Fallout

39

“Slow down,” Fisher ordered Pak. “You don’t want to get a speeding ticket.”

Pak eased up on the gas pedal, and the car — a 1990 Mercedes 300 Diesel that Fisher assumed was another RDEI perk — slowed to below 50 kph. The tires beat out a steady rhythm on the highway’s expansion joints, lulling Fisher toward drowsiness. He shook it off and focused.

Knowing he was losing ground to exhaustion, Fisher had taken out some insurance against the inevitability of Pak trying to make a move: Tightened around the base of each of Pak’s ring fingers was a wire-thin flexicuff. The other ends were secured around the steering wheel’s lower half. He had enough length to operate the Mercedes but nothing else.

They’d been traveling for forty minutes. In the side mirror Fisher could see the lights of Pyongyang in the distance, but out here, just six miles outside the city, it was pitch-dark, save what little moonlight filtered through the low cloud cover. It was as though they’d passed through a curtain on the capital’s eastern outskirts, from lighted skyscrapers and streetlamps to blackness.

With one eye trained on the iPhone’s screen, which currently displayed a hybrid satellite/road map of North Korea, and one eye tuned toward Pak, Fisher ordered him to turn left off the two-lane highway onto a narrow gravel road that took them into a stretch of rolling hills covered by evergreen trees. Fisher watched the latitude and longitude coordinates at the edge of the iPhone’s screen scroll until finally they stopped and started flashing.

“Stop here,” Fisher ordered.

Pak pulled to the side of the road and shut off the engine. Fisher took the car keys.

“I’m taking a little walk,” he told Pak. “If you can manage to gnaw your fingers off before I get back, you’re free to go.”

“You’re a funny man,” Pak grumbled.

“So I’ve been told.”

Fisher climbed out, clicked on his penlight, then started up the hillside until he reached the tree line, where he stopped and reoriented himself to the iPhone’s screen, and kept going, following a game trail higher into the trees. After sixty seconds he stopped, checked his position, then turned left, took four paces, and knelt down. He broomed the pine needles away with his hands. Lying there half buried in the dirt was a wood handled gardener’s trowel. Fisher started digging. It took only a minute to unearth a black Gore-Tex rucksack. He smiled to himself. Hello, old friends.

Fisher hadn’t asked, and Lambert hadn’t offered an explanation, but just before leaving Washington he’d given Fisher a set of latitude and longitude coordinates. “If you have to go to ground.”

He didn’t have to look inside the bag to know it contained his full mission equipment loadout: tac suit, goggles, SC-20 rifle and pistol, OPSAT, his Fairbairn-Sykes dagger — all of it would be there.

Fisher didn’t need an explanation of how the bag found its way here; he had a solid hunch: Against every operational tradecraft rule in the book, Tom Richards had instructed their spy in the SSD’s comptroller’s office to take a drive in the country.

Thanks, whoever you are, Fisher thought.

He picked up the bag and started back down the path.

Twenty minutes later, back on the main highway, Fisher’s Bluetooth headset vibrated; he tapped the connect button.

“Sam, it’s Grim. Will and I are almost done sorting through the dump from Pak’s laptop. About two months before Carmen Hayes went missing, Pak was assigned a new password and log-in to an SSD intranet portal. The portal address has changed, but the e-mail account associated with it hasn’t. There’s a backlog of e-mail that shows spikes at times that correspond with some interesting events — namely the mortar bombardment in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz president’s resignation, Omurbai’s reappearance, Calvin Stewart’s transfer to the Site 17 platform… that sort of stuff. All related to Manas.”

“Anything worthwhile?”

“The e-mails are encoded — some kind of digital one-time pad setup, which means only Pak and whoever he was exchanging e-mails with had the decryption algorithm, and it probably changed frequently. I’ve got enough messages with enough repeated phrases and references to start piecing it together from the back end, but it’s going to take time.

“But here’s what you need to know. First of all: Is Pak within earshot?”

“Yes.”

“Then just listen; don’t let on. All of the e-mails Pak sent through this portal go to a single routing station about ten miles east of Pyongyang. I’ve been tracking you, and I think he’s taking you on a wild-goose hunt. You’re about five miles southeast of the routing station and heading away from it.”

“I see.”

“And he’s taking you straight into a military restriction zone.”

“Huh.”

“I’m looking at the sat pics right now. If you keep going down the road you’re on, you’ll run smack into a checkpoint, and within a half mile of you there’s a dozen antiaircraft sites, bunkers, infantry barracks, and radar sites. According to Langley, that whole area is a retreat for North Korean Workers’ Party bigwigs. It’s one of the most heavily guarded sites in the whole country.”

“Good to know.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’ll get back to you.” Fisher disconnected. He turned in his seat and leveled the pistol with Pak’s chest. “Stop the car.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Stop the car.”

In the corner of his eye, through the windshield, Fisher saw a glimmer of light. He turned. A quarter mile down the road a pair of floodlights came to life atop a guard shack that straddled the road. The lights pierced the windshield. Fisher squinted.

Pak slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The Mercedes’s powerful engine roared, and the car lurched forward. A half second later, Pak spun the wheel hard left, and the car skidded, sliding sideways down the road, and then suddenly they were airborne. Fisher went weightless for a moment before he was slammed forward again. His forehead cracked against the dashboard, and everything dimmed.

Fisher was vaguely aware that the car had come to a stop. He opened his eyes and looked around. The Mercedes was sitting right side up, angled downward in a drainage ditch. Fisher touched his forehead and his hand came back red. Beside him, Pak was unconscious, sitting upright in his seat, his head leaning against the side window, both hands still tethered to the wheel. Down the road he heard voices calling in Korean, then an engine accelerating toward him.

Move, Sam, don’t think. Move!

Fisher cast his eyes around the car for the pistol and spotted it lying on Pak’s floorboard. He retrieved it. Using both hands he smeared blood from his forehead down over his face and neck. He opened the car door, rolled out onto his knees, and tried to stand, but fell. He took three quick breaths to clear his head, then tried again and forced himself upright. He looked left. Down the road, not more than a hundred yards away, a vehicle was speeding toward him. He tucked the pistol into his front waistband, then climbed up the embankment and ran around to Pak’s side. He paused to wave his hands at the approaching vehicle in what he hoped was the universal Help me gesture, then stumbled to Pak’s door and began fumbling for the handle.

The vehicle — a jeep with three soldiers, Fisher now saw — skidded to a stop. The headlights pinned Fisher. The soldiers climbed out, rifles in hand, and encircled him.

“Pak!” Fisher cried, mush-mouthing his marginal Korean. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” Help me! Fisher turned his face in quarter profile toward the soldiers. Fisher was hoping the sight of blood, combined with his obvious panic, would have the desired effect. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” he cried again, batting at the car’s door handle and waving an arm toward the soldiers.

One of them, evidently the senior of the trio, barked an order. Fisher caught a snippet: “… go help…!”

It was exactly what Fisher had been waiting for. He drew the pistol from his waistband and spun. He ignored the two soldiers closest to him, who had lowered their rifles and were stepping forward to help, and focused instead on the third, who was holding his rifle at ready low. Fisher fired two shots, striking the man’s center of mass, then sidestepped left, adjusted his aim, fired twice more, then again, dropping the two other soldiers in midstep. He hurried forward, kicking rifles away as he went, and checked for pulses. All three were dead.

Behind him, Fisher heard a groan, then Pak’s voice: “You still won’t get there.”

Fisher turned around and walked back to the car.

Pak said, “In twenty minutes there will be a hundred soldiers looking for you. You won’t make it.” He coughed, then hawked up some mucus and spat it on the ground.

“Maybe,” Fisher replied, “but I’m not inclined to take your word for it. One question before I go: There was a man who was looking for Carmen Hayes. You know who I’m talking about?”

Pak furrowed his brows, then nodded. “A private detective. So?”

“Were you the one who put him in that chamber at Site Seventeen?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Couldn’t leave him alive.”

“But why that way?” Fisher asked. He wasn’t sure why any of this was important to him, but for some reason he couldn’t pin down, he needed to hear the words. “Why kill him like that?”

Pak shrugged. “Why not? I was curious.” Then Pak’s face changed. His eyes focused on Fisher’s, and he smiled smugly. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“I knew him. His name was Peter. He was my brother.”

Pak laughed, a mocking snort. “Peter. Yes, I put him in there. Locked the door myself.”

“Did you let him out?”

Pak frowned. “Let him out?” He laughed. “Why would I let him out?”

Peter must have somehow broken out after Pak and his people had left, found a life raft, and set off, hoping against hope he’d be spotted. He probably had an idea he was already dying.

“So you just left him there to die,” Fisher said.

“He deserved no better,” Pak replied. “He wasn’t a man. He cried. He begged and screamed like a—”

Fisher raised his pistol and shot Pak in the forehead.

Pak’s head snapped back, his eyes bulging, mouth frozen open in midsentence.