“One, but he’s just an information resource. An old friend, in fact.”
“Any airports or strips nearby?”
“Strips, but mostly for puddle jumpers and inland charters. If they’re going to get Stewart out, they’d have to do it by boat again or get him to an airport proper. I’m putting both Stewart and Pak on the watch list—observe and report, no apprehension unless directed. If they make for an airport, we’ll know it.”
“Good.”
“How soon can you—”
“Bird and Sandy are en route. There’s an airstrip at Enfield, a few miles north up the One oh two. I’m on my way.”
GRAND RIVER, CAPE BRETON ISLAND, NOVA SCOTIA
BY the time Stewart’s tracking beacon made it ashore and finally came to rest at what looked like the middle of nowhere on Cape Breton’s rugged southern coast, dawn was only a few hours away, so at Fisher’s suggestion, Lambert scrubbed the mission. Before Fisher could track down Stewart and Pak and find out what they were up to, he needed to get the lay of the land. According to Fisher’s map of Cape Breton, there were no towns or villages to speak of between Grand River and Fourchu, some thirty miles to the north.
Grimsdottir’s contact, an old college friend turned history author named Robert A. Robinson—RAT—as Grim called him, lived in Soldiers Cove not far from Grand River with his wife of thirty-five years, Emily.
Robinson, a Middle East policy expert kept on a consultant’s retainer by the CIA, was also, despite being Canadian neither by birth nor citizenship, the foremost expert on the obscure subject of Cape Breton Island history.
“He can brief the hell out of you, make a laser out of your cell phone, and recite obscure sci-fi trivia until you bleed from the ears,” Grimsdottir had said.
“A jack of strange trades,” Fisher said.
“And he knows how to keep his mouth shut. You can trust him.”
Fisher’s first impulse was to simply follow Stewart’s beacon and do his own surveillance, but Stewart and Pak seemed to be going nowhere for the time being and, as Fisher had learned the hard way over the years, the six Ps were unbreakable laws of nature one didn’t taunt: Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. Better to know where he was going before he dove in headfirst.
Fisher found Robinson’s home, a three-story Victorian that backed up to horse pastures on two sides and a creek on the other, on the outskirts of Soldiers Cove, population 101. It was eight in the morning, and mist still clung to the grass and low-lying bushes. He pushed through the gate in the white split-rail fence and followed a crushed shell path to the front door. It opened as he mounted the porch steps.
A man in a wheelchair, his lap covered by a red argyle blanket, wheeled onto the porch. “Don’t tell me: You must be Sam of the no last name.”
Fisher smiled. “I must be. And you must be Robert the R AT.”
“Ha! I see Anna’s been telling tales out of school again.” Robinson had a genuine smile and booming laugh. “Come in, come in. Coffee’s on.”
Fisher followed him down a hardwood hallway into a country-style kitchen complete with a wood-burning Napoleon stove. Robinson wheeled through the kitchen and bumped the chair down two short steps into a four-season sunroom. Fisher took the indicated seat.
To the east, the sun was rising, a perfect orange disk suspended over the horse pasture at the rear of Robinson’s property. A cluster of horses were standing near the fence, chewing grass, their breath smoking in the air.
“Not a bad way to start the day, is it?”
Fisher took a sip of coffee and shook his head. “Not bad at all.”
“SO,” Robinson began, “Anna told me you were a grim fellow, that I shouldn’t for any reason cross you if I value my life.”
Fisher stared at him. “No, she didn’t.”
“No, she didn’t—but she told me to say she did.”
“She’s a card, that Anna.”
“She is indeed. To business: You’re looking for a man; he’s somewhere around between here and Fourchu. Can you show me where, exactly?”
Fisher pulled a Palm Pilot from his pocket, powered it up, and pulled up the map screen. Stewart’s beacon was marked as a tiny red circle. He showed it to Robinson, who frowned. “Latitude and longitude, please?”
Fisher tapped the screen with the stylus, changing the map’s overlay.
“How precise is this beacon—I mean this spot, on the map?” Robinson said with a sly grin.
Doesn’t miss much, Fisher thought.
“Give or take three feet.”
“Ah, the joys of technology. It’s all about physics, you know, all about physics.”
“Pardon me?” Fisher said.
But Robinson was no longer listening. He had pulled a Gateway laptop from his chair’s saddlebag and was powering it up. Muttering the latitude and longitude coordinates to himself, he called up Google Maps—“The bane of the National Reconnaissance Office, you know,” he said to Fisher. “Now everyone can play their game”—then punched in the coordinates and studied the satellite image there.
“Just as I thought,” Robinson said.
“What?”
“Your quarry, Sam my new friend, is in Little Bishkek.”
Bishkek. Robinson’s mention of the word was so unexpected it took Fisher several seconds to process what he was hearing. “Bishkek. As in Kyrgyzstan’s capital?”
“Yes, sir. That Bishkek. The same Bishkek that is, as we speak, in the midst of yet another civil war. Are you a big believer in coincidences, Sam?”
“No.”
“Me neither. But that’s not even the worst news. Your little red circle there—if the coordinates are accurate—is not just in Little Bishkek, it is inside the walls of Ingonish.”
“Which is?”
“The home—a castle slash fort, really—to the mayor, general, chief enforcer, and king of Little Bishkek, Tolkun Bakiyev.”
“You’d better back up,” Fisher said, “And give me a little history.”
“Back in the seventies, a group of enterprising Kyrgyz families that specialized in crime of the organized variety, started feeling unwelcome in Bishkek. Back then, before they went into Afghanistan, the Soviets got serious about injecting their proletariat gospel into the stans, including Kyrgyzstan, by helping the Bishkek government crack down on the working-class-unfriendly Mafia. Bosses, henchmen, and sundry thugs began disappearing and dying left and right.
“Knowing they couldn’t fight the Soviet bear, and being more interested in profits than in principle, what was left of the Kyrgyz Mafia struck their tents and emigrated for greener pastures. Some went to Europe, some Australia, some America, but one family—the Bakiyev clan—came to Nova Scotia. The other families failed, broke apart, or were otherwise destroyed by local organized crime or law enforcement, but the Bakiyevs played it smart. They found a rundown and mostly uninhabited village on the coast of Cape Breton, moved in, took up the local trade of fishing, and just generally worked at fitting in and making babies for six or seven years, all the while attracting other wandering Kyrgyz.
“Once the elder Bakiyev—Tolkun’s father—thought their group had properly assimilated, he quietly turned the town back to its old ways of organized crime. Now they specialize mostly in smuggling black market goods, from fake iPhones to Gucci knockoffs that they ship into the United States. No one really knows how much influence Tolkun has outside Little Bishkek, but since the town’s founding, not a single outside land developer has managed to make any inroads there. It’s a tight-knit community, Sam, and they’re not the welcoming sort. You’ve seen those westerns, where a stranger walks into the saloon and the music stops and everyone just stares at him?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what it’s like driving through Little Bishkek. You stop for a cup of coffee, and you’ve got a hundred pair of eyes watching you until you hit the town’s outskirts again. They’re not unfriendly, exactly, but it’s pretty clear that if you’re not Kyrgyz, you do
n’t want to be shopping for apartments.”
“I understand.”
“I truly hope so, Sam. If you’re planning on getting him out of Little Bishkek, and they’re not willing to part with him, the odds are stacked against you.”
Fisher, staring at the horses cantering through the pasture, nodded slowly, then turned to Robinson and smiled grimly. “I love a challenge.”
18
LITTLE BISHKEK
TWO hours after dusk, as night fully closed in over the coast, Fisher turned south off Cape Breton’s main southern coast road, the St. Peters-Fourchu, onto a winding dirt track that took him to the beach. He rolled to a stop in the gravel parking lot in the lee of a sand dune and shut off the headlights and engine. He sat quietly for few minutes, listening to the engine’s tick tick tick as it cooled and watching the clouds gather over the sea. The rain would be here in less than an hour, and while its coming would present its own challenges for the mission ahead, the rain would dampen sound, deepen the shadows, and the clouds would cover the full moon, which had been his biggest worry.
His cell phone trilled. He checked the caller ID screen, then tapped the CONNECT button on his Bluetooth headset. “Hi, Grim.”
“I’ve got the colonel on as well, Sam.”
“Evening, Colonel.”
“I understand you’ve managed to find yourself a tough nut to crack.”
“It’s a gift I have.”
Between Robinson’s own maps and books and firsthand knowledge of the area and Grim’s computer research, they had over the last ten hours built an impressive profile on Tolkun Bakiyev’s home, the fort known as Ingonish.
Ingonish, named after the city on the northern tip of the island, was built in 1740 by the French and changed hands half a dozen times over the next eighteen years as the French and British fought first the Seven Years’ War, then the King George’s War. Intended as a siege fort to guard what was now the Grand River Estuary, Ingonish never saw battle and as such never gained a place in the history books, earning in the mid-nineteenth century the nickname, the Forgotten Castle.
Upon leaving Robinson’s house, Fisher had immediately called in to report the Kyrgyzstan connection. Like Fisher, Lambert wasn’t a believer in coincidences, and he immediately tasked Grimsdottir and Redding with finding a connection—any connection, no matter how slight—that might explain a link between Carmen Hayes, the hydrogeologist; Calvin Stewart, the particle physicist; Chin-Hwa Pak, the North Korean RDEI spy; and the PuH-19 that had killed Peter. All were pieces of what appeared may be the same puzzle, but there was so far not even a hint of what bigger picture they might form.
Right now, though, Fisher had to focus on the task at hand: getting into Ingonish.
“Your OPSAT is fully loaded,” Grimsdottir said. “The problem is, the castle hasn’t been a tourist attraction for twenty years, since Bakiyev bought it, so we don’t have any recent pictures. The good news is, the thing’s made mostly of stone, so there’s not much remodeling the guy could have done. Between Robert’s library and what I’ve been able to pull off the Net, we put together a partial blueprint of the place. There’re going to be gaps, though, so play it by ear.”
“One of my specialties,” Fisher replied.
“Sam, same ROE as before,” Lambert said. “We need to keep this pipeline open, especially if it might eventually lead to Kyrgyzstan.”
Bodies tend to clog pipelines, Fisher thought. “Understood. I know you’ve probably already considered this, Colonel, but that mortar attack on Bishkek . . . The North Koreans have that kind of technology—stolen, of course, but they’ve got it nonetheless.”
“Yeah, I know. And satellite access.”
Through front companies, the North Korean RDEI had for years been snatching up space on commercial satellite launches and piggybacking on existing commercial Landsats (land satellites) in orbit.
Fisher checked his watch, then craned his neck so he had a clearer view through the windshield. The rain clouds were slipping over the coast, and against the lower curve of the moon he could see wisps of rain. “Time to get the show on the road.”
“Stay in touch,” Lambert said, “and stay invisible.”
Fisher did his superman imitation in the car, slipping out of his street clothes to reveal his tac suit underneath, donned his web harness, belt, and rucksack, then climbed out and started jogging.
Ingonish, situated on the northern edge of Little Bishkek, was a mile up the beach. Fisher covered the distance in six minutes. He stopped in a crouch against the cliff beneath the fort, some two hundred feet above his head. Down at the tide line, the ocean was hissing across the sand and receding, a soothing, rhythmic swoosh-hiss broken only by the distant groaning of foghorns. Fisher licked his lips and tasted salt.
Above his head came a screech. He pressed himself against the rock and looked up. Halfway up the cliff, the flapping shadow of a bird wheeled away from the rocks and disappeared in the darkness. Fisher, suspicious now, flipped down his goggles and switched to night-vision mode and scanned the cliffs above.
“You’ve got to be kidding me . . .” he murmured.
Scattered in nests among the nooks and crannies across the rock face were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cormorants. A perfect, self-sustaining organic early warning system, Fisher thought. He had zero chance of scaling the cliff without setting off an explosion of screeching birds.
Rising from the top of the cliff for a quarter mile to the north he could see the towers and crenellated walls of the fort itself. Scattered across the wall were four stories of arched, inset widows; here and there, some were lit from within. Fisher used the goggles to zoom in but saw no one moving behind the glass.
He said into the SVT, “Penetration route one is out. Switching to PR two.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied. “Problem?”
“Birds,” Fisher replied. “Lots and lots of birds.”
PR two had been Fisher’s second choice primarily because to reach it he had to go precisely where he didn’t want to go: through downtown Little Bishkek. Facing a naturally suspicious and xenophobic population, the idea of picking his way down the main street—at night or not—was unappealing at best. Robinson had mentioned that yet another of Little Bishkek’s quirks was that at night its inhabitants fielded an unofficial police force, citizens that patrolled the streets and sidewalks armed with billy clubs, flashlights, and whistles. The clubs and flashlights didn’t particularly concern Fisher, but the whistles did. Little Bishkek’s population was 694, and he was beginning to think a single whistle blast would bring each and every one of them to the streets.
Fisher jogged back to his car, then up the winding track to the St. Peters-Fourchu, where he crouched down in the bushes and kept watch for a few minutes to ensure he was alone. Satisfied, he sprinted, hunched over, two hundred yards down the road, staying in the undergrowth along the shoulder until he reached the junction where St. Peters-Fourchu met Quqon Road, Little Bishkek’s main thorough-fare, which curved again to the south, toward the bluffs. Another thirty seconds of running brought him within sight of the village’s westernmost building, a small, tin-roofed post office. He crouched down against the building’s hard-board wall, scooted to the edge, and peeked around the corner. A drizzle was now falling, lightly pattering on the roof above. The drainpipes gurgled softly with the runoff.
Little Bishkek’s layout was straightforward: Businesses and restaurants lined the northern and southern sides of Quqon Road, the latter sitting atop the cliffs overlooking the sea, a mile south of Ingonish. From the road’s northern edge, residential streets radiated inland for half a mile. As far as Fisher could see, the village’s architecture was comprised mostly of saltbox construction with hard and clap-board siding, dormered windows, and steeply pitched slate roofs. Over the tops of the businesses, each of which was fronted by a raised, continuous boardwalk and a hand-painted sign in both French and Kyrgyz, Fisher could see dozens upon dozens of chimneys—most emitting
a curl of smoke—and scattered squares of lighted windows. The storefronts were painted in various shades of pale blue, butter yellow, and mint green. Lining the boardwalk every fifty feet or so was an electric, gaslight-style streetlamp, the globes glowing yellow in the darkness.
Fisher switched to night vision and scanned the street. He saw nothing but a single cat, ghostly in washed-out gray green, dash across the street and disappear down a side street. He switched first to EM—as expected he saw no signs of cameras or sensors—then to infrared to scan for thermal signatures.
Hello there . . .
Two figures, standing together at the corner of a building on this side of the street about a hundred yards away. In IR, they were man-shaped cutouts cast in various temperature shades of red, yellow, green, and blue. As Fisher watched, he could see a long, dark blue cylinder dangling from each man’s hand. Billy clubs. The men talked for a few more minutes as one of them smoked, then shook hands and parted company, one crossing the street and heading north, the other mounting the boardwalk and heading in Fisher’s direction, tapping the billy club against his thigh as he walked.
Fisher crept back along the building until he reached the rear wall, where he found an open-faced porch. Its outer rail sat three feet from the edge of the cliff, which dropped away into darkness. Far below he could hear the faint rush of the surf, and closer in, seemingly coming from a few feet down the rock face, soft cooing sounds he assumed belonged to the cormorants. Between the porch rail and the cliff’s edge was a narrow gravel path. He crouch-stepped around the porch’s corner railing onto the path, then down to the building’s next corner.
“Arretez!”
The voice, speaking in French, came from Fisher’s left. He spun and found himself facing a pair of legs. He looked up in time to see a billy club sweeping down toward his face. He jerked his head backward, felt the club graze his cheekbone and, as he fell backward onto his butt, he drew his pistol and squeezed off a single shot. The bullet entered below the man’s chin and exited the top of his skull. His head snapped back, and he toppled forward, his billy club skittering down the path. Fisher rolled out of the way. The man landed with his upper torso over the edge of the cliff, teetered there for a moment, then slid over the edge. There came the distant flapping of wings and scattered squawks, but after five seconds silence returned. Fisher crab-walked down the path, retrieved the guard’s fallen billy club, tossed it over the edge, and then crawled beneath the floorboards of the porch and went still.