Blacklist Aftermath Page 2

  Fisher wove around the first two columns of water, but the next one was falling far too close to the wall, driving him back to the outside and along the ledge once more. Here the ground was much more unstable; his back wheel felt mushy, and rocks tumbled into the ravine behind him. As he cleared the gauntlet, he swore aloud—because another lay before him:

  A pair of waterfalls about three meters apart were raging down the cliff now, washing hard over the road and eating hungrily at the ledge. Rahmani, that suicidal maniac, muscled his bike right through the flow, getting kicked off to the side and nearly washed over before he slammed his wheel to the right and managed at the very last second to leap free with a high-pitched whine of his engine and sputter from his tires.

  With a renewed resolve and drawing on a long career of taking risks that would leave most men weak-kneed and clutching their throats, Fisher rolled his wrist and blasted into the waterfall at top speed, assuring himself that his forward momentum was a greater force than the water but realizing at the last second that his assurances were bullshit. If he didn’t steer for the wall, he was dead.

  For the span of three full heartbeats, he saw only the water, haloed in gloom and washing over him, until abruptly he broke free, smiled—and the bike slid out from beneath him. That he got his foot down before dumping was a small miracle, and he was able to kick up and right himself—just as his handlebar began dragging along the wall, a few sparks flickering. He leaned into his next turn and reached a stretch of more level ground.

  Rahmani was far below now, having already negotiated the next hairpin, his headlight like a firefly, tiny against the colossal skyscrapers of rock.

  But just ahead of him, lumbering downhill like a tortoise, was another pair of lights, and for just a moment the vehicle’s silhouette appeared: a sedan, probably a taxi, whose driver was either carrying a very high-paying fare or was desperate to get home despite the weather. At any rate, that driver was suddenly Fisher’s best buddy. If the road remained as narrow as it presently was, Rahmani would either lose time trying to pass the taxi or find himself stuck behind it—with Fisher roaring up behind him.

  Riding a new rush of adrenaline, Fisher set about taking the hairpin turn as swiftly and violently as he could, letting his left foot drag as he flung himself into the curve, wishing he had a dedicated race bike so he could brush his knee along the mud. He spun out again, nearly lost it, then drifted his way to a straight course and began sewing up the gap.

  One of the road’s few surviving signs—most of them had been struck by drivers and flattened or smashed off the cliff—indicated another sharp turn ahead. Fisher took a deep breath and held it. Bringing himself as close to the wall as he dared and locking his gaze on his headlight’s meager beam, he soared around the turn, losing a bit of traction before easing up and letting the bike guide him into the corner. The old Yamaha was a true piece of crap, but she was growing on him now, his gear shifts a little more intuitive, the sounds of the motor communicating speed much more clearly.

  Rahmani drew up fast on the taxi, and a second glance there showed he was trapped behind it. Fisher gritted his teeth and remained tight to the wall, his speed nearly twice that of Rahmani’s. The cabdriver had to be confronting his own mortality, and for a moment, Rahmani looked back, his face cast in the pallid glow of Fisher’s light. His eyes bugged out as he realized he’d failed to lose Fisher and was seconds away from being caught.

  A faint thrumming of rotors sent Fisher’s gaze skyward. Then another sound erupted, a large diesel engine, an engine much louder than the taxi’s.

  They were nearing another sharp turn to the right, and abruptly it was there: an old Volvo F6 delivery truck from the 1970s, its daredevil of a driver taking up the entire road and rumbling head-on toward the taxi.

  The truck driver locked up his brakes, as did the cabdriver, but their tires had little traction across the sheets of rain and mud.

  “Sam, we’re back online, target locked on with FLIR, and Briggs is inbound,” came a familiar voice through the nickel-sized subdermal embedded behind his ear.

  Fisher wasn’t wearing the subvocal transceiver, or SVT, patch on his throat, so he couldn’t respond, but that hardly mattered.

  The truck and taxi collided in a thundering, screeching explosion of twisting metal and fiberglass and shattering glass that stole his breath and sent debris hurtling toward him.

  The taxi’s front end crushed as though it were made of papier-mâché, and the truck kept coming, plowing the taxi back with the front wheels rising off the dirt.

  Rahmani had no time to react. He screamed and struck the sedan’s rear bumper. His front wheel folded like a taco as the bike slid sideways, and in the next second he caromed off the rear window and vanished beneath the vehicle—

  Into the meat grinder.

  The squealing and gurgling and crunching of metal grew to a crescendo as Fisher cursed and steered for the barest of openings on the left side, trying to skirt around the bulldozing truck. He swore again because the taxicab with Rahmani beneath began sliding toward the ledge, cutting him off. He crashed into the taxi and flew headfirst over the handlebars, went tumbling across the cab’s trunk, and then the force of the Volvo’s momentum sent him rolling off the side of the sedan.

  A stretch of rocks and earth about eight inches wide saved Fisher’s life.

  He struck that patch shoulder-first, realized where he was—about to plunge over the ledge—and reflexively reached out with both hands, clutching some heavy weeds and grasses that sprouted along the cliffside.

  His legs came whipping around, the force driving the grass through his fingers, his grip now tentative at best. He dug the tips of his boots into the mountainside, but there was no good purchase on the wet rock and mud, and his legs dangled. He groaned with exertion, his arms literally trembling under the load. Something flashed to his left, and there it was, the sticker of Jesus that had been peeling off his motorcycle’s gas tank; it fluttered on a rock for a few seconds, then blew away.

  Above Fisher, off to his right, the truck’s rear wheels gave out, and the lumbering vehicle began sliding tailfirst toward the edge. The driver tried to steer out of the slide, but it was too late.

  The entire ledge quaked as the Volvo’s rear wheels hung in midair while the undercarriage slammed down and was dragged along the stone. Finally, the front wheels left the road, even as the driver, a lean, bearded man in coveralls, tried to bail out, but the truck was already airborne. Fisher watched with an eerie fascination as the driver wailed and the vehicle’s headlights shone straight up into the rain, then wiped across Fisher before the truck tumbled away, twin beams flashing and dancing, growing fainter, fainter . . . until a distant impact and whoosh of flames resounded from somewhere below.

  The helicopter was overhead now, the rotor wash whipping through the storm. That would be a Mil Mi-24 Russian-made helicopter gunship, one of a small fleet the government of Bolivia had purchased from the Russians to combat the drug trade. Fisher had sent Briggs to link up with the pilot and weapons system operator the moment their target had bolted.

  A spotlight shone on Fisher, then the nylon fast rope dropped at his shoulder, within arm’s reach. He reached out for the rope even as, from above, an African-American man dressed in full Kevlar-weave tactical operation suit and wearing trifocal sonar goggles came sliding down, looking for all the world like Fisher himself.

  Clutching the rope, Fisher managed to climb back up and onto the road, then he guided the rope toward the wall so that the man, Isaac Briggs, could hop onto the mud.

  Briggs was a kid, really, just twenty-seven, former U.S. Army intel officer, former paramilitary ops officer with the CIA, current member of Fourth Echelon—which he liked to call 4E because he hailed from a world of e-books and theories and military history, a world dominated by acronyms and PowerPoints that, in the world according to Fisher,
didn’t mean jack when you were in the field. Briggs was a good guy, handpicked by Fisher, and he was just now escaping from the clutches of theory and learning to trust his instincts. No more company man for him. He worked for Fourth Echelon now.

  “Got here as soon as we could,” Briggs cried, tugging up the goggles and lifting his voice over the sound of the chopper.

  Fisher shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. This thing’s gone to shit.”

  Ignoring the needling pain that seemed to come from every part of his body, Fisher led Briggs back toward the taxi, which was now hanging partially off the ledge. The stench of leaking gasoline and oil still rose through the rain as they drew near.

  “Damn,” Briggs gasped.

  The taxi’s engine was somewhere in the backseat. The driver’s head—just his head—was lying on the rear dashboard, his severed left arm jutting from a rear window.

  Fisher frowned at Briggs. “You’re not gonna be sick, are you?”

  “I was already sick of chasing this bastard around the world.”

  “Well, you got your wish. It ends here. And not well for us.” Fisher glared at the chopper. “Call that bird. Tell him to bug out for a few minutes till we’re ready for him.”

  Briggs nodded and barked orders into his radio.

  Tensing, Fisher dropped to all fours, called for Briggs to hand him a flashlight, and let the beam play under the wreckage. He spotted one of Rahmani’s legs, IDed by the color of the man’s pants, shoved up into the cab’s transmission, but the rest of him was missing.

  Releasing another string of curses, Fisher sprang to his feet and directed the light across the road, the beam slowly exposing a trail of body parts near the wall, one they’d missed walking over because it was hidden in the shadows. They found the torso with the head still attached; it was lying among some rocks, the blood washing off in the rain.

  Fisher was ready to strangle someone, and Briggs sensed that. He kept his distance, and without a word, they began a meticulous search of the body and scoured the rest of the road for anything Rahmani might have been carrying. Fisher found a small pistol, a beat-up old Makarov, but nothing else. Briggs snapped as many photos as he could before they gathered up the body parts in a “glad bag” and sent them up to the chopper when it returned.

  Rahmani had been the best lead they’d had in locating that stolen uranium. That his group had pulled off the robbery was nothing short of miraculous, which had the world’s intelligence communities assuming that it was an inside job. The general public had no idea what was happening, and the Russians were thus far tight-lipped about the entire affair. Sorry, nyet, this is state secret information.

  The Mayak facility was two hours south of Ekaterinburg, at the end of unmarked back roads, near a forested plateau of lakes and small rivers. It was protected by chain-link barbed-wire fences and a deforested strip of land that provided no cover. The facility had just been updated with a new electronic surveillance system provided by the United States and a radiation monitoring system that was well-nigh impossible to defeat—unless your name was Sam Fisher. The rest of its defenses were classified, but it was not reckless to assume that the Russians had a keen interest in guarding their nuclear material—especially when they’d been backed by the U.S. Congress to the tune of 350 million dollars to build a heavily fortified warehouse or “Plutonium Palace” to store approximately 40 percent of their military’s excess fissile material.

  Nevertheless, Rahmani and his unidentified cronies had not only broken into the facility but had managed to escape from it with their pockets glowing green. Their smuggling route was still a point of conjecture. Kazakhstan was only a four-hour drive to the south, but that course would’ve taken them through Chelyabinsk and many border checkpoints. They had more likely gone southwest, traveling some 1,200 miles or more to the Caspian Sea, with the goal of smuggling the uranium through Azerbaijan and into Turkey.

  What’s more, it took the Russian government more than three days to officially report the incident, giving the thieves ample time to escape the country. Whether the Russians were doing their own damage control or the theft was entirely unnoticed by their staff at the facility was a second point of conjecture.

  A tip from the National Intelligence Organization of Turkey—Milli I.stihbarat , or MI.T—led to a raid on a small machine shop in an industrial sector of Istanbul situated near slums where the noise of constructing a nuclear weapon was easily masked. And yes, Fisher had learned long ago that the process of nuclear bomb making was, in fact, quite loud, which seemed rather fitting, given the nature of the device.

  Their raid—a joint effort between the United States and Russia’s own foreign intelligence service, Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR—had turned up little. Rahmani’s group had already pulled up stakes before they’d fully moved in and begun constructing their weapon. The SVR agent operating with them was a sour-faced mute who offered little more than shrugs between playing on his smartphone. Fisher had suggested that Istanbul was merely a diversionary stop along their route. The SVR agent had agreed. Then shrugged. Then agreed again.

  Bottom line: Rahmani had known where to find the uranium. And if he hadn’t, he would’ve at least known the players who could point Fisher and his team in the right direction.

  For now, though, all Fisher could do was stare through the rain as he was hoisted up to the chopper.

  The mountainside seemed darker and even emptier now. El Camino de la Muerte had claimed three more victims, and Fisher should have been grateful that he hadn’t been the fourth, but he wasn’t. He felt only anger—knots of anger—tightening in his gut.

  2

  “MONEY is like alcohol,” Igor Kasperov was telling the reporters from the Wall Street Journal as they toured his Moscow headquarters. “It’s good to have enough, but it’s not target. I’m here to be global police and peacekeeper. I’m here to do charity work everywhere. I’m here, I guess, to save our world!” He tossed a hand into the air and unleashed one of his trademark smiles that had been featured on the cover of Time magazine. The two gray-haired, bespectacled reporters beamed back at him.

  Kasperov was no stranger to entertaining the press in the old factory that was now the headquarters of Kasperov Labs, one of the most successful computer antivirus corporations on the planet. That was no boast. According to Forbes, between 2009 and 2012 retail sales of his software increased 174 percent, reaching almost 5.5 million a year—nearly as much as his rivals Symantec and McAfee combined. Worldwide, he had over 60 million users of his security network, users who sent data to his headquarters every time they downloaded an application to their desktops. The cloud-based system automatically checked the code against a “green base” of 300 million software objects it knew to be trustworthy, as well as a “red base” of 94 million known malicious objects. Kasperov’s code was also embedded in Microsoft, Cisco, and Juniper Networks products, effectively giving the company 400 million users. His critics often quibbled over the accuracy of those numbers. He’d send them cases of vodka with notes that instructed them to relax and simply watch as Kasperov Labs became the world’s leading provider of antivirus software.

  To that end, Kasperov took enormous pleasure in employing hundreds of software engineers, coders, and designers barely out of college. This motley crew of pierced-and-tattooed warriors created a magnificent dorm room atmosphere that was, no pun intended, infected with their enthusiasm. They’d seen pictures of the playful Google offices in Mountain View, California, and had become, in a word, inspired. These reporters could sense that, and Kasperov played it up for them, joking around with the staff, high-fiving them like a six-foot-five rock star with unkempt sandy blond hair that he constantly tossed out of his face. His daily glasses of vodka had turned his cheeks ruddy, and last year he’d begun wearing bifocals, but he was still young enough for an American girlfriend barely thirty-two who’d modeled for Victoria’s Sec
ret among others. Surrounded by his youthful staff and his lover, he would defy time and live forever because life was good. Life was fun.

  Without question, these uptight American journalists would refer to him as an oligarch in their reports, a continent-hopping mogul who’d made his fortune after the fall of the Soviet Union. They’d say he was a wild man who had the president’s ear and was, like the country’s other oligarchs, heavily influencing the government because of his connections and wealth. He would dismiss those shopworn claims and give them something more impressive to write about that would enthrall their readers. To begin, he would discuss the ambitious nature of his new offices in Peru and the great work he was going to do there.

  They stood now on a balcony overlooking the hundreds of individually decorated cubicles and walls of classic arcade games. Banks of enormous windows brought in the snowscape and frozen Moskva River beyond. “It is wonderful, is it not?” he asked.

  The reporters nodded, issued perfunctory grins, then launched quite suddenly and aggressively into their questions, as though the sheen of his celebrity and success had suddenly worn thin.

  “What do you think about social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and others?”

  Kasperov refilled their vodka glasses as he spoke. “Freedom is good thing. We all know this. But too much freedom allows bad guys to do bad things, right?”

  “So you don’t like Facebook.”

  “I’m suspicious of these websites. We have VK here, right? It’s like Facebook clone, very popular, even my daughter who’s in college has account. But these websites can be used by wrong people to send wrong messages.”

  “You said freedom is a good thing. But exactly how much freedom do you have?”

  “What do mean? I have much freedom!” He gestured with his drink toward the work floor. “And so do they.”