But. . .
He looked up at the ceiling. Maybe.
He backtracked along the wall, then darted across the floor and mounted one of the ladders affixed to the side of the shelving. He climbed to the top and then sidestepped along the shelf until he could reach up and grab the ceiling joist. He let his legs swing out, then used the momentum to lever himself atop the joist.
He crept down the joist until he was directly over the office roof, then tied a line to the beam and rappelled down. He walked to the nearest skylight; it was locked by a simple hook latch, which slid free using the tip of his knife.
A click-clackechoed through the building.
Sam dropped flat, switched to IR.
Crouched outside the door was a man. Fisher switched back to NV in time to see the door slowly swing inward. Move, Sam!Feet-first, he slid through the skylight, dropped to the floor in a crouch. The office was narrow, with one wall dominated by shoulder-high filing cabinets and the other by three battered, gray steel desks.
He switched to EM. As he’d guessed, there was a second trigger beam across the windows. He then went back to NV and slowly peeked up to window level.
The man, dressed all in black, his face covered by a balaclava, was running hunched over toward the office stairs. Fisher crossed the room, ducked under the trigger beam, and flattened himself against the wall. He drew the Sykes.
Footsteps padded up the stairs, then stopped. There was a soft double beep. Fisher switched to EM; the trigger beam was gone. He switched back to NV. The door swung inward. With the lightest of touches, Fisher palmed the knob, stopping the door’s swing.
For a long five seconds nothing moved; then the man appeared, stepping cautiously.
Fisher would never know what had prompted the move—peripheral vision, intuition, something else—but the man suddenly spun around and lunged toward him, a knife in his hand. Fisher caught the man’s wrist with his left hand and twisted hard while sweeping the ankle with his foot. As the man fell, Fisher stepped behind him, grabbed the man’s chin, and lashed out with the Sykes. The dagger plunged into the hollow beside the man’s collarbone, instantly severing the carotid artery, the subclavian, and the jugular. The man gasped, jerked once, then went still. Fisher eased him to the floor and swung the door shut.
He frisked the body. Unsurprisingly, the man carried nothing on him.
“Sleeper; clean,” Fisher radioed.
He pulled off the man’s balaclava. He was black.
Local talent,Fisher thought. Hired by whom, though?
HISsearch took only minutes. None of the filing cabinets contained anything regarding either the Tregoor the Sogon.
He keyed his subdermal. “Lambert, there’s nothing here.”
“Not surprised. Come on home.”
Fisher turned to leave. Then he stopped. Turned back.
Sitting on top of one of the cabinets was an ancient microfiche reader. Fisher chuckled to himself. Kolobane’s record-keeping methods might be lagging behind those of the cyber world, but they weren’t entirely backward.
He searched the cabinets again without luck, then turned his attention to the desks. In the bottom drawer of the first one he found an accordian folder filled with microfiche transparencies. Bingo.
“Lambert?”
“I’m here.”
“Disregard my last. We just caught a break.”
26
GERMANTOWN, MARYLAND
TWELVEhours after slipping out of Kolobane Shipyard and meeting the Osprey at the extraction point, Fisher was back home. He knew it would be short-lived. It wouldn’t take Grimsdottir long to find what they were looking for on the microfiches. However, as was par for the course, whatever information she found would probably lead to another diversion, another facade—behind which waited . . . What? Iran, or someone else? In the end, it might not matter, Fisher realized. Events were beginning to snowball and the snowball was rolling straight for Tehran.
While he had been in Dakar, the autopsies on the charred bodies found in the coffee warehouse in Freeport City were completed. All were male, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four; all had been shot once in the back of the head prior to being set aflame, en masse, with an accelerant, probably kerosene. Each man’s fingertips had been severed post mortem and his teeth removed by blunt-force trauma.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the men unidentifiable—and they would’ve succeeded, if not for the diligence of the FBI’s chief medical examiner.
Two bits of evidence had survived the fire: one, a partially digested meal in the stomach of one of the corpses that was identified and chemically matched to tomato paste found in the Trego’s food stores. Two, whoever had knocked out the men’s teeth had missed a molar in one of the mouths, and in the molar was a filling. It took only hours for the FBI’s labs at Quantico to identify the composition.
The filling was a blend of tin and silver amalgam found only in the Zagros Mountains of Iran.
TRUEto Lambert’s prediction, the President had taken the first step toward war with Iran, ordering the Ronald ReaganCarrier Battle Group to steam at best possible speed to the Gulf of Oman and take up station just outside Iran’s territorial waters. In Iraq and Kuwait, elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were put on ready alert, as was the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division.
Meanwhile, while Iran’s United Nations ambassador categorically denied his government’s involvment in the Tregoand Slipstone attacks during a special General Assembly Session, the Security Council voted unanimously but toothlessly that the perpetrator of the attack on the United States was “in violation of international law and will be held fully accountable.”
In the Arab world, reactions to the attacks were predictably split between moderate Muslims—both secular and devout—and extremists; the former condemning the attacks and offering support and condolences to the American people, the latter celebrating the catastrophe with street rallies and flag-burning protests outside U.S. embassies from Turkey to Sudan to Indonesia.
FISHERdid his best to enjoy his off time, but he found himself anxious to move, to keeping plucking at the threads of the mystery. Where it would end might be a foregone conclusion—death and ruin for Iran—but as far as he was concerned, as long as there were questions unanswered, he still had a job to do. If another war in the Middle East was inevitable, history would judge the U.S. on the righteousness of its cause, and the accuracy of its intelligence. There could be no doubts, no question marks.
It was late afternoon when he gave up and left the house. He drove into town, picked up a couple of steaks and baking potatoes, a tub of sour cream, and a six-pack of Heineken, then got on Highway 270 and drove north to Frederick, where he pulled into the parking lot of the Cedar Bend Assisted Living Community. Grocery bags in hand, he walked to Apartment 302 and knocked on the door. Thirty seconds later, it opened to reveal a wizened old man in a blue cardigan.
Sam held up the bags. “Feel like some company?”
“Sam-o! Good to see you, good to see you, come in. You shoulda called ahead. Might’ve had a woman with me,” said Frank Bunch.
Sam grinned. “I’ll remember that next time.”
Frank Bunch was an old family friend and the original owner of Sam’s Sykes Fairbairn commando dagger, which Frank had presented to him upon graduation from BUD/S along with a whispered piece of advice Sam had never forgotten: “Violence is easy; living with violence isn’t. Choose carefully.”