Conviction (2009)

by Tom - Splinter Cell 05 Clancy

  "Hey, there!" one of the men called. "More--"

  Fisher let the tip of his foot catch a seam in the deck and stumbled forward, dropping the tray as he did so. As it sailed toward the group's feet, he drew the SC, brought it up, and fired three times in rapid succession, taking down both men and one of the women. The fourth one reacted surprisingly fast for a drunk, spinning on her heel and running toward the couple who stood twenty feet away. She got halfway there before Fisher's dart in the nape of her neck took her down. Even before she sprawled to the deck, Fisher shifted aim and fired again, taking out the woman on the chaise lounge. He turned, focused on the couple. From eight feet he fired twice, but a gust of wind took both darts wide, giving the man a chance to reach toward the gun in his waistband. Fisher fired again and this time the dart struck home, hitting him in the hollow of the throat. Beside him, the woman stood still, her arms raised and her mouth agape.

  "Please, don't--"

  Fisher darted her in the thigh. She went down.

  He spun, SC extended, looking for more targets. There were none.

  FISHER immediately realized he'd made a mistake, but given the plethora of fatal errors that accompanied all missions, it was an oversight he could manage: He'd brought flex cuffs enough for only Zahm's men, so after dragging the bodies closer together he secured the three men and four women in a convoluted daisy chain, wrists and ankles crisscrossing one another until the group resembled a Twister game that had gone awry. Even sober, the best the group could manage would be a disjointed scuttle across the deck; the stairs would be impossible.

  Fisher trotted back up to the villa, trussed together the couple in the guest room, then returned to where he'd left Zahm. He was still unconscious. Fisher pulled his balaclava down, then checked his watch. He waited another ten minutes, then went into the kitchen, filled up a pitcher of ice water, and dumped it over Zahm's upturned face. The improvised waterboarding had the desired effect. Zahm convulsed and sputtered and rolled onto his side, where he vomited. Fisher let him catch his breath, then knelt down beside him and stuck the barrel of the SC into his eye socket. Hard.

  "Hey! Who--"

  "Shut up."

  Retired or not, drunk or not, Zahm's soldier instincts kicked in at once. He snapped his mouth shut in midsentence and studied Fisher with a special operator's gaze.

  "I want the combination to your safe," Fisher said.

  Zahm didn't answer.

  "You can talk."

  "Go to hell, mate."

  "Is that your final answer?"

  "And if it isn't, what? You're going to shoot me?"

  Fisher shook his head. "Yes or no?"

  "No."

  "I thought as much. On your feet."

  22

  FISHER cut Zahm's feet free, then stood back as the man got up. Normally, Fisher would've felt confident keeping a couple of arms' lengths from an adversary. Zahm rated three.

  "What now?" Zahm asked.

  "That depends. The safe?"

  "Can't help you, mate."

  "It looks like we're going fishing."

  "Huh?"

  Fisher jerked his head toward the door, then followed Zahm down the hall and out the sliding doors toward the terrace steps. Zahm started down. Fisher kept his eyes alternately fixed on the small of Zahm's back and his shoulders; if the former SAS man tried to make a move, one or both of those spots would telegraph his intentions, giving Fisher the extra split second he needed.

  The lack of any computers in Zahm's home suggested that the man was technologically unsavvy, but Fisher didn't believe this. Zahm led one of the most successful gangs of thieves in British history and hadn't even come close to being caught. So the question was, why no computers? Fisher suspected Zahm simply didn't trust digital storage. While he wasn't certain he'd find what he was looking for in the safe--or that it even existed--it seemed the logical place to start.

  His choice regarding Zahm's interrogation, however, was based solely on instinct: The former SAS man wasn't likely to crack under normal methods. What Fisher had planned was abnormal in the extreme.

  When Zahm reached the pool deck, he stopped and stared at Fisher's handiwork. "They dead?" he asked.

  "No."

  "What did you do to them?"

  "Stop talking. Keep walking."

  When they reached the beach, Fisher ordered Zahm to the jetty.

  "Stop here," Fisher ordered as Zahm drew even with a skiff. "Get in."

  Zahm turned and gave Fisher a smarmy smile. "Sure you don't want to take the Dare? Great boat."

  "This'll do. Get in." Gun trained on Zahm, Fisher knelt down and steadied the boat's gunwale as Zahm stepped aboard. "Sit in the bow, facing forward."

  Zahm complied. Fisher cast off the painter, then stepped down and took his seat at the motor. It was a low-powered trolling model with electronic ignition. At the touch of the button the motor gurgled to life and then settled into a soft idle. Fisher cast off the stern line, then twisted the throttle and pulled out, aiming the bow for open ocean.

  WHEN he was a mile offshore, he throttled down and let the boat coast to a stop. Almost immediately the boat began rocking in the wind. Water lapped at its sides. He shut off the engine.

  "So, what now?" Zahm asked again. "We reenacting the Fredo scene from The Godfather? 'Cuz I--"

  Fisher nudged the SC's selector to DART and shot Zahm in the right bicep. It was a grazing shot so the drug took longer to do its job, but after ten seconds Zahm slumped forward. His head hit the gunwale with a dull thump.

  Fisher holstered the SC, drew his knife, and went to work.

  WHEN Zahm awoke twenty minutes later he found himself hanging over the side of the rowboat, his flex-cuffed wrists secured to the cleat. "What the hell is this!"

  "You're in the water."

  "I can see that. . . ." Zahm struggled, trying to chin himself up, but gave up after ten seconds. "What the . . . What's around my legs?"

  "The anchor."

  Now Fisher saw the first signs of fear in Zahm. The man's eyes flashed white in the darkness as he turned his head this way and that. "What the hell is this?" he shouted again.

  "Psychologists call it a stress trigger," Fisher replied. "I've got a theory about you, Zahm: First you volunteered for one of the toughest units in the British military. Probably saw your fair share of action, I'm assuming?"

  "Yeah, so?"

  "Then you leave the SAS and dive headfirst into writing novels; then you buy a seven-million-dollar yacht and spend most of your time at sea."

  "What's your point?"

  "My theory is this: When something scares you, you attack it. The more it scares you, the more of it you do."

  "Go to hell."

  "You're afraid of the water, Chucky."

  "No chance, mate."

  "Drowning, sharks . . . Whatever it is, you hate the ocean."

  Zahm shook his head a little too quickly.

  "Let's put it to the test," Fisher said, then scooted forward, drew his knife, and flicked the tip over Zahm's forearm, opening a one-inch cut. Blood trickled down his skin and began plopping into the water.

  Now Zahm's eyes bulged. He thrashed in the water.

  "Wouldn't do that," Fisher said. "Sharks love that. What kind do you have in these waters? Tiger? Bull? Great white?"

  "Come on, mate. Get me out of here."

  "As soon as you tell me what I want to know."

  Zahm didn't reply immediately. He craned his neck around, checking the water around him. "What . . . what did you say?"

  "As soon as you tell me what I want to know I'll bring you back aboard.

  "Talk! Come on!

  "You and your Little Red Robbers--

  "Hey, that's . . ."

  Fisher stopped talking. He simply stared at Zahm until the man barked, "Okay, okay . . ."

  Fisher continued. "You and your Little Red Robbers did some work for a man named Yannick Ernsdorff." This was half a hunch, but with men like Zahm, bravado was curre
ncy. "I want you to tell me what you did for him. The what, the when, the where--everything."

  "And if I do?"

  "Are you bargaining with me, Zahm?"

  Zahm jerked around in the water. "Something bumped me! Something bumped my feet!"

  "Didn't take long, did it?" Fisher observed. "That bump is a test. It's trying to figure out if you're a threat. Next it'll give you a test bite."

  "Oh, God . . ."

  "You done bargaining?" Fisher asked.

  "Yeah, sorry, sorry . . ."

  "Here's the upside for you: One, you stop being live bait. Two, we part company and never see each other again. And three, I'll keep your sideline job a secret-- providing you and your boys retire permanently. I assume you can afford to do that."

  "Yeah, we're set."

  "Do we have a deal?"

  Zahm nodded. "Now, for the love of bloody Christ, get me out of here!"

  Fisher hauled him over the gunwale, leaving his feet jutting over the side and the anchor line trailing in the water. Fisher rolled Zahm onto his back and waited until he'd caught his breath. "Yannick Ernsdorff," Fisher prompted.

  "Yeah, he hired us about eight months ago. One job, six million dollars, U.S. Don't know how he found us, but he had proof--enough to put us away for good. Knew every job we'd done. He never said the words, but I got the message: Do the job, take the money, and stay out of jail."

  "Where was the job?"

  "China. Someplace in China, near the Russian border. I've got documents in my safe."

  Fisher smiled. "I thought you might. Insurance?"

  "With a guy like Ernsdorff? Hell, yes, I got insurance."

  "You deal with anyone other than Ernsdorff?"

  "Nobody by name."

  "Descriptions?"

  "A Chinese bloke . . . lean, hair graying at the temples; a Russian . . . hoop earring and ponytail; an American . . . gray hair, crew cut."

  "Okay, go on."

  "So we spend three months prepping for the job. Turns out the place is a government-run research laboratory in the middle of nowhere. Disguised as a chicken farm. Good internal security but almost no external stuff. Tough nut, that place."

  "But you did the job?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Ernsdorff didn't tell us what we were after. Just told us where to go and what to look for. Just shipping crates--high-end Lexan stuff--with serial numbers on it. He told us not to look inside."

  "But you looked inside," Fisher said. "You took pictures."

  "Damn straight we did. One of my guys is good with seals. We broke open the cases, took inventory, then sealed them up again, pretty as you like."

  "And? What was inside?"

  "Weapons," Zahm said.

  "I assume we're not talking about AK-47s."

  Zahm shook his head. "No, mate, we're talking about World War III stuff."

  23

  HAPPILY, Fisher found he was wrong about Zahm's technological foibles. The man had no issues with modern conveniences. He simply enjoyed life too much to partake in them. In that alone, Fisher admired him.

  What he'd found upon opening Zahm's safe was not only a cardboard accordion folder filled with document scans and four-by-six photos in both color and black and white but also a Sony 4 GB Memory Stick Pro Duo.

  After making sure Zahm's guests were still bound and unconscious, Fisher made sure the former SAS man understood both the benefits of forgetting what had occurred over the past two hours and the consequences of pursuing the matter after Fisher's departure.

  IT was almost 3:00 A.M. before Fisher returned to his Setubal home. Just before 8:00 in Washington. He inserted the Memory Stick into the OPSAT's multiport, uploaded the data, then waited for a response from Grim. It didn't take long:

  Data received.

  Proceed ASAP to Madrid safe house.

  Lisbon Portela Airport. Flight 0835. Ticket at Iberia desk.

  Contact upon arrival.

  Short and sweet, Fisher thought. He'd worked with Grimsdottir long enough to know what that meant: She'd found something of value.

  HE caught three hours of sleep, then got up, packed, and drove his rental car to Cabo Espichel, a promontory overlooking the ocean. There he set the OPSAT for timed self-destruction and dropped it, along with the rest of his gear, in the backpack, into the ocean. However slight the chance of its being noticed, he was wary of repeating his DHL gear-shipment procedure one too many times. Patterns attract attention. And, though Fisher was not a superstitious man, he half believed in not pushing one's luck too far.

  He arrived at the Lisbon airport an hour before his flight, had a bite of breakfast in one of the concourse food courts, then boarded his flight, arriving in Madrid an hour later, two hours on the clock. He was at the safe house by eleven thirty, and talking to Grim on the LCD a few minutes after that.

  "We got a break," she announced. "Multiple breaks, in fact."

  "You have my attention."

  "First, this is mostly hunch work, but the three men other than Ernsdorff that Zahm claims to have dealt with . . . I think I know who they are: Yuan Zhao, Chinese intelligence; Mikhail Bratus, GRU, Russian military intelligence; and Michael Murdoch, an American. Does import and export, runs a handful of companies, most of them tech related. He's also elbow deep in defense contract work.

  "Second, we extracted another name from Ernsdorff's server data: Aariz Qaderi, a Chechen from Grozny."

  Fisher knew the name. Two years earlier, after assassinating his predecessor, Qaderi had taken control of the Chechen Martyrs Regiment, or CMR. It was well financed, tightly organized and disciplined, and made no bones about its mission: the subjugation or eradication of all nonbelievers.

  "What kind of data?" Fisher asked.

  "Just his name, an account number, and a pending payment of ten million U.S. dollars."

  "Big money. Pending to whom?"

  "Ernsdorff. Or whomever he's fronting for. Here's part two of the story: One of the serial numbers from Zahm's China job--"

  "He didn't remember where exactly. . . ."

  "The Jilin-Heilongjiang region, near the border with Russia, about a hundred miles northwest of Vladivostok. Anyway, one of the serial numbers from Zahm's job turned up during a raid of a CMR weapons cache outside Grozny. It was a land mine."

  "Hardly worth ten million dollars," Fisher observed.

  "No. I'm thinking the ten million is buy in. The land mine was a teaser--a freebie to get Aariz Qaderi interested.

  "That's the bad news. I've waded through Zahm's 'insurance' records from the theft. What Ernsdorff had him hit was a doppelganger factory."

  Fisher paused, sighed. "Oh, hell."

  For decades China's foreign intelligence agency, Ministry of State Security--the MSS or Guoanbu--had been focused on industrial espionage. Through its Tenth Bureau, Scientific and Technological Information, the Guoanbu had been successfully targeting private military contracts in the West. The existence of doppelganger factories--laboratories applying the raw intelligence data gathered by the Guoanbu--had been suggested by the CIA in the late nineties, but solid evidence had never been found.

  Doppelganger factories were dedicated to one purpose: creating perfect knockoffs of the West's latest and greatest weapons, often systems that weren't yet even in use by Western militaries.

  "The official name was Laboratory 738," Grimsdottir said. "But based on Zahm's data, there's no doubt what it was."

  "You said 'was.' "

  "I went back and checked the satellite imagery. About a month after Zahm's job, all activity at that chicken farm stopped. In the space of forty-eight hours it became a ghost town."

  "Can't say I blame them," Fisher replied. "What else are they going to do? Admit to the rest of the world they stole the biggest and baddest secrets, then used those secrets to create an uberarsenal that they then lost? What are we talking about, Grim? What kind of weaponry?"

  "I'll download the encrypted list to your new OPSAT when you're ready, but suffice it to say that Zahm w
asn't exaggerating: If this arsenal falls into the wrong hands, they'll become a first-world power overnight."

  HERE was one of the reasons--the other had been settled months earlier--Fisher had been on the run for the past year and a half. Long before Lambert died he'd become one of the few U.S. intelligence officials convinced that doppelganger factories were, in fact, real. Worse still, Lambert had come to believe the Guoanbu had been getting help from within the Pentagon, the private defense industry, and the U.S. intelligence community, including high level NSA officials--all of whom were, in essence, sowing the seeds of America's destruction. Armed with the most sophisticated--and often improved-upon--weapons and systems, China, its nuclear weapons, and its billion strong People's Liberation Army would become invincible.

  While it hadn't taken much time for Lambert to convince Fisher and Grim that his theory was sound, it had taken much more to convince them that his plan was their only viable course. In killing his boss, Fisher had not only laid the groundwork for his entry into the mercenary underworld, but he'd also removed the specter of Lambert uncovering the corruption and treason that had infected virtually every aspect of the U.S. military-industrial complex. With Lambert dead and Fisher on the run and hunted, those involved would breathe a sigh of relief, go about their business, and hopefully make a mistake on which Fisher and Grimsdottir could seize.

  "So let's put the pieces together," Fisher said. "Ernsdorff is playing money man to whomever hired him to hire Zahm."

  "Mister X," Grimsdottir suggested.