by Tom Clancy
His headlamp flickered and went dark.
His fingertips touched the escape hatch, then his palms. He drew his knife and stabbed around the edge of the hatch, hacking away at the thin metal until it fell away and disappeared in the swirling water. He stuck both arms through the hatch, braced his elbows on the roof, and levered himself up and out. Water bubbled up behind him and began flowing over the elevator car’s roof.
He tested the cable: It was thick with grease and grit. Half-a-decade old or not, the lubricant made the cable unclimbable. He looked around for a maintenance ladder. There wasn’t one. Fisher knew what this meant: a ride up the shaft like a piece of flotsam. The trip took only a few minutes, but in the narrow confines of the shaft the water roiled and whooshed as air from the complex below sought escape through one of the few exits left.
When he drew level with the door, he found it closed, but ten seconds of levering with his knife opened a gap wide enough for him to squeeze both hands through; another twenty seconds and he was lying on the concrete floor of the hut. Water gushed after him and sloshed across the floor.
Bad to worse, Fisher thought. The hut was made of cinder block, the door of thick steel secured by a virtually indestructible lock. Fisher looked around. The inside was barren, just a floor, four walls, and a roof. Fisher caught himself. Not just walls—five-decade-old walls. He didn’t need to find an exit; he needed to let the water make him an exit.
As the water rose past his ankles and then his knees, he hobbled from wall to wall, using the tip of his knife to test the grout between the cinder blocks. It wasn’t until the water had reached his waist that he found the spot he wanted. He began chiseling at it, concentrating the knife’s point on a quarter-sized spot. He stopped, stuck his finger into the hole. Halfway there. He jammed the knife back into the hole and hammered at it with his fist until his skin split and blood ran down his forearm. He switched hands and kept pounding.
The tip punched through. He pressed his eye to the hole. He saw bright sun.
The water reached his shoulders.
He thrust the knife back into the hole and began levering the haft in a circle, grinding away at the grout. A thumb-sized chunk of cinder block popped free, then another, and another. And then, with a sucking sound, the water found the hole and surged through. The water lapped at his chin and into his mouth. He sputtered and kept chopping at the block. The fifty-year-old grout began disintegrating. Horizontal and vertical gaps appeared, revealing daylight. The water level dropped an inch, then bubbled up again.
Fisher clamped the knife between his teeth, shoved both hands into the hole, and, using them as leverage, rammed his knee into the wall. Then again, and again, until his leg was numb.
A whole cinder block broke free and tumbled out. Fisher adjusted his aim and drove his knee into the neighboring block until it shifted sideways and slid halfway out. He drew his knee back, set his jaw, and—
A three-by-three section of the wall gave way and Fisher tumbled out onto the snow-covered ground and lay still. Hansen found him ten minutes later. Not content to sit on his hands at the entrance vent and wait for something that might never come, he’d left Gillespie to stand watch and taken the other team members on a perimeter search. Their first stop had been the hut.
FISHER watched the car pull down the driveway and stop beside the flagstone path leading to the front door. Fisher got there before either of them could ring the bell. Having left Washington two weeks after returning from Russia, Fisher had seen neither Hansen nor Grimsdóttir for three months. He’d stayed around only long enough to recover from the surgery on his ankle and sit through three days of debriefing.
Fisher invited them in. “Mojito?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Grimsdóttir, and Hansen nodded.
“Head down to the deck. I’ll meet you there.”
Ten minutes later they were sitting beneath an umbrella overlooking the water. Hansen took a sip of his mojito and smiled. “It’s good.”
“They’ve grown on me,” Fisher said.
“So this is it,” Grimsdóttir asked, “the villa of the late, great Chucky Zee?”
Fisher nodded. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
Through her contacts at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Grimsdóttir had enlightened the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA, about Zahm’s nonliterary endeavors. From there Zahm’s now-defunct criminal empire unraveled. Surprisingly, most of the jewelry and art and gems Zahm and his Little Red Robbers had stolen had never been fenced. SOCA found the bulk of the loot in a storage unit outside Setúbal. At her encouragement, the British Home Office had given Fisher a free, one-year lease on Zahm’s villa.
“The least I could do,” Grimsdóttir said. “I see they took his yacht, though.”
Fisher smiled. “A few days after I got here some very polite gentlemen from the Home Office came and asked for the keys. It’s okay. I’ve had enough of water for a while. Besides, if I change my mind, I’ve still got the rowboats.”
“How’s the ankle?”
“Getting there. How’s Kovac?”
Two hours after his arrest for treason, Kovac had tried to hang himself in his cell but was saved by an alert guard. As it turned out, Ames’s insurance cache had been more than enough to break the deputy director.
“Pliable,” Grimsdóttir replied. “Officially, he retired after discovering he had colorectal cancer. Unofficially, he spends in his days in an FBI safe house answering questions and naming names.”
“Is it going to do any good?”
Hansen answered, “Eventually. Lambert was right. This goes very deep. The good news is, the Laboratory 738 Arsenal is sitting at the bottom of a sinkhole near Lake Baikal. It’s out of circulation. Permanently. Turns out Zahm leased the complex from one of the men I saw in Korfovka—Mikhail Bratus, former GRU. As for the other two, Yuan Zhao and Michael Murdoch, we’re working on it. The auction guests didn’t fare very well. Only six made it out of the complex, and all of them were scooped up by the FSB.”
“Ernsdorff?”
“About a week after Baikal he disappeared, and he took a few hundred million in investors’ money with him. Ten days ago they found in him a St. John hotel with his throat cut. Someone didn’t appreciate his accounting methods.”
“What about our old friend Ames?”
“No sign of him. If he’s dead, somewhere in the sinkhole, we’ll never know.”
“And if he’s alive?” Fisher finished. “He’s not the kind of guy to hide forever. You and the others watch your backs.”
“You, too.”
“How are they, by the way—Nathan, Maya, and Kimberly?”
“All good. They send their regards.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the ocean, before Grimsdóttir said, “Sam, if you want to come back, I can arrange it.”
Fisher shook his head.
“Is that a no?”
Fisher looked around the deck for a few moments, then turned his face into the sun and took a deep breath. “That’s an ‘ask me again when my lease is up.’ ”
Turn the page for a sneak peek at the other side of the story . . . Coming December 2009!
TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL ENDGAME
Follow Ben Hansen’s team in their desperate race to corner Sam Fisher.
PROLOGUE
KORFOVKA, RUSSIAN FEDERATION NEAR THE CHINESE BORDER EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO
THE first blow loosened one of Ben Hansen’s molars and sent his head wrenching to one side.
Captured . . . killed . . .
He never saw the second blow, only felt Rugar’s pointed knuckles drive into his left eye.
Captured . . . killed . . .
Hansen’s head whipped back, then lolled forward as warm blood spilled down his chin.
Now Rugar’s screams grew incomprehensible, like panes of glass shattering across the hangar’s concrete floor.
Make no mistake. If you’re captured, you will be killed.
Hansen tugged at the plastic flex-cuffs cutting into his wrists and binding him to the chair. He finally mustered the energy to face Rugar, who loomed there, a neckless, four-hundred-pound, vodka-soaked beast crowned by an old Red Army ushanka two sizes too small for his broad head. He was about fifty, twice Hansen’s age, and hardly agile, but at the moment that hardly mattered.
The fat man opened his mouth, exposing a jagged fence of yellowed teeth. He shouted again, and more glass shattered, accompanied by the rattling of two enormous steel doors that had been rolled shut against the wind.
Hansen shivered. It was below freezing now, and their breaths hung heavy in the air. At least the dizziness from the anesthetic was beginning to wear off. He tried to blink, but his left eye did not respond; it was swelling shut.
And then—a flash from Rugar’s hand.
Captured . . . killed . . .
The fat man had confiscated Hansen’s knife.
BUT this wasn’t just any knife—it was a Fairbairn Sykes World War II-era commando dagger that had once belonged to the elusive Sam Fisher, a Splinter Cell few people knew but whose exploits were legendary among them.
Rugar leaned over and held the blade before Hansen’s face. He spoke more slowly, and the words, though still Russian, finally made sense: “We know why you’ve come. Now, if you tell me what I need to know, you will live.”
Hansen took a deep breath. “You won’t break me.”
For a moment Rugar just stood there, his cheeks swelling like melons as he labored for his next breath. Suddenly he smiled, his rank breath coming hard in Hansen’s face. “It’s going to be a long night for both of us.”
Rugar’s left ear was pierced, and the gold hoop hanging there caught the overhead lights at such an angle that for a moment all Hansen noticed were those flashes of gold. He realized only after the blood spattered onto his face that Rugar had been shot in the head, the round coming from a suppressed weapon somewhere behind them.
All four hundred pounds of the fat man collapsed onto Hansen, snapping off the chair’s back legs as the knife went skittering across the floor. Hansen now bore the Russian’s full weight across his chest, and he wasn’t sure which would kill him first: suffocation or the sickly sweet stench emanating from Rugar’s armpits.
With a groan, he shoved himself against the fat man’s body and began worming his way out, gasping, grimacing, and a heartbeat away from retching.
He rolled onto his side and squinted across the hangar, toward the pair of helicopters and the shadows along the perimeter wall and mechanics’ stations.
And then he appeared, Sergei Luchenko, Hansen’s runner. The gaunt-faced man was still wearing his long coat and gripping his pistol with a large suppressor. An unlit cigarette dangled from his thin lips.
Hansen sighed deeply. “What happened? Why didn’t you answer my calls?” He groaned over the question. “Strike that. I’m just glad you’re here.”
Sergei walked up to Hansen, withdrew a lighter from his breast pocket, and lit his cigarette.
“How about some help?” Hansen struggled against the flex-cuffs.
“I’m sorry, my friend. They sent me to kill you.”
“Bad joke.”
“It’s no joke.”
Hansen stiffened. “Not you, Sergei.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
Hansen closed his good eye, then spoke through his teeth. “Then why did you save me?”
“I didn’t. The kill must be mine. And . . . I didn’t want you to suffer.”
“This is not who you are.”
“I’m sorry.” Sergei withdrew a compact digital video camera from his pocket and hit the RECORD button. He held it close to Hansen. “You see, he is alive. And now . . .” Sergei raised his pistol.
Hansen cursed at the man.
There would be no life story flashing before Hansen’s eyes; no images of his youth growing up in Fort Stock-ton, Texas; no scenes from his days at MIT, which he had attended on a full scholarship; no moments from that bar with the director, Anna “Grim” Grimsdóttir, who had recruited him out of the CIA to join Third Echelon and become one of the world’s most effective field operatives—a Splinter Cell. No, there would be nothing as dramatic or cinematic as that—just a hot piece of lead piercing his forehead, fracturing his skull, and burying itself deep in his brain before he had a chance to think about it.
The gun thumped. Hansen flinched.
And then . . . Sergei collapsed sideways onto the concrete, a gaping hole now revealed in the back of his head.
Hansen swore again, this time in relief. He squinted into the shadows at the far end of the hangar. “Uh, thank you?”
No reply.
He raised his voice. “Who are you?”
Again, just the wind . . .
He lay there a few seconds more, just breathing, waiting for his savior to show himself.
One last time. “Who are you?”
Hansen’s voice trailed off into the howling wind and creaking hangar doors. He lay there for another two minutes.
No one came.
Tensing, he wriggled on his side, drawing closer to his knife, which was lying just a meter away. He reached the blade, turned it over in his hand, and began to slowly, painfully, saw into the flex-cuffs.
When he was free, he stood and collected himself, his face still swelling, the hangar dipping as though floating on rough seas. And then, blinking his good eye to clarity, he lifted his gaze to the rafters, the crossbeams, the pipes, and still . . . nothing. He turned back to the bodies and shook his head in pity at Sergei. Then he glowered at the fat man, who even in death would get the last laugh, since disposing of his body would be like manhandling a dead Russian circus bear.
There was still a lot of work to do, but all the while Hansen couldn’t help but feel the heat of someone’s gaze on his shoulders.
He shouted again, “Who are you?”
Only his echo answered.
1
HOLMES OFFICE COMPLEX HOUSTON, TEXAS PRESENT DAY
MAYA Valentina saw it in the man’s gaze, which flicked down from her low-cut blouse to her well tanned legs to her feet jammed into a pair of stilettos. She tossed back her hair, which fell in golden waves across her shoulders, then put an index finger to her lips, as though to nervously bite her nail. Oh, yes, he liked the shy schoolgirl routine, and Valentina could pass for a freshman, too, though she was nearly twenty-eight.
“Hi, there. You must be Ms. Haspel,” he said, drawing in his sagging gut and probably wishing his thinning hair were two shades darker.
She reached across the desk and accepted his hairy paw. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Leonard, and thanks for the interview.”
“Well, as I said, we only have one position to fill, so the competition is fierce. Please have a seat.”
She settled down and leaned toward his desk, keeping her blue eyes locked on his. “Can I ask a question before we start?”
“By all means.”
“Does the company have a sexual-harassment policy?”
His lip twitched. “Of course.”
“Well, I’ve had some problems in the past.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, the one guy was married and claimed I was a stalker, which was totally not the case. The other guy kept saying I was making lewd remarks, and he even said I flashed my panties, and there’s no way I did that.”
He hesitated. “Are you serious?”
“Yes. I like to get dressed up for work. It doesn’t mean I want to have sex with everyone I see.”
He cleared his throat. “Of course not. But you should know that we have a dress code. Business casual.”
Valentina nodded and gazed salaciously at him. “Is what I’m wearing okay?”
He swallowed before answering.
HANSEN was sitting in an SUV parked outside the four-story office building. The complex was comprised of ten equally nondescript buildings that were headquarters for
a lengthy list of companies that were, according to an intel report, “assembling stacked layers of silver and nonconducting magnesium fluoride and cutting out nanoscale-sized fishnet patterns to form metamaterials.”
Grim had explained that metamaterials held the key to developing cloaking devices to render objects invisible to humans. Leonard’s company in particular was developing paint for military vehicles and fabric for military uniforms. This was all quite serious business, which was why Hansen could only shake his head as he listened to Maya and Leonard. What the hell was she doing? All she had to do was get hired.
Admittedly, she’d hated the tired old plan of playing dress up to ensure Leonard took the bait, so overplaying the role was her way of protesting. She wouldn’t just be the attractive new hire; she was now the quirky sex addict who’d called way too much attention to herself. Hansen was a breath away from reporting her misconduct to Grim, but then he thought better of it and just sat there as Maya told Leonard she was always available for overtime and “after-hours” work. Hansen grimaced.
AT 10:05 A.M. Nathan Noboru parked his utility van at the curb outside William Leonard’s seven-thousand-square-foot home. Sprawling front lawns, well-manicured grounds, and tree-lined brick-paved driveways unfurled to a grand entrance shadowed by twenty-foot columns painted in a glossy antique white. This part of southwest Houston was called Sugar Land, and it was sweet indeed: Multimillion-dollar homes were nestled among well-tended golf course greens and tranquil lakes. The senior citizen manning the neighborhood guardhouse had taken a perfunctory glance at Noboru’s forged work orders and immediately waved him through.