Close. Too close.
Little Bishkek’s citizen cops were armed with more than just clubs and whistles; they also came equipped with some very quiet footsteps.
Fisher waited another five minutes, watching to see if the encounter had drawn any attention, then keyed his SVT and said, “Sleeper; clean.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied.
Whether his clean report would prove truly accurate or not, only time would tell. In his brief, Robinson had doubted the village’s cops were on any check-in schedule or supervision. Fisher checked his watch: still three hours before shift change. Time enough if he moved quickly. Even if the man’s body were found tonight, it was unlikely the crash into the rocks below would have left much to identify. Hopefully the trauma would camouflage the bullet wound.
In fact, Fisher thought, a little staging might help the ruse. He crawled back onto the path and used his hands to smooth out the man’s erratic footprints near the path. He took another NV/IR scan of the area to ensure he was still alone and then used his boot heel to gently kick away a foot-wide section of dirt along the cliff face. With luck, the indentation would look like a section that had simply given way beneath the man.
Fisher got up and started moving.
19
OVER the next hour Fisher picked his way slowly through the heart of the village. In addition to the other guard he’d seen upon reaching the outskirts, he found three others, each seemingly moving in random patterns, sometimes up and down the residential streets bordering Quqon Road, sometimes on the boardwalks along the storefronts, but always moving aside for occasional stops to chat with a fellow guard. Fisher absently wondered whether this level of patrol was the norm or if it had been prompted by the new arrival at Ingonish. He hoped it was the former; it might mean security measures inside the fort itself had similarly remained unchanged.
Finally, just before midnight, he was within fifty yards of the fort itself. The fort’s facade, a stone wall twelve feet tall and, according to Robinson, four feet thick, rose directly from the road and was broken only by a pair of massive, cross-beamed oak doors. It wasn’t the wall or the doors that interested Fisher but rather an architectural detail Robinson had mentioned in his brief.
He circled to the rear of the next-door building—an outdoor café with green and white awnings—and crept along the cliff-side path until he was within arm’s reach of the fort’s wall. Here, running between the café and the wall, was a three-foot gap in the street’s cobblestones covered by a rusted iron grating. Through the grating, four feet below, Fisher could see cracked and jagged cobbles.
The canal, which Robinson had called a siege runnel, lay at a slight slant and perpendicular to the main road, and began just inside the front wall with an L-shaped junction. It ended at the edge of the cliff with a funnel-like chute, also covered in iron grating.
Though it had never seen any action, Robinson had said, the siege runnel had been designed as a stationary siege defense system into which cannonballs and boiling pitch could be dropped and then rolled onto invaders on the beach below.
Down the alley Fisher heard footsteps clicking on the cobblestones. He dropped flat on the path, his face pressed into the dirt. At the mouth of the alley, a silhouetted figure had stopped. The man clicked on his flashlight and shined the beam down along the siege runnel. The light played over Fisher’s face, paused for a few seconds, then clicked off. The man walked on. His footsteps creaked as he mounted the boardwalk steps, then faded, clicking on wood as he continued down the street. Fisher slowly reached up, toggled his goggles to IR, waited until he could no longer hear the footsteps, then waited another two more minutes until he was certain the man hadn’t doubled back.
Still on his belly, he crawled forward until his fingertips touched the edge of the runnel’s grating. From his right thigh pouch he withdrew what looked like three twelve-inch strips of heavy filament tape. Each strip was made up of two bonded halves, one half containing a superconcentrated coat of gelled nitric acid, the other half a catalyst, and between the two a thin strip of neutralizing agent. Jutting a few inches from the end of each strip was a nub of knotted cable.
He placed two strips perpendicularly across the grating, about a foot apart, and the third along the grating’s far edge where it met the cobbles. Next he reached out his left hand, gripped the center of the grating and then in turn pulled the cable nub from each strip. Five seconds passed, and then Fisher heard a faint hissing, like air escaping a tire’s valve stem. The hissing went on for a full sixty seconds, then slowly faded away. The severed grating gave way. He tensed his forearm, taking the grating’s weight, then caught it, scooted forward, laid it in the bottom of the runnel, and crawled down.
Five minutes later he had the grating back in place, secured by homemade black baling wire clips he’d fashioned earlier that day.
“At PR two,” he radioed. “Moving in.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied.
Now safely inside the runnel, Fisher had two options for gaining entry into the fort proper: one a sure thing and the other a maybe. Forts of this period, which used this particular type of siege defense, usually, but not always, had two ports into which defenders fed their bombs: a cannonball port, just inside the fort’s walls—this would be the L junction Fisher had seen earlier—and a pitch slot, normally located inside the castle near a forge for heating the pitch. This was Fisher’s preferred entrance.
He switched his goggles to NV and on hands and knees began crawling up the runnel toward the street.
Suddenly, behind him at the cliff’s edge, came the crunch of footsteps on gravel.
Fisher froze, looked around. Ten feet ahead of him he saw a square of darkness set into the side of the runnel. Moving as quickly as he dared without giving himself away, he crawled to the opening, duck-stepped into it under a cobblestone overhang, and went still. He drew his pistol, switched the selector to DART 4, and looked up through the grating. Fisher was under no illusions here. Putting a shot—dart or bullet alike—through the grating was a one-in-a-thousand chance.
For a few seconds nothing moved. All was silent.
And then, like a ghost gliding out of the darkness, a guard crept into Fisher’s field of vision. The man, walking on flat feet, had his whistle clamped between his teeth, his billy club clutched in his fist and held before him. Carefully, slowly, Fisher backed himself deeper into the opening until he felt his back press against something hard. His heart pounded in his chest. He felt sweat gathering on the small of his back and his sides.
Keep moving, pal, just keep—
The guard stopped. He clicked on his flashlight and knelt down, playing it beneath the foundation pilings of the café next door, then down along the runnel. He stood up again, then stepped over the grating toward the fort’s outer wall.
Checking the rooftops, Fisher thought. He took in a calming breath, let it out slowly.
After another sixty seconds, the guard stepped back over the grating, took one last look around, then headed down the alley toward the street.
FISHER had found his “maybe” entrance. The pitch slot was eighteen inches wide and three feet tall and sealed from the inside by an ancient but solid-looking wooden hatch and a brand-new stainless steel padlock. Someone had given at least passing attention to Ingonish’s small security details, but as he’d found at Legard’s estate and he often found when dealing with men who lived by ego and ruled by threat of violence, Tolkun Bakiyev probably assumed his reputation alone was security measure enough. The rest—locks, sensors, cameras—were secondary. For men like that, admitting you needed heavy, sophisticated security was to show weakness.
Fisher picked the padlock and opened the hatch an inch, testing the hinges for telltales, but like the padlock, someone had looked after this detail as well; the hinges had a fresh coat of oil on them—WD-40, by the smell of it. He checked the jamb and hinges for wires or sensors; there were none. In the cracks between the cobbles, however, he s
potted a gooey black substance. He worked his fingernail into a crack and dug out some of the substance. He sniffed it. Tar. Fisher smiled. Ingonish may have never seen any real warfare, but it appeared someone had at least tested out her defenses. He stared at the tar for a few more moments, strangely fascinated, wondering exactly how old it was. Ingonish was built in 1740; the tar was at least two hundred sixty-eight years old. Amazing, Fisher thought.
He slid the flexicam through the crack. On the other side of the hatch was another four feet of cobble-lined runnel that ended in an up-sloping ramp; beyond that, Fisher could see a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot room with brick walls. Set into the right wall were two windows he assumed overlooked the cliff and between them a wide, open-hearth fireplace. On the nearest wall, just to the left of the flexicam’s lens, was a long woodworker’s bench backed by a Peg-Board holding a variety of hand tools, from screwdrivers to pliers to hand planes. A workshop. On the bench itself were several birdhouses in various states of construction. On the far wall was a single wooden door, but unlike those he’d encountered outside, this one was modern, a maple six-panel slab with brushed nickel hardware.
He gave the room a thorough scan in all three modes—IR, NV, and electromagnetic—and all looked clear, so he withdrew the flexicam, packed it away, then pushed the hatch all the way open and crawled through. When he reached the slope, he belly-crawled until he was just below the level of the floor, then took a final EM scan of the room. Again, he saw nothing.
He stood up and stretched his limbs, then checked the OPSAT. On the RFID tracking screen, which Grimsdottir had overlaid with her cobbled-together blueprint of Ingonish, Stewart’s beacon, now a red diamond, pulsed steadily. Fisher turned in a circle, orienting himself with north, then checked the screen again. He panned and zoomed the blueprint.
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. r />
“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.