No, he decided, he hadn’t lied to Stewart. He’d meant what he’d said, and he’d tried to get him out. He’d failed. Period. It was a promise he shouldn’t have made, but he had, and it was done. His intentions had been good; his follow-through, not so much.
And as for Peter… Come what may, scores would be settled. Anyone and everyone who’d been a party to Peter’s death would pay in full.
Fisher’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He flipped it open. It was Grimsdottir: “So, what’s your preference? Morton’s or Outback?”
“You’ve lost me, Grim.”
“For your steak. Never mind, just turn on your TV and call me back.”
Fisher walked back inside and flipped on the kitchen set; it was already tuned to MSNBC.
“… again, stunning news out of war-torn Kyrgyzstan…” The inset image beside the anchorwoman changed to show a podium, the same one the Kyrgyz president had stood behind while resigning two days ago. Standing behind it now was Bolot Omurbai. “Let’s listen,” the anchor said.
“… the grace of Allah and the will of the Kyrgyz people, I have returned to lead our country back to the ways of Islam — the ancient ways of Manas, before all was poisoned by the West, by technology, by modern soullessness.” Omurbai’s eyes seemed to glaze over as he spoke, his gaze fixed straight ahead as though he were in his own world. “Turn your eyes to Kyrgyzstan and behold our greatness. Watch the scourge of Manas return the lost Kyrgyz race back to greatness!”
Omurbai stopped suddenly. He blinked several times, emerging from this trance, then continued. “I am told that most of the world believed me dead.” Here Omurbai offered a disarming smile and a spread of his hands. “As they say, news of my demise was misreported.
“The outlaw government, backed by the evil forces of the United States, foisted a lie upon the world and the people of Kyrgyzstan — a lie meant to crush the spirit of my people…”
Fisher muted the television. Good Christ. Until now, his suspicion that Omurbai was still alive had been notional; now it was tangible.
Of course, Omurbai was lying. The man captured by the U.S. Army Rangers in that cave had been dressed in Omurbai’s uniform, had answered to his name, and stood by it throughout his trial.
Had Omurbai already left the country by then? Fisher suspected so. He’d probably fled across the Kazak border even before the bombs started falling. Then, aided by loyalists in the stans, he’d made his way to Little Bishkek and disappeared into Tolkun Bakiyev’s Ingonish. What remained to be answered was the nature of Omurbai’s connection to the North Korean government. What was driving that partnership?
Fisher flipped open his cell phone to call Grimsdottir, then stopped, hesitated, and flipped it closed again. On the kitchen table was his hatbox full of mail. One of the envelopes jutting from the stack had caught Fisher’s eye; he walked over and slid it out.
He felt his heart lurch. He knew the handwriting on the envelope.
Peter.
27
“No doubts?” Lambert asked.
Fisher, his eyes fixed on the cellophane-sealed letter lying in the center of the conference table under a circle of light, seemed not to hear. Redding and Grimsdottir, also leaning over the letter, waited for Fisher to respond.
After a few moments, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I’m sorry?”
“The letter. No doubt it’s Peter’s handwriting?”
“No, it’s his.”
Quashing his urge to tear open the letter as soon as he’d seen it, Fisher had instead immediately called Lambert, who’d called the Department of Energy operations center, which in turn dispatched NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) to Fisher’s home. Though primarily tasked with the identification and handling of nuclear weapons, NESTs were also the best general-circumstances radioactive response teams in the country. However unlikely, if the letter contained even the barest trace of PuH-19, it needed to be handled appropriately.
With the letter on its way to Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Fisher himself was whisked to George-town University Hospital, where the doctors, already made aware of the nature of the possible contamination, gave him a full physical, from head to toe, inside and out. No trace of PuH-19 was found.
Four hours later the letter, too, was declared clean of any contamination, so it was transported to the FBI’s Quantico labs, where it was pushed through Latent Prints and Trace Evidence units, then returned to Fort Meade. Peter’s prints were found on the letter; no remarkable trace findings.
The letter had been postmarked in Nuuk, where Peter had been first taken after being picked up by the fishing boat, about four days before Peter had been transferred to Johns Hopkins. How the letter had gotten mailed Fisher could only guess, but the most likely answer was a kind-hearted nurse or orderly. What remained a true mystery was how Peter had escaped the chamber aboard the platform and made his way into a life raft.
“That’s not his normal handwriting, I assume,” Grimsdottir said.
Fisher shook his head. “He must have already been sick. Plus, he never wrote anything down. He had a snapshot memory.”
The handwriting, while clearly belonging to Peter, was shaky, as though written by a palsied hand. Even the letter itself, which was headed by the words, “Sam… important… piece together… answers here,” wasn’t so much a letter as it was a disjointed collection of doodles, some writing along the ruled lines, some in the margins, some upside down and trailing off the page into nowhere. It was as though Peter were trying to prize from his fevered and failing mind the most pertinent pieces of his investigation in hopes that Fisher could pick up the trail.
There were references to Site 17, the now-destroyed drilling platform; to Little Bishkek; to the missing Carmen Hayes — all of which Fisher understood. But then there were other notations, words and numbers that seemed unconnected to anything he’d encountered:
Sun
Star
Nile
Wonder ash
49- 2303253/1443622
Oziri
Red… tri… my… cota
“The problem is,” Redding said, “we don’t know how far the PuH-19 had spread through him when he wrote this. All this could be nonsense. It might have made sense to him at the time, but we have to at least consider it’s meaningless.” Redding caught Fisher’s eye and grimaced. “Sorry, Sam, no offense.”
“None taken. You’re right; it’s possible.”
“Maybe,” Grimsdottir said, tapping a pencil on the table, “but maybe not.” She turned around, walked to a computer workstation, and started tapping keys. They watched her in silence for a couple minutes, and then Lambert said, “Grim…”
“Hang on… Okay, thought so.” She curled an index finger at them, and they walked over and clustered around the monitor. On-screen was a Discovery Channel website article entitled “The Lost Sunstar.”
… a mystery that has remained unsolved for almost sixty years. The Sunstar, a civilian version of the World War II Curtiss C-46 Commando transport plane owned by millionaire geologist-adventurer Niles Wondrash, took off from Mwanza, Tanzania, on the evening of November 17, 1949, with his manservant Oziri. The Sunstar, flown by Wondrash himself, never reached its destination, Addis Ababa, nine hundred miles to the north in Ethiopia. Extensive search and rescue efforts failed to find any trace of Wondrash and the Sunstar. They had simply vanished from existence…