16
WHILESam had never heard of Marcus Greenhorn, both Grimsdottir and Lambert assured him Greenhorn was as dangerous as any terrorist—so much so he’d earned himself a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
A mathematical prodigy who graduated from high school at age seven, from Princeton at ten, and MIT at fourteen, Marcus Greenhorn, now twenty-two, had at the age of eighteen nearly handed a nuclear weapon over to Iranian-backed Hamas extremists, having used his cyber-wizardry to hack into the Air Force’s security grid and steal access codes to the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex in New Mexico, home to a plethora of nuclear warheads, including the W56 Minuteman II and the W84 GLCM, or Ground Launched Cruise Missile.
Brilliant as he was, Greenhorn fell victim to a pedestrian flaw—greed. After collecting his half-million-dollar advance from Hamas, Greenhorn had turned around and tried to extort the U.S. government, promising to turn over details of Hamas’s planned raid on Kirtland for two million dollars. While Greenhorn’s skills were impressive, they weren’t a match for the full and focused effort of the National Security Agency, which tracked the extortion demand back to Greenhorn, extracted the details of the Hamas raid from his computer, then proceeded to wipe clean the Swiss account he’d set up for his early retirement.
Broke, on the run, and hiding from his disgruntled Hamas customers, Greenhorn had gone underground and become a cyber-mercenary.
Since that incident, the authorities had kept Greenhorn’s former friends and compatriots under electronic surveillance, but to no avail. Until now.
“This virus he wrote for the Tregolaptop is pure Greenhorn,” Grimsdottir said, “but with a twist—a bit of security code he’s used once too often. I took the code and turned the mainframe loose on all the e-mails we’ve intercepted from Greenhorn’s old friends. We got a hit.”
“Explain,” said Lambert.
“We ran the same encryption protocols in Greenhorn’s virus through all the e-mail intercepts. It seems one of Greenhorn’s ex-girlfriends has been getting love letters—all disguised as spam: mortgage offers, discount pharmacies . . . the usual stuff. Well, yesterday this woman got an e-mail from Greenhorn. Decrypted, it read, ‘Ticket waiting for you at airport. Meet me, Burj al Arab. Champaign and caviar.’ ”
“Where’s Burj al Arab?” Lambert asked.
Fisher answered. “Not where—what. The Burj al Arab is a hotel—probably the most luxurious resort on the planet. It’s in Dubai.”
Lambert squinted at him. “How do you know this?”
Fisher shrugged, offered a half smile. “Guy’s got to vacation somewhere, doesn’t he?”
“Well, consider yourself on vacation. Bring me back a souvenir.”
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
THEtaxi pulled over and Fisher paid the driver and climbed out. Though in mission prep he’d read every piece of literature and memorized every drawing and schematic, seeing the Burj al Arab in person took his breath away, as did the heat, which, despite it not yet being noon, had risen to ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
Sitting on a palm-lined, artificial island a quarter mile offshore, the hotel was connected to the mainland by a raised two-lane bridge bordered by high guardrails and secured at each end by a gate manned by a pair of armed guards. At sixty stories and 1,053 feet, the curved, stark white Burj al Arab was not only the tallest hotel in the world, but also the most lavish, featuring a six-hundred-foot-tall atrium, a helipad, a rooftop tennis court, suites with more square footage than the average person’s home, personal butlers, and chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces.
Designed by its architects to resemble a giant, wind-filled sail, the hotel’s impact was dramatic, both at a distance and up close. Taking it in, Fisher’s eyes and brain were momentarily tricked into believing they were watching a clipper ship gliding into port.
And a security system second to none,Fisher thought, snapping off a photograph. He wasn’t alone in his gawking. Dozens of tourists stood at the head of the bridge shooting pictures over the heads of the smiling, white-shirted guards. The Burj al Arab’s reputation as a prime Middle Eastern tourist attraction made Fisher’s surveillance much easier.
While he’d been in the air, Grimsdottir had been doing her own reconnaissance, albeit of the cyber variety. According to the Burj al Arab’s mainframe intranet, Marcus Greenhorn was staying in the three-thousand-square-foot, six-thousand-dollar-per-night penthouse suite. And he wasn’t alone. Aside from his girlfriend, who had arrived the previous day, Greenhorn was being attended by no less than five bodyguards supplied by the Emir himself and drawn from the ranks of UAE special forces troops known as Al-Mughaaweer, or “The Raiders.”
This told Fisher two things: One, whoever Greenhorn was working for had unparalleled influence in the Middle East; and two, his own penetration of the Burj al Arab had just become an even tougher proposition.
He checked his watch. Three hours till nightfall.
THElack of security boats patrolling the waters around the hotel spoke volumes about either the security staff’s laziness, or its confidence in the internal security system. Fisher assumed the latter, and this was backed up by his final call to the Situation Room.
“I’ve download the hotel’s blueprints and schematics to your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir said. “I’m not going to lie to you, Sam, it’s ugly.”
“Define ugly.”
“Redundancies upon redundancies. I’m hacked into their security grid, but in most cases I’ll only be able to bypass alarms and sensors for twenty seconds before backup systems kick in. When I say ‘move,’ you’ll have to move fast. When I say ‘freeze,’ you’ll have to freeze.”
“I’m at your command.”
Lambert said, “Sam, I’ve confirmed your equipment drop. Just follow the GPS marker and dive straight down.”
Given the nature of the target, he and Lambert had agreed a typical insertion method was a nonstarter. The hotel was kept under watch by a nearby Naval radar station, which meant any air approach would draw the attention of UAE fighter-interceptors. Even without that complication, Fisher wasn’t confident about parachuting in. The winds around the hotel were volatile and the rooftop small. If he missed the target, he’d find himself in a one-thousand-foot free fall.
That left only one option: underwater. To that end, earlier that day the CIA’s deputy station chief in the Dubai consulate had been sent on a fishing trip up the coast from the Burj al Arab, where he’d dropped a weighted duffel containing Fisher’s equipment load-out.
“How far down?”
“Twenty-five feet, give or take. Nothing for you.”
Years earlier Fisher had taken up open-ocean free-diving, in which divers hold their breath and plunge to depths ranging from one hundred to four hundred feet. Initially attracted to the sport by simple curiosity, Fisher had immediately found himself hooked by not only the physical challenges—which were substantial—but also the mental ones. Free-diving was the ultimate test of one’s ability to focus the mind and control fear.
“It’s never the dive, Colonel, it’s the ascent.”
Getting in was only half the battle; getting out, the other half.
17
ANhour after the sun dropped below the horizon, Fisher left his hotel and took a taxi to Dubai’s nightclub district, where he got out and strolled around until certain he hadn’t been followed. Then, following his mental map, he walked two blocks west to the shore. A quick check with his mini-NV monocular showed no one on the beach. He walked to the tide line.
To his left, a mile away, the Burj al Arab was ablaze, lit from within by amber light and from without by strategically placed green floodlights shining up against the snow-white exterior. As designed, it looked like the massive, glowing sail of a clipper ship resting on the ocean’s surface. On the rooftop, Fisher could see ant-sized tennis players scurring back and forth under the glare of stadium lights. The sky was clear, but the stars were dulled by the pollution of nearby refineries and wells.