by Tom Clancy
“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 Fisher 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.”
“I see.”
“And he’s taking you straight into a military restriction zone.”
“Huh.”
“I’m looking at the sat pics right now. If you keep going down the road you’re on, you’ll run smack into a checkpoint, and within a half mile of you there’s a dozen antiaircraft sites, bunkers, infantry barracks, and radar sites. According to Langley, that whole area is a retreat for North Korean Workers’ Party bigwigs. It’s one of the most heavily guarded sites in the whole country.”
“Good to know.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“I’ll get back to you.” Fisher disconnected. He turned in his seat and leveled the pistol with Pak’s chest. “Stop the car.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Stop the car.”
In the corner of his eye, through the windshield, Fisher saw a glimmer of light. He turned. A quarter mile down the road
a pair of floodlights came to life atop a guard shack that straddled the road. The lights pierced the windshield. Fisher squinted.
Pak slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The Mercedes’s powerful engine roared, and the car lurched forward. A half second later, Pak spun the wheel hard left, and the car skidded, sliding sideways down the road, and then suddenly they were airborne. Fisher went weightless for a moment before he was slammed forward again. His forehead cracked against the dashboard, and everything dimmed.
Fisher was vaguely aware that the car had come to a stop. He opened his eyes and looked around. The Mercedes was sitting right side up, angled downward in a drainage ditch. Fisher touched his forehead and his hand came back red. Beside him, Pak was unconscious, sitting upright in his seat, his head leaning against the side window, both hands still tethered to the wheel. Down the road he heard voices calling in Korean, then an engine accelerating toward him.
Move, Sam, don’t think. Move!
Fisher cast his eyes around the car for the pistol and spotted it lying on Pak’s floorboard. He retrieved it. Using both hands he smeared blood from his forehead down over his face and neck. He opened the car door, rolled out onto his knees, and tried to stand, but fell. He took three quick breaths to clear his head, then tried again and forced himself upright. He looked left. Down the road, not more than a hundred yards away, a vehicle was speeding toward him. He tucked the pistol into his front waistband, then climbed up the embankment and ran around to Pak’s side. He paused to wave his hands at the approaching vehicle in what he hoped was the universal Help me gesture, then stumbled to Pak’s door and began fumbling for the handle.
The vehicle — a jeep with three soldiers, Fisher now saw — skidded to a stop. The headlights pinned Fisher. The soldiers climbed out, rifles in hand, and encircled him.
“Pak!” Fisher cried, mush-mouthing his marginal Korean. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” Help me! Fisher turned his face in quarter profile toward the soldiers. Fisher was hoping the sight of blood, combined with his obvious panic, would have the desired effect. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” he cried again, batting at the car’s door handle and waving an arm toward the soldiers.
One of them, evidently the senior of the trio, barked an order. Fisher caught a snippet: “… go help…!”
It was exactly what Fisher had been waiting for. He drew the pistol from his waistband and spun. He ignored the two soldiers closest to him, who had lowered their rifles and were stepping forward to help, and focused instead on the third, who was holding his rifle at ready low. Fisher fired two shots, striking the man’s center of mass, then sidestepped left, adjusted his aim, fired twice more, then again, dropping the two other soldiers in midstep. He hurried forward, kicking rifles away as he went, and checked for pulses. All three were dead.
Behind him, Fisher heard a groan, then Pak’s voice: “You still won’t get there.”
Fisher turned around and walked back to the car.
Pak said, “In twenty minutes there will be a hundred soldiers looking for you. You won’t make it.” He coughed, then hawked up some mucus and spat it on the ground.
“Maybe,” Fisher replied, “but I’m not inclined to take your word for it. One question before I go: There was a man who was looking for Carmen Hayes. You know who I’m talking about?”
Pak furrowed his brows, then nodded. “A private detective. So?”
“Were you the one who put him in that chamber at Site Seventeen?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Couldn’t leave him alive.”
“But why that way?” Fisher asked. He wasn’t sure why any of this was important to him, but for some reason he couldn’t pin down, he needed to hear the words. “Why kill him like that?”
Pak shrugged. “Why not? I was curious.” Then Pak’s face changed. His eyes focused on Fisher’s, and he smiled smugly. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
“I knew him. His name was Peter. He was my brother.”
Pak laughed, a mocking snort. “Peter. Yes, I put him in there. Locked the door myself.”
“Did you let him out?”
Pak frowned. “Let him out?” He laughed. “Why would I let him out?”
Peter must have somehow broken out after Pak and his people had left, found a life raft, and set off, hoping against hope he’d be spotted. He probably had an idea he was already dying.
“So you just left him there to die,” Fisher said.
“He deserved no better,” Pak replied. “He wasn’t a man. He cried. He begged and screamed like a—”
Fisher raised his pistol and shot Pak in the forehead.
Pak’s head snapped back, his eyes bulging, mouth frozen open in midsentence.
40
Fisher slowed his pace, trotted down an embankment, and dropped belly first into the foot-wide stream there. Ten seconds later a convoy of two jeeps and four trucks roared by on the road and disappeared around a bend.
Fisher keyed his SVT. “Status,” he said.
“I’ve got a real-time satellite feed,” Grimsdottir said. “An NK expert from the DIA named Ben is sitting next to me.”
“Morning, Ben,” Fisher said pleasantly.
“Uh… morning sir.”
“He’ll tell us what we’re looking at,” Grimsdottir said. “Lambert and Redding are here, too.”
Lambert said, “Sam, it looks like Pak’s prediction was dead-on. They’re mobilizing everything in the area. Right now it’s about a company’s worth — maybe a hundred fifty men. On the plus side, they’re not organized. I think your ruse at the checkpoint might buy you more time than we’d thought. We’re seeing a good-size cluster of vehicles around the crash.”
After dispatching Pak, Fisher had done a series of things in short order: picked up the shell casings he’d expended, stripped Pak’s car of its license plate and any documentation inside, cut Pak’s hands free of the wheel and pocketed the flexicuffs, maneuvered the dead soldiers, including their rifles, back to the jeep and arranged them as they’d arrived, then plucked a pair of grenades off one of their belts and pushed the jeep forward until it rolled down the embankment and bumped into Pak’s door.
He’d then stepped back to check his handiwork. Satisfied, he’d shouldered his rucksack, then pulled and popped the grenades and dropped one each into the jeep’s and Mercedes’s gas tanks.
He was fifty yards away, crouched in the undergrowth, when the explosion turned the sky orange.
“Long shot as it is,” Fisher said now, “with luck it’ll take them a while to figure out it was more than an accident. With even more luck, they won’t figure it out, but I’m not counting on that.”
“Probably wise,” Lambert said. “You’ve made good time. Three miles in twenty-two minutes.”
Fisher had taken a previous five-minute break to strip out of his civilian clothes, bury them, and slip into his tac suit and gear. Tactically, the change had of course made sense, but on an intangible but no less important level, it had also helped him switch mental gears. He was on the run, deep inside Indian country. This was his element.
“Getting old,” Fisher said. “Used to be a little faster.”
Fisher checked his watch, then looked eastward. The horizon was fringed with orange light, but directly above him the sky was swollen with rain clouds. Daylight was fifty minutes away. He needed to find a bolt-hole.
“Any ideas?” Fisher asked. “I need to disappear in the next thirty minutes.”
“We’re looking,” Grimsdottir said.
Ben’s voice came on the line. “Sir, within a quarter mile of you — to the east and west — are two SAM sites,” he said, referring to surface-to-air missiles. “The normal complement for these are twelve men apiece. They’re not hardened soldiers, but I’d still give them a wide berth. To the south, where you just came from, is that NKWP retreat and checkpoint, another SAM site, a radar station, and a supply depot. To the north, where Miss Grimsdottir tells me you’re headed, are some empty artillery posit
ions — basically crescent-shaped sandbag revetments; a barracks, which we believe is only partially manned; and an abandoned sewage disposal plant.”
“How far?” Fisher asked.
“Half a mile.”
“Will is downloading a higher-resolution annotated map to your OPSAT right now,” Lambert said.
Twenty seconds later it was on Fisher’s screen. He studied it. Three hundred yards to the west of his position, at the end of the drainage ditch in which he lay, was a grove of trees running from north to south.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Pecan orchard,” replied Ben. “It runs north for about a mile, right past the sewage plant.”
“My kind of place,” Fisher said. “I’m moving.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, having picked his way from tree to tree through the pecan grove, Fisher dropped to his belly in the tall grass that bordered the sewage plant’s fence. He switched his goggles first to NV, then infrared, scanning the plant’s outbuildings and roads for activity. The plant, which roughly covered a square mile, was laid out in an L-shape, with a pair of rectangular Quonset hut-style buildings aligned on each arm of the L and a filtration pond situated between them. Running into the pond on a raised, cross-girdered platform was a six-foot-diameter sewage pipe.
He saw neither movement nor signs of habitation on the grounds. No lights, no cars. He zoomed in on one of the buildings. The windows were covered in an even layer of dust and grime. He studied the dirt parking lot and was about to zoom back out when something caught his eye: a pattern in the parking lot’s dirt.
“Grim, do we have any data on the weather around here? Specifically, wind patterns.”