by Tom Clancy
Eyes fixed on Vin, Fisher got up and picked his way through the trees along the edge of the ravine until he was within twenty feet of the bridge. When he stepped from the trees and crouched down, Vin saw the movement and began to turn his head.
“No,” Fisher ordered. “Face the cars.”
Vin complied. “Was that you?”
“Was that me, what?”
Vin jerked his head toward the two dead men. “Them.”
“I needed their car. Something told me they weren’t the cooperative type.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Fisher flipped the selector to COTTONBALL and fired one into the point of Vin’s right shoulder. Vin gave out a slight gasp, then toppled over sideways, unconscious before he hit the ground. Fisher got up and walked over. He frisked Vin’s would-be executioners and found a few hundred euros, a set of car keys, two passports, and a half dozen credit cards between them. The money was real enough, but not so the passports and cards, he suspected. He took everything. Next he checked Vin’s pulse; it was steady.
Time for an eye in the sky. Fisher thumbed the selector on the SC-20 again and pointed the barrel into the sky at a seventy-degree angle over the bunker. He pulled the trigger. The projectile was of course saddled with an alphanumeric DARPA-inspired name, but Fisher had long ago dubbed it the ASE, or All-Seeing Eye—essentially a miniaturized version of a Sticky Cam embedded in an aerogel parachute.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and has a surface area that boggled the mind: Spread flat, each cubic inch of the stuff—roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another—could cover a football field from end zone to end zone. In the case of the ASE, its palm-sized, self-deploying aerogel chute could keep the camera aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.
He lifted the OPSAT up, tapped a few buttons, and the ASE’s bird’s-eye view appeared on the screen. He switched modes from night vision to infrared; doing this drew enormous power from the ASE’s internal battery, cutting its life nearly in half, but the view was rewarding. From five hundred feet above the ground, Fisher had a view of the bunker and the field to the east. In familiar rainbow hues he could pick out two figures lying prone in the field, their SC-20s aimed at the bunker. A third figure was walking across the bunker’s roof near the emplacement where he had exited. The fourth figure was nowhere to be seen. Probably still inside, Fisher assumed. He tapped a few more keys on the OPSAT’s screen, sending a self-destruct command to the ASE, which triggered an overload in the battery, frying the camera’s internal circuitry.
One last task.
He got out his Gerber Guardian and went to work.
14
BITBURG, GERMANY
FISHER sat before the computer screen, sipping a double shot of espresso and occasionally clicking on the browser’s REFRESH button. The Internet café was busy, filled with late-morning commuters stopping by for a caffeine fix before work and the early-lunch crowd looking for a boost to get them through the afternoon. The babble was all in German, and Fisher used his waiting time trying to catch snippets of conversation; his German was good, but it could always be better.
He hit REFRESH once more and was rewarded with a newly saved message in his drafts folder. He clicked on it, scanned the contents, and nodded. Finally, the answer he wanted. His request for a meeting—if only a voice-to-voice one—had been met with resistance. Until now.
The night before, after punching holes in the rear tires of both Audis, Fisher had taken the dead men’s car, a Volvo, and driven to the L1. He headed south to Obersgegen, and then northeast for twenty miles to Bitburg, a city of thirteen thousand. It was nearly dawn when he pulled into the city limits. He drove through downtown, the eastern edge of town, following signs for an overnight rest stop where he pulled in, changed out of his tac-suit, and caught four hours of sleep in the Volvo’s backseat.
Now, shortly after eleven, rested and alert after three double espressos, he reread Vesa’s message one last time, committed the details to memory.
Meeting approved. Proceed immediately to
Aachen.
There was a street address, but it was unfamiliar to Fisher. He deleted the message, signed off the computer, got a coffee to go, and left.
He arrived in Aachen ninety minutes later and, after consulting his iPhone’s map, found a crowded shopping area, where he abandoned the Volvo, then caught a taxi and rode aimlessly for thirty minutes before telling the driver to stop. He spent another hour walking, checking for signs of surveillance, before stepping into an Enterprise office and renting a BMW 7 Series. Twenty minutes later he pulled to a stop before a brownstone apartment on Kockerellstrasse. He got out, trotted up the steps, and punched the correct code into the keypad lock; as with the Pelican case, the code consisted of the brownstone’s latitude and longitude coordinates combined with some division and subtraction.
He heard a soft buzz, then a click, and the latch opened under his hand. There was no one home, of that he was certain—or mostly certain. He wouldn’t have been sent here if the safe house were occupied. Even so, with his SC pistol at his side he searched the apartment’s two floors. The decor and furnishings had been chosen straight from a hotel supply catalogue: comfortable but without personality. On the second floor he found a similarly furnished office. One wall was dominated by a fifty-inch LCD television monitor. Sitting on the dark cherry desk, on a leather blotter, was what looked like a standard telephone. He punched SPEAKERPHONE, waited for the dial tone, then hit the pound button three times and the asterisk button twice. The speaker emitted thirty seconds’ worth of squelches and clicks as the encryption buffers engaged; then a computerized, Stephen Hawkingesque voice came on the line. “Please hold . . . transferring . . .”
Then a female voice: “Sam, are you there?”
“I’m here, Grim.”
IT had been eight months since he’d heard Anna Grimsdóttir’s voice, and a lot longer than that since they’d stood in the same room together. The LCD monitor glowed to life, and on the upper edge of the TV’s case a tiny green light blinked on, indicating the built-in webcam was on. Grimsdóttir’s face and shoulders resolved. Fisher didn’t recognize the background, but it clearly wasn’t anywhere at Fort Meade. He guessed that she, too, was using a Third Echelon safe house.
She looked the same as she had the last time they’d seen each other. Despite his misgivings about his old friend’s loyalty, it was good to see her. He missed his old life.
“You look tired, Sam,” Grim now said.
“I am tired. When was the last time you heard from Hansen?”
“Couple of days. I’m afraid we might have a mutiny on our hands.”
“How so?”
“The team knows we’re holding back on them. Moreau’s got his hands full.”
“He’s in the field?” Louis “Marty” Moreau was one of Third Echelon’s best technical operations managers—in other words, a Splinter Cell “handler.”
Grim nodded. “Coordinating. And getting shot at.”
Fisher smiled. “But surviving, right?”
“Right. Anyway, Hansen’s trying to keep the team on track, but I can hear it in his voice: He knows something isn’t kosher. There’s more than a little frustration there, too.”
“Don’t blame them. Well, for what it’s worth, they haven’t been making it easy on me. Almost had me a few times.”
“Uh-huh,” Grimsdóttir replied skeptically. “You’ve given them some breaks.”
“Some. Have to make sure the show’s convincing enough to sell Kovac,” Fisher replied, referring to the National Security Agency’s deputy director, Nicholas Andrew Kovac. Grimsdóttir’s boss. In addition to being an all-around idiot and dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat, Kovac was also on their too-long list of high-ranking NSA Brahmins who may have sold out the United States. Until Fisher and Grimsd
óttir finished this mission, she would have to placate Kovac. Unfortunately, that meant fielding a team to hunt down Fisher.
“So far, so good,” Grimsdóttir said.
“Grim, we’ve got a problem. They were in Vianden—Hansen and the others. They almost caught me in Ernsdorff’s backyard.”
“What?”
Fisher brought her up to speed, starting with his arrival in Vianden and ending with his escape from the Siegfried-Line bunker. He left out any mention of Vin’s close call at the bridge.
“They shouldn’t have been there,” Fisher explained. “I left them no trail to follow.”
“You’re sure?” When Fisher didn’t reply, Grim said, “Of course you didn’t.”
“There are only a couple of ways they could’ve gotten there.”
“Me and an outside information conduit.”
Fisher nodded.
“It wasn’t me, Sam.”
Fisher almost said, Convince me. It wasn’t necessary. He’d known Anna Grimsdóttir too long, and the expression on her face told Fisher she was telling the truth.
“So that leaves a conduit. Moreau?”
“No chance.”
“The mole, then,” Fisher replied.
“Has to be.”
“And you’re sure about that part?”
Grim nodded. “There’s a cutout. Code name is Sting-ray. He or she was in the Russange-Villerupt area the same time you were. Someone on the team is getting fed. We just don’t know who or why.”
“I’d like to think we could rule out Hansen.”
“Me, too. But we can’t. Not yet.”
“Ames.”
Grimsdóttir sighed. “He’s a weasel, but beyond that there’s nothing that points to him.”
“He took a couple of shots at me—at the Esch-sur-Alzette reservoir.”
“He reported it to Hansen. Fell on his sword. Said he got a little jumpy and fired warning shots.”
Fisher considered this and shrugged. “It happens.” Fisher changed topics: “Put their feet to the fire,” Fisher said. “Right now, they’re pissed off and frustrated. Threaten to pull them out of the field if they don’t tell you how they got to Vianden. Hell, threaten to investigate them, kick them out of the program, take away Christmas. They’re good, all of them, but they’re green. Use it.”
Grim nodded. “I’ll do it.”
“By the way, who are the other two? The blonde and the Japanese Vin Diesel.”
At this Grimsdóttir laughed. “Maya Valentina and Nathan Noboru. I’ll download their bios to your OPSAT.”
“You may have a problem with Noboru. When I came out of the bunker, he was seconds away from getting a bullet in the head. Two men—one short and stocky, the other tall, anemic looking.”
“Those would be misters Gothwhiler and Horatio. Mercenaries. Noboru did a job for a group called Gothos a few years back, but there was a woman and child involved, so he aborted mid mission. Gothos stiffed him, so Noboru hacked into its account and liberated his fee—he only took half, though, since he didn’t do the woman and child.”
“Interesting. I think I like him.”
“You said, ‘seconds away,’ ” Grimsdóttir prompted. “I assume that means you—”
“I did. Seemed like the right thing to do. Where are you with the data from Ernsdorff’s server?”
“Still working on it. Heavily encrypted stuff, but there’s gigabytes’ worth, so at least we know we’re digging in the right place. Hopefully, I’ll have something in a few hours—at least a direction I can point you.”
“I’ll need something to satisfy Hans.”
“You’ll have it. How soon?”
“I meet him in Hammerstein tomorrow.”
For the sake of appearances, when Yannick Ernsdorff had come to Third Echelon’s attention Grimsdóttir and Fisher—who was already on the run and well established in the mercenary community—had looked for other agencies with an interest in Ernsdorff’s activities. They found their stalking horse in Germany’s BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Federal Intelligence Service. Fisher’s BND contact, Hans Hoffman, hadn’t specified what kind of information they were seeking, instead giving Fisher plenty of latitude. “Whatever you can find, ja?” had been Hoffman’s vague instructions, which told Fisher that the Germans were in just the initial stages of mounting an operation against Ernsdorff or against someone Ernsdorff serviced. Either way, during the months running up to Fisher’s penetration of Ernsdorff’s estate the BND had supplied him with dribs and drabs of peripheral intelligence, which he had dutifully funneled back to Grimsdóttir at Fort Meade. None of the information had been, in and of itself, earth shattering, but it had given them a few insights into the man. Now Fisher had to report back to his customer and turn over the information he’d gathered—at least such information as Grimsdóttir deemed juicy enough to satisfy them but benign enough to keep the BND behind Third Echelon’s own investigation. Until they were done with Yannick Ernsdorff, he needed to remain untouchable.
“When are you going to have your come-to-Jesus meeting with the team?” Fisher asked.
“Hansen’s set to call in within the hour.”
“Keep me posted.”
“As soon as I have something, I’ll call. The safe house is solid. You won’t get any unexpected company. Stay there, get some rest.”
“Twist my arm.”
“Hang in there, Sam. I think we’re in the last innings.”
Fisher nodded and smiled wearily. “Unfortunately, that’s usually when the rain starts falling.”
IGNORING the instincts that had for the past year kept him constantly moving from city to city and country to country, Fisher took Grimsdóttir’s advice. He had a long, hot shower, washed his clothes, then laid out all his gear, inspecting and cleaning each piece until satisfied everything was working as designed. At three o’clock he walked down the block to a sporting goods store and bought a Deuter Quantum 55+10 backpack, large enough to accommodate all his gear, and an assortment of kayaker’s dry bags, then found a grocery store and bought some fruit, cheese, sourdough bread, sliced turkey and roast beef, and a six-pack of Berliner Kindl Weisse, then returned to the brownstone and ate at the dining room table.
At five he heard a soft double bing from upstairs. He walked into the office and touched the phone’s SPEAKER button. Grimsdóttir’s face appeared on the LCD. “You look a little better,” she said.
“I feel a little better. Might be the two Berliner Kindl Weisses, though.”
“What?”
“German beer.”
Grimsdóttir screwed up her face. “Too stout for me.”
Fisher shrugged. “What do you know?”
“I talked to Hansen and his team. I think I talked them down. Rattled their cages a little bit. It won’t last forever, though—especially with him. He knows something’s off about their mission, but at least for the near future he’s willing to take some things on faith.”
“Good. And Vianden?”
“They took some initiative and played a hunch. They still buy that you’re freelance, and they assumed Luxembourg had something to do with a job. Noboru still has contacts in that world, so he came up with a few names of players that are still in the know. Ames made a few calls and got a hit.”
“Explain.”
“It’s a small world you’re in, Sam, and somebody of your caliber stands out. According to Ames, it was just a matter of asking about jobs in Luxembourg and U.S. government covert operatives gone bad, so to speak. Nobody had your name, but somebody had Ernsdorff’s. They drove up from Luxembourg city, started scouting the area, and the rest is bad luck.”
“How did they catch up to me after I lost them the first time?”
“Police scanner. Something about a man with a gun in a campsite.”
“Hippies were robbing my Range Rover.”
“Pardon me?”
“Forget it. So, you buy it—Ames’s story?”
“It’s plausible.”
“Do we know who Ames got the tip from?”
“Somebody named Karlheinz van der Putten.”
Fisher smiled. “I know the name. Half-German, half-Dutch guy. Used to be Fernspäher—special-forces reconnaissance unit. He’s got to be in his sixties by now. His nickname was Spock.”
“Why, does he have some kind of ear fetish? Something sexual?”
“Not so much sexual as surgical. He used to take ears as trophies.”
“Very nice,” Grim muttered. “Well, his trophy days are over, evidently. According to Noboru, van der Putten went into the information business.”
“How much did Ames say he paid him?”
“Fifty thousand.”
“Where’s he living now?”
Grimsdóttir paused a moment and looked down at her PDA. “Spain. A village called Chinchón southeast of Madrid. Why?”
Fisher didn’t answer. “Where did you leave it with Hansen?”
“They’re back in Luxembourg, regrouping. Kovac’s breathing down my neck, so I’ll have to put them on the road again soon. Check your Lycos account tomorrow after Hammerstein.”
“And Ernsdorff’s server?”
“I’ve downloaded the package for Hoffman to your OPSAT. Should be plenty there to make the BND happy and keep them busy for a while.”
15
HAMMERSTEIN, GERMANY
IT was a leisurely two-hour drive from Aachen to Hammerstein, and the road meandered east before turning south through Cologne, then to Bonn, where Highway 42 took him along the east bank of the Rhine down to Hammerstein. Fisher met Hans Hoffman at a small, locally owned winery called J. P. Zwick Weinstube Weingut. The day was bright and sunny, the surface of the Rhine ruffled by a slight breeze. Fisher could see barges and pleasure boats in the main channel. Horns and whistles echoed across the water.
He found Hans Hoffman seated at a table in a rear courtyard surrounded by hedges. Sitting on the kelly green tablecloth were four empty wineglasses. He was sipping his fifth.
