by Tom Clancy
“Get up here.”
“You got something?”
“Maybe. Move it.”
Ames’s footfalls came soft but swiftly, and within a few seconds he stood beside Hansen.
“How much you want to bet that skylight was opened from the outside?”
“Nothing, because it was.” Ames mounted the ladder and climbed up twelve feet to the top. He pushed open the skylight, which folded soundlessly out of the way.
Soundlessly.
Hansen followed, and they both emerged onto the roof. Hansen leaned over and ran his finger along one of the skylight’s hinges. His finger came up slick. “Fisher sprayed the hinges with silicone so they wouldn’t squeak. This is definitely his entrance point.”
“How’d he get up here?” Ames crossed the roof and spotted the air-conditioning unit. “Oh, here we go. I think he climbed up on the AC; then he could reach the ladder there.” Ames climbed down the ladder and jumped onto the AC unit affixed to the wall. Again, Hansen followed, and in a few moments they both stood on the ground, staring up at the building.
“So if he came in from up top … ” Hansen began aloud. “Wait a minute.” He jogged around the front of the warehouse to the door, his gaze probing … and then he saw it—a long two-by-four lying near the wall about twenty feet away. He went over, picked up the wood, and inspected the ends. As he suspected, the wood was indented on one side. He brought the piece up to the door handle, and the indentation matched.
“If we go back to the loading dock, we’ll find another two-by-four over there.”
“He locked them in,” Ames concluded.
“Then he came in from up top. They didn’t stand a chance.”
Ames snorted. “Yeah, well, they were fools. Fisher’s playing with us now. Old man Fisher’s going to cry like my sister when I get down with him.”
Hansen made a face. “Pride cometh before the fall.”
“You quoting Shakespeare?”
Hansen smirked. “No, Oprah. Let’s go.”
They crossed to the loading dock, where Hansen did, indeed, spot the second two-by-four, the indentation once again matching the door handle.
They went back inside the warehouse and Hansen crossed to the oak coffee table, where at each leg he found a black plastic ring: flex-cuffs. He was painfully familiar with them and felt his wrists ache from that night in Korfovka. Sure enough, the plastic matched the sliver he’d found upstairs in the bathroom.
So there it was: Fisher had probably lured them one by one upstairs, where he’d neutralized and cuffed them. But he’d saved the questioning of Doucet for the main arena. He imagined Doucet bound to the table and Fisher conducting the interrogation in his deadpan voice:
“We’re done with questions. You talk. Otherwise, pain.”
“No!” Doucet cried.
“All right. You choose pain.”
Hansen flinched and shuttered as he noticed, on the floor, the scratch marks where Doucet had tried to free himself. All of it jibed with the police report.
Hansen and Ames spent another fifteen minutes searching for anything else of interest. Hansen discovered that the clothing dryer had been pulled back from the wall, and the floor was clear of dust in an area about the size of a briefcase. Something had, no doubt, been stashed there and removed.
Outside, they slipped back to their cars and took off, with Hansen, Ames, Noboru in one car, the women in the other. They would take separate routes back to the hotel, yet another tradecraft detail Hansen employed this time around.
He and the others were about five minutes away from the warehouse when Moreau called: “Ben? Maya and Kim are okay, but it looks like you boys have picked up a tail.”
After swearing under his breath, he answered, “Talk to me.”
“Black Range Rover. Two occupants. Driver’s got the lights out. Can’t see their faces. The driver’s a pretty big guy, though. They’re keeping pretty far back. What’re you going to do, cowboy?”
“You testing me?”
“Life’s a test, young man. Every day. Every hour. Every minute.”
Hansen sighed and looked over at Ames, who was at the wheel. “Just keep driving.”
Ames frowned. “You kidding me? I can lose these bastards, but you’ll need to hang on.”
“No. If they followed us out here, then they saw us leave the hotel. They know where we’re going. Let’s just head back and see what they do.”
“I agree with that plan,” said Noboru. “We don’t know who they are, and if we react, we will lose the element of surprise.”
NOBORU had forced the emotion out of his voice—and that wasn’t easy. Two men were following them, one larger. This wasn’t his paranoia rearing its ugly head. Horatio and Gothwhiler were back there in that Range Rover. They had tracked Noboru to France. They were coming to finally, inevitably, settle the score.
But how had they found him? Had someone within Third Echelon tipped them off? As far as Noboru knew, only Grim was aware of his past. But perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps there were others, those who worked for Kovac … those who would like nothing more than to expose another conspiracy within the organization: that one of Third Echelon’s Splinter Cells had once been employed by Gothos, a corporation currently identified as an enemy of the United States.
Noboru swallowed. He reached for the door handle, saw himself leaping from the car, rolling down the ditch, then coming around to bring his pistol to bear on the car. He would kill them. The nightmare would end tonight.
But what if he were wrong? What if these men had been hired by Kovac or even Fisher himself? If Noboru were to confront them, he’d be doing the very thing he had just advised Hansen against: tipping his hand to the enemy.
But to remain silent, in place, knowing that they could be back there, would take inhuman reserve. He could barely breathe and the bile was building in his throat.
“Moreau?” Hansen called. “We’re not reacting.”
They drove on, all the way back to the hotel, with Moreau finally telling them that the Range Rover had pulled into a parking garage about five blocks away.
As they parked in their own garage, Moreau continued to feed them reports. Still no sign of the drivers.
“Ben, I suggest we search our cars,” said Noboru.
“Good idea.”
And within five minutes they found a pair of GPS tracking devices, both placed within the back sides of the cars’ rear bumpers.
“Those are British made,” said Moreau. “Interesting. Excellent encryption. They’re not amateurs.”
“Let me shadow them,” said Noboru. “Let me go alone.”
“I’d advise against that,” said Moreau.
“Sir, are you telling me how to run my team?” asked Hansen. “Is that within the purview of operations management?”
“Young man, I’d like a word in private. Come on up here, ASAP.”
“Tell him you’ll wear your sexy bathrobe,” said Ames with a wink.
“I heard that,” cried Moreau.
Hansen looked at Gillespie and Valentina, who were holding the tracking devices. “Stick them on two other cars. We’ll have a little fun with our tails.”
The women smiled and got to work.
BACK up in Moreau’s hotel room, Hansen stood before the man and lifted his shoulders. “Time for answers.”
Moreau turned away from his computer, sat back in the chair, and pillowed his head in his hands. “You’re getting ahead of me, cowboy. I haven’t asked any questions yet.”
“I’m asking the questions. First and most obvious: What the hell are we doing here?”
“I’m about to tear you a new one for your insubordination,” answered Moreau. “After that, we can order ice cream.”
Hansen spaced his words for effect: “You know what I mean.”
“Mr. Hansen, we are in the middle of an operation to bring in a rogue agent. You didn’t get the memo?”
“Don’t give me that BS. Geeks forgot to pack the goggles? Now
we got a tail?”
“What’re you suggesting?”
“You don’t want us to capture Fisher.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“He’s working with Grim. He’s up to something. And we’re running defense. We’re the screen. And Kovac’s beginning to figure that out, and he’s got people all over us.”
“Your job is not to stand and speculate on what-ifs and maybes and, Oh, I think I got this all figured out with my MIT education. Your job is to bring me Sam Fisher’s head.” Moreau leapt to his feet and raised his voice. “Jesus Christ, cowboy! What part of that equation don’t you understand?”
“The part where you lied to us.”
Hansen took a step forward and riveted his gaze on Moreau.
Standoff.
Chapter 19.
PARKING GARAGE REIMS, FRANCE
WHILE Hansen was meeting with Moreau, Noboru was already three blocks down the street and heading toward the garage where the Range Rover was parked. The others thought he’d gone down to a little all-night cafe on the corner to bring back some fresh-brewed decaf.
With a woolen cap pulled tightly over his head and the collar of his trench coat turned up, Noboru entered the five- level parking garage and kept low behind the first row of cars. The attendant booth was empty, tickets and payment being issued by an automatic system.
Noboru stole his way up to the first level, eyes probing with an almost mechanical precision. He dashed from car to car and ventured up to the second level, squinting once more at every dark vehicle he spotted.
By the time he reached the third level, he was growing frustrated and breathless. There were plenty of open parking spaces within the garage, yet the Range Rover was not there.
Again, no luck on the fourth level. In fact, there were even fewer cars parked this high up.
He took himself all the way to the edge of a wall beside which stood the rooftop parking area. If the Rover had been parked there, Moreau would have picked it up via satellite. Noboru checked the lot anyway. No Range Rover.
He began to panic. Wrong garage? Had the car pulled out while he’d been on his way there?
Sweating profusely now, he sprinted all the way down to the first level and once more took up a position behind a small sedan.
And then he saw it, a bank of garage doors located along the rear wall of the garage. A sign indicated that these were secured garages for rent.
Fool! He’d missed that the first time around.
The bad news: There were six garage doors, and the Range Rover could be behind any one of them.
Noboru had tools but not much time.
He reached the first door, then opened his coat, removed his lock-picking set, and used one of the handles to open up a small gap in the first door, where the rubber base met the concrete floor. Through that gap he inserted the end of a flexicam, activated the base unit, set it for night vision, and slid the probe up to examine the car. No car. Empty garage.
On to the next one.
A Renault. And the next one. Empty. And as he was about to check the next one, headlights flashed behind him. He dove for cover beside the nearest car and waited there.
What the hell? It was the black Range Rover.
No. He blinked hard. It was a black SUV but not a Range Rover.
Noboru swallowed. Tried to calm himself. The SUV pulled into a spot near the exit, and a young couple exited, giggling. The man grabbed his partner’s ass as they ventured across the street, toward a row of small hotels.
Back to work.
And as fate, luck, and a cruel and merciless universe would have it, Noboru had to check all six garages before finding the Range Rover parked inside the last one.
The doors were opened by remote control, with rolling codes, and Noboru waited while his CBT Code-Scan, a Third Echelon-engineered magic box, got to work. It took another five minutes for the CBT to cast its spell, and the door finally cycled open. Noboru entered, then shut the door behind him.
He flicked on his penlight and took a deep breath. Picking the lock on the Range Rover still wouldn’t disable the vehicle’s alarm system, but if you had a key fob—or a device that could precisely mimic one, like the CBT—then you could simply press a button, resynchronize the forty-bit random codes, and gain access. Noboru understood that the device would reprogram the car to allow him entrance, and then, quite remarkably, return the car to its original codes so its owner would be none the wiser.
After a few seconds, the CBT’s LED screen flashed, the car chirped, and the locks opened. Noboru immediately searched the glove box for a rental-car agreement and found it. The name on the papers was an alias breathtakingly familiar to him.
Horatio and Gothwhiler were in France. After him. No doubts.
Noboru activated his OPSAT and opened a channel directly to Grim, who answered after a few moments. “Uh, what is it, Nathan?”
“My old friends are here.”
A few seconds of nothing, then, “I understand.”
“You made a promise.”
“I know.”
“How’d they find me?”
“I don’t know. We can’t talk about it now.”
“I need to do something.”
“Leave that to me.”
He paused. “I’m sorry, but I don’t trust you anymore.”
“You have to. If you do something, you could compromise your mission.”
“I’ll plant a V-TRAC and route the signal to you. If you don’t take care of this soon, I’ll have to do it—even if it costs me my job.”
“I understand. But you need to trust me. Okay?”
Noboru shook his head. “Take care of the problem. Good-bye, Grim.”
After planting the V-TRAC device well up inside the Range Rover’s body, Noboru left the parking garage, hustled back to the coffee shop, and returned to the room with five tall cups of decaf.
“Where the hell were you?” asked Valentina.
“One of the coffee machines broke, and I helped the lady fix it. She gave me the decaf for free.” He forced a grin, and he thought his cheeks would crack off.
Hansen accepted his coffee and said, “Was the Range Rover there?”
“Uh, what do you mean?”
Hansen’s tone grew harder. “Yes? Or no?”
Noboru opened his mouth, thought better of lying, and then suddenly said, “We’ll be tracking it.”
“Any idea who they are?”
Noboru braced himself. This time he would have to lie. “Not sure who they are.”
“Kovac’s people, no doubt. All right.” Hansen faced the others. “Moreau’s a tough nut to crack, but here’s what I got out of him. For all intents and purposes, Kovac wants Fisher dead. And he’s pressing Grim hard to make it happen. Grim, of course, would like to talk to Sam before we put a bullet in his head. You don’t shoot your best friend for no reason. So if we ever catch up to him, my plan is to capture first. Moreau swears to me that they’re not lying about this, but to suggest that Fisher is just on the run in France with no agenda is ridiculous. He’s up to something, and we’re going to find out what.”
Ames snorted. “You’re damned right we are. And you all need to listen to me: You don’t capture Sam Fisher. And you don’t talk to him. You take him out. Those were our orders.”
Gillespie shifted over to Ames and deliberately spilled her coffee across his shirt. He cursed as she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I burn you?”
While the others tried to stifle their laughter, Hansen cleared his throat. “If we can take Fisher alive, that’s the way we do it. If it comes down to it, though, then we’ll have to kill him.”
HANSEN spent most of the night tossing and turning. In fact, he’d barely slept in the past two days, so when the courtesy wake-up call came, Hansen was ready to smash the phone against the wall. He rose, showered, shaved, dressed quickly, then gave up the bathroom to Ames, who was complaining about “pretty boy taking too much time.”
Noboru rema
ined dead to the world, and Hansen took a moment just to stare at the man who’d been a little too eager to check out their tail. Hansen mulled that over for a moment before heading down to the restaurant for some coffee.
Moreau had rented them another pair of cars, two Renaults—one burgundy, the other blue—and they loaded the gear and left by 8:00 A.M. for the sixty-mile drive east on A-4 to Emmanuel Chenevier’s apartment in Verdun, near the quai de Londres—and its many shops, restaurants, and discotheques—along the Meuse River. They were wary of tails, especially from those men in the black Range Rover, but Moreau reported that the Rover was tailing one of the decoy vehicles within which Valentina had planted the tracker. Moreau warned them that the ploy wouldn’t last long, and when they discovered what had happened, they would search their own vehicle for a tracker and/or abandon it. By that time Hansen and the others should be long gone.
They drove though the French countryside, the farmlands reminding Hansen of some of the Sunday drives he’d taken with his parents through Texas, although none of that terrain appeared even remotely as fertile as these grounds. However, the same sense of loneliness and utter quiet was still there.
Thankfully, Ames kept his mouth shut for most of the ride, and Gillespie sat quietly herself. Noboru and Valentina followed closely behind in their car, with Moreau still back at the hotel, monitoring the team’s progress. He planned to catch up with them later in the day.
Hansen had already decided that he’d be the one to speak with the forger. He reviewed the intel Moreau had given him.
Emmanuel Chenevier was a thirty-year veteran of the Directorate-General for External Security, a rather important-sounding synonym for France’s foreign intelligence agency. While the data did not indicate that Fisher and Chenevier had a prior relationship, Hansen had a strong feeling that they had known each other for years. At the very least, Fisher would be aware of the agent and his impressive record that indicated he was fiercely loyal to his country. That Chenevier would help an American on the run might prove surprising to some—unless of course Hansen’s initial premise was correct: The two were old friends. Fisher’s record indicated that there had been a time, back in the early 1990s, when he would’ve had the opportunity to meet and perhaps work with Chenevier; however, that was speculation on Hansen’s part.