Conviction

6

The instinctive part of Fisher’s brain reacted instantly, registering the motorcycle a quarter second before sending the “jump” impulse to his legs. The nearest oncoming car, moving at a leisurely fifteen miles an hour, was twenty feet away. To avoid Fisher, the motorcyclist could either go right, into the ditch, or left, into traffic. Fisher gambled and went in the latter direction, spinning on his heel back into the path of the oncoming car, landing in a half crouch, with his legs spread, ready to dive away if the car didn’t slow. To his left, the motorcycle’s brakes locked up. The headlight shuttered with the sudden deceleration, then veered right and down into the ditch. There came the sound of wrenching fiberglass. The car bearing down on Fisher slammed on its brakes. Horns began blaring. Car doors opened and witnesses began jogging toward the scene.

Blend, Fisher commanded himself. “Help me — he’s down here!” Fisher called in French, then trotted down into the ditch. The rider lay in the tall grass on the other side of the embankment; ten feet away his motorcycle was a tangled heap. Fisher and four others reached the rider at the same time. He was barely conscious. “Stabilize his head,” Fisher commanded, then lifted the visor on the man’s helmet. The face didn’t look familiar. Just bad timing, he decided.

Voices began babbling: “Idiot tried to pass…” “Did you see him?… almost hit…”

Fisher said, “He’s in shock. I’ll find a blanket. Stay with him… ”

“Oui, oui…”

Fisher trotted north, up the road. He glanced over his shoulder. A dozen or more people were now at the bottom of the ditch, tending to the motorcyclist. From the border came the whine of sirens and flashing blue lights. He put another fifty yards between himself and the commotion, then walked back into the ditch, up the other side, and into the trees beyond. He paused to get his bearings, using the highway to his left and the soccer stadium lights to his right as navigation points. The CFL station would be… that way. Another two minutes of walking brought him to a weed-covered gravel lot surrounded by a dilapidated hurricane fence, half of which jutted from the ground at wild angles, while the other had collapsed altogether. In the center of the lot was what had looked like, on Google Earth, an abandoned prison, with high brick and corrugated-steel walls topped by conical watchtowers and arched mullioned windows. It was, in fact, a deserted steel foundry. Early twentieth century, Fisher judged. A hundred years ago European industrialists often chose the ornate over the pragmatic, assuming a happy worker was a productive worker.

It was as good a place as any for another clothing change, he decided. His second clothing change had been for his pursuers’ benefit; having likely found the first outfit east of the swimming pool, they would have assumed he’d adopted night-friendlier clothes. If spotted now, he’d be another local in colorful springtime garb.

He spotted a vertical slit in the foundry’s sheet-metal wall and headed for it. A quarter mile to his left, back on the highway, he saw a pair of headlights do a quick U-turn, then a second pair. At this distance he couldn’t make out the makes and models, but the shapes suggested SUVs. They began heading south, in his direction.

What the hell?

Fisher sprinted for the wall, pried back the sheet metal, and stepped through the slit. He glanced back. The SUVs had drawn even with the foundry driveway and stopped, turn signals blinking, as they waited for a gap in traffic. Fisher wriggled through the opening, then did his best to wrench the metal closed behind him.

He pulled out his penlight and looked around. In the darkness, the scene was jumbled: vaulted concrete ceilings dotted with broken skylights through which moonlight streamed, crumbling plaster-covered brick walls, ladders and catwalks and spiral staircases, a labyrinth of overhead iron girders and concrete lintels. The floor was ankle deep in ash, dust, and accumulated silt. Weeds and spindly trees sprung from the loam. Somewhere overhead he heard the leathery flapping of wings. The echo told him the space was cavernous.

He took a step. His foot plunged through the soil and into empty space. He shined his light down. The floor was made of heavy four-by-four wooden beams. Through the hole in which his foot had slipped, he could see crisscrossing pipes and, beyond that, the glint of water. Man-made canals, he thought. Older foundries relied on them to cool equipment.

From the lot came the skidding of tires on gravel. Car doors opened, slammed shut.

Don’t think, run!

He pushed up, levered himself onto his belly, then jerked his leg free; he flexed it. Nothing broken. He got up and ran, steering for the nearest wall, hoping and assuming the beams would be stronger nearer the joists. The dancing beam of his penlight picked out a staircase rising against the wall. He sprinted for it, leapt onto the third step, then stopped. He looked back; his footsteps were as clear as if he’d left them in snow. To his right a series of forearm-sized pipes stretched beneath a concrete lintel. Fisher mounted the handrail for a better look. Maybe. It would be tight, but—

Voices shouted outside. The sheet metal at the entrance rattled.

Fisher grabbed the nearest pipe, pushed off the railing, then swung, hand over hand, until he reached an intersection of beams. He flipped his left leg up, hooked his ankle on the pipe, shimmied another three feet, then chinned himself level with the pipe, reached over with his left hand, found purchase, and levered himself atop the pipe run. He straightened his legs and tucked his arms flat against his thighs. It was a tight fit. He went still and took three calming breaths to slow his heart rate. He craned his neck to check his surroundings.

Five feet above him was another concrete lintel, this one running perpendicular to the pipes on which he lay; there would be a matching shelf along the opposite wall, he assumed. Four feet above this lintel, through a tracery of pipes, he could see the underside of the second floor.

From below came the violent wrenching of sheet metal, then silence.

Whispered voices.

Come on in, Fisher thought. But watch your—

As if on cue, he heard the splintering of wood, followed by a curse in Japanese. The accent was American, though, which told Fisher a bit more about the man.

Step.

“Help me, goddamn it!” a voice rasped.

“Hold on, hold on…” This was a woman’s voice. Not Kimberly, he didn’t think. Blondie, then. Hansen, the team leader, would be working solo while the other four were paired up. Blondie and Vin were here; Kimberly and Ames would probably be on the east side, looking for an entrance. As for Hansen—

More cracking of wood, another curse. This one from Blondie.

There were thirty seconds of grunting and whispers as the two extracted their legs and feet from the floor traps, followed by muffled feet padding through the loam and moving toward the stairs. A foot clanged on the metal steps, then stopped.

“What?” whispered Blondie. Clearly these young Splinter Cells had a few things to learn about CommSec — communication security. SVTs did, in fact, take some getting used to — as well as a bit of ventriloquial talent — but this was Stealth 101.

Silence now.

Fisher leaned his head to the side, just enough for one eye to clear the pipe run. Directly below him was a clean-shaven head. Vin. Fisher eased his head back. A flashlight clicked on and panned left to right, pausing on piles of debris and shadowed corners until the beam had made a 360-degree circuit. The flashlight went dark.

Then came on again. The light angled upward, tracking slowly over the pipes and beams. After a long thirty seconds, the beam went out.

Above, Fisher heard a crack, not of wood, but of rock on concrete, followed by a series of metallic clangs. Something hard thumped into his thigh, then rolled off and hit the ground with a powdery fwump. They were trying to flush him out. Another rock smacked into the lintel over his head. It ricocheted upward, hung there for a moment, then came back down, ting ing loudly in the darkness before zipping past Fisher’s face.

“Nothing there,” Blondie whispered. “Come on.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Footsteps clanked up the steps, then faded.

Fisher let out a breath. He drew his legs forward, under his chest, then stood up. Arms extended above his head, he grabbed the edge of the lintel, chinned himself up, then rolled onto the shelf. He was twenty feet above the floor; unless one of them found the perfect viewing angle through the pipes below, he was effectively invisible.

Next step, he thought. He had three options: hunker down and wait until they moved on, wait for a chance and slip away, or create his own chance and slip away. The first option was the worst of the three. With five people and at least a nominal equipment loadout, they could exfiltrate the foundry and stake it out electronically. He needed to be gone before the plan occurred to them. That left the third option: create some chaos and use the confusion to break out. How, though?

The answer presented itself with the sound of splintering wood above his head. The floor planks split. Ash and dirt funneled through the opening. The dust cleared to reveal a leg jutting through the hole, wriggling like a worm on a fishing line. To his or her credit, the person above made no sound, not even a gasp of surprise.

Fisher dug into one of his rucksack’s side pockets and came up with ten-foot coil of Type III 550 paracord. This was one of Fisher’s many “desert island staples,” along with duct tape, Swedish FireSteel, and superglue for on-the-fly wound repair. He tied a quick running bowline in one end of the cord, then lassoed the dangling foot, looped the free end twice over a pipe, and finished with a cinch knot.

The leg jerked once, then again.

“Shit,” a voice rasped from above. Sounded like Hansen.

Gonna need help, Ben.

Fisher didn’t wait for it to come but rather dropped back down to the pipe run and followed it across the space, ducking under beams and around pipes, until he reached the opposite lintel, where he chinned himself up. Through the floor he heard the rapid padding of footsteps. Two people, it sounded like. Hansen had called for help.

Fisher followed the shelf south, past Hansen’s position, until he reached the far brick wall. Below him and to the right he could see a steel ladder affixed to the wall. Arms outstretched like a trapeze artist, Fisher leaned out from the lintel, let himself fall forward, and then, at the last second, pushed off, snagging a pipe with both hands. He let himself swing twice, then hooked a lower pipe with his heels, reached forward, and grabbed the next pipe over. He wriggled his trunk forward until the pipe under his heels rode up under his butt, and then sat down. Next he rolled over so the pipe was pressed into his quadriceps and let himself slide off until his hands caught the pipe. Two hand-over-hand swings brought him to the ladder.

He stopped, listened.

From the floor above, he could hear shuffling and whispered voices: “Snagged… Go down there…”

Fisher climbed the ladder to the open floor hatch and peeked up. Thirty feet away he could see Hansen’s hunched form. Standing behind him were two figures — Kimberly and Ames, judging from their outlines.

“Go down there… ”

Kimberly trotted off toward the stairs. Ames stayed behind.

Fisher climbed the last few feet and crab-walked away from the hatch, then stopped behind a stack of bricks. An impulse popped into his head; he debated it briefly, then flipped a mental coin. More chaos it is, then.

The ankle-deep loam on the floor made the crossing almost too easy. Twenty seconds after leaving his hiding place, he was standing behind the pair. Hansen, stuck up to his crotch in the floor trap, couldn’t turn around; Ames could do nothing but stand watch over his team leader.

Fisher waited until Hansen said via SVT, “What? What kind of cord?” then reached forward, circled his right arm around Ames’s throat, and clamped down with Ames’s larynx in the crook of his elbow, his left fist pressed against Ames’s carotid artery. He leaned back, lifting Ames free of the floor. Fisher began reverse walking, taking wide, balanced strides on flat feet to compensate for the extra weight. The levered grip on Ames’s throat took immediate effect, shutting off the oxygen spigot to his brain and rendering him limp within four seconds.

Occasionally glancing over his shoulder, Fisher retreated to the hatch, where he stopped and stepped sideways behind the brick pile. He laid Ames flat, stripped the OPSAT (operational satellite uplink) off his wrist, then unhooked his SC-20 from its shoulder sling. He smelled the barrel; it had been fired recently. He ejected the magazine and found only two rounds missing. He hadn’t been the only one shooting at the reservoir.

Fisher laid the SC 20 aside and took Ames’s SC pistol from the holster and stuffed it into his waistband. He turned his attention to the OPSAT, tapping buttons and scrolling through menus until he found the first screen he wanted. In sequence, he tapped the buttons marked POSITIONING > ONBOARD GPS > OFF, then scrolled back to the diagnostics screen and tapped SELF-REPORT > SVT > MALFUNCTION > TRANSMIT INOPERABLE, then hit SEND. Next he switched screens to TACTICAL COMMS > INTRAUNIT, then called up the on screen keyboard and typed, MOVEMENT ON LOWER FLOORS, NORTH SIDE; INVESTIGATING, then hit SEND again.

Across the floor Hansen was moving, rolling to the left and withdrawing his leg from the hole. Kimberly had freed him. Fisher strapped the OPSAT to his wrist, returned to the hatch, and started downward. Footsteps clanged up the ladder across the room and, as his head dropped below floor level, he saw Kimberly’s figure sprinting across to Hansen, who was climbing back to his feet. Hansen’s taut posture told Fisher the team leader had failed to see the humor in his paracord trick.

Fisher repeated his trapeze act until he was back on the lintel shelf. Crouched over and taking careful, quiet steps, he headed south, stopping every ten feet to listen. Whether his ruse was working, he couldn’t tell. As he drew even with the hole in which he’d entered the foundry, a pair of figures — Vin and Blondie — appeared on the floor below, silently sprinting north, trailing a cloud of dust. Fisher stopped, crouched down, and checked the OPSAT. It appeared Hansen had bought, at least for the time being, Ames’s malfunction message, having used his command function to switch the team’s comms from VOICE to VOICE + TEXT TRANSCRIPTION. As the transcription was coded by OPSAT number rather than name, Fisher couldn’t tell who was who, but with Ames having gone solo, Hansen would have teamed up with Kimberly. In near-real time, Fisher watched the dialogue pop on the screen:

Starting to get worried now, Fisher thought. He stood up and continued on.

Hansen was sharp; at most, he’d give Ames another minute to respond and then order a regroup. If he and Kimberly had, in fact, seen the footprints heading toward the ladder hatch, Hansen would realize his mistake, his assumption. By then it wouldn’t matter. With the now-four-person team converging on the second-floor north wall, he would be moving south, toward—

Even before Fisher shifted his weight to his forward foot, he knew something was wrong, could feel the sole of his boot sliding sideways on the spot of grease or rainwater or whatever it was on the concrete. Before he could react, he was falling through space. The floor loomed before him. At the last moment he reached out and smacked his palm against a section of pipe. He twisted sideways, slowed ever so slightly; then his body was horizontal and falling again. He curled himself in a ball, arms wrapped around his head, legs tucked to his chest.

The loam softened the impact, but he still felt as if he’d taken a body blow from a heavyweight boxer. Swirling sparks burst behind his eyes.

He heard a crack, then a pop, then silence.

The floor splintered beneath him; then he was falling again.