There were returning chuckles from around the table.
Another warlord spoke up. “Where have you been? Could you not have trusted us with your secret?”
“As for your first question, the friends of the Kyrgyz people are legion. And to your second question, trust was never the issue, my friend. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I knew our homeland would remain safe in your hands—all of your hands—until I returned. Silence was a necessary evil, and soon you’ll see why.
“The new future of the Kyrgyz people begins today, with my return and with your continued loyalty. In a matter of weeks, by the grace of Allah, our homeland will be returned to us and set back on the one true course.”
“And what is this course?” the other warlord asked.
“The ways of old,” Omurbai replied. “The ways of Manas, before our land was polluted by immorality and technology and Western thought. I’ve watched from afar, my old friends. I’ve seen the disease spreading across our country, starting in the cities with billboards and flashing signs and dancing. Our people have lost their way, but I tell you this: With my return I bring the cure.”
“And this is?”
Omurbai waggled a finger at him as though admonishing a child. “Patience. All will soon be made clear.” Omurbai sat back in his chair and silently stared at each man in turn, then suddenly slapped both palms on the table. One of the chalap carafes tipped over, spilling its contents on the tablecloth.
“To other business,” Omurbai announced. He stood up and began walking around the table, placing a hand on each warlord’s shoulder in turn, finally stopping behind Samet. “As you know, Samet here has faithfully stood in my place since my departure. You’ve followed him loyally, and for that I thank you. The Kyrgyz people—those from the Land of Forty Tribes, thank you. However, I am disappointed in you.”
Omurbai had stopped behind Samet’s chair with both hands resting on his shoulders.
“Why, my khan?” asked the Ich Kylyk warlord.
“As I told you now and I’ve told you before, the disease that infects our country is insidious. No one is immune. Not you, not me, not the most hardened and loyal soldier. Even Samet here, loyal Kyrgyz that he is, has faltered. Isn’t that true, Samet?”
Samet craned his neck to look up at Omurbai. “I don’t understand, my khan. How have I failed you?”
“In word, Samet. You have failed me in word. I have it on trusted authority you have been seen in Bishkek—that you have been heard answering to your old Soviet name, Satybaldiyev.”
“No, my khan, this is not true—”
From the folds of his jacket Omurbai produced a long, curved knife. In one smooth motion, he reached across Samet’s throat, inserted the tip of the knife below his ear, and drew it cleanly across his larynx. Eyes bulging, Samet opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came. Blood gushed from the wound and sprayed across the tablecloth. His head, nearly severed, lolled to one side, and he toppled forward, his forehead cracking against the mahogany. His body spasmed and bucked in its chair for another ten seconds, then went still.
Omurbai jammed the tip of the knife into the tabletop and then looked around the table. “The disease of which I speak, my friends . . . It knows no bounds.”
He returned to his chair, sat down, poured himself more chalap, and took a sip.
“Now,” he said, “to business.”
6
THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM
FISHER hadn’t known Peter’s true name or origin until he was twenty-one, when his mother and father had sat him down to tell him. Peter, his adopted brother, was in fact Pyotr Limonovich, the only son of a now-dead friend of Sam’s father. It wasn’t until Peter turned eighteen that their father, now retired from the U.S. Department of State, told them the whole story.
Peter was the son of a man named Ivan, a major in the former Soviet Union’s KGB, their equivalent to the United States’s CIA; and Fisher’s father, a career diplomat, was not a diplomat at all but a twenty-five-year veteran case officer in the CIA.
It had all happened when Fisher was barely old enough to remember his father being gone for an extended period. A specialist in agent handling and defection, his father had been dispatched to Moscow. This was 1968, the height of the Cold War, his father explained, the years of North Korea’s capture of the USS Pueblo, the Soviet army’s brutal crush of the Czechoslovakian revolt, and the space race—events that for young Sam were only vague headline memories.
A major named Ivan Limonovich had made contact with the CIA’s deputy chief of station and over the next few weeks made clear his intention to spy for the United States. The “bride price” as it was known in the tradecraft lexicon, would be that Ivan and his newly born son, Pyotr (Ivan’s wife had died in childbirth), would be smuggled out of Russia after two years. The CIA agreed, and Fisher’s father was dispatched to be Ivan’s primary controller. Over the next two years, Ivan fed the United States invaluable information, including information that led to the release of the Pueblo’s crew and details of the Soviet nuclear arsenal that later became essential to the signing of SALT I, the first series of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. As often happened in the world of espionage, Fisher’s father and Ivan became friends.
At the end of the agreed-upon two years, Fisher’s father made arrangements to smuggle Ivan and his son from the country, only to see the plans go awry at the last minute. In a running gun battle at the Finnish border, Ivan Limonovich was killed, and with Soviet border troops at his heels, Fisher’s father managed to slip across the border with young Pyotr.
Once home, the Fishers did the only thing that seemed right and adopted Pyotr as their own and raised him along with their son Sam. Pyotr, too young to have learned any Russian or gain an accent and too young to have anything but the fuzziest of memories of his father, quickly grew into a typical American boy.
THIRD ECHELON
Dr. Seltkins was as good as his word. Two days after arriving at the army’s Chemical Casualty Care Division, Peter died. Fisher, who had spent as much time as they would allow him at Peter’s bedside in the airlocked hospital room, had gone to the cafeteria to catch a quick breakfast when the crash code was called. He returned to find Seltkins emerging from the airlock and a trio of nurses at Peter’s bed removing the IVs and monitor leads from his now-lifeless body.
Still lacking a diagnosis, the army erred on the side of caution and flew Peter’s body to the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Oregon, where it was cremated in a closed incinerator, then stored in the bowels of the facility inside a specially designed lead/ceramic composite container.
FISHER swiped his ID badge through the reader outside Third Echelon’s situation room. There was a muted beep, and the reader’s LED turned green. Fisher pushed through the door.
Decorated in earth tones and lit by soft halogen track lighting, the situation room was dominated by a long, diamond-shaped teak conference table. The walls were lined by forty-two-inch, high-definition LCD status boards and monitors that could be calibrated to display a variety of information ranging from weather, local and foreign news broadcasts, radar feeds—virtually anything that could be digitized and transmitted. Four computer workstations, each with enough processing power to control the electrical grids of a small country, were built into each of the long sides of the table.
Fisher had called Third Echelon his professional home for more years than he could recall. A top secret offshoot of the National Security Agency, or NSA, Third Echelon and its small collection of lone Splinter Cell operatives was a bridge of sorts: a bridge between the world of intelligence gathering and covert operations.
Splinter Cell operatives were recruited from the special warfare communities of the navy, army, marine corps, and air force, and then remolded into the ultimate covert soldiers able to survive and thrive in the most hostile of environments. The informal credo for Third Echelon was “no footprints.” Third Echelon went wher
e no other government agency could go, did what no other agency could do, then disappeared, leaving behind nothing that could be tracked back to the United States.
Itself the most secretive of the government’s intelligence organizations, the National Security Agency was located a few miles outside Laurel, Maryland, on an army post named after the Civil War Union general, George Gordon Meade. Once home to both a boot camp and a World War II prisoner-of-war camp, Fort Meade has been the NSA’s home since the 1950s.
Charged with the gathering and exploitation of SIGINT, or signals intelligence, the NSA could and did intercept virtually every form of communication on the planet from cell phone signals to microwave emissions and ELF (extremely low frequency) burst transmissions from submarines thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean.
Lambert and Anna Grimsdottir were sitting together at one end of the conference table drinking coffee. Three of the monitors on the wall behind them were tuned to the muted broadcasts of MSNBC, CNN, and BBC World.
Fisher grabbed a mug from the nearby coffee kiosk, poured himself a cup, and sat down at the conference table.
“Morning,” said Lambert.
“That’s debatable,” Fisher said, taking a sip. The coffee was hot and almost bitter, with a touch of salt. Lambert must have made it.
“When did you get back?” Grimsdottir asked. As Peter had no other family than Fisher, and his remains would probably forever remain locked deep inside Umatilla, Fisher had, in lieu of a funeral or memorial, accompanied him on the flight to Oregon and stood by as the technicians slid his body into the incinerator.
“A couple hours ago,” Fisher replied.
“You didn’t have to come in,” Lambert said.
“Yeah, I did. Do we know anything? Anything from Seltkins?” Even as Fisher had boarded the plane for Oregon, the CCCD’s labs had yet to determine what had killed Peter.
Grimsdottir pulled a manila folder from the stack before her and slid it across the table to Fisher. She said nothing. Fisher stared at her eyes for a few seconds until she looked away. Very bad news, Fisher thought.
Grimsdottir’s official designation was computer/signals intel technician, but Fisher thought of her as more like a free safety. To operatives in the field she provided tech and information support and she was, at least for Fisher, that constant voice in his ear during missions that represented his lifeline back to Third Echelon and the real world. Fisher had yet to see a computer-related problem too tough for Grimsdottir to crack.
Fisher opened the folder and skimmed the CCCD’s report. Finally, he looked up and said, “What in God’s name is PuH-19?”
“Plutonium hydride-19,” Lambert answered. “It’s a negative hydrogen ion that attaches itself to Plutonium-239 that’s exposed to pure oxygen. Usually comes in the form of fine particulates—think of flour, but about a thousand times finer.”
“Almost a gas,” Grimsdottir added. “It’s also pyrophoric, which is a fancy way of saying it’s an autoigniter. Its flash point is below room temperature; it’s also reactive to water or even humid air. In fact, it’s so touchy, the only safe way to handle it is in a pure nitrogen or argon atmosphere.”
“Sounds lovely,” Fisher said. “Contagious?”
“Not once it’s inside the body,” Grimsdottir replied. “The hydride particles settle in the tissues and organs and begin . . . dissolving them. Sorry, Sam, there’s really no other word for it.”
“It’s okay. Where’s PuH-19 come from?”
“Plutonium-based weapons production.”
“Which is good news,” Lambert said. “It sharply narrows the list of where Peter picked it up.”
Where, maybe, but not how, Fisher thought. After ten years as a Justice Department investigator, Peter had resigned in protest during Gonzales-gate and gone into business for himself as a security consultant. While certain Peter had an inkling of what Fisher did for a living, they’d never discussed it, and neither did they discuss the specifics of Peter’s business. Fisher had long suspected the nature of their work was similar.
“What else?” Fisher said.
Grimsdottir said, “It’s about a hundred times deadlier than plutonium. A speck of PuH-19 the size of a head of a pencil is enough to kill a room full of people—which is why its production and storage has been banned by all countries of the world save two: Russia and the United States.”
Fisher closed the file and slowly slid it back across the table to Grimsdottir. He looked at Lambert and said, “We need to talk.”
Anna took the hint and excused herself. When the door clicked shut, Fisher said, “I’m going to need a leave of absence or—”
“Now, Sam, hold on a second—”
“Or, if you’d prefer, I’ll have my letter of resignation on your desk by—”
“Not necessary.”
“Colonel, I’m going to find whoever did this to Peter.”
“I know.”
“And break a lot of laws doing it.”
“I know that, too.”
“And when I find them, I’m going to kill each and every one of them.”
Lambert laid a hand on Fisher’s forearm. “Stop. Take a breath. I mean it, Sam, take a breath.”
Fisher took a breath.
“While you were in the air with Peter’s body, I was at Langley,” Lambert said. “We’ve got the green light from both the DCI and the NID.” The director of central intelligence at the CIA and the national intelligence director—the president’s intelligence czar. “The mission’s ours. Find where and how Peter was infected, track it back to its source, and find out if there’s more out there. A coffee cup full of PuH- 19 could kill every living thing in New York City. Believe me, we’ve got a free hand on this.”
“They know about my connection to Peter?”
“Yep. It took some doing, but I convinced them you could stay objective. Can you?”
“You have to ask?”
“Normally, no, but there’s nothing normal about this. We need live, talking bodies, Sam, understood?”
Fisher nodded. “Understood.”
“You step outside the rules of engagement, and I’ll take you off this mission faster than you can blink.”
“I hear you, Colonel.”
“Good. Mission briefing in twenty. Anna’s got a lead for you.” Lambert stood up and started for the door. He stopped and turned around. “Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry about Peter.”
7
LA FONTAINE PARK, MONTREAL, CANADA
FISHER refolded his copy of the Montreal Gazette to the Arts & Life page and shifted his eyes left, keeping his target in view. The man was a creature of habit, Fisher had found over the last two days. Same park, same bench, same sack lunch containing a baguette sandwich, an apple, and a pint bottle of milk. Keeping such a routine was a dangerous tendency for a private detective, but then again, Jerry Pults’s seeming laziness was Fisher’s gain.
The park was abuzz with Montrealers flocking to one of the city’s many green spaces. With the last patches of snow gone and the tulips in bloom, spring had fully arrived, and the locals were taking advantage of it.
At ninety acres and more than 125 years old, La Fontaine Park was not only one of the city’s largest green spaces but also one of its oldest. It reminded Fisher of New York’s Central Park, with enough hills, ponds, bike paths, playgrounds, tennis courts, and cafés that it had become one of Montreal’s default get-together spots. In the distance, over the tops of the trees, Fisher could see the row of Second Empire-style houses that lined Rue Sherbrooke.
Pults, a former RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) detective, though ten years past retirement age, looked a lean and fit fifty years old—save one feature: a stiff left leg that he supported with a cane. Even so, Fisher wasn’t about to underestimate the man. Grimsdottir had worked her cyber magic and hacked into the RCMP’s personnel bureau database. Pults had had a long and distinguished career and had spent the last t
hree years of it at the RCMP Academy in Regina, Saskatchewan, after a crackhead’s bullet had shattered his hip. He was thrice decorated for bravery, an expert marksman, and had for five years been the lead unarmed combat instructor at RCMP Toronto. On the personal side, Grimsdottir had found nothing damning; in fact, Pults and his wife, Mary, his high school sweetheart, had been married for thirty-seven years. Three children, a boy and two girls, all upstanding citizens without so much as a parking ticket.
Unless Pults was hiding some deep secret they’d yet to uncover, he looked as clean as they come. Even so, the man’s detective agency was either failing or going through a slump. Over the past two days, Fisher had seen Pults meet with no one, nor did he leave the office for anything but lunch in the park and to go home at night. Grim’s probe into the agency’s financials showed little activity, and Pults’s personal accounts were exactly what you’d expect from a retired cop.
The lead Grimsdottir had found for Fisher involved Peter’s last credit card purchase a week earlier at Brulerie St-Denis, a café off Chemin Rheaume. A discreet canvass of the café with Peter’s picture led to Jerry Pults, a regular customer.
The question was, what was Pults’s connection with Peter, and had it contributed to his death?
AFTER a five-minute head start, Fisher followed Pults back to his office, which was sandwiched between a Vietnamese restaurant and a Thai restaurant/Internet café in a four-story building on Rue St. Andre. Fisher popped into a gift shop across the street and browsed their selection of snow globes and watched Pults’s building until he saw Pults’s secretary, a mid-forties redhead wearing CD-sized gold hoop earrings, come out the front door and head down the street. Another creature of habit, Fisher had found. She and Pults staggered their lunch hours, same time every day.