by Tom Clancy
He started swimming.
THE current, combined with his paddling, doubled his submerged speed. With his vision narrowed to what the cone of light from his headlamp illuminated, he had the sensation one got on an airport’s moving walkway. With no fixed references to latch on to, his brain was telling him he was swimming at a normal pace, but his body knew otherwise. Counting seconds in his head, Fisher swam hard for a minute, then turned left on the diagonal, aiming for the Rhine’s western shore. After another two minutes he felt the current suddenly slacken, and he knew he was clear of the main channel. He felt something soft slide over his chest and belly, and it took him a moment to realize it was mud. The bottom was rising. Twenty feet, he estimated. He was perhaps thirty feet from the bank. He had no fixed plan, but knew he needed to surface close to land, close to cover, lest he be spotted by rescue boats or an onlooker.
The current changed again and he felt his body spiraling left into some kind of vortex. His kicking feet touched mud, and then the water was calm again. He angled upward. The light increased. The surface came into view. Using his hands like flippers, he backpedaled in the water, slowing down until he was hovering a few feet below the surface. Directly ahead he could see trees: fuzzy broccoli shapes silhouetted against the sky. There was a gap between them. An inlet. He turned over, dove to the bottom, and swam on, using only his feet, arms spread wide, until he felt his fingers trailing over soil walls. The inlet continued to narrow and bottom out until his chest was scraping the bottom. He rolled onto his back and used his heels to wriggle forward until his head broke the surface. He blinked his eyes clear and found himself staring at tree branches, so close he could have reached out and touched them. He was right: an inlet. Shaped like an elongated V, it was at least two hundred feet deep. At its midpoint was a wooden footbridge. Someone was standing on it. No, two people. A man and a woman with their backs to him—watching the show in the main channel, he assumed. Moving with exaggerated slowness, Fisher reached up and removed the OmegaO’s mask.
It was ten long minutes before the couple moved on, crossing to the southern bank of the inlet and disappearing from view. Fisher rolled back onto his belly and began crawling.
At what he assumed was the end of the inlet, he instead found a choke point of dead branches and fallen logs draped by low-hanging boughs. On the other side of the natural dam he found a knee-deep creek enclosed in a tunnel of yet more undergrowth and trees. He followed the creek for a half mile, pushing deeper inland, occasionally glimpsing houses and cul-de-sacs through the trees until finally, after forty minutes of plodding through the water, he saw a raised concrete bridge ahead. He heard the rush of traffic, heavy enough that he realized he was near a major road.
He moved to the bank and found a comfortable place to sit down. He shrugged off his backpack, rummaged around until he found the Aloksak containing his iPhone; he pulled it out and powered it up. After tapping into a nearby wireless network, he called up the map feature and pinpointed his location. He was on the northern outskirts of Weißenthurm, the town across the Raiffeisen Bridge from Neuwied. The bridge ahead of him was part of the L121—Koblenzer Strasse. As the crow flies, he was less than a mile from where he’d gone off the Raiffeisen but almost twice that in the water and on foot.
He checked his watch. It was almost four o’clock. Three hours until nightfall.
17
MADRID, SPAIN
HAVING been out of contact longer than he’d anticipated, Fisher, upon landing at the Madrid Barajas International Airport, took a taxi downtown to the first touristy landmark that came to mind, the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales on Plaza de las Descalzas. The forty-minute drive gave him time to do some passive dry-cleaning. The driver, whom Fisher felt certain had been rejected by a Spanish demolition-derby show, made countersurveillance an easy task as he weaved in and out of traffic, ignored the speed limits, and showed a love for impromptu turns and narrow, one-way streets. By the time they reached Plaza de las Descalzas, Fisher was beyond certain he’d picked up no tails.
The previous night, after sitting on the bank of the inlet for five hours, he had waded out beneath the Koblenzer Strasse bridge, then walked north through farmers’ fields and down riverside hiking trails to Andernach, two miles north of Weißenthurm. By the time he found an appropriately anonymous hotel, the Martinsberg, his clothes were dry and he was presentable enough to arouse no suspicions from the night clerk. Once in the room, he first called the Frankfurt Airport’s Iberia desk and booked a late-morning flight to Madrid; his second call was to a local limousine company to arrange for a pickup. Both of these reservations he made using yet another pair of Emmanuel’s clean passports and credit cards. Unless he was recognized between Andernach and the airport, he would be leaving behind an ice-cold trail.
After a hot shower and a late room-service supper, Fisher spent ten minutes probing his rib cage until satisfied nothing was broken, then took four 200 mg tablets of ibuprofen and went to sleep. He awoke the next morning at eight, found a local address for a DHL office, and took a taxi there, returning thirty minutes later with a box and packing materials. He packed up his non-airport-friendly gear and weapons, sealed the box, and addressed it to the DHL office in Madrid and left it at the hotel’s front desk for pickup.
Now, just before noon Madrid time, he found himself standing before the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales. He paid the driver, waited for the car to squeal around the corner and out of sight, then walked four blocks southeast to an Internet café on Calle de la Montera.
Fisher got signed in, left his passport at the counter as requested, then found an open computer cubicle and sat down. There was a draft message in his Lycos mailbox. It read simply:21 Calle de la Concepción Jerónima
Apartment 3B
Key, baseboard
This would be another safe house. Fisher memorized the address, deleted the message, and was out the door and in a taxi two minutes later. It wasn’t until the car pulled onto the narrow street that Fisher realized the apartment faced the building housing Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. Nice touch, he thought as he got out.
As advertised, beside the door to apartment 3B Fisher found a loose baseboard, and behind it a key that opened the apartment door. Inside there was nothing. Where the German safe house had all the charm of a hotel chain, this studio apartment was completely empty, save for a familiar-looking keypad lock on the bedroom door. He punched in the correct code and pushed through. Inside was, of all things, a red beanbag chair sitting before an LCD television. On the floor next to the chair was a speakerphone. Fisher typed in his pound/asterisk code, and sixty seconds later Grimsdóttir appeared on the monitor.
“You’re alive,” she said simply.
“So it appears. They were tipped off, Grim.”
“What?”
“You heard me. If Hans Hoffman hadn’t grown a conscience, they would’ve been on me when I walked out of the winery.”
“Explain.” Fisher did so, and Grim said, “So Hoffman gets a thirdhand call that trickled down from the top, which means the original call had to come from someone with horsepower.”
“I got the impression it came from outside the BND. One of those ‘step aside and let nature take its course’ orders.”
“Kovac?”
“That was my first thought. What better way to undermine you than to arrange my capture? He makes some calls to ally agencies, cashes in a few favors, gets lucky. . . .”
“No proof, though,” Grim replied. “No one in the Bundesnachrichtendienst or the German government would cross Kovac.”
“Agreed.” Fisher moved on. “What do Hansen and his team think?”
“About your stunt? They’re skeptical, but the rescue workers haven’t even found the car yet, let alone a body. Truth is, I think they’re all in shock. They all think you did it on purpose; most of them think you thought you’d survive and were wrong.”
Fisher nodded. This was one of the outcomes for w
hich he’d hoped. The other involved the Neuwied police. He asked Grim about it.
“The second Mercedes—with Valentina, Ames, and Noboru—managed to take off before the cops arrived on the bridge. Hansen and Gillespie talked their way out of it. They told the police they saw a dangerous driver and were trying to keep it in sight until the police arrived. Apparently, aside from your BMW, the Hammerstein cops couldn’t identify any of the cars involved in the chase.” Grim asked, “How’d you do it?”
Fisher recounted the incident, from his car’s impact with the water to his arrival in Madrid.
“Why the limousine?”
“The opposite of anonymity is—”
“Ostentatiousness,” Grim finished. “Hiding in plain sight.”
“Something like that. Were they even covering the airports?”
“No, they drove straight back to Cologne Bonn Airport. I pulled them back to Luxembourg and put them in a holding pattern. I assume you’re in Madrid to visit the local ear collector?”
“You assume correctly,” Fisher replied.
Karlheinz van der Putten, a.k.a. Spock, lived in Chinchón, twenty-five miles to the south. Ostensibly, Ames, using Noboru’s contacts in the mercenary world, had produced the lead that had led the team to Vianden. Fisher wanted to know if, in fact, van der Putten was the source of the information. As Grim had said during their previous teleconference, the scenario was plausible, but something about it wasn’t sitting right in Fisher’s belly. What he couldn’t quite figure out was whether the suspicion was born of instinct or of his dislike for Ames.
“How long is van der Putten going to take?” Grim asked.
“If he’s home, I’ll have my answer before morning.”
“Good, because your next stop is right next door—Portugal.”
Third Echelon’s mainframe was still chewing on the bulk of the data Fisher stole from Ernsdorff’s server, but, Grimsdóttir told him, an interesting lead had bubbled to the surface: the name Charles Zahm—a person also known as Chucky Zee. Fisher had plodded through one of Zahm’s novels, Myanmar Nightmare—250 pages of an In Like Flint-style secret agent karate-chopping his way through hordes of turtleneck-wearing villains and sleeping his way through gaggles of impossibly buxom women in beehive hairdos. At last count, Zahm’s series had grown to thirteen books and publishing contracts worth millions, all predicated upon the fact that Charles Zahm had, until seven years earlier, been a member of the Special Air Service, or SAS, Britain’s elite counterterrorism force.
According to Ernsdorff’s private investigating team—most of the members of which were culled from Britain’s Security Service, also known as MI5—Zahm hadn’t restricted his postretirement exploits to paper but had also gone into crime. Along with five of his former SAS mates, Zahm was the leader of what London’s tabloids had dubbed the Little Red Robbers, based on the Mao Tse-tung masks they’d worn during their robberies of two armored cars, four jewelry stores, and four banks. Whether Zahm had ever read or even heard of Chairman Mao’s famous Communist treatise, known in the West as The Little Red Book, was a hotly debated topic in the country’s gossip rags. What wasn’t in doubt, however, was the Little Red Robbers’ willingness to use violence. In all, six innocent bystanders had been beaten nearly to death during the robberies as preemptive warnings to would-be heroes, the police suspected. One woman lost her unborn child in the process.
“I don’t buy it,” Grimsdóttir told Fisher.
“I disagree,” Fisher replied. “The SAS doesn’t induct idiots. Maybe Zahm is just that smart. Write a bunch of critically panned novels that make millions and hide in plain sight as a dim-witted former soldier.”
“While pulling off some of the biggest heists in Britain’s history,” Grim finished.
“He’s got the training. With his money and contacts, it wouldn’t have taken much to learn the ropes. There are plenty of retired thieves who’d gladly pass on their knowledge for a price. How solid does Ernsdorff’s info look?”
“Very. Names, dates, accounts, sexual predilections . . . In fact, it looks like a blackmail file. But for what purpose?”
“Can’t be money,” Fisher replied. “Ernsdorff has more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes. My guess: He’s leveraging Zahm—using his Little Red Robbers for a job or jobs.”
“That seems out of character given what we know about Ernsdorff. He’s been exclusively a background player”
“We know he plays middleman for bad guys and their money. And we know he’s playing bank for this auction. From that, it’s not that big a leap to other kinds of services.”
18
CHINCHÓN, SPAIN
ONE of the benefits of hunting people who live on the fringes of society is that they also tend to gravitate toward the fringes of communities. When you kill and steal and blackmail for a living, and have even a modicum of karmic awareness, you tend to worry about your deeds someday coming back to haunt you. Aside from the very rich, who could afford to live apart from the world and surrounded by security, or the very careful, who left no footprints that would lead enemies to their door, the bad guys who survive the longest are the ones who ignore that reclusive impulse and choose, instead, to dwell in plain sight, disguised as average citizens.
Luckily for Fisher, Karlheinz van der Putten, a.k.a. Spock, was neither wealthy nor karmically self-aware. Upon retiring from active mercenary life and setting himself up as an information clearinghouse, van der Putten moved to Chinchón, a town of five thousand whose two claims to fame were its central square, which served as a temporary bullring, and the church of Nuestra Señora de la Ascunción, where Francisco Goya’s Assumption of the Virgin was housed.
After signing off with Grimsdóttir and picking up a rental car, Fisher made two stops: one to replenish his basic traveling supplies, including an economy-sized bottle of ibuprofen for his bruised ribs, and the second to pick up the DHL box containing his weapons and gear. He was heading south out of the city by three and arrived in Chinchón an hour later, in the middle of siesta, the traditional Spanish period of late-afternoon rest and rejuvenation. He wore Bermuda shorts, sandals, and an “I ♥ Madrid” T shirt.
Chinchón was perched on the eastern slopes of Spain’s Sistema Ibérico mountain range, so the narrow cobble and brick streets rose and fell and branched at unexpected angles. The architecture was what one would expect from a village born during the Middle Ages: buildings of heavy, dark chiseled beams stacked closely together, faded stucco walls of yellow ocher and pale mocha, half-hidden courtyards, balconies fronted by ornate black iron railings, and a sea of undulating roofs covered in U-shaped terra-cotta tiles.
Fisher found a parking spot behind a tavern a few blocks from the Plaza Mayor and got out to stretch his legs. The streets were eerily quiet and deserted, save for the handful of people Fisher could see sitting on front porches and swinging in hammocks. A lone dog—a mix between a beagle and a husky, Fisher guessed—padded across the street and into a shaded alley. He stopped to give Fisher a glance over his shoulder, then trotted off into the shadows.
Fisher wandered for a few minutes, enjoying the quiet, then made his way toward what he hoped was the Plaza Mayor. It wasn’t hard; all the roads and alleys and paths seemed to converge on the town’s center. The bullring was up, Fisher saw: a six-foot-tall bloodred-and-yellow-striped fence enclosing a dirt clearing about 120 feet across. Surrounding the ring, like bleachers, were three-story galleried houses fronted by dark green railings. The sun reflected off the taupe-colored dirt, causing Fisher to squint. He caught a whiff of manure on the breeze.
A hand-painted sign on a nearby fence post announced that the bullfight would take place the next morning. With luck, he’d be gone by then. Not only did he have no love for the sport, but he needed to get on with the business of paying Charles “Chucky Zee” Zahm a visit and finding out precisely what he and his Little Red Robbers had been doing for Yannick Ernsdorff.
FISHER returned to his car and meandered throug
h town to the southwestern outskirts and followed the signs for Castillo de Chinchón until he pulled onto the tree lined dirt road that led him to a small gravel parking lot. As castles went, Chinchón’s was probably underwhelming for the unseasoned traveler; Fisher had seen enough of these to know that was more the rule than the exception. Built on a square and anchored on each corner by a turret barely taller than the crumbling stone walls, the castillo was not quite two hundred square feet; it was, however, built on a slope overlooking the entire town, which, during its prime, likely compensated for its size.
There were only two cars in the lot and both looked local.
FISHER parked, got out, and walked across the bridge through the portcullis, pausing to grab a brochure from the wall-mounted box. Once inside he walked across the courtyard to the northern wall and followed the steps up the battlement. He was alone; if the two cars in the lot belonged to attendants, they were probably on siesta somewhere.
He pulled his binoculars from his rucksack and panned down the green fields between the castle and the town, picking out landmarks until he found what he was looking for. Karlheinz van der Putten’s home, a two-story red-roofed villa surrounded by a low outer wall built under the shadows of mature olive trees, sat by itself on a dead-end road. Judging by the built-in swimming pool, lined with blue and white arabesque tiles, and the travertine flagstone deck, van der Putten had done well since going into business for himself. A balcony fronted by hand-chiseled cedar rails overlooked the pool deck; spanning the balcony’s width were sliding-glass doors through which Fisher could see a master suite. A matching set of sliding doors on the ground floor led to what looked like a living room, a breakfast nook, and a kitchen.
Fisher scanned the patio until he saw a lone man sprawled on a chaise lounge beneath a potted lemon tree. The angle made positive identification difficult, but the face seemed to match that of van der Putten. Fisher smiled. It seemed the man had spent a good portion of his profits on groceries. Van der Putten was pushing the scales at nearly three hundred pounds. His height, five feet six, combined with his choice of swimwear, a pair of red Speedo trunks, did nothing for him. The image of a sausage ringed by a too-tight rubber band came to mind. Still, Fisher could tell there was a layer of muscle beneath the layer of fat. He’d take care not to underestimate the portly mercenary’s experience and familiarity with violence—in fact, the story behind his nickname, Spock, told Fisher that van der Putten was not only familiar with violence but that he enjoyed it.