Fallout

17

With time to spare, Fisher took a commercial shuttle flight, the last one of the night, from Boston to Halifax and touched down shortly after midnight at Stanfield International Airport. As he walked off the Jetway, he powered up his cell phone; there was a text message from Grimsdottir: CALL ME. URGENT.

Fisher dialed, and she picked up on the first ring. “Change of plans,” she said without preamble. “The Gosselin made a sudden stop off Michaud Point — the southern tip of Cape Breton Island.”

“And?”

“And they’re moving Stewart. Looks like a small boat’s taking him ashore.”

Damn. As the crow flew, Michaud Point was one hundred sixty miles north of Halifax; by road, probably another fifty on top of that. “We have any assets there?” Fisher asked.

“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.”

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 don’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.”