He turned up the collar of the jacket and started walking.
Only three cars passed him and none of them slowed, which he took as a good sign. Still, with each step he felt the tingle of fear in his belly grow. He’d had his share of missions on the Chinese mainland and each of them had been unpleasant at best. Both the PLA and the Guoanbu — the Chinese secret police — were ruthlessly efficient and tended to arrest first and interrogate later.
When he reached Kong Nga Po Road, he turned right and walked a few blocks, then turned again, into a small industrial park. He found Excelsior’s warehouse next to the sewage plant’s hurricane fence. Fisher walked around back to the loading dock and walked up the ramp. He tried the door. It was locked. There was a buzzer. He pulled a baseball cap from his pocket and put it on, then pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and pressed the buzzer.
Thirty seconds passed. The door swung open. Fisher lowered his head. Under the brim of the cap he saw a pair shiny dress shoes. Security guard, he thought.
“Shen-me?” a man’s voice said. What?
Fisher pushed the papers toward the guard, who instinctively reached for them. Fisher grabbed his wrist and jerked him off balance. As he lurched forward, Fisher wrapped his arm around the man’s neck and squeezed, cutting off the blood flow. After a few seconds, the man went limp.
Fisher dragged him through the door, dropped him, and and caught the door with his fingertips to keep it from slamming shut. He froze and listened. If there were other night-shift workers, they might be coming to investigate. No one came.
The loading dock was dark save for a yellow exit sign above the door. The walls were stacked high with boxes and crates in various states of loading. On the far wall were a pair of swinging doors. He dragged the man into the nearest shadow and headed for the doors.
On the other side was the warehouse itself. Long and narrow with a low ceiling, the space was divided into four aisles, each of those divided into eight-by-eight-foot caged, floor-to-ceiling bins. Each bin seemed to contained a category of office equipment, from copiers, to desks, to generic artwork for bare walls. He found the bin he was looking for at the end of the second aisle. Through the cage he saw metal shelves crowded with computer CPUs. With a little coaxing from his picks, the padlock popped open in his hand.
He went to work, and twenty minutes later he’d checked each CPUs serial number with no luck. Then it occurred to him: Song Woo had only recently returned its equipment. What would Excelsior do with recent returns? Maintenance check, perhaps?
In the last aisle he found two bins that had been merged into a work space. Sitting on the bench were a half-a-dozen CPUs and monitors. He picked the gate lock and started checking numbers. He got lucky almost immediately. He dialed Grimsdottir. “Got ’em,” he said.
“Excellent. Plug me in.”
Fisher connected the OPSAT’s USB cord into the first CPU.
Grimsdottir said, “No go. The hard drive’s been reformatted.”
Fisher plugged into the second one.
“Bingo. That one’s been wiped, too, but not very well. There’s data still there. Can you pull it?”
“Consider it done.”
Five minutes later, he was back at the loading dock. As his hand touched the doorknob, he heard the slamming of a car door, then footsteps coming up the ramp. He checked his watch: five minutes to midnight. Shift change?
The door buzzer went off.
Fisher hurried to the guard’s body and traded his own jacket for the uniform jacket; his ballcap for the guard’s brimmed one. The buzzer went off again.
“Wei!” a voice shouted. Hey!
A fist pounded on the door.
Fisher took a breath and opened it.
The security guard had his fist poised over the door, ready for another strike. Down the ramp was a two-door Hongqi, with a magnetic sign affixed to the door. The man regarded Fisher for a moment, then cocked his head and opened his mouth to speak.
Fisher hit him, a short jab to the point of his chin. The man stumbled backward, landed hard on his butt, then did a reverse somersault down the ramp. Fisher jogged after him and stopped his roll. He took the car keys from the man’s jacket pocket, then carried him to the trunk, peeled off of the magnetic logo, tossed it into the backseat, and drove away.
30
After ninety minutes of nearly silent travel, Fisher’s escort, Elena, pulled the car to the side of the road and shut off her headlights. “I have to smoke,” she said in slightly accented but letter-perfect English. She got out and lit up. Fisher got out and stretched. His feet crunched on the gravel.
As it had been for the last hour, the road was deserted and dark. Without the glow of the headlights, Fisher now realized just how dark it was. On either side of the road, marshland disappeared into the blackness. They were truly in the middle of nowhere.
His turnaround time between his foray into Hong Kong and his landing at Kiev’s Borispol Airport had been a too-short six hours — just enough time to deliver the hard drive he’d stolen from the Lo Wu warehouse to Grimsdottir, go through a quick Chernobyl mission brief with Lambert, then find an empty office couch to curl up on for two hours.
From the ear-jarring bustle of Hong Kong to the silent, barren wastelands of Chernobyl, Fisher thought. He wasn’t even sure what time zone his body clock was running on.
“You’re nervous,” he said to Elena.
“Wouldn’t you be?” Elena puffed and paced. Twenty-seven, she was tall and slender, with auburn hair held in a loose ponytail. “What I’ve been doing for your country is about information. I give information and they take it. They’ve never sent anyone here. Why would they send anyone here?”
Elena Androtov was a biologist with PRIA, or the Pripyat Research Industrial Association, which managed the thirty-kiliometer exclusion zone around the now-infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Worried that the Ukrainian and Russian governments weren’t fully sharing what they knew about the ongoing effects of the Chernobyl disaster with the world, Elena had walked into a U.S. consulate while on vacation in Bulgaria and offered to be a window on what she and her colleages were really learning inside the Exclusion Zone.
Ideology, Fisher thought. It was one of the four MICE. The reasons why people offer or agree to spy for a foreign agency usually fall into one of four categories: Money, Ideology, Compromise, or Ego. Elena had never asked for money or recognition, nor was she under duress. While the CIA was grateful for her information, none of it was earth-shattering. Her handler had repeatedly reminded her she could quit at any time, no questions asked.
Fisher understood her apprehension at his sudden apperance. For the last six years her handlers had simply accepted her data with a simple “Thanks, make contact when you have more.” And now, inexplicably, she was being asked to play tour guide to some mysterious secret agent.
“How long have you worked here?” he asked. He knew the answer, but talking helped.
“Six years. I came right after university. I wanted to help.”
“Have you?”
“You tell me. How many people do you think died because of Chernobyl?”
“The official count was thirty-one.”
Elena snorted. “Thirty-one! Twice that number of firefighters died within five minutes of reaching the scene, charred to a crisp by gamma radiation. Poof! Gone!”
“How many, then?”