Conviction (2009) Read online

  “Second, we extracted another name from Ernsdorff’s server data: Aariz Qaderi, a Chechen from Grozny.”

  Fisher knew the name. Two years earlier, after assassinating his predecessor, Qaderi had taken control of the Chechen Martyrs Regiment, or CMR. It was well financed, tightly organized and disciplined, and made no bones about its mission: the subjugation or eradication of all nonbelievers.

  “What kind of data?” Fisher asked.

  “Just his name, an account number, and a pending payment of ten million U.S. dollars.”

  “Big money. Pending to whom?”

  “Ernsdorff. Or whomever he’s fronting for. Here’s part two of the story: One of the serial numbers from Zahm’s China job—”

  “He didn’t remember where exactly. . . .”

  “The Jilin-Heilongjiang region, near the border with Russia, about a hundred miles northwest of Vladivostok. Anyway, one of the serial numbers from Zahm’s job turned up during a raid of a CMR weapons cache outside Grozny. It was a land mine.”

  “Hardly worth ten million dollars,” Fisher observed.

  “No. I’m thinking the ten million is buy in. The land mine was a teaser—a freebie to get Aariz Qaderi interested.

  “That’s the bad news. I’ve waded through Zahm’s ‘insurance’ records from the theft. What Ernsdorff had him hit was a doppelgänger factory.”

  Fisher paused, sighed. “Oh, hell.”

  For decades China’s foreign intelligence agency, Ministry of State Security—the MSS or Guoanbu—had been focused on industrial espionage. Through its Tenth Bureau, Scientific and Technological Information, the Guoanbu had been successfully targeting private military contracts in the West. The existence of doppelgänger factories—laboratories applying the raw intelligence data gathered by the Guoanbu—had been suggested by the CIA in the late nineties, but solid evidence had never been found.

  Doppelgänger factories were dedicated to one purpose: creating perfect knockoffs of the West’s latest and greatest weapons, often systems that weren’t yet even in use by Western militaries.

  “The official name was Laboratory 738,” Grimsdóttir said. “But based on Zahm’s data, there’s no doubt what it was.”

  “You said ‘was.’ ”

  “I went back and checked the satellite imagery. About a month after Zahm’s job, all activity at that chicken farm stopped. In the space of forty-eight hours it became a ghost town.”

  “Can’t say I blame them,” Fisher replied. “What else are they going to do? Admit to the rest of the world they stole the biggest and baddest secrets, then used those secrets to create an überarsenal that they then lost? What are we talking about, Grim? What kind of weaponry?”

  “I’ll download the encrypted list to your new OPSAT when you’re ready, but suffice it to say that Zahm wasn’t exaggerating: If this arsenal falls into the wrong hands, they’ll become a first-world power overnight.”

  HERE was one of the reasons—the other had been settled months earlier—Fisher had been on the run for the past year and a half. Long before Lambert died he’d become one of the few U.S. intelligence officials convinced that doppelgänger factories were, in fact, real. Worse still, Lambert had come to believe the Guoanbu had been getting help from within the Pentagon, the private defense industry, and the U.S. intelligence community, including high level NSA officials—all of whom were, in essence, sowing the seeds of America’s destruction. Armed with the most sophisticated—and often improved-upon—weapons and systems, China, its nuclear weapons, and its billion strong People’s Liberation Army would become invincible.

  While it hadn’t taken much time for Lambert to convince Fisher and Grim that his theory was sound, it had taken much more to convince them that his plan was their only viable course. In killing his boss, Fisher had not only laid the groundwork for his entry into the mercenary underworld, but he’d also removed the specter of Lambert uncovering the corruption and treason that had infected virtually every aspect of the U.S. military-industrial complex. With Lambert dead and Fisher on the run and hunted, those involved would breathe a sigh of relief, go about their business, and hopefully make a mistake on which Fisher and Grimsdóttir could seize.

  “So let’s put the pieces together,” Fisher said. “Ernsdorff is playing money man to whomever hired him to hire Zahm.”

  “Mister X,” Grimsdóttir suggested.

  “Okay. Mister X takes delivery of the 738 Arsenal. . . . Did Zahm indicate where this happened?”

  “Korfovka, Russian Federation, about sixty miles from Laboratory 738 and five miles over the border. I’ll send you the particulars later.”

  “Mister X takes delivery of the 738 Arsenal, then uses Ernsdorff to put the word out to the world’s major terrorist groups about the auction. They invited anyone with the resources to provide the ten-million-dollar ante. To sweeten the deal, he sends out party favors—like the land mine they found at the CMR cache.”

  “I can buy that.”

  “What was it, by the way? The mine, I mean.”

  “Antitank. Essentially a miniature MIRV,” Grim replied, referring to a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. “It uses range and bearing tremble sensors to target multiple tanks. When they’re in range, the mine pops up and launches up to six kinetic-energy armor-piercing penetrators—tungsten carbide combined with depleted uranium—moving at about eight thousand feet per second.”

  “About five thousand miles an hour,” Fisher added. “Even with a thirty percent miss rate, one of those things could take out a tank platoon.”

  “In the space of about ten seconds,” Grim added.

  “OKAY, it’s a safe bet Aariz Qaderi and the CMR are invited to the auction. Do we know where Qaderi is now?”

  “As of two days ago, still in Grozny. I’m retasking a satellite right now for a pass over his house. We’ll know something in about four hours. In the meantime, we’ve got a problem we have to solve first.”

  “Which is?”

  “Our tracking method just got flushed down the toilet—or at least partially.”

  Four months earlier, having decided the arsenal auction was genuine, Fisher and Grimsdóttir began searching for a method, not only to tag and track the weapons once they left the auction site, but to find the auction site itself. Standard GPS-oriented tracking methods were a nonstarter. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, Ernsdorff and his employer would make sure the attendees and the weapons were clean when they arrived at the auction site. No matter how small and how well disguised, GPS trackers emit electromagnetic waves. It was the unavoidable nature of the beast. If Fisher was going to have any chance of making sure the weapons didn’t disappear into the black hole of the terrorist underworld, he needed an unorthodox tracking method.

  As it turned out, such technology existed, but it did not belong to the United States or any of her allies but was instead the brainchild of private Italian researcher named Dr. Terzo Lucchesi, one of perhaps six scientists who had pushed the field of nanotechnology to its farthest reaches. What Lucchesi was doing in his Sardinia-based laboratory was the stuff of science fiction.

  In an ironic twist, Grimsdóttir and Fisher attempted to start their own doppelgänger factory, writ small, by hacking into Lucchesi’s mainframe and stealing what they needed: an atomic scale tracking beacon that Fisher could deploy at a distance and Grimsdóttir could monitor remotely. The most promising approach came from one of Lucchesi’s projects, code named Ajax, which involved molecular, photonic-crystal-based robots designed for microscopic electronic repair. Of course, as did most nanotechnologies, Ajax had a plethora of collateral applications, including the signal-hijacking of silicon microchips.

  Once Grimsdóttir had extracted the details of Ajax from Lucchesi’s mainframe, she turned the project over to her own private laboratory, deeply firewalled within Third Echelon, which set out to transform Lucchesi’s robots into microscopic, and therefore untraceable, beacons designed to infiltrate cell phones, laptop
and desktop computers, modems, broadband routers—anything that used microchip technology to transmit digital data—and send a prearranged burst transmission using the host device’s own internal circuitry. Alone, each Ajax robot was ten nanometers, or one hundred thousand times smaller than the head of a pin; the number of bots required to hijack the average silicon microchip was 125—in all, smaller than a virus.

  “So what’s the problem? Your lab geeks leave the door open?” Fisher asked.

  Grimsdóttir laughed. “Not quite that simple. We’re missing a line of code. We’ve got the bots working like a charm—we can program them to magnetically gravitate to anything with whatever EM signal we choose; they infiltrate, congregate, and diffuse where they’re supposed to, but they don’t transmit.”

  You think Lucchesi left it out?”

  “Yes. We don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t have it finished when we hacked in, or he held it back for security reasons.”

  “How long is this line of code?”

  “Four thousand or so characters.”

  “Long line. You’ve tried to hack back into his mainframe?”

  Grim nodded. “It’s not there.”

  “At four thousand characters it’s not something he memorized,” Fisher observed. “Which means he’s got it stored somewhere else—somewhere not linked to his mainframe.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So I’m going to Sardinia.”

  “Already got your flight booked.”

  24

  AN afternoon Iberia flight took him from Madrid to Milan’s Malpensa Airport for a charter connection to Olbia on Sardinia’s northeastern coast, where he drove inland on the E840 until he reached the small town of Oschiri. Whether it was coincidence or sentimentality, Fisher didn’t know, but according to Grimsdóttir’s biographical brief on Terzo Lucchesi the doctor had been born in Oschiri. He’d built his cutting-edge laboratory two miles from Oschiri, on the arid hills overlooking the Coghinas Reservoir, a location that had as much to do with water access as nostalgia, Fisher guessed. Nanotechnology fabrication produced copious amounts of heat; without fresh cooling water . . . Fisher hadn’t done enough research to know what happens to superheated nanotech, but he doubted it was pleasant.

  Fisher drove into Oschiri, found a restaurant from whose terrace he could see the Lucchesi laboratory, and ordered lunch. While waiting, Fisher, again playing the lookie-look tourist, snapped photos of the countryside around the facility. As laboratories went, the building was architecturally impressive but petite: a white cube measuring two hundred feet to a side and sixty feet tall, with mirrored slit windows on each floor at five foot intervals. Six stories aboveground, Fisher estimated, and an unknown number underground. At least one, judging from the massive cloverleaf of water conduits that climbed the side of the reservoir before disappearing into the angled hillside beneath the laboratory. That much piping translated into a lot of water, and a lot of water required machinery. As for exterior entrances, Fisher counted two, both on the east side of the building: one pedestrian door and one garage door complete with sloped loading ramp.

  During his approach to Oschiri, Fisher had seen signs of neither a police nor a military presence, which told him Lucchesi had pulled off a minor miracle beyond those he creates in the lab: He had managed to keep the Italian military and intelligence communities at bay. As it seemed unlikely neither entity was unaware of Lucchesi’s work, Fisher guessed this meant he was placating them with marvels peripheral to his nanotech work or that he had promised them something juicy in the future.

  Or Fisher was simply wrong, and Lucchesi had a company of 9th Parachute Assault Regiment troopers inside the cube.

  AFTER lunch Fisher followed the SS392 northwest out of Oschiri and to the reservoir. The winding road took him within three-quarters of a mile of the laboratory before curving north along the shore, over a bridge, then east, following the contour of the reservoir before curving once again, this time north into the mountains. He stopped the car, turned around, and retraced his course to Oschiri.

  He’d confirmed his suspicion: There were no boats to be rented on Coghinas Reservoir. If he wanted to exploit the laboratory’s natural weaknesses, he’d have to do it the hard way.

  AN hour later, back in Olbia, Fisher drove to the airport, found the FedEx pickup desk, and collected the box Grim had sent him. In a hurry, Fisher had decided against visiting another cache, which was in San Marino, on the opposite site of Italy’s boot. He drove to his hotel, unpacked the box, and powered up his OPSAT. As promised, Grim had left him an update:1. Team returning to U.S. pending your results.Fisher was under no illusion: With Kovac still breathing down her neck about whether he, Fisher, was verifiably dead, Grimsdóttir might soon reach a place where she had to either actively continue the ruse or manufacture evidence that Fisher was still alive. Perpetrating the lie would give Kovac cause to fire her; coming up with new evidence would send Hansen and his team back in the field. Fisher would have to consider his options.

  2. Started covert investigation: Ames’s finances, history, communications, etc.Ames had lied about the source of the information that had sent the team to Vianden, and Ames had probably ordered van der Putten killed to cover it up. Why? If not Third Echelon, who was Ames’s master? Where had he truly gotten his information? For these two questions, the finger seemed to point to Kovac, but they had no proof. Lambert had believed the corruption ran deep and high within the U.S. intelligence community. Could Kovac be among the bad eggs, or was he simply a bitter bureaucrat with an ax to grind with Grimsdóttir?

  3. Details thin re Lucchesi facility: none available. “Mystery Question” still remains.At this message, Fisher smiled. Terzo Lucchesi was perhaps the best-known unknown in Italy, a Howard Hughes-like figure whose secretive research and lifestyle had kept the collective tongues of the tabloids wagging for a decade. Not even Third Echelon’s reach had shed any light on Lucchesi. What Fisher and Grimsdóttir had dubbed the Mystery Question was this: How exactly did Lucchesi fund his research?

  4. Signs at Aariz Qaderi home of pending departure. Attempting to electronically penetrate target computers for further information.

  5. Detailed inventory of 738 Arsenal theft.

  Fisher scanned the list and immediately realized Zahm hadn’t been exaggerating: In both quality and quantity, the weapons in the 738 Arsenal were staggering and apparently perfect, if not improved, versions of the original systems:French high-impulse thermobaric mortar and grenade rounds

  South African Milkor MGL (multiple-grenade-launcher) systems

  Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifles

  Swiss TDI Vector close-quarter-combat machine pistols

  American Intelligent Munitions System (IMS) land mines

  British AS50 .50 sniper/antimatériel rifles

  American Mk44 Bushmaster II 30mm chain guns

  American XM307 Advanced Crew Served Weapons (ACSW)

  Swedish ADWS (acoustic direction weapons system)

  British Starstreak High Velocity antiaircraft missiles

  Fisher continued reading until he reached the bottom of the list, then read it a second time, counting as he went. Sixty-two different systems or weapons and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition—all with three things in common: They were cutting-edge, they were portable, and whichever terrorist group got its hands on the 738 Arsenal could wreak havoc on any armed force in the world.

  ITEM number four was Fisher’s most immediate concern. Aariz Qaderi was their only known auction attendee. If he left before Fisher could nanotag him, they’d have no hope of tracking him to the meeting and the 738 Arsenal would be lost. Fisher considered his options and realized he had none: On his own, with standard technology, he would lose Qaderi.

  He needed the final line of code for Lucchesi’s nanobots.

  25

  HAVING traveled so far, so quickly, through so many time zones, Fisher’s internal clock was scrambled. Though he knew better, it seemed there hadn’t been a day
in the past two weeks that he hadn’t been waiting for nightfall to either leave his hotel or hostel and go on the run or don his tac-suit and go about his business.

  Tonight was no different. He caught a few hours of sleep before ordering room service, then walked out to his umpteenth rental car. He dropped a new backpack, containing his new equipment loadout, into the trunk, then left Olbia and headed south, arriving in Lucchesi’s hometown forty-five minutes later. As before, he followed the SS392 northeast, but where the road turned north toward the bridge, Fisher took a dirt tract heading south. Following prompts from his Garmin, after three miles he slowed down and doused his headlights. Ahead, to the right, an acre-sized clump of trees appeared against the night sky. Fisher let his car coast to a stop before the gravel driveway. Predictably, the farmhouse looked different from ground level than it did from Google Earth, but the overgrown weeds, dilapidated barn, and empty animal pens had been clear enough, and now, looking at the sign on the chain spanning the driveway, he knew there was no mistake. The farmhouse had been foreclosed upon six months earlier and had been vacant ever since.

  Fisher got out and walked to the chain and found it was padlocked to an oak tree on either side of the drive. It had been done sloppily, however, with both loops set too high and the chain drooping to low. After a brief search, Fisher found a pair of fallen branches with the right configuration and used them to lift the chain off the ground. He drove through, stopped, and got out and kicked the branches away, then pulled behind the barn and shut off the ignition.