by Tom Clancy
“And?”
“And every computer but one looks like a dedicated security workstation. Personal computer on the fourth floor, last room in the northeast corner. My guess: It’s either Legard’s bedroom or office. You get me a hard link to it, and I’ll hack in.”
“Consider it done. I’ll get back to you.”
Fisher pushed himself up into a crouch and crab-walked to the windows. The windows, which from below had appeared vertical, were actually sloped inward. Fisher slipped the latch of the nearest window and opened it an inch.
Twenty feet below, under the glare of the halogen lights, he could see Legard, now without his face mask, moving down the line of dummies, thrusting, lunging, and spinning, dispatching each with a death blow before moving on to the next.
Legard was a handsome man, with long, flowing black hair, chiseled cheekbones, and a lantern jaw. He looked ten years younger than his actual age of fifty. After he’d dispatched the last dummy with a lunging strike to the throat, Legard strolled back through the gauntlet, his foil tucked under his arm, a broad grin on his face.
“What do you say, Bruno, eh? Am I not a joy to watch?”
The guard, now sitting up straight, said, “Yes, boss, amazing stuff.”
Still smiling, Legard removed his gauntlets and tossed them at Bruno. “Someday you’ll see the beauty in it, my friend. Your senses have been blunted by our product, yes? All those fresh, pretty things… hard to concentrate on what really counts in life.”
“True, boss.”
“How’s our guest getting along?”
“Full of complaints, that one.”
Guest? Fisher thought. Carmen Hayes?
“He’s a pampered scientist, Bruno, a lab rat. What do you expect?”
Not Carmen.
“It would be nice if he stopped whining. I called Baie Comeau. They’re loading him aboard in a few minutes. He’s been curled up in a corner, whimpering all night.”
Baie Comeau, Fisher thought. Grimsdottir’s briefing had listed Baie Comeau, one of Legard’s port warehouses along the St. Lawrence. Clearly they were loading someone aboard one of Legard’s ships. But bound for where, and to whom?>
“We’ll be rid of him soon enough. Go get me some water, will you?”
Bruno got up and stepped through the door.
Fisher didn’t hesitate. He drew his pistol, set the selector to DART 1, then opened the window another two inches. Legard was standing at the far wall, practicing his fencing poses before the mirror. Fisher took aim and fired. The dart struck true, plunging into the nape of Legard’s neck. He gave a faint gasp, staggered forward a couple steps, arms flailing as he looked for something to latch on to, then crumpled, sliding down the mirror to the floor.
Fisher holstered the pistol, swung the window all the way open, hooked the Monkey Claw on the sill, then let the wire drop to the floor and followed it. With a quick whip of the wire he freed the Monkey Claw, then wrapped it up, restored it, and sprinted to the mirrored wall where Legard lay. The switch panel beside the door controlled the lights, he assumed. He flipped all four switches. The room went black. He pressed himself to the wall, flipped down his goggles, and switched to NV. He drew a lead-and-leather sap from his belt and waited, eyes on the door.
Ten seconds later, he heard the knob turn. The door swung open, casting a skewed rectangle of yellow light on the maple floor. Bruno’s shadow moved forward, followed by Bruno himself as he crossed the threshold.
“Boss? Hey, boss, are you—”
Fisher was up and moving. Right arm cocked, he took two quick steps toward Bruno, then flicked his wrist. The lead and leather sap impacted just below Bruno’s ear with a dull thud. Bruno collapsed, and the water bottle he’d brought for Legard rolled across the floor. Fisher caught Bruno’s body, dragged him out of the light, and laid him down. He drew the pistol and waited. Five seconds, ten, then thirty. No shouts of alarm. Fisher crept to the door and peeked around it; the hall was clear. He swung the door shut and locked it.
He holstered his pistol and turned back to Legard.
Time to have a chat with our white slaver.
12
Fisher’s SC pistol had a variety of dart selections, ranging from low to high in anesthetic dosage. Level three would keep a 180-pound man unconscious for ninety minutes; level two, half that; level one, fifteen to twenty minutes. Legard, whom Fisher assumed weighed nearly two hundred pounds, would take around ten minutes.
He was two minutes off. Eight minutes after Fisher darted him, Legard groaned, lifted his head from his chest, and shook it. He blinked his eyes a few times, then opened them and looked around. Fisher had propped him against the mirror with one of the padded dummies behind his back, his hands bound behind his back by a plastic flexicuff. Bruno, who had gotten a level two dart after he went down, was similarly bound, save one addition: a gag made of his own socks.
Now, crouched a few feet away from Legard, Fisher studied the crime lord in the gray-green glow of his NV goggles. The room was pitch-black, except for what little pale moonlight made its way through the upper windows. The rest of Legard’s training dummies stood like frozen sentinels down the center of the room, multiplied by the mirrors on both walls.
Legard cleared his throat, then spoke: “What’s… what’s going on? Bruno, are you there? Bruno!”
“Keep your voice down,” Fisher whispered. “Raise it again, and I’ll put a bullet in your knee. Nod if you understand.”
Legard nodded.
“Bruno’s taking a nap. You and I need to have a chat.”
“Who the hell are you? Don’t you—”
“Know who you are? Of course I know who you are, Mr. Legard.” People like Legard were predictable. First the indignation, then the threats, then the propositioning. “And just to save time, yes, I know what a mistake this is, invading your home; and yes, I know what you’ll do to me if you catch me; and, no, I don’t want any money to let you go. Did I miss anything?”
“You’re a dead man.”
“We’ve already been through that,” Fisher whispered. “Time to move on.”
“You can go fu—”
Fisher jammed the barrel of the pistol against the sole of Legard’s foot. “Be nice, or you’ll be fondling your foil from a wheelchair. Understood?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Okay, here’s how it’s going to work: I’m going to ask you some questions. I’m a decent judge of character. Now, just because I’m also a nice guy, I’m going to give you two free lies. After that, I’m going to start hurting you. Are you ready?”
“Yeah…” Legard grumbled, clearly not yet a believer.
“Tell me about a woman named Carmen Hayes.”
“Who?”
“Brunette, late thirties, scientific type. Not the typical blond-haired runaway you sell. She was snatched off the streets of Montreal four months ago.”
Legard chewed his lower lip as though giving the question careful thought. “Sorry. Don’t know her.”
“That’s one lie. Okay, we’ll come back to her later. The man you were talking about with Bruno — your ill-mannered guest. Who is he, and where’s he going?”
Legard shook his head. “There’s no one here. I have no guests.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Turn your head to the side.”
“What?”
“Turn your head to the side. Now.” Legard did so. Fisher said, “Lift your chin a little…”
Legard did so. Fisher fired a shot into the training dummy just below Legard’s chin. Legard recoiled, nearly tipping on his side. Fisher propped him upright.
Legard blurted, “You’re crazy, Jesus Christ, you’re crazy.”
“It’s a distinct possibility,” Fisher replied. “I’m going to ask you one more time, and then I won’t ask again until you’re bleeding and crippled. So answer carefully. Tell me about Carmen Hayes and your mystery guest at Baie Comeau.”
Legard s
tarted talking.
* * *
Fisher’s pistol had in fact four dart settings: one through three, and then level four, which was yet another bit of magic from the shadowed halls and devious minds at DARPA. Fisher had read the scientific name for the dart’s contents once and its tongue-torturing complexity made him glad they’d given it a code name, Spigot, which, he assumed was meant to describe what the chemical did to a person’s short-term memory — namely, it opened a notional valve on his or her brain and let twenty to thirty minutes of short-term memory leak out.
There are two kinds of memory, short-term and long-term; the former stored by the frontal and parietal lobes, the latter stored weblike throughout different portions of the brain. The bridge between the two, the part of the brain that converts short-term memory into long-term memory, is governed by the hippocampus, which is where Spigot worked its magic. By partially dissolving the chemical glue that holds the hippocampus bridge together, Spigot created a mild version of retrograde amnesia that turned the target’s previous thirty minutes of memory into dreamlike recollections that faded within minutes of regaining consciousness.
So, despite his first instinct, the truth was, Fisher had had no intention of killing Legard. As much as the man deserved to be gone from the planet — and Fisher was giving serious thought to paying him another visit after all this was over — his death would stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble, especially if he was in contact with whoever he’d delivered Carmen Hayes to and to whoever was about to deliver his latest prisoner, the man Legard had identified as Calvin Stewart.
If Fisher was going to follow the trail of clues that appeared to have gotten Peter killed, he needed this pipeline to remain open. Of course, Fisher was painfully aware that by maintaining the pipeline’s integrity, he was allowing Legard to send who knew how many kidnapped girls to their overseas buyers. Another time, Fisher thought, another late-night visit.
In quick order, he hit Legard with a level three dart and a level four, then unbound him. He did the same to Bruno, then returned the training dummy to its stand and turned the lights back on. While both men would awake confused, neither would remember anything of the last half hour. Legard was fencing; Bruno watching. And then… nothing until they awoke. And if Fisher did his job right, leaving no trace of his presence, and nothing was found missing or out of place following the inevitable security sweep Legard would order, their minds would find a way to write off the experience.
In the end, Fisher felt certain Legard had told him the whole truth. He had in fact kidnapped Carmen Hayes, but the request had come to him anonymously through a series of cutouts, one of whom he trusted. The price had been right — US$500,000—so Legard had taken the job. Calvin Stewart’s kidnapping had been the same story: kidnapped off the street after being lured to Montreal by a bogus job offer. Legard knew little about either Hayes or Stewart, except that they were both “science types of some kind,” nor did he know where they were ultimately bound. Legard’s latest victim, Stewart, was to be initially delivered to the same place he’d sent Carmen Hayes: a waterfront warehouse in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A group of masked men had met Legard’s own crew and taken custody of Carmen — as they would, Fisher assumed, take custody of Stewart.
But why? Who was collecting scientists, and why? And what did either of them have to do with Peter’s death? Too many questions, Fisher thought, and not enough answers. Perhaps his next stop would remedy that.
Fisher keyed his SVT and said, “Grim, I’ve got a name for you: Calvin Stewart. Somewhere I think you’ll find a missing persons report on him. I need everything you can dig up.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“A warehouse in Halifax.” Fisher gave her the particulars. “They’re loading Stewart onto a ship in Baie Comeau. That’s my next stop. Where’s Bird?”
“Idling on the tarmac at St-Mathieu-de-Beloeil. ETA to evac point Charlie is ten minutes.”
“Radio him for me, tell him to put on his flying hat. I’ll be calling.”
Fisher signed off, then slipped out the fencing room door and padded down the hall to the last door on the east side, the one Grimsdottir suspected contained the only personal computer in the house. The door was unlocked. Inside he found what looked like a private study. The lights were off save a single spotlight in the ceiling that cast a dim pool of light on the hardwood walnut floor. He found the PC — a high-end Alienware — on a rolltop desk in the corner and plugged the OPSAT’s USB into the PC’s port.
“Hooked up,” Fisher told Grimsdottir.
“Roger. Scanning… Nice firewall… nice, but not nice enough. There, I’m in. Downloading now.” Thirty seconds passed, then, “Done, Sam.”
Fisher disconnected the USB. “I’m ex-filtrating.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later he was sliding out the pool’s exit chute and climbing down the rocks into the kayak course. He looked east and could see on the horizon the barest hint of reddish pink under a fringe of leaden clouds. This was false dawn, he knew. The true sunrise was at least four hours away. Red skies at night, sailor’s delight, Fisher thought. Red skies at dawn, sailors take warn. It was an old nautical saying that he’d found to be more often accurate than not. In fact, he could smell the tang of ozone in the air. Rain was coming.
Having already trail-blazed his infiltration route through the forest surrounding Legard’s mansion, he simply followed the course in reverse order, moving more quickly this time and pausing only to avoid the guards and dogs. An hour later he was at the wall. He crouched down and checked the OPSAT to ensure his spot was still dog-friendly, then called up the OPSAT’s communication screen, tapped the airplane icon, then selected from the drop-down menu the commands, CALL TO followed by EVAC POINT C. Five seconds passed, then Fisher heard in his ear, “Roger. En route. ETA ten. Out.”
Fisher scaled the wall and headed for the water.
13
Fisher lay belly down, his face mask awash in the shallows of the river, for four minutes, gauging the current and watching the rain clouds gather over the treetops, then pushed off, stroked a hundred yards into the channel, and stopped. The current immediately took hold of him, dragging him downstream. Three minutes later he was a half mile away from Legard’s estate when he heard the faint thrumming of a plane’s engines, followed a few seconds later by the sight of the flat-bottomed, rounded nose cone of a V-22 Osprey emerging from the fog along the southern shoreline.
The Osprey dropped to twenty feet, swooped over Fisher, then banked, its engine nacelles rotating from horizontal to vertical as it slowed to a hover and then began drifting backward until its tail was directly above Fisher. The tail ramp lowered, and a coiled rope rolled out and dropped into the water beside him. Fisher looped his arm into the thick rubber horse collar and gave a thumbs-up at the ramp, where he knew a high-resolution night-vision camera was focused on him.
The Osprey lifted upward, and the winch began reeling him in.
* * *
Five minutes later, dried off, coffee cup in hand, and changed into a pair of blue coveralls, Fisher sat down in the empty engineer’s seat in the rear of the cockpit and said, “So, how’s everyone’s morning so far?”
The pilot, an easygoing southern boy nicknamed Bird, said, “Peachy, Sam, and you?”
Fisher shrugged. “The usual. Hi, Sandy.”
Sandy, Bird’s copilot, one of the first women to break into the male-dominated special operations community, nodded back at Fisher. “Sam.” Where Bird was a carefree soul, Sandy was the polar opposite: taciturn and all business. Fisher liked Sandy, but he could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen her smile. Together, Bird and Sandy formed a balanced pair.
The newest edition to Bird’s crew, the Osprey’s engineer/ navigator/loadmaster, was an Annapolis wunderkind graduate named Franklin. Fisher wasn’t sure if Franklin was his first name or last, but Bird had dubbed him Franco, so Franco it was. He had a quick, easy smile and could do black-belt-leve
l sudoku, in pen, with one half of his brain while calculating glide paths with the other.
Fisher was very much at home aboard the Osprey, which Bird had dubbed Lulu, per his prerogative as the captain, and had spent almost as much time flying aboard it as he had driving his own car. Billed as both a VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) and STOL (short takeoff and landing) craft, the Osprey was not only Third Echelon’s workhorse, used for dicey insertion and extraction missions in “denied areas,” but had over the years been Fisher’s lifesaver many times.
“Morning, Franco,” Fisher said.
“Morning, sir,” Franco said with a nervous smile. Though both Bird and Sandy denied it, Fisher suspected they’d been telling their new crewman tall tales about him — that Fisher ate live ducklings for breakfast and he’d been responsible for the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.
“Bird, how far to Baie Comeau?” Fisher asked.
“Two hundred miles. Should have you there in forty.”
Too long, Fisher thought. If Bruno’s prediction was right, Stewart might have already been loaded aboard whichever of Legard’s ships would be carrying the scientist to Halifax. They’d have to catch the ship at sea.
Fisher grabbed a headset on the bulkhead, settled it on his head, and swiveled the microphone to his mouth. Bird said, “Sit room on button two.” Fisher punched the button and said, “You there, Grim?”
“Here.”
“Any luck?”
“Some. Calvin Stewart’s boss reported him missing two weeks ago. Stewart is a particle physicist at University of Toronto. He’s working on a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy; I’m trying to get the specifics, but the DOE is being cagey.
“As for the ship, the only one in Legard’s fleet that’s filed departure with the Baie Comeau harbormaster is a dry cargo hauler called Gosselin. She left port twenty minutes ago, heading for the Gaspé Passage. She should be passing Pointe-des-Monts right about now.”