“Yeah…” Legard grumbled, clearly not yet a believer.
“Tell me about a woman named Carmen Hayes.”
“Who?”
“Brunette, late thirties, scientific type. Not the typical blond-haired runaway you sell. She was snatched off the streets of Montreal four months ago.”
Legard chewed his lower lip as though giving the question careful thought. “Sorry. Don’t know her.”
“That’s one lie. Okay, we’ll come back to her later. The man you were talking about with Bruno — your ill-mannered guest. Who is he, and where’s he going?”
Legard shook his head. “There’s no one here. I have no guests.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Turn your head to the side.”
“What?”
“Turn your head to the side. Now.” Legard did so. Fisher said, “Lift your chin a little…”
Legard did so. Fisher fired a shot into the training dummy just below Legard’s chin. Legard recoiled, nearly tipping on his side. Fisher propped him upright.
Legard blurted, “You’re crazy, Jesus Christ, you’re crazy.”
“It’s a distinct possibility,” Fisher replied. “I’m going to ask you one more time, and then I won’t ask again until you’re bleeding and crippled. So answer carefully. Tell me about Carmen Hayes and your mystery guest at Baie Comeau.”
Legard started talking.
Fisher’s pistol had in fact four dart settings: one through three, and then level four, which was yet another bit of magic from the shadowed halls and devious minds at DARPA. Fisher had read the scientific name for the dart’s contents once and its tongue-torturing complexity made him glad they’d given it a code name, Spigot, which, he assumed was meant to describe what the chemical did to a person’s short-term memory — namely, it opened a notional valve on his or her brain and let twenty to thirty minutes of short-term memory leak out.
There are two kinds of memory, short-term and long-term; the former stored by the frontal and parietal lobes, the latter stored weblike throughout different portions of the brain. The bridge between the two, the part of the brain that converts short-term memory into long-term memory, is governed by the hippocampus, which is where Spigot worked its magic. By partially dissolving the chemical glue that holds the hippocampus bridge together, Spigot created a mild version of retrograde amnesia that turned the target’s previous thirty minutes of memory into dreamlike recollections that faded within minutes of regaining consciousness.
So, despite his first instinct, the truth was, Fisher had had no intention of killing Legard. As much as the man deserved to be gone from the planet — and Fisher was giving serious thought to paying him another visit after all this was over — his death would stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble, especially if he was in contact with whoever he’d delivered Carmen Hayes to and to whoever was about to deliver his latest prisoner, the man Legard had identified as Calvin Stewart.
If Fisher was going to follow the trail of clues that appeared to have gotten Peter killed, he needed this pipeline to remain open. Of course, Fisher was painfully aware that by maintaining the pipeline’s integrity, he was allowing Legard to send who knew how many kidnapped girls to their overseas buyers. Another time, Fisher thought, another late-night visit.
In quick order, he hit Legard with a level three dart and a level four, then unbound him. He did the same to Bruno, then returned the training dummy to its stand and turned the lights back on. While both men would awake confused, neither would remember anything of the last half hour. Legard was fencing; Bruno watching. And then… nothing until they awoke. And if Fisher did his job right, leaving no trace of his presence, and nothing was found missing or out of place following the inevitable security sweep Legard would order, their minds would find a way to write off the experience.
In the end, Fisher felt certain Legard had told him the whole truth. He had in fact kidnapped Carmen Hayes, but the request had come to him anonymously through a series of cutouts, one of whom he trusted. The price had been right — US$500,000—so Legard had taken the job. Calvin Stewart’s kidnapping had been the same story: kidnapped off the street after being lured to Montreal by a bogus job offer. Legard knew little about either Hayes or Stewart, except that they were both “science types of some kind,” nor did he know where they were ultimately bound. Legard’s latest victim, Stewart, was to be initially delivered to the same place he’d sent Carmen Hayes: a waterfront warehouse in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A group of masked men had met Legard’s own crew and taken custody of Carmen — as they would, Fisher assumed, take custody of Stewart.
But why? Who was collecting scientists, and why? And what did either of them have to do with Peter’s death? Too many questions, Fisher thought, and not enough answers. Perhaps his next stop would remedy that.
Fisher keyed his SVT and said, “Grim, I’ve got a name for you: Calvin Stewart. Somewhere I think you’ll find a missing persons report on him. I need everything you can dig up.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“A warehouse in Halifax.” Fisher gave her the particulars. “They’re loading Stewart onto a ship in Baie Comeau. That’s my next stop. Where’s Bird?”
“Idling on the tarmac at St-Mathieu-de-Beloeil. ETA to evac point Charlie is ten minutes.”
“Radio him for me, tell him to put on his flying hat. I’ll be calling.”
Fisher signed off, then slipped out the fencing room door and padded down the hall to the last door on the east side, the one Grimsdottir suspected contained the only personal computer in the house. The door was unlocked. Inside he found what looked like a private study. The lights were off save a single spotlight in the ceiling that cast a dim pool of light on the hardwood walnut floor. He found the PC — a high-end Alienware — on a rolltop desk in the corner and plugged the OPSAT’s USB into the PC’s port.
“Hooked up,” Fisher told Grimsdottir.
“Roger. Scanning… Nice firewall… nice, but not nice enough. There, I’m in. Downloading now.” Thirty seconds passed, then, “Done, Sam.”
Fisher disconnected the USB. “I’m ex-filtrating.”
Twenty minutes later he was sliding out the pool’s exit chute and climbing down the rocks into the kayak course. He looked east and could see on the horizon the barest hint of reddish pink under a fringe of leaden clouds. This was false dawn, he knew. The true sunrise was at least four hours away. Red skies at night, sailor’s delight, Fisher thought. Red skies at dawn, sailors take warn. It was an old nautical saying that he’d found to be more often accurate than not. In fact, he could smell the tang of ozone in the air. Rain was coming.
Having already trail-blazed his infiltration route through the forest surrounding Legard’s mansion, he simply followed the course in reverse order, moving more quickly this time and pausing only to avoid the guards and dogs. An hour later he was at the wall. He crouched down and checked the OPSAT to ensure his spot was still dog-friendly, then called up the OPSAT’s communication screen, tapped the airplane icon, then selected from the drop-down menu the commands, CALL TO followed by EVAC POINT C. Five seconds passed, then Fisher heard in his ear, “Roger. En route. ETA ten. Out.”
Fisher scaled the wall and headed for the water.
13
Fisher lay belly down, his face mask awash in the shallows of the river, for four minutes, gauging the current and watching the rain clouds gather over the treetops, then pushed off, stroked a hundred yards into the channel, and stopped. The current immediately took hold of him, dragging him downstream. Three minutes later he was a half mile away from Legard’s estate when he heard the faint thrumming of a plane’s engines, followed a few seconds later by the sight of the flat-bottomed, rounded nose cone of a V-22 Osprey emerging from the fog along the southern shoreline.