Checkmate Read online

  45

  HE questioned Lok for another twenty minutes, then darted him in the neck, left him sleeping in Shek’s funerary tower, and headed back down to the recessed door. Per Lok’s instructions, he found the latch embedded in the baseboard molding and gave it a soft kick. The door opened. Light seeped around the edges. He stood to one side, swung it the rest of the way open, and waited for the count of ten, then peeked around the corner. Clear.

  He stepped inside, shut the door behind him. He was in a short corridor that ended at another door, this one with a small reinforced window set at chin height. Stenciled on the door was a cluster of yellow triangles on a black circular background—the classic symbol for a fallout shelter. Judging from the faded paint, this was a Shek-era addition, probably part of the pagoda’s original design. Yet another eccentricity in an already-full quiver of oddities.

  Fisher reached up and unscrewed the lightbulb above his head, then flipped his trident goggles into place, switched to NV, and peeked through the window. There was no one.

  He went through the door and found himself in a concrete room. A giant yellow arrow on the left-hand wall pointed downward. A single-strip fluorescent light flickered on the wall of the landing. He started down. He stayed close to the far wall, careful to keep his shadow from slipping over the railing. At the first landing he turned down the next flight, and continued down six flights. At the bottom was another windowed door through which he could see the back of a man’s head.

  The guard was too close to the door to risk the flexi-cam, and without knowing whether the man had company, a snatch from behind was out of the question. Plan B, then.

  From his belt he drew the sidearm he’d taken from Lok, placed it on the third step, then retreated beneath the stairwell. He drew his pistol and toggled the selector to DART, then fired at the door. The dart ticked against the steel, then skittered away. In the window the guard’s head turned. Fisher drew back under the steps, lay down on his back, and flicked the pistol back to single-shot.

  The door creaked open. There were three seconds of silence, then a Chinese voice—frustrated, disgusted. Fisher assumed the words amounted to, Okay, which idiot dropped his gun?

  Boots clicked on concrete. Fisher pictured the man walking and counted steps: four . . . five . . . six . . . Foot on the first step . . .

  Fisher pushed off the wall and slid out, gun coming up. The man sensed movement and started to turn, but too late. Fisher fired. The bullet penetrated beneath his left earlobe. The Glaser Safety Slug had devastating effect, instantly pulverizing the man’s brain stem. The man tipped sideways, but even as he started sliding down the wall, Fisher was up and moving. He caught the body as it fell, then dragged it beneath the stairwell. He checked the steps and wall for blood, wiped up two spots, picked up Lok’s gun.

  A quick peek revealed the corridor was empty and thankfully short, with two rooms on each side and a vaultlike door at the end—which led to what Lok had called “the room.” The floor was covered with two black rubber tiles Fisher guessed were vibration dampeners. Shek had spared no expense on his doomsday bunker.

  Fisher punched up OPSAT’s comm screen: The mysterious CIA signal was still there, and unless he’d missed finding something above or there was yet another level below this one, the beacon was coming from the first room on his right.

  Time to solve a mystery.

  HE slid the flexi-cam beneath the door. In the fish-eye lens he saw what looked like a college dorm room. Two single beds, one each on the left and right walls, separated by a desk, a clothes bureau at the foot of each bed. On the left-hand bed, a man reclined. He suddenly sat up and dropped his feet to the floor. He was Chinese. He rubbed his face in his hands, looked around.

  Agitated, Fisher thought.

  He withdrew the flexi-cam, briefly considered his options, then decided simple was easier. He drew his pistol then lightly tapped his index finger on the door three times. From inside, the bed creaked, footsteps approached. The door swung open.

  Fisher didn’t give the man a chance to react. He barreled through the door, palm against the man’s chest, shoving him, gun in his face. The man’s legs bumped into the bed rail and he fell backward onto the bed.

  “Not a sound,” Fisher warned.

  Mouth agape, arms raised, the man nodded. “Okay, okay . . .”

  English. Well modulated, very little accent. “Shut up,” Fisher snapped. “Interlace your hands across your chest.”

  The man complied and Fisher checked the room. Only one of the bureaus contained clothes. No roommate. Fisher stood over the man. “We’re going to make this quick. I’m going to talk, you’re going to listen. For the past few hours you’ve been transmitting a beacon signal on a CIA carrier frequency.”

  “No, I—”

  “Yes, you have. Tell me why.”

  The man hesitated.

  Fisher said, “If I had a problem with your beacon, you’d be dead right now. The fact that you’re not should tell you something. The fact that I’m not Chinese should also tell you something. You can either believe me, or not, but I don’t have the time to waste on you.” He leveled the pistol with the man’s forehead.

  “Okay, okay, wait. It’s in the desk drawer.”

  “Open it. Slowly.”

  The man did so. He pulled out a white 30GB iPod Video, unplugged a wire, and handed it over. “There’s a phone conduit behind the desk; I tapped into it.”

  “Clever,” Fisher said. “Yours?”

  “No. My handler gave it to me.”

  This would be a CIA case officer from the Near East Division. The modified iPod would have come from Langley’s wizards in the Science & Technical Directorate. Fisher handed the iPod back.

  “I’m going to put my gun away.” The man nodded and Fisher sat down on the opposite bed. “What’s your name?”

  “Heng.”

  His face was chalky and his eyes were red-rimmed and underlined with bags. He was clearly exhausted, and Fisher knew lack of sleep had nothing to do with it. Whoever Heng was—agent, informant, or something else altogether—he’d been under tremendous stress for a long time.

  “What’s your job?” Fisher asked.

  “You mean, what do I do here, or what am I doing for the agency?”

  “The latter.”

  “For the past year, I’ve been feeding them information about Kuan-Yin Zhao.”

  Fisher felt like he’d swallowed a ball of ice. “Say that name again.”

  “Kuan-Yin Zhao.”

  And suddenly a big piece of the puzzle Fisher had been racing to assemble snapped into place.

  46

  IF the now-mummified Bai Shek was China’s version of a Howard Hughes-ian cliche, then Kuan-Yin Zhao was its version of The Godfather, only more violent.

  After a ten-year meteoric rise up the bloody ladder of Chinese tongs and triads, Zhao had for the last twenty years reigned as the undisputed kingpin of the Chinese underworld. Labor, transportation, gambling, prostitution, drugs—every vice or necessity of Chinese daily life was in some way, large or small, controlled by Zhao. It was the latter category, drugs, that had for the last eight years solidified his position, and he owed it all to something called Jagged.

  A synthetic derivative drug developed by Zhao’s own chemical engineers, Jagged was both an addict’s nightmare and his fantasy. A dozen times more addictive than methamphetamine, Jagged provided the user with a mixed high—the smooth dreamscape of heroin combined with the energy rush of cocaine—all with an easy come-down that lasted less and less time with each dose, until the user couldn’t go for more than an hour or two without a fix. Withdrawl symptoms could last a month or more and were similar to those of hemorrhagic disease: fever, migraine headache, cramping, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the eyes, and ecchymosis, or the pooling of blood beneath the skin.

  From a manufacturing perspective, Jagged was a dream come true. Its component chemicals were found in everything from food additives and pesticides to
over-the-counter allergy medicines and household cleaning products—all cheap, legal, and nearly impossible to regulate. In the eight years it had been in circulation, Jagged’s chemical makeup had resisted all replication, which left Kuan-Yin Zhao not only its sole producer, but also one of the wealthiest men on the face of the earth.

  In the first three years of its existence, Jagged had spread like the plague it was from China to Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and India, before finally leaving Asia and jumping into Russia and the former Soviet Republics, Eastern and Western Europe, and finally America. Everywhere Jagged went, rates of addiction and crime skyrocketed. It spread through high schools and colleges and into suburbia, addicting both the curious and recreational users as well as hard-core users.

  The justice systems of affected countries were overwhelmed. State and federal legislators couldn’t allocate money fast enough to find a place to house those convicted not only of possesion of Jagged, but also of the crimes that inevitably trailed in its wake: prostitution, theft, murder, assault, rape.

  Fisher had read the stats and he’d seen the results on city streets. In the five years since it hit the United States, Jagged’s rate of use—and thereby addiction—had outstripped its every competitior, having risen to 9.2 percent of the population, or almost 27 million people. For every ten people in the United States, one of them was a hard-core Jagged addict who would slit your throat for the spare change in your pocket.

  THAT answered the who part of Fisher’s puzzle. Kuan-Yin Zhao had enough wealth to buy anything and anyone he needed, but the question of why he’d launched the Trego and Slipstone attacks and why he seemed to be trying to orchestrate a war between Iran and the U.S. was still a mystery. Fisher hoped Heng might answer that question.

  “What do you do for Zhao?” Fisher asked.

  “Intelligence,” Heng answered. “I was Second Bureau, Guoanbu.”

  “Foreign Directorate,” Fisher said.

  “Yes. One of Zhao’s people recruited me. I lost a sister and a cousin to Jagged. I thought I’d get inside Zhao’s organization and . . .” Heng stopped, threw up his hands. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I knew could not go to my superiors; Zhao’s influence is everywhere. He has so much money. . . .”

  “So you offered yourself up to the CIA.”

  Heng nodded. “I knew there was an undeclared station in Taipei, so I arranged to go on vacation there and I made contact.”

  “What have you given them?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. I don’t think I’m Zhao’s only recruit. He’s got an operation going, but it’s compartmentalized. I handle a piece of it, someone else handles another piece. . . . I’m sure you know how it works.”

  Fisher decided Heng deserved to know what was at stake here. “You know about Slipstone?”

  “I saw it on news, yes.”

  “We think Zhao’s behind that. He got his hands on some nuclear waste from Chernobyl.”

  Heng closed his eyes and sighed. “I had a chance to kill him once, you know. I should have.”

  “Maybe you’ll get another shot,” Fisher said. “But for now, I need your eyes and ears here. When did you last make contact with your handler?”

  “A month, month and a half ago. About that time Zhao cracked down on security and we started moving. Communication was impossible.”

  Four to six weeks, Fisher thought. About the time Zhao would have put the Trego and Slipstone operations into motion. The fact that Heng was still incognito here suggested there was more of Zhao’s plan yet to unfold.

  “What’s the last thing you did for him?”

  “Two weeks ago, I went with two of his bodyguards to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, to meet a man—an Iranian.”

  The two men the FBI had in custody from Slipstone had been ultimately bound for Ashgabat.

  Connecting dots.

  “And? Did you know him? Did you get a name?”

  Heng shook his head. “I gave him a package and went over an operation with him—a raid of some kind. All I had was a map. No legend. It’s somewhere along a coastline, but nothing looked familiar to me. I could tell it was some kind of military installation, but that’s it. My guess is that someone else had already given the man the other parts of the operation. As I said—”

  “Compartmentilization, I know. Draw it for me.”

  Heng drew the map from memory, but with no peripheral features it meant nothing to Fisher.

  He continued questioning Heng, going backward and forward through his time with Zhao, but there was little else to glean. Heng’s role had largely been that of a courier.

  “I do have something that might be useful,” he said. “In Ashgabat, I met the Iranian at a private home. I know where it is, and I remember a name: Marjani. Ailar Marjani.”

  “I’ll look into it. What’s in the room, the one with the vault door?”

  “Zhao’s nerve center. Communications, computers, satellite uplinks—he’s got it all.”

  “How many in there?”

  “Three or four.”

  “Is Zhao here?”

  “No, but I think he’s coming. I don’t know when.”

  Fisher considered his options. Hunker down, wait for Zhao, and either snatch him or kill him? Or take what he had and get out? He chose the latter. Whatever was left to play out in Zhao’s scheme, Fisher knew there was no guarantee the man’s death or disappearance would stop it. Besides, while getting his hands on Zhao might be easy enough, getting off the island alive—with or without him—would be another matter altogether. “You know I can’t take you out,” Fisher said to Heng.

  “I know.”

  “Lay low and keep you eyes open. Make contact if you can.”

  Heng nodded.

  “One last question: How do I get into Zhao’s nerve center?”

  HENG’S answer was to take Fisher down the hall to the first door on the left. Fisher picked the lock and they slipped inside. It was a utility room with an air-conditioning unit, a few supply closets filled with sundry items, and an open circular pit in the floor surrounded by a fringe of steel plates secured to the floor by a padlocked chain.

  Fisher sent Heng back to his room, then picked the padlock and pried up one of the plates, revealing a two-foot-deep crawl space. Cool air rushed up to meet him; it smelled of earth. Years ago, Heng had explained, when Shek had ordered his pagoda built, the foundation had struck a seasonal water table, so the fallout shelter’s pilings had been raised to compensate for moonsoon flooding. Two months earlier, had Fisher pried back the well’s plates, he would have found a small lake instead of dirt. The pit was a runoff sump for excess water.

  Fisher shut off the overhead light, then dropped through the opening and pulled the plate closed behind him.

  WITH a hum, his NV goggles powered up, revealing an expanse of dirt and concrete pilings. To his right, a pair of eyes flashed red; with a screech, the rat scurried away and disappeared.

  He started crawling, angling to his left and counting feet until he was centered under the hallway. He adjusted course and kept crawling. He reached a horizontal steel plate that extended from the floor above to the dirt below. This would be the outer vault door. He crawled around the plate. After another ten feet, he came to a second one, the inner vault door. On the other side of this he saw a dozen squares of blue light cast on the dirt floor.

  These lattice floor tiles were backups to the air conditioners, Heng had explained. Zhao’s nerve center ran a lot of electrical equipment, all of which had to be kept cool.

  Fisher slowed down now, moving a few inches, then stopping and listening before moving again. After ten feet, he heard a low-level buzz of electricity and hushed voices speaking in Chinese. He powered down his goggles and kept crawling until he could see through a tile.

  He found himself looking at the back of a chair and a pair of feet resting on the floor. A computer workstation. He inched to his right until he could see through the next opening. Here he could see the corner of a plasma T
V screen. He craned his neck until a station logo came into view: CNN. He moved to the next tile. Mounted on the wall above was what looked like backlighted sheet of Plexiglas. Fisher couldn’t tell its width, but it seemed to extend from the floor to the ceiling.

  It was a HUD, or Heads-Up Display, he realized, similar to the one in his own scuba faceplate or in fighter cockpit screens. On it was displayed a lighted map an-noted with grease-pencil markings. The area displayed looked familiar, but it took a moment for him to place it:

  Persian Gulf, western coastline of Iran.

  47

  THE upper rim of the sun was just edging over the horizon when Houston’s sail rose from the water fifty yards to his right. A seaman was waiting on deck, ready with a hand up. “Welcome back,” the kid said.

  “Good to be back,” Fisher said. He meant it.

  It had taken him the remainder of the night to extract himself first from the pagoda, then back through the security cordon surrounding the compound, across the island to the cliff road, and down to the beach, where he’d hidden his scuba gear among the rocks. He was bone tired, but buzzing with excess adrenaline. His mind was spinning, trying to fit together what he’d uncovered on the island.

  After a quick towel-off and a change of clothes, he found Collins and Marty Smith in the Control Center. “Was it everything you’d hoped?” Smith said with a grin.

  “And so much more,” Fisher replied. “Max, I need you to send the immediate extract signal, then clear the area at best speed.”

  “Bad news?” Collins asked.

  “I think so. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

  COLLINS guided the Houston north, then east, skirting the patrol areas of the 093s they’d passed on the way in, then ordered the the OOD to take her deep and increase speed to twenty knots. Two hours later, Collins called Fisher to the Control Center, wished him luck, and sent him topside. A hundred yards off the port beam, the Osprey was hovering over the ocean’s surface. The rear ramp was down, and leaning from it, one hand hooked on a cargo strap, was Redding. He gave Fisher a wave.