Conviction

EPILOGUE

He felt a vague pang of guilt for not being excited at the prospect of having company, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that if he told them the truth, they would probably understand and even forgive him for it. They were friends, certainly, but not in the pure sense of the word. Of course, that predicament wasn’t uncommon in a business where friendships were usually forged in the fire of hardship and tragedy. It was a strong, almost instantaneous bond, one that most people rarely took time to examine. The proverbial elephant in every room. He was cynical, that much he could admit, but whether that was his permanent mind-set or simply a bad habit that would fade with time, he didn’t know. He would find out.

Fisher stepped away from the sunlit floor-to-ceiling windows and walked to his nearby leather armchair. He propped the cane against the arm and took a test lap around the room. The limp was almost gone and would eventually disappear altogether. Thanks to pins and screws and plates, the bones in his ankle were almost as good as new. His only reminder of the injury would be an uncanny knack for predicting rain. Given the alternatives, he considered it a fair trade.

The wave that had slammed into his back drove him headfirst into the side of the elevator-shaft wall, momentarily stunning him. When he opened his eyes, a second or half second later, he saw the partially open elevator doors sweeping past him. Acting on instinct, he shoved his arm into the gap, then made a fist and did a bicep curl until his shoulder was wedged between the doors. Having had no time to take a breath before the wave hit, Fisher found himself under five feet of water without an ounce of air in his lungs. He squirmed deeper into the elevator, his one good leg crabbing at the floor until he popped through the gap and he was able to stand. The water boiled at his chin. He looked up. His headlamp illuminated the ceiling escape hatch. He reached up. It was just out of reach, so he steadied himself, breathing deeply, oxygenating his blood as the water rose over his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and then he was submerged.

His headlamp flickered and went dark.

His fingertips touched the escape hatch, then his palms. He drew his knife and stabbed around the edge of the hatch, hacking away at the thin metal until it fell away and disappeared in the swirling water. He stuck both arms through the hatch, braced his elbows on the roof, and levered himself up and out. Water bubbled up behind him and began flowing over the elevator car’s roof.

He tested the cable: It was thick with grease and grit. Half-a-decade old or not, the lubricant made the cable unclimbable. He looked around for a maintenance ladder. There wasn’t one. Fisher knew what this meant: a ride up the shaft like a piece of flotsam. The trip took only a few minutes, but in the narrow confines of the shaft the water roiled and whooshed as air from the complex below sought escape through one of the few exits left.

When he drew level with the door, he found it closed, but ten seconds of levering with his knife opened a gap wide enough for him to squeeze both hands through; another twenty seconds and he was lying on the concrete floor of the hut. Water gushed after him and sloshed across the floor.

Bad to worse, Fisher thought. The hut was made of cinder block, the door of thick steel secured by a virtually indestructible lock. Fisher looked around. The inside was barren, just a floor, four walls, and a roof. Fisher caught himself. Not just walls — five-decade-old walls. He didn’t need to find an exit; he needed to let the water make him an exit.

As the water rose past his ankles and then his knees, he hobbled from wall to wall, using the tip of his knife to test the grout between the cinder blocks. It wasn’t until the water had reached his waist that he found the spot he wanted. He began chiseling at it, concentrating the knife’s point on a quarter-sized spot. He stopped, stuck his finger into the hole. Halfway there. He jammed the knife back into the hole and hammered at it with his fist until his skin split and blood ran down his forearm. He switched hands and kept pounding.

The tip punched through. He pressed his eye to the hole. He saw bright sun.

The water reached his shoulders.

He thrust the knife back into the hole and began levering the haft in a circle, grinding away at the grout. A thumb-sized chunk of cinder block popped free, then another, and another. And then, with a sucking sound, the water found the hole and surged through. The water lapped at his chin and into his mouth. He sputtered and kept chopping at the block. The fifty-year-old grout began disintegrating. Horizontal and vertical gaps appeared, revealing daylight. The water level dropped an inch, then bubbled up again.

Fisher clamped the knife between his teeth, shoved both hands into the hole, and, using them as leverage, rammed his knee into the wall. Then again, and again, until his leg was numb.

A whole cinder block broke free and tumbled out. Fisher adjusted his aim and drove his knee into the neighboring block until it shifted sideways and slid halfway out. He drew his knee back, set his jaw, and—

A three-by-three section of the wall gave way and Fisher tumbled out onto the snow-covered ground and lay still. Hansen found him ten minutes later. Not content to sit on his hands at the entrance vent and wait for something that might never come, he’d left Gillespie to stand watch and taken the other team members on a perimeter search. Their first stop had been the hut.

Fisher watched the car pull down the driveway and stop beside the flagstone path leading to the front door. Fisher got there before either of them could ring the bell. Having left Washington two weeks after returning from Russia, Fisher had seen neither Hansen nor Grimsdóttir for three months. He’d stayed around only long enough to recover from the surgery on his ankle and sit through three days of debriefing.

Fisher invited them in. “Mojito?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Grimsdóttir, and Hansen nodded.

“Head down to the deck. I’ll meet you there.”

Ten minutes later they were sitting beneath an umbrella overlooking the water. Hansen took a sip of his mojito and smiled. “It’s good.”

“They’ve grown on me,” Fisher said.

“So this is it,” Grimsdóttir asked, “the villa of the late, great Chucky Zee?”

Fisher nodded. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

Through her contacts at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Grimsdóttir had enlightened the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA, about Zahm’s nonliterary endeavors. From there Zahm’s now-defunct criminal empire unraveled. Surprisingly, most of the jewelry and art and gems Zahm and his Little Red Robbers had stolen had never been fenced. SOCA found the bulk of the loot in a storage unit outside Setúbal. At her encouragement, the British Home Office had given Fisher a free, one-year lease on Zahm’s villa.

“The least I could do,” Grimsdóttir said. “I see they took his yacht, though.”

Fisher smiled. “A few days after I got here some very polite gentlemen from the Home Office came and asked for the keys. It’s okay. I’ve had enough of water for a while. Besides, if I change my mind, I’ve still got the rowboats.”

“How’s the ankle?”

“Getting there. How’s Kovac?”

Two hours after his arrest for treason, Kovac had tried to hang himself in his cell but was saved by an alert guard. As it turned out, Ames’s insurance cache had been more than enough to break the deputy director.

“Pliable,” Grimsdóttir replied. “Officially, he retired after discovering he had colorectal cancer. Unofficially, he spends in his days in an FBI safe house answering questions and naming names.”

“Is it going to do any good?”

Hansen answered, “Eventually. Lambert was right. This goes very deep. The good news is, the Laboratory 738 Arsenal is sitting at the bottom of a sinkhole near Lake Baikal. It’s out of circulation. Permanently. Turns out Zahm leased the complex from one of the men I saw in Korfovka — Mikhail Bratus, former GRU. As for the other two, Yuan Zhao and Michael Murdoch, we’re working on it. The auction guests didn’t fare very well. Only six made it out of the complex, and all of them were scooped up by the FSB.”

“Ernsdorff?”

“About a week after Baikal he disappeared, and he took a few hundred million in investors’ money with him. Ten days ago they found in him a St. John hotel with his throat cut. Someone didn’t appreciate his accounting methods.”

“What about our old friend Ames?”

“No sign of him. If he’s dead, somewhere in the sinkhole, we’ll never know.”

“And if he’s alive?” Fisher finished. “He’s not the kind of guy to hide forever. You and the others watch your backs.”

“You, too.”

“How are they, by the way — Nathan, Maya, and Kimberly?”

“All good. They send their regards.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the ocean, before Grimsdóttir said, “Sam, if you want to come back, I can arrange it.”

Fisher shook his head.

“Is that a no?”

Fisher looked around the deck for a few moments, then turned his face into the sun and took a deep breath. “That’s an ‘ask me again when my lease is up.’ ”