever got around to approving the navy’s budget requests for more polar-class icebreakers.
The Russians, meanwhile, were running nuclear-powered Arctic icebreakers, while building the largest and most powerful vessel of that type in the world. So a great deal of responsibility for tracing Russian and other nations’ activities in the region had been left to U.S.-based intelligence agents using satellite and other technology. Notwithstanding the U.S., at times the entire region appeared to be a free-for-all of competing interests, while the very accuracy of its icy borders — upon which so much negotiating depended — was abused not so much by the threat of war or lesser aggressions, but by the increasing impact of the warming.
Lana summoned Jeff Jensen, her carefully attired VP in charge of CF’s internal security, though he was also drawn inevitably into naval affairs because the tightly wound thirty-eight-year-old Mormon was an Annapolis grad and veteran navy cryptographer. He had also served with distinction in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Jensen hurried into her office within moments, working what appeared to be a new digital device that likely came from a friend in the tech field. He kept those contacts current, which kept CF on top of all the advances in the soft and hard “wares” of the business.
“I know about the Russian ships,” he said, looking up as he pocketed the device. “I was getting ready to send you a report when you texted. We’ve already got a satellite photo of one of them. It’s leading a polar-rated ship that’s laying more cable on the seabed,” Jensen went on. “It’s very shallow there.” As it was along most of the Siberian shelf.