Checkmate (2006)

by Tom - Splinter Cell 03 Clancy

Fisher handed over another bill. "You know this place?" The driver grabbed the dollar, but Fisher held on. "You know how long it's been here?"

  "Maybe two month. Gone last week. Never see nobody."

  "Okay, take me back."

  The driver drove to the end of the alley and turned onto the main road. Fisher let him get three blocks away, then said, "Let me out here." He paid the fare and got out, then flipped open his satellite phone and speed-dialed. Grimsdottir answered: "Extension forty-two ninety."

  "Hey, it's me. Aunt Judy isn't home, but she left a forwarding number." He recited the leasing agent's phone number. "Give her a call and let me know what you find out."

  "Will do."

  Fisher hung up and started walking. In the distance, over the stacked rooflines of Kowloon, he could see a rainbow of searchlights crisscrossing the sky. This was a nightly event in Hong Kong, a light show atop the sky-scrapers that lined the shores of Victoria Harbor. In contrast, here he was just a few miles inland walking past a coop full of clucking chickens. This was the lure of Hong Kong: two worlds, the modern and the traditional, crowded into a chunk of land one third the size of Rhode Island.

  He took a circuitous route through the streets and alleys until certain he wasn't being followed, then made his way back to the alley where Song Woo was located. He wasn't hopeful of finding anything in the deserted office, but it was an i he needed to dot.

  He found the alley as he'd left it: dark and deserted. He felt slightly naked without his tac-suit, but his pants were black and after turning it inside out, his jacket was as well.

  He clicked on his flashlight and gave the door a quick study. He clicked off the flashlight and pulled a pick set from his pocket and went to work. Twenty seconds later, he got a satisfying snick as the lock snapped back. He eased open the door, slipped through, and shut it behind him.

  The office, no bigger than an average bedroom, was devoid of furniture and furnishings. Even the overhead fluorescent lights were missing from their fixtures. At the back was a closed door. Inside he found storage closet lined with empty shelves. Sitting in the corner on a table was a multifunction printer/fax/copier. On its back side he found a sticker with Chinese characters.

  He pulled out his sat phone, took picture, and sent it to Grimsdottir with the caption "Translation?" Her answer came back sixty seconds later:

  EXCELSIOR OFFICE RENTALS

  15 CAMERON ROAD, STE 443

  KOWLOON

  CALL ME - GRIM

  He dialed and she picked up. "What's this you sent me?" she asked.

  He explained. "It looks like Song Woo was more than just a front; they did some business here. My thought is, if they rented a copier, did they rent computers?"

  "And if so, might someone have forgotten to erase everything? Good thinking."

  "Anything on the leasing agent?"

  "Working on it, but my guess is we're going to find another front company. I do have their account number at Excelsior, though."

  CAMERON Road was only a ten-minute taxi ride away, but rather than finding another comfortably dark alley, Fisher found himself standing on the sidewalk before a four-story modern office building. He lingered for only a moment, then walked across the street and stepped into a darkened doorway to watch.

  Through the front windows he could see a security guard sitting at a kidney-shaped reception desk. A woman in a charcoal gray business suit got off the elevator and walked past the desk with a wave, then pushed out the door and started down the sidewalk.

  Fisher's first instinct was to study the building for weaknesses, but then he checked himself. Here, patience was his best weapon. The front doors weren't locked, which left only lone guard in his way. The man was in his seventies, so incapacitating him would be simple, but if the pot of tea on the guard's desk was any indication, nature might do the work for Fisher.

  Five minutes passed, then ten.

  The guard stood up, stretched, then walked to the far end of the lobby and pushed through a door. Here's to an aged bladder, Fisher thought.

  He walked across the street, into the lobby, and straight to the elevators. To the right was a door bearing a stair-step pictograph. He pushed through.

  He found Excelsior Office Rentals on the fourth floor. The door's lock was more modern than the one he'd encountered at Song Woo, but it gave way with little more effort. Once inside, he found a bank of filing cabinets in a side room. He found Song Woo's file and scanned it.

  He dialed Grimsdottir. "Song Woo leased two computers from Excelsior. I've got an address for their warehouse." He gave it to her.

  "Sam, that's north of you--way north, in Lo Wu."

  Bad news. Lo Wu sat just a half mile from the border with China. Ever since the Brits handed Hong Kong back to China in 1999, the rule for tourists was, the farther north you travel, the tighter the security. Regular PLA (People's Liberation Army) troops patrolled the streets alongside civilian cops; roadblocks were more frequent and detentions more common--especially of Westerners, who rarely ventured outside Hong Kong proper and, as far as Beijing was concerned, had little business doing so.

  "I know where it is," Fisher said. "Load the map on my OPSAT. I'll be in and out of there before you can say, 'Life sentence in a Chinese labor camp.'"

  29

  LO WU

  FISHER paid the driver, got out, and shut the door. The driver did a hasty U-turn, then sped back down the dirt road, taillights disappearing into the fog. Fisher would've preferred a less conspicuous infiltration method than a bright yellow taxi, but he was short on time and the next KCR train from Kowloon to Lo Wu wasn't scheduled until the following tomorrow. As it was, he'd had to hail three taxis before finding a driver willing to take him to Lo Wu.

  Still, he wasn't overly concerned. Hong Kong's taxi drivers had an uncanny ability to immediately forget whatever their fares did or said or where they went. This wasn't so much a function of discretion as it was of self-preservation. Since the British handover, not much had changed on the surface of Hong Kong, but there was an undercurrent of tension on the streets, as if the people knew Beijing was watching.

  And if the Chinese government was watching Hong Kong, they were certainly watching Lo Wu, a stone's throw from the border. If he was being watched right now, he saw no sign of it. The road was empty and devoid of streetlights. To the north, perhaps half a mile away, he could see the lights of Lo Wu; beyond those, five miles away, the brighter lights of Shenzhen, China's southernmost metropolitan area at five million people.

  According to Grimsdottir's map, Excelsior's warehouse was on the southern outskirts of Lo Wu, between a slaughterhouse and a sewage treatment plant. It was also only a few blocks from the Border District's Police Headquarters. He pulled the OPSAT from his jacket pocket, called up the map, and memorized the landmarks.

  He turned up the collar of the jacket and started walking.

  ONLY three cars passed him and none of them slowed, which he took as a good sign. Still, with each step he felt the tingle of fear in his belly grow. He'd had his share of missions on the Chinese mainland and each of them had been unpleasant at best. Both the PLA and the Guoanbu--the Chinese secret police--were ruthlessly efficient and tended to arrest first and interrogate later.

  When he reached Kong Nga Po Road, he turned right and walked a few blocks, then turned again, into a small industrial park. He found Excelsior's warehouse next to the sewage plant's hurricane fence. Fisher walked around back to the loading dock and walked up the ramp. He tried the door. It was locked. There was a buzzer. He pulled a baseball cap from his pocket and put it on, then pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and pressed the buzzer.

  Thirty seconds passed. The door swung open. Fisher lowered his head. Under the brim of the cap he saw a pair shiny dress shoes. Security guard, he thought.

  "Shen-me?" a man's voice said. What?

  Fisher pushed the papers toward the guard, who instinctively reached for them. Fisher grabbed his wrist and jerked him off balance.
As he lurched forward, Fisher wrapped his arm around the man's neck and squeezed, cutting off the blood flow. After a few seconds, the man went limp.

  Fisher dragged him through the door, dropped him, and and caught the door with his fingertips to keep it from slamming shut. He froze and listened. If there were other night-shift workers, they might be coming to investigate. No one came.

  The loading dock was dark save for a yellow exit sign above the door. The walls were stacked high with boxes and crates in various states of loading. On the far wall were a pair of swinging doors. He dragged the man into the nearest shadow and headed for the doors.

  On the other side was the warehouse itself. Long and narrow with a low ceiling, the space was divided into four aisles, each of those divided into eight-by-eight-foot caged, floor-to-ceiling bins. Each bin seemed to contained a category of office equipment, from copiers, to desks, to generic artwork for bare walls. He found the bin he was looking for at the end of the second aisle. Through the cage he saw metal shelves crowded with computer CPUs. With a little coaxing from his picks, the padlock popped open in his hand.

  He went to work, and twenty minutes later he'd checked each CPUs serial number with no luck. Then it occurred to him: Song Woo had only recently returned its equipment. What would Excelsior do with recent returns? Maintenance check, perhaps?

  IN the last aisle he found two bins that had been merged into a work space. Sitting on the bench were a half-a-dozen CPUs and monitors. He picked the gate lock and started checking numbers. He got lucky almost immediately. He dialed Grimsdottir. "Got 'em," he said.

  "Excellent. Plug me in."

  Fisher connected the OPSAT's USB cord into the first CPU.

  Grimsdottir said, "No go. The hard drive's been reformatted."

  Fisher plugged into the second one.

  "Bingo. That one's been wiped, too, but not very well. There's data still there. Can you pull it?"

  "Consider it done."

  Five minutes later, he was back at the loading dock. As his hand touched the doorknob, he heard the slamming of a car door, then footsteps coming up the ramp. He checked his watch: five minutes to midnight. Shift change?

  The door buzzer went off.

  Fisher hurried to the guard's body and traded his own jacket for the uniform jacket; his ballcap for the guard's brimmed one. The buzzer went off again.

  "Wei!" a voice shouted. Hey!

  A fist pounded on the door.

  Fisher took a breath and opened it.

  The security guard had his fist poised over the door, ready for another strike. Down the ramp was a two-door Hongqi, with a magnetic sign affixed to the door. The man regarded Fisher for a moment, then cocked his head and opened his mouth to speak.

  Fisher hit him, a short jab to the point of his chin. The man stumbled backward, landed hard on his butt, then did a reverse somersault down the ramp. Fisher jogged after him and stopped his roll. He took the car keys from the man's jacket pocket, then carried him to the trunk, peeled off of the magnetic logo, tossed it into the backseat, and drove away.

  30

  CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE

  AFTER ninety minutes of nearly silent travel, Fisher's escort, Elena, pulled the car to the side of the road and shut off her headlights. "I have to smoke," she said in slightly accented but letter-perfect English. She got out and lit up. Fisher got out and stretched. His feet crunched on the gravel.

  As it had been for the last hour, the road was deserted and dark. Without the glow of the headlights, Fisher now realized just how dark it was. On either side of the road, marshland disappeared into the blackness. They were truly in the middle of nowhere.

  His turnaround time between his foray into Hong Kong and his landing at Kiev's Borispol Airport had been a too-short six hours--just enough time to deliver the hard drive he'd stolen from the Lo Wu warehouse to Grimsdottir, go through a quick Chernobyl mission brief with Lambert, then find an empty office couch to curl up on for two hours.

  From the ear-jarring bustle of Hong Kong to the silent, barren wastelands of Chernobyl, Fisher thought. He wasn't even sure what time zone his body clock was running on.

  "You're nervous," he said to Elena.

  "Wouldn't you be?" Elena puffed and paced. Twenty-seven, she was tall and slender, with auburn hair held in a loose ponytail. "What I've been doing for your country is about information. I give information and they take it. They've never sent anyone here. Why would they send anyone here?"

  Elena Androtov was a biologist with PRIA, or the Pripyat Research Industrial Association, which managed the thirty-kiliometer exclusion zone around the now-infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Worried that the Ukrainian and Russian governments weren't fully sharing what they knew about the ongoing effects of the Chernobyl disaster with the world, Elena had walked into a U.S. consulate while on vacation in Bulgaria and offered to be a window on what she and her colleages were really learning inside the Exclusion Zone.

  Ideology, Fisher thought. It was one of the four MICE. The reasons why people offer or agree to spy for a foreign agency usually fall into one of four categories: Money, Ideology, Compromise, or Ego. Elena had never asked for money or recognition, nor was she under duress. While the CIA was grateful for her information, none of it was earth-shattering. Her handler had repeatedly reminded her she could quit at any time, no questions asked.

  Fisher understood her apprehension at his sudden apperance. For the last six years her handlers had simply accepted her data with a simple "Thanks, make contact when you have more." And now, inexplicably, she was being asked to play tour guide to some mysterious secret agent.

  "How long have you worked here?" he asked. He knew the answer, but talking helped.

  "Six years. I came right after university. I wanted to help."

  "Have you?"

  "You tell me. How many people do you think died because of Chernobyl?"

  "The official count was thirty-one."

  Elena snorted. "Thirty-one! Twice that number of firefighters died within five minutes of reaching the scene, charred to a crisp by gamma radiation. Poof! Gone!"

  "How many, then?"

  "Over the last twenty years, just counting Ukraine and Belarus, I'd say two hundred thousand. So I ask you: How can I be helping when the whole world still believes thirty-one?"

  "Why don't you get out?"

  "I've got another year on my contract," she replied, then seemed to relax slightly. She took a drag on her cigarette. "Then maybe I'll leave. Leave Ukraine." She looked up at him. "Maybe I'll come to America."

  It was more a question than statement.

  Fisher said, "Maybe I can help you with that. But for now, you need to get me inside the Exclusion Zone. Get me in, and I'll do the rest."

  "Oh, really? The Exclusion Zone. Okay, James Bond, what do you know of the Exclusion Zone?" Not waiting for an answer, Elena pointed up the road. "Just over that hill is the checkpoint. Chernobyl is another thirty kilometers beyond that! Thirty kilometers! That's . . . that's . . ."

  "Eighteen miles," Fisher said.

  "Eighteen miles. Another fifteen kilometers past that is Ghost Town."

  "You mean Pripyat?" Before the disaster, Pripyat had been an idyllic city of fifty thousand where most of the Chernobyl workers and their families had lived. For the last two decades it had been deserted.

  "Yes, Pripyat. That's what the disaster did. That's how bad it was--is. I'll take you there. You can feel the ghosts. They walk the streets." Elena laughed and muttered to herself, "Thirty-one people. Hah!"

  "You're pretty passionate about this. Were you always?"

  "Oh, no. Just like everyone else, I'd believed the official reports. Why would our government lie about something like that? They're here to protect us. I was naive. I came here and my eyes were opened. Yours will be, too--if you want to see, that is."

  "I do."

  "Good." She checked her watch. "Get back in. We need to go."

  31

  ELENA drove for another few
minutes, then, as Fisher had asked, pulled over again. "The checkpoint is one kilometer," she said. "You remember where you're going?"

  Fisher grabbed his rucksack from the backseat and got out. "I remember. I'll meet you there in fifteen minutes."

  "Fifteen minutes."

  He shut the door, patted the car's roof, and she drove away. Her headlights disappeared into the mist. He shouldered the rucksack and walked down the embankment into the marsh. He pulled out the OPSAT, double-checked his map, then settled his trident goggles into place, switched to NV, and started jogging.

  HE and Elena would face two checkpoints. The first one, placed at the outer edge of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, was manned by guards drawn from the Ukrainian Army; every soldier was required to spend six weeks guarding the zone.

  No car was allowed to enter the Zone, lest it be contaminated. Outsiders were required to park their clean vehicles in the checkpoint parking lot, then walk through, where they were logged in and assigned a "dirty" vehicle from the motor pool.

  The Inner Ring, eleven kilometers from Reactor Number Four, was guarded by a second checkpoint, where visitors were again required to trade cars--dirty for even dirtier--and change clothes. Civilian clothes, which would be decontaminated, sealed in plastic bags, then returned to the first checkpoint to await the wearer's return, were exchanged for dark blue coveralls, plastic boots, gloves, and white surgical masks.

  According to PRIA, the use of the zone cars was not hazardous to humans, but their introduction to the world outside the zone might have "unforeseen ecological consequences."

  TEN minutes after setting out, Fisher came to a line of scrub pines and stopped. A gust of wind whistled through the trees, causing the branches to creak. He pulled his collar up against the chill.

  Whether by chance or by choice Fisher didn't know, but at least at this entrance, the tree line represented the outer ring. Irrational as it was, he wondered if things would look and feel different inside the zone. Was the grass rougher, more brittle? Were the leaves on the trees withered, trapped in in some endless radioactive autumn? Did the water smell different? He knew better, but such was the nature of radiation--an invisible rain of poison that left nothing untouched. Including the imagination.