“That’s my guess, but she doesn’t fit the profile: brunette, closer to thirty than twenty. Most of Legard’s acquisitions are runaways or street kids. I think Peter figured Legard had been contracted to snatch Carmen and deliver her somewhere for someone. Not a regular customer. If you want someone kidnapped, why not go to someone who’s done it a lot?”
This was an unexpected turn, Fisher thought. He’d never had the slightest inkling Peter had been involved in the Hayes kidnapping. How did an oil baron’s missing daughter, a Canadian crime boss, and white slavery tie into PuH-19 and Peter’s death?
Fisher said, “Okay, so Peter asked you to do a background check on Legard…”
“Yeah, he was looking for a way in — a corner he could peel back. He never told me how he got interested in Legard, but the theory was that if Legard had snatched Carmen, she’d probably gone down the same pipeline Legard uses for his other girls.”
“You told me you should have gone with him,” Fisher said. “What did you mean? Someplace specific?”
“One of Legard’s front companies is called Terrebonne Exports. Fish canning and export. He’s got a fair-size fleet and warehouses all along the St. Lawrence Seaway and on Nova Scotia. Peter thought Legard was using his ships to smuggle the girls overseas.”
This made sense. There was a reason why ships and ports were the preferred venue for smugglers, terrorists, and sundry criminals. Ports were virtually impossible to fully secure, and ships were, by their very nature, a warren of nooks and crannies tailor-made for hiding contraband, inanimate and human alike.
The question was, did he follow what was likely Peter’s course and look at Legard’s warehouses, or did he go to Legard himself and ask — not so nicely — what had happened to Peter and why?
The truth was, Fisher had made up his mind before he even asked the question.
8
Fisher heard a muted squelch as the subdermal receiver implanted beneath the skin behind his ear came to life. Then, a few seconds later, Grim’s voice: “Do you read me, Sam?”
Fisher lowered his binoculars and shimmied backward, deeper into the underbrush. The night was chilly, hovering at fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and a low mist clung to the ground. Overhead he could hear the occasional pinging screech of bats hunting the darkened treetops for insects.
Before him lay a half-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River and beyond that, the village of Saint-Sulpice and, on its outskirts, Aldric Legard’s estate, a sprawling three hundred thousand square-foot French country mansion set on ten acres of rock elm and white oak.
The approach Fisher had chosen seemed tailor-made for him. This section of the St. Lawrence was bisected by Iles de Boucherville, a series of narrow, tree-covered islands that ran parallel to both shorelines and were uninhabited save the dozens of strobe-topped navigation towers designed to warn off passing ships. Lined with hundreds of tiny coves and inlets, the islands appealed to the SEAL in Fisher as not only the perfect insertion point but also the perfect E&E (escape and evasion) route. If he ran into trouble and had to retreat under pursuit, the islands’ geography would work to his advantage.
Fisher said, “Grim, you know I gave up trying to read you long ago. You’re an enigma.”
“Sweet-talker.”
Fisher’s communications system, specially made for Third Echelon by DARPA, the Pentagon’s version of James Bond’s Q division, consisted of two parts: the subdermal receiver, which directly vibrated the set of tiny bones in the ear known as the ossicles, or more colloquially, the hammer, anvil, and stirrup; and the second part, the transmitter, which was a butterfly-shaped adhesive patch known as an SVT, or subvocal transceiver, worn across the throat just above his Adam’s apple. This had been the hardest of the two components to master and required a skill Fisher likened to a cross between whispering and ventriloquism. For all that, though, he loved the system; it allowed him to communicate while bad guys stood five feet away.
“I’m loading your OPSAT now,” Grimsdottir said, referring to the operational satellite uplink. Fisher had come to think of the OPSAT as his own personal Palm Pilot on steroids. Worn across the forearm, the OPSAT served not only as Fisher’s encrypted satellite communications hub, but it also fed him images and data that ranged from a simple weather readout to a real-time satellite feed from a fifteen-ton Lacrosse-class radar-imaging satellite orbiting four hundred miles above the earth’s surface. More than that, like Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear, the OPSAT had come to represent for him a link back to the real world. Working alone, in places filled with people only too happy and capable of killing him on-site, was challenging enough. With the OPSAT, lifesaving information and a friendly voice were only a few button presses away.
“Data dump complete,” Grimsdottir said.
Fisher pressed his thumb to the OPSAT’s screen. A red horizontal laser line scrolled down the screen as the biometric reader captured his thumbprint.
//… BIOMETRIC SCAN ENGAGED…
… SCANNING FINGERPRINT…
… IDENTITY CONFIRMED… //
The OPSAT booted up, showing a transreflective screen in black, green, and amber. Fisher pressed a few buttons, checked the database and uplink, then said, “Good to go.”
Lambert’s voice came on the line. “Sam, the ROE are tight on this; you’re on allied soil.”
In this case, Fisher’s rules of engagement were straight from the manual, and he knew the words by heart: Avoid all contact. Leave no trace of presence. Less-than-lethal force authorized if contact unavoidable. Lethal force authorized only to maintain mission and/or operative integrity. Translation: Don’t be seen and don’t kill anyone unless the mission will otherwise go to hell in a handbasket. Fisher had always enjoyed the line, “operative integrity.” This was yet another euphemism: Getting captured or killed was the same thing as a failed mission.
“Got it. No war with Canada,” Fisher replied. “I’m on the move. Call you on the other side.”
Fisher’s choice to go directly to the source — Montreal’s godfather, Aldric Legard — had been an easy one. Not only was Legard his best chance of finding out what had happened to Peter, and why, but also of finding Carmen Hayes. While the mystery of her disappearance had piqued Fisher’s curiosity, his first concern was of a more practical nature. Regardless of whether his visit to Legard provided him a lead, he knew one thing: It seemed clear that Peter’s pursuit of Carmen’s disappearance had gotten him killed, and so, logically, if he could retrace Peter’s steps he would eventually run squarely into the people who had not only killed Peter but also whoever had the PuH-19.
Fisher slipped the face mask over his eyes and slithered belly first down the embankment and into the water. He coiled his legs and shoved off the muddy bank, propelling himself into the channel. The current caught him, and his weight belt slowly drew him beneath the surface. He fitted the microrebreather, which was roughly the size and shape of a five-pound hand weight, into his mouth and took a sharp breath to activate the chemical gas scrubber; he was greeted by a slight hiss and the cool, metallic taste of oxygen flowing into his mouth.
As his body descended through the water, he felt its chill envelop him. After a few seconds his tac suit quickly absorbed and redistributed the cold.
Fisher was biased, he knew, since the thing had saved his life more times than he could count, but as far as he was concerned, his tac suit — officially, the Mark V tactical operations suit — was as close to magic as DARPA had ever come.