by Tom Clancy
Stewart’s beacon was three floors above him at the northern end of the fort.
He said into the SVT, “I’m in. Target beacon is steady. Moving on.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied. “What’s your ETE?”
Fisher checked his watch. “Ninety to one-twenty. Something up?”
“More action on the Kyrgyzstan front.”
“Understood. I’ll keep you posted. Out.”
What now? Fisher thought.
20
Ingonish was a trapezoid, with its base running parallel to the cliff and its narrower, truncated top facing inland to the village. Each of the trapezoid’s four corners was anchored by a stone watchtower eighty feet tall and topped with a gallery for archers. A fifth tower, twice as wide and forty feet taller than the others, was set between the two cliff-side corners, at the midpoint of the wall, and was topped by an expansive cupola that had once hosted the fort’s three eight-inch antiship mortars. According to Fisher’s OPSAT blueprint, Ingonish measured roughly three hundred feet, or one football field, to a side and encompassed some ninety thousand square feet. He prayed Stewart’s beacon remained in place; if not, he had too much territory to cover and not much time with which to do it.
Fisher knelt before the workshop door and snaked the flexicam underneath. His vision was filled by a massive locomotive’s driving wheel, crank, and coupling rod. Fisher tapped the OPSAT screen, changing the resolution and switching to fisheye. He checked again. A toy train, a replica steam locomotive. It didn’t seem to be on a track, so Fisher slid the flexicam out a little farther and gave the locomotive a tap. It toppled onto its side, and beyond its plastic wheels Fisher could see the rest of the room.
Both he and Grimsdottir had been wrong. Tolkun Bakiyev had done a lot of remodeling. What lay before Fisher had once been a warren of workshops, storage bunkers, and soldiers’ sleeping quarters made of heavy timber and thatch-and-mud brick. The warren would have been surrounded by a stone wall, twenty feet tall and set thirty feet in from the outer wall. Between, the two stone staircases would have risen to the second floor, which would have held the officers’ quarters, the armory, and tunnels through which soldiers could access the fort’s five battle towers.
All of it, save the stone staircases rising along each of the four walls and an arched stone passageway that joined them, was gone and in its place what Fisher could only describe as a playground. The train he’d seen was part of a set, a railway diorama built into the wall ten feet off the floor. It was complete with villages and towns, way stations, mountain tunnels, gorges, and waterfalls. A full quarter of the floor was dominated by a solid polished wood skate-board park, complete with half-pipes, high banks, stairs, pyramids, and grind rails. Near the far wall Fisher could make out what looked like a three-lane bowling alley, and beside that an inflatable kid’s red-and-yellow bouncy fun castle. Wonderful, Fisher thought. BakiyevLand.
Fisher’s brief on Bakiyev had mentioned no children. Either the man just liked to have fun, or he was an idiot-child in a man’s body, or his home frequently served as a playground for Little Bishkek’s children.
The remainder of the space was taken up with no less than a dozen seating areas sectioned off with hanging rug walls, each containing its own cluster of leather couches, chairs, and a jumbo plasma TV screen. Robinson had guessed and Fisher had agreed that Bakiyev’s living spaces were likely in one or all of the watchtowers.
He took a few still shots for the Third Echelon photo album, did a final, full-mode sweep of the room, then withdrew the flexicam and opened the door and set out.
He picked his way down the center of the room, heading for the north stairway, using the skate park’s obstacle course as cover. At the halfway point he heard, faintly, the squealing of tires, tinny and cartoon-like, and a voice muttering in Kyrgyz. Ahead and to his left, in one of the seating areas, Fisher could see the flickering of television light behind one of the rugs. He crouched down and crept around a grind rail.
Seated on a red leather couch before a plasma television were two men. Leaning against the couch beside each man Fisher could see the barrel of an AK-47. On the screen, the two men were racing dune buggies down a virtual Caribbean beach. One of the buggies missed a dune jump and tumbled end over end. The man on the left groaned, dropped the controller, and threw up his hands. He snatched up his rifle, said something to his partner that Fisher didn’t catch, then walked off in the direction of the bowling alley. The other man leaned back and lit a cigarette, blowing a cloud of blue smoke toward the screen.
Fisher changed course, steering away from the men and around the skate park until he reached the north wall. The bowling alley, which sat at the foot of the stairway, was directly opposite Fisher now. The guard who’d wandered off was now standing beside a lighted popcorn kiosk complete with a red-and-white-striped awning, scooping his hand inside and shoving popcorn in his mouth. His AK sat propped against the kiosk’s wheel. Fisher found a dark corner and crouched down to wait. The guard gorged himself for another astonishing ten minutes, then let out a belch, picked up his AK, and wandered back toward his buddy, who had returned to playing the dune buggy game.
In his ear, Fisher heard Grimsdottir’s voice: “Sam, we’ve got activity again.”
Since focusing the NSA’s electronic attention on Tolkun Bakiyev and Ingonish, she’d picked up several cell phone transmissions from two different cell phone numbers, all of which she was picking apart, and an intermittent satellite Internet signal. The problem was, Bakiyev had installed not one but two servers in the fort, both Hewlett-Packard Pro-Liant DL360 G5s, one acting as his own private web server, the other as what Grimsdottir had called an “anonymizing intercept gateway proxy server,” the use of which, Fisher gathered, was a high-tech and expensive way of cloaking your Internet activities.
Grimsdottir was making progress in breaking through the firewalls, but it was slow going. One of Fisher’s goals was to find the server room and perform a hard link. There aren’t many practical reasons for law-abiding private citizens to own such systems. If there were any skeletons in the closet, those servers might be the door.
“What kind of activity?” Fisher asked.
“Cell phone and server. Somebody’s talking and surfing in there.”
“Point me.”
“South of you, say sixty yards, and up forty feet. Feeding to your OPSAT now.”
Fisher checked his screen. “Got it.”
* * *
He waited until Orville Redenbacher had resumed the dune buggy race, then slipped along the wall and around the corner to the stairway. The stones were covered by a red, black, and ochre Persian rug runner that Fisher’s estimate put at US$10,000.
He was five feet from the top when he heard a door slam somewhere to his right. Hunched over, he padded up the final few steps, then dropped to his belly and peeked around the corner. At the far end of the arched passage, where it curved around the bulge of the tower, a man in a gray velvet track suit was leaning on the railing, looking down at BakiyevLand.
“Hey, you two, what’s the racket?” the man said in heavily accented English.
Fisher switched his goggles to NV, zoomed in on the man’s face, and snapped a photo.
One of the men — Orville, it sounded like — said, “Sorry, boss, sorry.”
On Fisher’s OPSAT, the picture he had just taken had been rotated in three dimensions and the missing features filled in. Beside it was another photo that appeared to be a Canadian immigration shot. Beneath the photos the words MATCH: TOLKUN BAKIYEV flashed.
“Just keep it down,” Bakiyev replied. “I’m going to work for another twenty minutes, then I’m going to bed. I want it quiet.”
“Sure, boss, no problem.”
“And don’t eat all my popcorn, damn it.”
Bakiyev turned and strode back through the tower door and slammed it behind him. Twenty minutes to nighty-night, Fisher thought. He checked his OPSAT; Stewart’s beacon lay to his left and abo
ve him, inside the north tower.
* * *
Once through the tower door, Fisher found himself facing a narrow spiral staircase that ascended around a center column of stone and heavy oaken crossbeams. Ten feet above his head he could see floor joists. He mounted the staircase, testing each step with his foot, testing his weight, before moving on.
On the first floor he found the space divided by four rooms, like wedges from a pie. Fisher stopped at each door to scan the interior with the flexicam. All four rooms — sleeping quarters — were empty. He moved to the second floor and again found only empty bedrooms, though only three this time as the tower narrowed with each floor. On the third floor, the final one below the archer’s cupola, Fisher found, predictably, only two rooms. The first room, another bedroom, contained what appeared to be a figure under the covers of a single trundle bed. Fisher switched to EM and immediately saw a troubling signature: a tight funnel of swirling gray light in the far corner of the room near the ceiling. Security camera. He switched back to NV, centered the flexicam on the security camera, then tapped the OPSAT screen: CURRENT IMAGE>SLAVE AND TRACK MOTION>SCREEN OVERLAY. The OPSAT processed the request and replied, FINISHED. He switched screens. On the fort’s blueprint screen, Stewart’s room now showed a partially transparent red cone emanating from the corner in which the security camera lay.
Now, the question was, why did only this room have a security camera? He thought he knew the answer, but it took thirty seconds of panning and zooming to confirm it. There. The sleeping figure’s right hand was resting outside the covers on the pillow; attached to the wrist was what looked like a handcuff. Stewart.
Fisher moved to the final room. Inside, Chin-Hwa Pak was sitting on the edge of his bed in his pajamas using a stylus to tap on a smart phone. On the nightstand, under the glow of a shaded reading lamp, was a semiautomatic pistol.
Fisher checked his watch. Pak looked ready to go to bed; he would wait a few minutes, then check again. He found a corner and crouched down, leaning against the wall.
Something… Fisher thought. Something was nagging at his subconscious. Something about one of the other bedrooms…
Fisher got up and crept back down the spiral staircase to the first floor, then found the room in question, the first one to the left of the stairs. He gave the room another precautionary EM scan, then picked the lock, slipped inside, and shut the door behind him. He walked to the nightstand beside the bed and turned on the reading lamp.
This room, unlike the others, which were almost spartan in their furnishings, was well-appointed: a queen-size bed with a down comforter, a rolltop desk, a built-in bookshelf across from the bed, artwork on the walls… This was no ordinary guest room. Bakiyev hadn’t gone to special lengths for his other two guests — even his North Korean spy — so why this room?
Fisher went to work. He took his time, searching every nook and cranny of the room. In the nightstand drawer he found a laminated map of Kyrgyzstan with traces of grease pencil on it. Trapped behind the nightstand and the wall he found a faded envelope. On one corner of the envelope’s rear, written in blue ink, was a doodle, some scratched-out added numbers, random lines. The main address and return address were written in English — the clumsy block letters of someone unfamiliar with the language. The return address was Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; the main address read, “University College London.” All were in black ink.
Inside Fisher found a letter, written in Kyrgyz by a feminine hand. The date was March 1967. Fisher’s grasp of Kyrgyz was weak, but he was able to piece together and translate the letter’s salutation: My Dear little Soso…
Soso, Fisher thought.
He sat down on the bed, scanned the remainder of the letter for any other recognizable phrases, then thought for a couple minutes. He keyed his SVT. “Grim, you there?”
“Here.”
“Steak dinner says I can guess what your Kyrgyzstan news is.”
“You’re on.”
“Bolot Omurbai isn’t dead.”
There was a solid five seconds of silence, and then she said, “What? What are you talking about?”
“I think I’m sitting in Omurbai’s temporary mausoleum.”
21
“You’ve lost me, Sam,” Grimsdottir said. “Hold on, let me patch in the colonel…”
Lambert came on the line: “What’ve you got, Sam?”
Fisher repeated what he’d said to Grimsdottir, then added, “If I’m not mistaken, Omurbai’s mother used to call him ‘little Soso’—after Stalin’s childhood nickname.”
“Checking,” Grimsdottir said. “Yeah, that’s right. What about the letter?”
“March 1967, University College London. He would have been…”
“Eighteen or nineteen,” Grimsdottir answered. Fisher could hear keys tapping in the background; after half a minute, she came back. “Omurbai studied there — economics — for a year before he dropped out.”
“Speculate,” Lambert ordered.
“Omurbai was there years and years ago,” Grimsdottir replied. “Long before he took over the country.”
“Or the letter is new, and whoever the Kyrgyz government killed was one of Omurbai’s body doubles.” He told them about the blue-ink doodle on the back of the envelope. “Plus, this room is untouched — almost a shrine. I doubt it would’ve been kept like this if Omurbai had visited before his rise to power. He would have been just another fellow Kyrgyz to Bakiyev. And the laminated map — the copyright reads 2007.”
“Let’s play this out,” Lambert said. “Omurbai escapes Kyrgyzstan, leaving a body double in his place and telling his commanders to fight on until he returns. From there, with the help of Tolkun Bakiyev he makes his way to Little Bishkek, where he hides out, licks his wounds, and regroups—”
“And makes friends with the North Koreans,” Fisher added.
“Right. And uses their advisers, their weapons, and their money — and Bakiyev’s network — to plan his return to power.”
“That sounds about right,” Fisher replied. “A lot of unanswered questions yet, but it’s plausible. The biggest question is: What’re the North Koreans getting out of the deal? What does Omurbai have to offer them?”
“Speaking of Omurbai’s big comeback,” Grimsdottir said, “that’s the other news. The latest reports show the Kyrgyz government on the edge of collapse. There’s fighting inside Bishkek now; the rebels are pushing in.”
“They always had the numbers but not the direction,” Fisher said. “Without Omurbai they were aimless — a gaggle of warlords that couldn’t agree on what kind of tea to serve at meetings, let alone wage a war.”
“And now,” Lambert said, “maybe they have their rudder back.”
22
They talked for a few more minutes, then Fisher signed off and returned to the third floor. He checked in on Pak and found him lying in bed reading, so he moved to Stewart’s room, picked the lock, and slipped inside. He stood motionless for a few moments, pressed flat against the door, listening. He started side-sliding along the wall, following the contour of the room, checking the security camera’s detection cone on the OPSAT as he went, until he was standing directly beneath the camera itself.
He studied the camera’s underbelly. He saw no signs of a microphone, but he did see a manufacturer’s name and model number. He relayed them to Grimsdottir. “I need an encode for a loop switch.”
While both Fisher’s SC pistol and rifle were EM jammer capable, he used the feature sparingly. His concern wasn’t about whether or not the jammer was effective (it was), but rather about the intangible part of the equation; that is, the human part: what a security guard does when one of his or her monitors turns to static for no apparent reason only to resolve itself seconds later. And what do they do when another camera displays the same static, then another. Human judgment is an unpredictable beast. Some guards will write off the interference; some will not. It was those who worried Fisher, so whenever possible he preferred the now-antiquated and a
dmittedly more tedious “loop switch” method.
“No problem. Stand by.” She came back ten seconds later. “Got it. Encoding now.”
On his OPSAT screen, a series of seemingly random numbers and letters were marching across the screen. They disappeared, and in their place was the word READY. From his web belt Fisher withdrew a loop interrupter switch — a loop switch, for short — a six-inch length of UTP Cat6 cable with a miniature C-clamp on each end. On the inner side of each clamp was a ring of sharp, tiny connector teeth; inside the cable itself, a microprocessor; and jutting from the center of the cable between the clamps, an infrared port.
Fisher aligned the loop switch’s IR port with that of the OPSAT’s.
CONNECTING…
CAPTURE…
ENCODING…
DONE.
Fisher reached up, lightly placed one clamped end of the loop switch to the camera’s feed cable, and the other a few inches away. Satisfied with the setup, Fisher tightened both clamps simultaneously. He then again aligned the loop switch’s IR port with the OPSAT’s and read the screen: LOOP ESTABLISHED. If there were eyes watching Stewart’s camera, now all they would see was a replayed loop of him sleeping.
Fisher crept to the bed and knelt down beside it. He placed a hand on Stewart’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “Calvin. Calvin, wake up.”
Stewart groaned, and his eyelids fluttered open. It took a few seconds, but he focused on Fisher and then said, groggily, “Sam.”
“How’re you holding up?”
“Well, I’ve got a bed. That’s an improvement.”
“Still with the jewelry, I see.”
Stewart glanced at his cuffed hand. “Day and night.”
“Let me see your thumb.” Stewart extended it, and Fisher examined the fake nail. All looked good. “We pinned down the identity of your minder. He’s a North Korean agent.”
“Any clue what they want with me?”