“Just keep it down,” Bakiyev replied. “I’m going to work for another twenty minutes, then I’m going to bed. I want it quiet.”
“Sure, boss, no problem.”
“And don’t eat all my popcorn, damn it.”
Bakiyev turned and strode back through the tower door and slammed it behind him. Twenty minutes to nighty-night, Fisher thought. He checked his OPSAT; Stewart’s beacon lay to his left and above him, inside the north tower.
ONCE through the tower door, Fisher found himself facing a narrow spiral staircase that ascended around a center column of stone and heavy oaken crossbeams. Ten feet above his head he could see floor joists. He mounted the staircase, testing each step with his foot, testing his weight, before moving on.
On the first floor he found the space divided by four rooms, like wedges from a pie. Fisher stopped at each door to scan the interior with the flexicam. All four rooms—sleeping quarters—were empty. He moved to the second floor and again found only empty bedrooms, though only three this time as the tower narrowed with each floor. On the third floor, the final one below the archer’s cupola, Fisher found, predictably, only two rooms. The first room, another bedroom, contained what appeared to be a figure under the covers of a single trundle bed. Fisher switched to EM and immediately saw a troubling signature: a tight funnel of swirling gray light in the far corner of the room near the ceiling. Security camera. He switched back to NV, centered the flexicam on the security camera, then tapped the OPSAT screen: CURRENT IMAGE>SLAVE AND TRACK MOTION>SCREEN OVERLAY. The OPSAT processed the request and replied, FINISHED. He switched screens. On the fort’s blueprint screen, Stewart’s room now showed a partially transparent red cone emanating from the corner in which the security camera lay.
Now, the question was, why did only this room have a security camera? He thought he knew the answer, but it took thirty seconds of panning and zooming to confirm it. There. The sleeping figure’s right hand was resting outside the covers on the pillow; attached to the wrist was what looked like a handcuff. Stewart.
Fisher moved to the final room. Inside, Chin-Hwa Pak was sitting on the edge of his bed in his pajamas using a stylus to tap on a smart phone. On the nightstand, under the glow of a shaded reading lamp, was a semiautomatic pistol.
Fisher checked his watch. Pak looked ready to go to bed; he would wait a few minutes, then check again. He found a corner and crouched down, leaning against the wall.
Something . . . Fisher thought. Something was nagging at his subconscious. Something about one of the other bedrooms . . .
Fisher got up and crept back down the spiral staircase to the first floor, then found the room in question, the first one to the left of the stairs. He gave the room another precautionary EM scan, then picked the lock, slipped inside, and shut the door behind him. He walked to the nightstand beside the bed and turned on the reading lamp.
This room, unlike the others, which were almost spartan in their furnishings, was well-appointed: a queen-size bed with a down comforter, a rolltop desk, a built-in bookshelf across from the bed, artwork on the walls . . . This was no ordinary guest room. Bakiyev hadn’t gone to special lengths for his other two guests—even his North Korean spy—so why this room?
Fisher went to work. He took his time, searching every nook and cranny of the room. In the nightstand drawer he found a laminated map of Kyrgyzstan with traces of grease pencil on it. Trapped behind the nightstand and the wall he found a faded envelope. On one corner of the envelope’s rear, written in blue ink, was a doodle, some scratched-out added numbers, random lines. The main address and return address were written in English—the clumsy block letters of someone unfamiliar with the language. The return address was Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; the main address read, “University College London.” All were in black ink.
Inside Fisher found a letter, written in Kyrgyz by a feminine hand. The date was March 1967. Fisher’s grasp of Kyrgyz was weak, but he was able to piece together and translate the letter’s salutation: My Dear little Soso . . .
Soso, Fisher thought.
He sat down on the bed, scanned the remainder of the letter for any other recognizable phrases, then thought for a couple minutes. He keyed his SVT. “Grim, you there?”
“Here.”
“Steak dinner says I can guess what your Kyrgyzstan news is.”
“You’re on.”
“Bolot Omurbai isn’t dead.”
There was a solid five seconds of silence, and then she said, “What? What are you talking about?”
“I think I’m sitting in Omurbai’s temporary mausoleum.”
21
“YOU’VE lost me, Sam,” Grimsdottir said. “Hold on, let me patch in the colonel . . .”
Lambert came on the line: “What’ve you got, Sam?”
Fisher repeated what he’d said to Grimsdottir, then added, “If I’m not mistaken, Omurbai’s mother used to call him ‘little Soso’—after Stalin’s childhood nickname.”
“Checking,” Grimsdottir said. “Yeah, that’s right. What about the letter?”
“March 1967, University College London. He would have been . . .”
“Eighteen or nineteen,” Grimsdottir answered. Fisher could hear keys tapping in the background; after half a minute, she came back. “Omurbai studied there—economics—for a year before he dropped out.”
“Speculate,” Lambert ordered.
“Omurbai was there years and years ago,” Grimsdottir replied. “Long before he took over the country.”
“Or the letter is new, and whoever the Kyrgyz government killed was one of Omurbai’s body doubles.” He told them about the blue-ink doodle on the back of the envelope. “Plus, this room is untouched—almost a shrine. I doubt it would’ve been kept like this if Omurbai had visited before his rise to power. He would have been just another fellow Kyrgyz to Bakiyev. And the laminated map—the copyright reads 2007.”
“Let’s play this out,” Lambert said. “Omurbai escapes Kyrgyzstan, leaving a body double in his place and telling his commanders to fight on until he returns. From there, with the help of Tolkun Bakiyev he makes his way to Little Bishkek, where he hides out, licks his wounds, and regroups—”
“And makes friends with the North Koreans,” Fisher added.
“Right. And uses their advisers, their weapons, and their money—and Bakiyev’s network—to plan his return to power.”
“That sounds about right,” Fisher replied. “A lot of unanswered questions yet, but it’s plausible. The biggest question is: What’re the North Koreans getting out of the deal? What does Omurbai have to offer them?”
“Speaking of Omurbai’s big comeback,” Grimsdottir said, “that’s the other news. The latest reports show the Kyrgyz government on the edge of collapse. There’s fighting inside Bishkek now; the rebels are pushing in.”
“They always had the numbers but not the direction,” Fisher said. “Without Omurbai they were aimless—a gaggle of warlords that couldn’t agree on what kind of tea to serve at meetings, let alone wage a war.”
“And now,” Lambert said, “maybe they have their rudder back.”
22
THEY talked for a few more minutes, then Fisher signed off and returned to the third floor. He checked in on Pak and found him lying in bed reading, so he moved to Stewart’s room, picked the lock, and slipped inside. He stood motionless for a few moments, pressed flat against the door, listening. He started side-sliding along the wall, following the contour of the room, checking the security camera’s detection cone on the OPSAT as he went, until he was standing directly beneath the camera itself.
He studied the camera’s underbelly. He saw no signs of a microphone, but he did see a manufacturer’s name and model number. He relayed them to Grimsdottir. “I need an encode for a loop switch.”
While both Fisher’s SC pistol and rifle were EM jammer capable, he used the feature sparingly. His concern wasn’t about whether or not the jammer was effective (it was), but rather about the intangible pa
rt of the equation; that is, the human part: what a security guard does when one of his or her monitors turns to static for no apparent reason only to resolve itself seconds later. And what do they do when another camera displays the same static, then another. Human judgment is an unpredictable beast. Some guards will write off the interference; some will not. It was those who worried Fisher, so whenever possible he preferred the now-antiquated and admittedly more tedious “loop switch” method.
“No problem. Stand by.” She came back ten seconds later. “Got it. Encoding now.”
On his OPSAT screen, a series of seemingly random numbers and letters were marching across the screen. They disappeared, and in their place was the word READY. From his web belt Fisher withdrew a loop interrupter switch—a loop switch, for short—a six-inch length of UTP Cat6 cable with a miniature C-clamp on each end. On the inner side of each clamp was a ring of sharp, tiny connector teeth; inside the cable itself, a microprocessor; and jutting from the center of the cable between the clamps, an infrared port.
Fisher aligned the loop switch’s IR port with that of the OPSAT’s.
CONNECTING . . .
CAPTURE . . .
ENCODING . . .
DONE.
Fisher reached up, lightly placed one clamped end of the loop switch to the camera’s feed cable, and the other a few inches away. Satisfied with the setup, Fisher tightened both clamps simultaneously. He then again aligned the loop switch’s IR port with the OPSAT’s and read the screen: LOOP ESTABLISHED. If there were eyes watching Stewart’s camera, now all they would see was a replayed loop of him sleeping.
Fisher crept to the bed and knelt down beside it. He placed a hand on Stewart’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “Calvin. Calvin, wake up.”
Stewart groaned, and his eyelids fluttered open. It took a few seconds, but he focused on Fisher and then said, groggily, “Sam.”
“How’re you holding up?”
“Well, I’ve got a bed. That’s an improvement.”
“Still with the jewelry, I see.”
Stewart glanced at his cuffed hand. “Day and night.”
“Let me see your thumb.” Stewart extended it, and Fisher examined the fake nail. All looked good. “We pinned down the identity of your minder. He’s a North Korean agent.”
“Any clue what they want with me?”
“We’re working on it. Anything on your end?”
“Same questions, different angles. It almost feels like a job interview—like they’re trying to decide if they’ve got the right guy.”
“Encourage that.”
“Why?”
“A couple reasons,” Fisher replied. “One, the more useful you are to them, the more valuable you are. And two, if they’re convinced you can do the job for them—whatever that is—they’ll send you farther down the pipeline, and I can track you. Hopefully to the source of all this. Hopefully to the PuH-19.”
“God, how long is this going to last?”
“I don’t know, Calvin. Not much longer, I would bet. Hang in there. As soon as it’s safe to pull you out, I’ll do it.”
“I guess I don’t have much choice but to trust you, do I?”
“Well,” Fisher said with a half grin, “it just so happens you’re in luck: I’m a trustworthy guy. You’re doing fine, Calvin. Get some sleep. I won’t be far away.”
FISHER returned to Pak’s door, and in the flexicam’s lens he could see the North Korean had turned out his light and now appeared to be asleep. Fisher watched for another five minutes; Pak didn’t stir. Fisher lightly scratched at the door with his fingernail. Nothing. Another scratch, this time louder. Still, Pak remained motionless.
Fisher withdrew the flexicam, then picked the lock and slipped inside. On flat feet, he crept to the edge of the bed. Pak lay on his right side, facing away from Fisher. His chest was rising and falling rhythmically. To be on the safe side, Fisher drew his pistol, removed a Level 1 dart from the magazine, then moved to the end of the bed. Pak’s bare left foot poked out from under the covers. Fisher knelt down below the footboard and scratched the sole of Pak’s foot with the dart. Pak stirred slightly, then turned onto his left side and went back to sleep.
Fisher searched his room but found nothing of interest, so he turned his attention to Pak’s smart phone—a Palm Treo 700—on the nightstand. The keypad was password-locked. He called Grimsdottir. “I’ve got a Treo that needs a crack and dump,” he said.
“Connect me.”
Fisher did so. As if by magic, the Treo powered up and began a rapid-fire scroll through its programs and folders. After twenty seconds of this, the screen went dark again.
“Got it,” said Grimsdottir. “I’ll take a look at it and get back to you.”
“Roger. I’m heading to the server room, then I’m out.”
HE found it on the top floor of the southern tower—the one he’d seen Bakiyev emerge from earlier—slipped inside, and then tapped into each server in turn and waited for the OPSAT to download the data. He was about to leave when he heard the door to Bakiyev’s room open, then slam shut.
“I know that, yes, I know,” Bakiyev was saying into what Fisher guessed was a phone, “but it wasn’t scheduled until morning. I understand . . . yes, I’ll get it ready. How long? Okay, I’ll have the pad lights on. Ten minutes.”
Footsteps pounded down the spiral staircase. Another door slammed, then silence.
Someone was coming for Stewart, Fisher assumed. Pad lights . . . The roof.
Fisher climbed the spiral staircase all the way to the top, where it ended at a roof hatch. It was unlocked. He pushed through it and into the archer’s gallery, a domed enclosure with a chest-high, square-serrated stone wall. He looked down. Forty feet below lay the roof of the fort, itself encircled by a crenellated wall. In the center of the roof was a white-painted circle overlaid with an X. Fisher zoomed in on it and could see lights embedded in the roof.
He scanned the north tower, looking for movement, but saw nothing. Instead, he spied a roof door set into the base of the tower.
Damn. Second floor. Go, go, go.
He climbed back through the hatch, picked his way down the spiral staircase to the second floor and, following his internal compass, located the right room. It, too, was unlocked. He slipped inside and looked around. On the far wall, hidden behind a floor-to-ceiling armoire, he found the door. He stepped inside the armoire, flipped the door’s dead bolt, and opened it enough for the flexicam. Nothing was moving. He checked his watch: Five minutes to go.
The opposite tower door opened. Tolkun Bakiyev strode out, trotted to the center of the roof, and raised a pair of binoculars. He scanned the sky to the northwest for ten seconds, then started back to the door. Chin-Hwa Pak poked his head out. Bakiyev waved him back inside, then followed.
Four minutes later, Fisher heard the barely perceptible thumping of helicopter rotors. He switched to NV and zoomed in to the northwest just in time to see a pair of navigation strobes appear out of the darkness, followed seconds later by the white nose cone and Plexiglas windshield of a Sikorsky S-76. Fisher flipped up his goggles.
The landing pad lights glowed to life, outlining the circle and cross. Forty seconds later, the S-76 swept in over the roof, barely clearing the wall, and touched down.
Sticking to the shadows along the wall, Fisher ran, crouched over, until the Sikorsky lay between him and the north tower door. He drew the SC-20 from its back holster and dropped to his belly. Beneath the S-76’s cabin and through the landing skids Fisher saw two pair of legs emerge from the tower door and start jogging toward the helicopter. Through the cabin’s tinted windows he saw the lights come on as the opposite door slid open to receive the passengers.
Fisher changed the SC-20’s fire selector to Sticky Cam, then pulled one off his belt. The standard color for a Sticky Cam was black; Fisher pulled off the outer laminate to expose the white coating. Better match for the Sikorsky’s paint scheme. He toggled the Sticky Cam’s switch to GPS ENABLED, the
n loaded it. He tucked the rifle’s stock to his cheek and peered through the scope, panning and zooming until he’d found his target.
Wait . . . The thump of the Sticky Cam would likely go unnoticed over the Sikorsky’s engines, but Fisher didn’t want to take a chance. Pak and Stewart reached the helicopter and took turns climbing in.
Wait . . .
Through the cabin window he saw an arm reach for the cabin’s latch. The door started sliding shut. Now.
Fisher fired. The Sticky Cam flew true and popped onto the S-76’s tail boom just as the cabin door thumped shut. He waited, breath held, half expecting one of the crew to climb out, but nothing happened. Ten seconds passed, then twenty. Thirty. Then the engines increased in pitch, and the S-76 lifted off the pad, rose up twenty feet, wheeled, and disappeared over the north tower. The landing pad lights went dark.
Fisher let out his breath and checked the OPSAT:
STICKY CAM > GPS ENABLED > ONLINE >TRACKING
Fisher smiled grimly to himself. You can run, but you can’t hide.
23
THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM
LESS than a day after the first mortar round landed in Bishkek, the moderate government collapsed from within. With most of its armored vehicles destroyed along with what few strike aircraft it could field, the government forces had taken a crippling blow, and the battle for Bishkek quickly turned into a house-to-house fight as the insurgent army poured down from the mountains surrounding the capital and drove into the city proper under a steady stream of mortar fire that sometimes simply blanketed an area, wiping it clean of soldiers and vehicles alike, while other times taking out single targets, but always doing so with frightening speed and precision.
By the time the government forces recovered from the initial assault and managed to regroup, half the city was already lost, under insurgent control as thousands of Bishkek residents took to the streets and marched on government buildings and the presidential residence.