Fallout (2007) Read online

  Three men were sitting in chairs before the LINAC having an animated discussion. A fourth man in a thigh-length black leather coat stood behind the group, arms folded across his chest. Fisher zoomed in. It was Chin-Hwa Pak.

  Stewart was sitting in the middle chair, flanked on both sides by Koreans. The man to Stewart’s left was holding a clipboard, which he was tapping with a pen and waving in front of Stewart, who pushed it away.

  Behind him, Pak pulled out a pistol and put it to Stewart’s head. He leaned over and whispered something in Stewart’s ear.

  Stewart reluctantly took the clipboard and started leafing through pages.

  Fisher took pictures, getting all the men’s faces, the LINAC, and the hyperbaric chamber. He scanned the room for a place to plant a Sticky Ear, but it was too confined. Pak would hear the placement.

  Stewart had stopped leafing through the clipboard’s pages and seemed to be studying something intently. He gestured to one of the men, who pulled a calculator from a briefcase on the floor and handed it over. Stewart started punching numbers, writing notations, and leafing back and forth through the pages.

  He handed the clipboard back to the first man and tapped something on the page with his pen, then started gesturing to various parts of the LINAC. The men listened closely until Stewart finished, then began talking to one another across him.

  A fourth Korean entered the room through the door beside the chamber. He whispered something to Pak, then handed him what looked like a thin remote control. Pak nodded and pocketed the device.

  Suddenly, behind Fisher in the walkway, he heard a creaking. He spun around, gun coming up. A Korean was standing in the walkway. Obviously startled and uncertain, the man squinted, trying to make out the figure half hidden in the shadows. The man’s hand shot into his coat and came out with a pistol. Fisher fired. The man stumbled backward, the hand holding the gun still coming up. The barrel flashed, and the shot boomed through the walkway.

  Fisher spun again, bringing the pistol around. Pak and his partner were already moving—the latter drawing a pistol and taking aim on Fisher while Pak barked orders at the two other Koreans as he shoved them toward the door. Shots peppered the wall behind Fisher. He crab-walked left, squeezing off a trio of shots as he moved. Pak, having gotten the two other Koreans out the door, turned back to Stewart, who was trying to rise to his knees. Pak drew a pistol from his pocket and leveled it at Stewart’s head. Stewart let out a scream that Fisher could only describe as half-angry, half-desperate, then launched himself at Pak. The other Korean, distracted by the scream, turned toward them. Fisher rose up, took aim, and drilled a shot into the side of the man’s head.

  Pak, startled by Stewart’s move, backpedaled toward the door. His gun roared once, then again. Stewart stumbled, but kept coming. He wrapped Pak in a bear hug, and together they tumbled through the door.

  Fisher holstered the pistol, drew the SC-20 from his back sling, and sprinted down the space, dodging and leaping tables until he reached the downed Korean. He checked the man; he was dead. On flat feet, Fisher slowly crept to the door and peeked his head around the corner. Pak was gone, but lying headfirst halfway down the steps was Stewart. Fisher rushed to him, knelt down.

  He was still alive, but just barely. Fisher unzipped his jacket, ripped open his shirt. One bullet had entered just above his navel; the other in the center of the sternum, just below the breastbone.

  “It’s a LINAC,” Stewart rasped, reaching for Fisher’s hand and pulling him closer. “They’re using it . . . using it . . .” Stewart coughed. He opened his mouth to speak again, but it was full of bubbling blood.

  “I’m sorry, Calvin.”

  Stewart gave the barest shake of his head, then he went still.

  From somewhere below, Fisher heard a muffled crump, then another, then a third. A vibrating rumble rose through the stairs and shook the walls, followed seconds later by the shriek of tortured steel.

  The remote, Fisher thought. Getting rid of the evidence.

  Fisher gave Stewart’s hand a final squeeze, then laid it across his chest and started down the stairs. He stopped. Turned back. One last thing . . .

  He rushed back up the stairs into the laboratory. He took close-up pictures of the LINAC and the welded ring connector on the chamber’s door, then pressed his face to the porthole window. The angle was tight and the single bulb inside the chamber dim, but he took three quick shots of the interior connectors, hoping to catch enough detail.

  Below his feet the deck was canting to the left. Somewhere he could hear the rapid-fire pop pop pop of rivets giving way and the wrenching of steel on steel.

  He was about to turn away from the chamber when something caught his eye. He pressed his face back to the porthole. It took him a full ten seconds to register what he was seeing. Up and down both of the chamber’s walls were crisscrossing streaks of blood, and here and there, also stamped in blood, partial palm prints.

  Fisher felt his stomach rise into his throat.

  Peter’s fingertips had been shredded nearly to the bone.

  This is it. This is where it had happened. Where they killed him.

  The deck was slanting badly now. Behind him, chairs and desks were skittering across the floor and crashing into the wall. Still staring into the chamber, Fisher grabbed the wheel to steady himself. Somewhere in the back of his head a faint voice prodded him: Get out . . . get out!

  He tore his eyes from the porthole and headed for the door.

  26

  GERMANTOWN, MARYLAND

  AFTER a night of observation and restless sleep in Bethesda, Fisher drove himself home, a 1940s farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine about thirty minutes northwest of Washington. At Fisher Farms, as Grimsdottir called it, his closest neighbor wasn’t within a stone’s throw, and the road he lived on simply wound deeper into the Germantown countryside, so the only traffic he saw was that of neighbors or the occasional wanderer. There was no hum of car engines, no honking of horns—few noises, in fact, save those produced by nature: the chirping of chickadees, the croaking of frogs, the wind fluttering through the maples.

  He’d bought the property on the cheap from the former owner, who had moved out of state years earlier and let it fall into disrepair. Fisher’s home improvement list never seemed to shorten, but that didn’t bother him. He found the “unextraordinariness” of retiling a bathroom or fixing a broken shutter therapeutic—the perfect antidote to a job that was anything but workaday.

  Fisher climbed out of the car and mounted the front porch steps. Sitting at the foot of the front door was a round hatbox brimming with envelopes. On the way home he’d called Mrs. Stinson, the retired librarian who lived half a mile down the road. Taped to the side of the box was a note:

  Welcome back. An apple pie on the back porch for you.

  Edna

  Fisher smiled. No place like home.

  HE took a shower, made some coffee and a plate of ham and eggs, then stretched out on the couch under the bay window and read for a while—The White Rhino Hotel by Bartle Bull—then dozed fitfully for an hour, so he got up, changed clothes, and went outside to weed the garden. He gave up after ten minutes. He took off his gloves and walked to the middle of the lawn and sat down cross-legged in the sun.

  His mind wouldn’t turn off and kept returning to the platform, to Calvin Stewart, to the claw marks on the chamber wall, the bloody, shredded fingernails . . .

  He should have never promised Stewart he would get him out. He knew better. There were few sure things, and even fewer in his line of work. What bothered him most is he couldn’t decide whether he’d made the promise to secure Stewart’s cooperation or because he’d truly meant it. To survive and thrive in special operations you had to have a mission mind-set: whatever it took to do the job. It wasn’t a matter of setting aside your morals, per se, but a level of dedication, a silent oath to get the job done, regardless of hurdle or hardship.

  Had he subconsciously been follo
wing this oath when he made the promise to Stewart? Before he’d dropped aboard the Gosselin, he’d known Stewart had a wife and a seven-year-old daughter. Now they didn’t have him. Had Stewart died still believing Fisher was going to save him?

  Peter. Fisher tried to imagine what it must have been like for his brother, trapped inside that chamber, that iron coffin, listening to the accelerator’s motors spool up, and then . . . what? What had he felt? Had he—?

  Stop, Sam. Just stop.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and stared at the sky, seeing but not seeing the clouds.

  This was another hazard of the job. Some operators never let themselves think like this; they simply wiped their mental slate clean after a mission and moved on. Others, like Fisher, did just that but only after a mission. Shove your worries, fears, and emotional speed bumps into a mental vault, lock it shut, then reopen it later when you’re safe at home. Opinions varied about which method was the healthiest, but for Fisher there’d never been any doubt. There’s only so much stuff you can shove in the vault before it starts leaking. Better to keep it swept out.

  No, he decided, he hadn’t lied to Stewart. He’d meant what he’d said, and he’d tried to get him out. He’d failed. Period. It was a promise he shouldn’t have made, but he had, and it was done. His intentions had been good; his follow-through, not so much.

  And as for Peter . . . Come what may, scores would be settled. Anyone and everyone who’d been a party to Peter’s death would pay in full.

  Fisher’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He flipped it open. It was Grimsdottir: “So, what’s your preference? Morton’s or Outback?”

  “You’ve lost me, Grim.”

  “For your steak. Never mind, just turn on your TV and call me back.”

  Fisher walked back inside and flipped on the kitchen set; it was already tuned to MSNBC.

  “. . . again, stunning news out of war-torn Kyrgyzstan . . .” The inset image beside the anchorwoman changed to show a podium, the same one the Kyrgyz president had stood behind while resigning two days ago. Standing behind it now was Bolot Omurbai. “Let’s listen,” the anchor said.

  “. . . the grace of Allah and the will of the Kyrgyz people, I have returned to lead our country back to the ways of Islam—the ancient ways of Manas, before all was poisoned by the West, by technology, by modern soullessness.” Omurbai’s eyes seemed to glaze over as he spoke, his gaze fixed straight ahead as though he were in his own world. “Turn your eyes to Kyrgyzstan and behold our greatness. Watch the scourge of Manas return the lost Kyrgyz race back to greatness!”

  Omurbai stopped suddenly. He blinked several times, emerging from this trance, then continued. “I am told that most of the world believed me dead.” Here Omurbai offered a disarming smile and a spread of his hands. “As they say, news of my demise was misreported.

  “The outlaw government, backed by the evil forces of the United States, foisted a lie upon the world and the people of Kyrgyzstan—a lie meant to crush the spirit of my people . . .”

  Fisher muted the television. Good Christ. Until now, his suspicion that Omurbai was still alive had been notional; now it was tangible.

  Of course, Omurbai was lying. The man captured by the U.S. Army Rangers in that cave had been dressed in Omurbai’s uniform, had answered to his name, and stood by it throughout his trial.

  Had Omurbai already left the country by then? Fisher suspected so. He’d probably fled across the Kazak border even before the bombs started falling. Then, aided by loyalists in the stans, he’d made his way to Little Bishkek and disappeared into Tolkun Bakiyev’s Ingonish. What remained to be answered was the nature of Omurbai’s connection to the North Korean government. What was driving that partnership?

  Fisher flipped open his cell phone to call Grimsdottir, then stopped, hesitated, and flipped it closed again. On the kitchen table was his hatbox full of mail. One of the envelopes jutting from the stack had caught Fisher’s eye; he walked over and slid it out.

  He felt his heart lurch. He knew the handwriting on the envelope.

  Peter.

  27

  THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM

  “NO doubts?” Lambert asked.

  Fisher, his eyes fixed on the cellophane-sealed letter lying in the center of the conference table under a circle of light, seemed not to hear. Redding and Grimsdottir, also leaning over the letter, waited for Fisher to respond.

  After a few moments, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I’m sorry?”

  “The letter. No doubt it’s Peter’s handwriting?”

  “No, it’s his.”

  Quashing his urge to tear open the letter as soon as he’d seen it, Fisher had instead immediately called Lambert, who’d called the Department of Energy operations center, which in turn dispatched NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) to Fisher’s home. Though primarily tasked with the identification and handling of nuclear weapons, NESTs were also the best general-circumstances radioactive response teams in the country. However unlikely, if the letter contained even the barest trace of PuH-19, it needed to be handled appropriately.

  With the letter on its way to Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Fisher himself was whisked to George-town University Hospital, where the doctors, already made aware of the nature of the possible contamination, gave him a full physical, from head to toe, inside and out. No trace of PuH-19 was found.

  Four hours later the letter, too, was declared clean of any contamination, so it was transported to the FBI’s Quantico labs, where it was pushed through Latent Prints and Trace Evidence units, then returned to Fort Meade. Peter’s prints were found on the letter; no remarkable trace findings.

  The letter had been postmarked in Nuuk, where Peter had been first taken after being picked up by the fishing boat, about four days before Peter had been transferred to Johns Hopkins. How the letter had gotten mailed Fisher could only guess, but the most likely answer was a kind-hearted nurse or orderly. What remained a true mystery was how Peter had escaped the chamber aboard the platform and made his way into a life raft.

  “That’s not his normal handwriting, I assume,” Grimsdottir said.

  Fisher shook his head. “He must have already been sick. Plus, he never wrote anything down. He had a snapshot memory.”

  The handwriting, while clearly belonging to Peter, was shaky, as though written by a palsied hand. Even the letter itself, which was headed by the words, “Sam . . . important . . . piece together . . . answers here,” wasn’t so much a letter as it was a disjointed collection of doodles, some writing along the ruled lines, some in the margins, some upside down and trailing off the page into nowhere. It was as though Peter were trying to prize from his fevered and failing mind the most pertinent pieces of his investigation in hopes that Fisher could pick up the trail.

  There were references to Site 17, the now-destroyed drilling platform; to Little Bishkek; to the missing Carmen Hayes—all of which Fisher understood. But then there were other notations, words and numbers that seemed unconnected to anything he’d encountered:

  Sun

  Star

  Nile

  Wonder ash

  49- 2303253/1443622

  Oziri

  Red . . . tri . . . my . . . cota

  “The problem is,” Redding said, “we don’t know how far the PuH-19 had spread through him when he wrote this. All this could be nonsense. It might have made sense to him at the time, but we have to at least consider it’s meaningless.” Redding caught Fisher’s eye and grimaced. “Sorry, Sam, no offense.”

  “None taken. You’re right; it’s possible.”

  “Maybe,” Grimsdottir said, tapping a pencil on the table, “but maybe not.” She turned around, walked to a computer workstation, and started tapping keys. They watched her in silence for a couple minutes, and then Lambert said, “Grim . . .”

  “Hang on . . . Okay, thought so.” She curled an index finger at them, and they walked over and clustered around the monitor. On-screen was
a Discovery Channel website article entitled “The Lost Sunstar.”

  . . . a mystery that has remained unsolved for almost sixty years. The Sunstar, a civilian version of the World War II Curtiss C-46 Commando transport plane owned by millionaire geologist-adventurer Niles Wondrash, took off from Mwanza, Tanzania, on the evening of November 17, 1949, with his manservant Oziri. The Sunstar, flown by Wondrash himself, never reached its destination, Addis Ababa, nine hundred miles to the north in Ethiopia. Extensive search and rescue efforts failed to find any trace of Wondrash and the Sunstar. They had simply vanished from existence . . .

  Lambert straightened up and whistled softly. “I’ll be damned.”

  Grimsdottir said, “I knew those words sounded familiar.”

  “Those numbers,” Fisher said. “The first two before the dash match the year Wondrash disappeared. The others—two sets of seven numbers divided by a slash—latitude and longitude?”

  “Could be,” Redding said. “What about the other words—‘Red . . . tri . . . my . . . cota’?”

  “No idea,” Grimsdottir said. “I’ll have to do some digging. But here’s the real shocker, boys,” she added, hands flying over the keyboard as she brought up Google, typed a word, and hit ENTER. She pointed triumphantly to the screen, which displayed a genealogy website’s database. “Wondrash’s manservant . . . Oziri? That’s a traditional Kyrgyz name.”

  “WHAT we have to decide,” Lambert said as they retook their seats around the conference table, “is whether any of this is worth pursuing. Grim, where do we stand on putting the puzzle together?”