by Tom Clancy
Luckily for Fisher, he had to cover only twelve vertical feet, which he did in forty seconds, pulling himself level with the walkway’s roof. He reached out with his left hand, hooked his fingertips in the eaves trough, then froze.
Beyond the hedge he could hear footsteps echoing on the sidewalk and coming this way. Over the top of the hedge he saw the peaked cap of his smoking soldier glide past the apartment’s walkway gate, then continue down the sidewalk, where he eventually disappeared into the darkness.
Fisher shifted some weight to his left, testing the eaves trough. It groaned softly, sagged slightly, but held. He pushed off with his right foot, swung it upward, hooked his heel on the trough, then boosted his body onto the roof. He spread himself flat and went still and stayed that way for a few minutes until certain he’d attracted no attention.
He was now within arm’s reach of the building’s first-floor hallway, which in a curious break with the communist gray architecture that seemed to dominate most of Pyongyang’s older neighborhoods, circumnavigated the building. Bordered on the exterior side by a waist-high railing and arched openings, and on the interior side by apartment doors, the style was more Mediterranean than Soviet-industrial. Beside each apartment door was a wall sconce, a lengthwise-cut cylinder of brushed stainless steel that cast light on the ceiling. Whatever else Pak had done for the RDEI, he must have succeeded; in North Korea, apartments of this quality were reserved for political stars. This was luxury, North Korean style.
Fisher was about to reach for the railing when he stopped. Cameras. He pulled back and spread himself flat again. Almost slipped up, Sam. In his earlier surveillance of Pak’s building, he’d seen a doorman sitting behind a desk in the lobby. Judging from the flickering glow Fisher had seen reflected in the doorman’s glasses, he’d been watching a small, unseen television. But what kind? Regular, close-circuit security, or both?
He pulled his DARPA-enhanced iPhone from his pocket and scrolled through to his Images folder, typed in the password, and called up the blueprint of Pak’s building. It was incomplete and partially speculative, cobbled together by Grimsdottir using a collage of sources: satellite imagery, tourist photos, electrical grid maps, similar buildings in other parts of the country . . . She’d used it all to give Fisher at least a sketch of what he’d be facing.
Looking at it now, his best guess put the elevator directly behind the wall at his back. He looked up. The wall, ten feet wide—typical of an elevator shaft—extended all the way to the roof. If there were cameras in the building, the first place he would likely find them would be on each floor, facing the elevators.
After waiting for his smoking soldier to pass by once again, Fisher rose into a crouch, then reached up, grabbed the railing, chinned himself up, scanned the hall for cameras and, seeing none, rolled over onto the floor, where he pressed himself flat against the elevator shaft’s wall and sidestepped up to the corner.
He heard the whirring of the camera before he saw the camera itself. He stopped short, went still.
Long before his days with Third Echelon, Fisher had dealt with more than his fair share of surveillance cameras using only his ears and his good timing. Faint though they were, camera motors had a distinct aural signature, especially at their range stops, the point at which a rotating camera reaches its panning limit to the left or right. It is at this point, as the motor pauses then reverses the camera’s direction, that a well-tuned ear can detect the barely perceptible strain on the motor. And it was this sound Fisher was listening for as he stood motionless, back pressed against the wall, eyes closed . . .
There . . . there . . . there . . . there. Twelve seconds from range stop to range stop. Which stop was which—facing left or facing right—didn’t matter. With no other cameras in the hall, this one would be calibrated to full rotation so it could see down the length of each hall. It was at this point when the camera’s blind spot was most accessible. Stand directly beneath the camera’s mount, and you’re as good as invisible.
Fisher waited, listening and counting, then stepped out from the wall and centered himself under the mount. Above him, the camera, which had been panning right, reversed course and started coming around. Fisher looked left and counted doors. Pak’s apartment number was 9, the third door down. The trick would be reaching that door and getting inside in the time it took the camera to complete a full pan.
Suddenly, Fisher’s decision was made for him.
Pak’s door opened, and Pak himself stepped out.
38
PAK, juggling a bag of garbage in each hand, leaned back into his apartment, trying to get the door closed.
Fisher glanced up. The camera was pointed directly at Pak. It paused, then started panning in the other direction. Fisher counted One one thousand, two one thousand, then pushed off the wall and sprinted, hunched over, straight at Pak. He covered the distance in less than three seconds, but at the last moment, either sensing Fisher’s presence or hearing his approach, Pak spun to face him.
Fisher’s earlier hunch about the man’s physical condition and training was dead-on. In the blink of an eye, Pak, still holding the garbage bags, lashed out with a front heel kick. It was perfectly aimed and delivered, a strike that could easily snap a neck or crush a skull. But Fisher, having registered Pak’s slight shifting of weight to his back leg, was ready for the kick. Still moving at a sprint, he dropped his shoulder, somersaulted beneath the leg, caught the raised heel with his right hand, then rose up and caught Pak squarely in the chin with a short jab. Pak stumbled backward into the apartment, stunned. Fisher didn’t give him a chance to react but kept driving forward, raising Pak’s leg until he toppled over sideways, sliding back-first down the wall and landing with an “Umph” on the floor. Fisher twisted Pak’s foot, flipping him onto his stomach, then dropped to one knee, grabbed a handful of his hair, and slammed his head against the floor once, twice, three times. Pak went limp.
Fisher grabbed him by the foot again and spun his limp body around and dragged him farther into the apartment, then shut the door. He pulled a pair of plastic flexicuffs from their hiding place in his jacket’s lining and bound Pak’s wrists and ankles, dragged him into the living room, laid him face-first on the floor, then picked up a nearby coffee table and placed it over his body. He found a narrow-based vase and placed it on top of the table. The rudimentary early warning system would give Fisher a few seconds’ notice should Pak regain consciousness and get frisky. Knowing now how dangerous the North Korean was, Fisher wasn’t going to give him even the slightest advantage.
He did a quick search of Pak’s studio apartment and found no one else home. In the bedroom, however, he did find a portrait of Pak sitting with a woman and two young girls. Many North Korean political up-and-comers were given two residences: a working apartment in Pyongyang for use during the week and a private rural home for weekends. This, Fisher suspected, was where Pak’s family was. Also in the bedroom he found a wireless-capable laptop and, in Pak’s nightstand, a Type 69 7.62mm pistol in a leather holster along with two fully loaded magazines. He pocketed the pistol and the magazine and turned his attention to Pak’s closet. He found what he was looking for almost immediately: the thigh-length black leather coat Pak had been wearing at the Site 17 platform. In the coat’s left pocket he found Stewart’s thumbnail beacon. He stared at it a moment. Thanks, Calvin. He stuck it in his pocket, grabbed the laptop, and returned to the living room.
He pulled the iPhone from his pocket, called up the iPod feature, scrolled to the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and punched a code into the keypad. The screen changed to an amber-on-black compasslike display with the words ENGAGED > SEEKING SIGNAL flashing near the bottom edge of the screen. Fisher spent the next ten minutes sweeping the apartment for audio and video devices. He found none, so he went into the kitchen, found an English-version of Diet Coke, then returned to the living room and sat down in a wing-back club chair a few feet from Pak’s head. He stuck a magazine into the pistol, chambered a
round, and waited.
FISHER was almost finished with his Diet Coke when Pak began stirring. He groaned, and his eyelids blinked open, then closed again as he tried to focus. He tried to raise his hands to his face; his knuckles rapped the underside of the coffee table with a dull thud, and the vase teetered, then went still.
“Just lie still,” Fisher said. “It’ll be easier for both of us.”
Pak went still. He rotated his eyes and craned his neck until he could see Fisher. Instead of the typical “Who are you” and “What do you want,” Pak said simply, “You’re an American.” His English was only slightly accented; Fisher noted his use of the contraction. Pak had had extensive language training, which was to be expected from an RDEI agent.
“I am,” Fisher said.
“Don’t you know where you are? You’ll never get out of the city alive. You probably won’t get off this block alive.”
“We,” Fisher replied.
“What?”
“We’ll never get out of the city alive.” He held up Pak’s pistol. “I guarantee you, if that time comes, you’ll go before me.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Western imperialist technology at its best.”
“Why have you come here?”
“Complicated question.” Too complicated, Fisher thought. If not for Omurbai and Manas, Pak would have gotten a bullet a long time ago. But that wasn’t the situation, was it? He needed Pak alive. “I want you to tell me where Carmen Hayes is, and I want you to tell me everything you know about Manas: Where it is, where Omurbai plans to use it, and how to neutralize it.”
Pak offered him a condescending grin. “I’m not going to help you.”
“I thought you’d say that,” Fisher said. “And I’m sure I’d have a hard time changing your mind. Am I right?”
Pak nodded.
Fisher gestured to Pak’s laptop, which sat, powered up, on a side table. An SD/USB card reader jutted from one of the laptop’s side ports. “You’ve got some pretty good encryption on there. Unfortunately, it’s not good enough. Right now, I’m loading a virus onto your hard drive. I won’t pretend to know how it does what it does, but here’s what I do know: Two hours from now, and every two hours after that, if a specially coded e-mail doesn’t land in your in-box, the virus goes active.”
“That’s your plan?” Pak said, smiling smugly. “You’re going to ruin my laptop?”
“No, I’m going to ruin your life. You see, you trusted your encryption a little too much—put too much dicey information on your hard drive. What that virus will do is plant digital tracks in every corner of your life—your e-mail accounts, your finances, your travel logs—and the story it will tell is that of a traitor, a trusted RDEI agent who volunteered to spy for the United States and has been feeding the CIA information for the past three years. You might not be afraid of what I can do to you, but I know you’re afraid of what your bosses at the SSD do with traitors. I’ve seen video of their interrogation methods. It’s not pretty. But, of course I’m sure you know that.”
“I don’t believe you,” Pak said. “They won’t believe it.”
“Bad gamble,” said Fisher.
And it was. This was no bluff. The CIA’s biggest contribution to Fisher’s mission was one of its most prized agents, an executive secretary in the comptroller’s office at the State Security Department. While none of the information she’d passed to Langley had been of strategic value, it had given the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate an invaluable glimpse into the administrative side of North Korea’s security services, allowing it to build from the inside out profiles of more than a dozen RDEI agents: where they went, how they traveled, and through which banks and front companies money was moved. It had been a jigsaw puzzle of daunting complexity, but it had paid off. Fisher’s threat to Pak was a case in point.
What Fisher did not tell Pak was that while he was unconscious another program on another SD card had plucked from the laptop’s hard drive every piece of data within a certain range of file extensions, the passwords and log-ins to a half dozen SSD intranet portals, including Pak’s office e-mail account. Once the program had completed its search, Fisher had loaded the contents onto his iPhone for encrypted burst transmission back to Third Echelon, where Grimsdottir and Redding, working at tandem workstations, were sorting through the data.
“That’s not possible,” Pak said. “You’ll miss something.”
Fisher smiled. “I doubt it. I happen to work with a woman who’s frighteningly good at what she does, and right now you’re her only project. Did I mention she was kind enough to open a private account at Syndikus Treuhandanstalt bank in Liechtenstein? You’ve got a small fortune in there. You’ll never see it, of course, but your bosses will.”
Pak’s eyes shifted, and Fisher saw for the first time a hint of fear.
“Make no mistake,” Fisher continued, “when we’re done with you, you’ll be the greatest traitor your country has ever seen. Or, option two: You agree to help us.” Fisher spread his hands and gave Pak a friendly grin. “It’s your call.”
“How do I know I can trust—”
“You don’t. There’re only two things you can count on right now: one, that we can and will burn you; and two, whatever else happens, the first hint I get that you’re double-dealing us, I’ll put a bullet in your head. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
Pak closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out. “I’ll take it.”
39
“SLOW down,” Fisher ordered Pak. “You don’t want to get a speeding ticket.”
Pak eased up on the gas pedal, and the car—a 1990 Mercedes 300 Diesel that Fisher assumed was another RDEI perk—slowed to below 50 kph. The tires beat out a steady rhythm on the highway’s expansion joints, lulling Fisher toward drowsiness. He shook it off and focused.
Knowing he was losing ground to exhaustion, Fisher had taken out some insurance against the inevitability of Pak trying to make a move: Tightened around the base of each of Pak’s ring fingers was a wire-thin flexicuff. The other ends were secured around the steering wheel’s lower half. He had enough length to operate the Mercedes but nothing else.
They’d been traveling for forty minutes. In the side mirror Fisher could see the lights of Pyongyang in the distance, but out here, just six miles outside the city, it was pitch-dark, save what little moonlight filtered through the low cloud cover. It was as though they’d passed through a curtain on the capital’s eastern outskirts, from lighted skyscrapers and streetlamps to blackness.
With one eye trained on the iPhone’s screen, which currently displayed a hybrid satellite/road map of North Korea, and one eye tuned toward Pak, Fisher ordered him to turn left off the two-lane highway onto a narrow gravel road that took them into a stretch of rolling hills covered by evergreen trees. Fisher watched the latitude and longitude coordinates at the edge of the iPhone’s screen scroll until finally they stopped and started flashing.
“Stop here,” Fisher ordered.
Pak pulled to the side of the road and shut off the engine. Fisher took the car keys.
“I’m taking a little walk,” he told Pak. “If you can manage to gnaw your fingers off before I get back, you’re free to go.”
“You’re a funny man,” Pak grumbled.
“So I’ve been told.”
Fisher climbed out, clicked on his penlight, then started up the hillside until he reached the tree line, where he stopped and reoriented himself to the iPhone’s screen, and kept going, following a game trail higher into the trees. After sixty seconds he stopped, checked his position, then turned left, took four paces, and knelt down. He broomed the pine needles away with his hands. Lying there half buried in the dirt was a wood handled gardener’s trowel. Fisher started digging. It took only a minute to unearth a black Gore-Tex rucksack. He smiled to himself. Hello, old friends.
Fisher hadn’t asked, and Lambert hadn’t offered an explanation, but just before leaving Washington he’d given Fis
her a set of latitude and longitude coordinates. “If you have to go to ground.”
He didn’t have to look inside the bag to know it contained his full mission equipment loadout: tac suit, goggles, SC-20 rifle and pistol, OPSAT, his Fairbairn-Sykes dagger—all of it would be there.
Fisher didn’t need an explanation of how the bag found its way here; he had a solid hunch: Against every operational tradecraft rule in the book, Tom Richards had instructed their spy in the SSD’s comptroller’s office to take a drive in the country.
Thanks, whoever you are, Fisher thought.
He picked up the bag and started back down the path.
TWENTY minutes later, back on the main highway, Fisher’s Bluetooth headset vibrated; he tapped the connect button.
“Sam, it’s Grim. Will and I are almost done sorting through the dump from Pak’s laptop. About two months before Carmen Hayes went missing, Pak was assigned a new password and log-in to an SSD intranet portal. The portal address has changed, but the e-mail account associated with it hasn’t. There’s a backlog of e-mail that shows spikes at times that correspond with some interesting events—namely the mortar bombardment in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz president’s resignation, Omurbai’s reappearance, Calvin Stewart’s transfer to the Site 17 platform . . . that sort of stuff. All related to Manas.”
“Anything worthwhile?”
“The e-mails are encoded—some kind of digital one-time pad setup, which means only Pak and whoever he was exchanging e-mails with had the decryption algorithm, and it probably changed frequently. I’ve got enough messages with enough repeated phrases and references to start piecing it together from the back end, but it’s going to take time.
“But here’s what you need to know. First of all: Is Pak within earshot?”
“Yes.”
“Then just listen; don’t let on. All of the e-mails Pak sent through this portal go to a single routing station about ten miles east of Pyongyang. I’ve been tracking you, and I think he’s taking you on a wild-goose hunt. You’re about five miles southeast of the routing station and heading away from it.”