Fallout (2007)

  Fisher crossed the street, pushed through the building’s door, and took the stairs to the third floor. Pults’s office was the first door on the right; the silver-painted plastic plaque beside it read PULTS INVESTIGATIONS. Fisher turned the knob and walked through. In the back, behind a Formica-topped reception desk, a muted bell sounded.

  “Be right with ya,” Pults called.

  Fisher walked past the reception desk, turned at a copy machine/coffee room, and stood in Pults’s doorway. Pults was sitting on the edge of his desk, one sock and shoe off, clipping the toenail on his big toe. Behind Pults was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase packed to overflowing. Fisher saw some Herodotus and Plutarch, dozens of World War II and Civil War history books, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a compendium of Three Stooges trivia. Clearly Pults was well-read and had eclectic taste. Beside the bookcase was a five-by-seven picture of a dog, a bichon frise, Fisher guessed. It was wearing a superman costume with the word SNOWBALL emblazoned across the front.

  “Hey, hi there,” Pults said, looking up. “I’ll be right—”

  “That’s okay,” Fisher said. “This won’t take long. You had lunch with a man named Peter a couple weeks ago at Brulerie St-Denis. As far as I can tell, you were the last man to see him alive.”

  Pults squinted at Fisher for a few seconds, slipped his sock and shoe back on, then limped around his desk and plopped down in his chair. “Peter’s dead?”

  Pults looked genuinely surprised. Fisher nodded.

  “And who are you?”

  Fisher had already given his approach a lot of thought. Both his gut and Pults’s personnel file told Fisher the former RCMP detective was an honest man. If he had anything to do with Peter’s death, it was probably unintentional. Plus, Pults, being a cop, had heard a lifetime of crap from criminals trying to get over on him. Fisher’s best chance was to simply lay his cards on the table and ask for the man’s help.

  “My name is Sam. I’m Peter’s brother.”

  “Yeah? Huh. Funny, Peter never mentioned a brother.”

  “He never mentioned a private detective to me.”

  “Can you prove it?” Pults asked.

  “What’d you have in mind? An old Christmas card?”

  “You guys had a cat when you were kids. What was its name?”

  Interesting, Fisher thought. Pults’s question implied more than a simple business relationship, but a friendship.

  “Pod,” Fisher said. “Short for Tripod. He lost his right front leg in a raccoon trap in the woods behind our house. Peter found him, ran home with him, and pestered our mom till she gave in and let us keep him.”

  “And how’d he stop the bleeding?”

  “He didn’t. I did. Used the rubber tubing off my sling-shot.”

  Pults smiled, showing a gap between his front teeth the width of a nickel’s edge. “Man, I always liked that story. Tell me what happened to Peter.”

  Fisher did. After he finished, Pults was silent for a few seconds. He clasped his hands on top of his desk blotter, dipped his chin, and shook his head. “I should have gone with him. This goddamned hip . . .”

  “Gone where?” Fisher asked. “Start at the beginning.”

  He and Peter were business partners, Pults explained, and had been for nearly two years. He was Peter’s link to the RCMP and the Canadian underworld, which Pults knew inside and out after two decades. Peter paid him under the table and kept their relationship off the books.

  “He played his cards close to the vest,” Pults said.

  “Runs in the family.”

  “Anyway, he had a lot of big clients. When he had something for me, I’d handle it. It wasn’t often, but it was enough to keep me in salmon lures and fishing trips.”

  “Which explains your business’s low traffic.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a decent pension, so whatever Peter tossed my way was gravy. This last thing, though, was a different animal.”

  “How so?”

  Pults opened his top desk drawer, withdrew a manila folder, and slipped a newspaper clipping from it. He handed it to Fisher, who scanned the article, which included a picture of a woman. She had long black hair, delicate cheekbones, a nose with an ever-so-slight bump in it, and flashing brown eyes. Fisher read the picture’s caption and looked up at Pults in surprise. “Carmen Hayes? You’re kidding?”

  Pults shook his head. “Price, Carmen’s father, hired Peter to find her.”

  Four months earlier, the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of Price Hayes had disappeared on a trip to Montreal. While Price Hayes was infamous—a colorful and crotchety old-money Texas oil baron with a family name as old as Sam Houston’s—his daughter, Carmen, was renowned, but only within her chosen field, hydrogeology, the study of how fluid moves through and affects rock. Since graduating from college, Carmen had worked in the exploration division of her father’s company.

  According to Price Hayes, his daughter had responded to a corporate headhunter’s invitation to meet with the CEO of Akono Oil, a Japanese firm specializing in deep-water petroleum exploration and extraction. The day after arriving in Montreal, Carmen disappeared. Through its general counsel, Akono Oil claimed it never extended such an offer to Carmen, and none of its corporate staff had been in Montreal during that time.

  Both the FBI and the RCMP had worked the case with fervor, turning over every rock and every lead, large and small, but to no avail. No sign of Carmen could be found. Her trail ended the moment she stepped out of her hotel that morning. For the first month after her disappearance, the mystery of Carmen Hayes had been a regular on every cable news channel and tabloid show.

  “Mr. Hayes had pushed and rousted every government official he could get on the phone on either side of the border,” Pults said. “But there was nothing they could do. Before he hired Peter, Price had gone through three other private investigators, some of the biggest and best in the business.”

  “How long had Peter been on it?”

  “About a month.”

  “And?”

  “And I think he had something. He didn’t share much with me, and that had me worried. He said it was for my own good. He was looking at a man named Aldric Legard.”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Fisher said. “Quebec Mafia.”

  “Right. A brutal son of a bitch. Was the number two man until one night five or six years ago. He and the boss are sitting down to a nice dinner of potage aux pois chiches. The boss had a spoonful of it halfway to his mouth when Legard jammed a stiletto into his eye. Boss goes headfirst into the potage, Legard keeps eating. Piece of cake.”

  “That’ll put you off your soup,” Fisher said.

  “And then some. So, Legard moves to number one and starts shaking up the business. The old boss was into contracts, unions, high-end escort services, and so on. Legard ditches all that and starts up with heroin, coke, and white slavery.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “White girls, late teens or early twenties, mostly blondes, shipped over to Indonesia and the Middle East for stripping or sex—or both. Legard has quite a customer base. He even takes requests: height, weight, eye color . . . you know. Legard’s also—”

  “How many?” Fisher said.

  “Girls?” Pults shrugged. “Who can say? Most of them live off the grid. They disappear, and no one notices except their friends—who rarely report anything, given the way they feel about police. If I had to guess at a number, though . . . Well into the hundreds.”

  “Christ,” Fisher said. “What else?”

  “Legard’s also elbow deep in Ottawa. He’s on a first name basis with half the House of Commons. Just a rumor, of course, but it would explain why he’s not locked up in some hole somewhere.”

  “So Peter thought Legard had snatched Carmen Hayes?”

  “That’s my guess, but she doesn’t fit the profile: brunette, closer to thirty than twenty. Most of Legard’s acquisitions are runaways or street kids. I think Peter figured Legard had been contracted to snatch Carmen and deli
ver her somewhere for someone. Not a regular customer. If you want someone kidnapped, why not go to someone who’s done it a lot?”

  This was an unexpected turn, Fisher thought. He’d never had the slightest inkling Peter had been involved in the Hayes kidnapping. How did an oil baron’s missing daughter, a Canadian crime boss, and white slavery tie into PuH-19 and Peter’s death?

  Fisher said, “Okay, so Peter asked you to do a background check on Legard . . .”

  “Yeah, he was looking for a way in—a corner he could peel back. He never told me how he got interested in Legard, but the theory was that if Legard had snatched Carmen, she’d probably gone down the same pipeline Legard uses for his other girls.”

  “You told me you should have gone with him,” Fisher said. “What did you mean? Someplace specific?”

  “One of Legard’s front companies is called Terrebonne Exports. Fish canning and export. He’s got a fair-size fleet and warehouses all along the St. Lawrence Seaway and on Nova Scotia. Peter thought Legard was using his ships to smuggle the girls overseas.”

  This made sense. There was a reason why ships and ports were the preferred venue for smugglers, terrorists, and sundry criminals. Ports were virtually impossible to fully secure, and ships were, by their very nature, a warren of nooks and crannies tailor-made for hiding contraband, inanimate and human alike.

  The question was, did he follow what was likely Peter’s course and look at Legard’s warehouses, or did he go to Legard himself and ask—not so nicely—what had happened to Peter and why?

  The truth was, Fisher had made up his mind before he even asked the question.

  8

  SAINT-SULPICE, QUEBEC, CANADA

  FISHER heard a muted squelch as the subdermal receiver implanted beneath the skin behind his ear came to life. Then, a few seconds later, Grim’s voice: “Do you read me, Sam?”

  Fisher lowered his binoculars and shimmied backward, deeper into the underbrush. The night was chilly, hovering at fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and a low mist clung to the ground. Overhead he could hear the occasional pinging screech of bats hunting the darkened treetops for insects.

  Before him lay a half-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River and beyond that, the village of Saint-Sulpice and, on its outskirts, Aldric Legard’s estate, a sprawling three hundred thousand square-foot French country mansion set on ten acres of rock elm and white oak.

  The approach Fisher had chosen seemed tailor-made for him. This section of the St. Lawrence was bisected by Iles de Boucherville, a series of narrow, tree-covered islands that ran parallel to both shorelines and were uninhabited save the dozens of strobe-topped navigation towers designed to warn off passing ships. Lined with hundreds of tiny coves and inlets, the islands appealed to the SEAL in Fisher as not only the perfect insertion point but also the perfect E&E (escape and evasion) route. If he ran into trouble and had to retreat under pursuit, the islands’ geography would work to his advantage.

  Fisher said, “Grim, you know I gave up trying to read you long ago. You’re an enigma.”

  “Sweet-talker.”

  Fisher’s communications system, specially made for Third Echelon by DARPA, the Pentagon’s version of James Bond’s Q division, consisted of two parts: the subdermal receiver, which directly vibrated the set of tiny bones in the ear known as the ossicles, or more colloquially, the hammer, anvil, and stirrup; and the second part, the transmitter, which was a butterfly-shaped adhesive patch known as an SVT, or subvocal transceiver, worn across the throat just above his Adam’s apple. This had been the hardest of the two components to master and required a skill Fisher likened to a cross between whispering and ventriloquism. For all that, though, he loved the system; it allowed him to communicate while bad guys stood five feet away.

  “I’m loading your OPSAT now,” Grimsdottir said, referring to the operational satellite uplink. Fisher had come to think of the OPSAT as his own personal Palm Pilot on steroids. Worn across the forearm, the OPSAT served not only as Fisher’s encrypted satellite communications hub, but it also fed him images and data that ranged from a simple weather readout to a real-time satellite feed from a fifteen-ton Lacrosse-class radar-imaging satellite orbiting four hundred miles above the earth’s surface. More than that, like Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear, the OPSAT had come to represent for him a link back to the real world. Working alone, in places filled with people only too happy and capable of killing him on-site, was challenging enough. With the OPSAT, lifesaving information and a friendly voice were only a few button presses away.

  “Data dump complete,” Grimsdottir said.

  Fisher pressed his thumb to the OPSAT’s screen. A red horizontal laser line scrolled down the screen as the biometric reader captured his thumbprint.

  // . . . BIOMETRIC SCAN ENGAGED . . .

  . . . SCANNING FINGERPRINT . . .

  . . . IDENTITY CONFIRMED . . . //

  The OPSAT booted up, showing a transreflective screen in black, green, and amber. Fisher pressed a few buttons, checked the database and uplink, then said, “Good to go.”

  Lambert’s voice came on the line. “Sam, the ROE are tight on this; you’re on allied soil.”

  In this case, Fisher’s rules of engagement were straight from the manual, and he knew the words by heart: Avoid all contact. Leave no trace of presence. Less-than-lethal force authorized if contact unavoidable. Lethal force authorized only to maintain mission and/or operative integrity. Translation: Don’t be seen and don’t kill anyone unless the mission will otherwise go to hell in a handbasket. Fisher had always enjoyed the line, “operative integrity.” This was yet another euphemism: Getting captured or killed was the same thing as a failed mission.

  “Got it. No war with Canada,” Fisher replied. “I’m on the move. Call you on the other side.”

  FISHER’S choice to go directly to the source—Montreal’s godfather, Aldric Legard—had been an easy one. Not only was Legard his best chance of finding out what had happened to Peter, and why, but also of finding Carmen Hayes. While the mystery of her disappearance had piqued Fisher’s curiosity, his first concern was of a more practical nature. Regardless of whether his visit to Legard provided him a lead, he knew one thing: It seemed clear that Peter’s pursuit of Carmen’s disappearance had gotten him killed, and so, logically, if he could retrace Peter’s steps he would eventually run squarely into the people who had not only killed Peter but also whoever had the PuH-19.

  Fisher slipped the face mask over his eyes and slithered belly first down the embankment and into the water. He coiled his legs and shoved off the muddy bank, propelling himself into the channel. The current caught him, and his weight belt slowly drew him beneath the surface. He fitted the microrebreather, which was roughly the size and shape of a five-pound hand weight, into his mouth and took a sharp breath to activate the chemical gas scrubber; he was greeted by a slight hiss and the cool, metallic taste of oxygen flowing into his mouth.

  As his body descended through the water, he felt its chill envelop him. After a few seconds his tac suit quickly absorbed and redistributed the cold.

  Fisher was biased, he knew, since the thing had saved his life more times than he could count, but as far as he was concerned, his tac suit—officially, the Mark V tactical operations suit—was as close to magic as DARPA had ever come.

  A one-piece black coverall festooned with the various pouches, pockets, and harness attachments needed to carry all his equipment, the tac suit’s interior was fitted with the latest generation Gore-Tex while its exterior was made up of Kevlar and Dragon Skin, the world’s first “move when you move” body armor. Dragon Skin could stop shrapnel and any bullet short of a sniper’s high-powered penetrator round. The Gore-Tex was designed to maintain Fisher’s core body temperature and could do so down to ten degrees and as high as one hundred ten.

  The truly magical part was the camouflage system. The outer Kevlar layer was impregnated with a substance code-named Cygnus, after the first officially identified black hole. Th
e liquid polymer fiber was matte-black and micro-roughened so as to trap and diffuse—if only for a fraction of a second—light particles. It wasn’t invisibility per se, but Fisher had found that shadows seemed much deeper while he was wearing the tac suit. Completing the camouflage was the use of disruptive patterning through the odd placement of his pouches and pockets, all of which were of different sizes and shapes. In low-light conditions, the human eye was drawn to movement, color difference, and geometric form. Of the three, form was the most challenging problem, but by rearranging and resizing the pouches, the outline of the body becomes fuzzy.

  He reached up and touched a button on his face mask. Two halogen lights, one built into each side of his mask, came to life, emitting a pair of pencil-thin red beams. As designed, they converged directly ahead of him, at arm’s reach. He lifted the OPSAT to his face and studied the screen. His course to the opposite shore, marked as a green parabolic line, took into account the river’s current and would, barring any miscalculation, bring him to the surface within ten feet of the outer stone wall of Legard’s estate.

  He slipped on his webbed swimming gloves and started swimming.

  9

  WHEN the parabolic course line on the OPSAT screen shortened to a few millimeters, Fisher turned off his mask lamp, stopped stroking, and let his momentum carry him forward. He let his arms hang down until he felt his fingertips scraping the soft mud bottom. He jammed his fingertips into the muck until he had purchase, pulled himself down until his belly touched the mud, then began easing himself forward, inch by inch, until the upper rim of his face mask broke the surface. He waited a moment for the water to drain away from the glass, then removed the rebreather and looked around.

  He froze.