"I don't know. I'm just gathering information for now."
"You don't need to do anything," she says. "I'll kill him first."
I figure this is anger and bravado talking. "That's not necessary, Mrs. Prokofiev. I'm sure that--"
But I'm interrupted by the sound of cars moving past the office window. I remember that the driveway leading to the garage is on the side of the house directly next to the office.
"My husband!" she says, standing. "He is home!"
I curse to myself. "I'll have to hide."
She waves her finger at me. "No. Do not hide. Go out the back door. I will keep him occupied when he comes in. Hurry!"
I nod, thank her, and leave the office. Ivan the Terrible is beginning to wake up. He sees me and growls sleepily. I jump over his body and he springs to his feet. When he barks, Mrs. Prokofiev shouts, "Ivan! No!" The dog whimpers slightly and sits. He apparently knows who his master is.
I go out the back door, close it, and step into my old footprints to keep from creating new ones.
"Sam, you're not alone," Lambert says. "Man at three o'clock."
Sure enough, a uniformed guard comes around the house to the back, apparently performing a routine security sweep for the general's arrival home. He sees me and shouts for help. As he draws his pistol, I forget about the footprints and rush him. I slam into him head-on and together we fall into the snow. I punch him in the face as hard as I can but the man is well trained. He plunges his knee into my side, sending a jolt of pain into my kidney. I roll off of him and attempt to get to my feet but the guard whips his arm out and stiff-hands me in the neck. If the angle had been a little better for him, he would have broken it. As it is, I fear he's destroyed my larynx. I struggle for breath but the pain is intense.
The guard stands, draws his weapon, and points it at my head. I'm on my knees, helpless and groveling before him, but I do have the presence of mind to clutch handfuls of snow and pack them together.
The guard says, "I should go ahead and kill you but I think we'll see what the general has to say about you."
Suddenly there's a loud gunshot inside the house. The guard stiffens and looks up. I use the opportunity to throw my slush ball into his face. It's one of Krav Maga's basic tenets--use whatever you have available in order to gain an advantage. I then spring at him, pushing off with my legs like a jack-in-the-box. I ram him in the abdomen, knocking him down once again. His pistol, a Makarov, flies into the air. This time I don't give him a chance to rebound. I jump and bring the soles of my heavy boots down on his head. I twist, land with legs on either side of his temples, and then I give him a solid kick in the right cheekbone.
He stops squirming.
I pause for a second and a half to make sure I'm not leaving anything behind and then I take off toward the side of the house. As I run past the office window, I hear angry voices inside but it's impossible to identify them. And I really don't care. My throat is on fire and I just want to get the hell out of there. I got what I needed, I think.
Sticking to the shadows, I jump the iron fence and sprint down the street toward the van.
7
COLONELIrving Lambert had a bad feeling about the upcoming meeting. Senator Janice Coldwater had called it, which wasn't a good sign. In Lambert's opinion, the good senator was trouble. As the head of a small group of Washington, D.C., officials known by its members as "the Committee," she had the power to tell him and other high-ranking military and intelligence officers what to do.
Lambert felt the burden of his age as he walked down the corridor toward the designated conference room in the Pentagon. The fact that the meeting was being held in the center of all-things-military was also foreboding. He would be facing his counterparts in the other governmental intelligence organizations, as well as the politicians who made the big decisions involving Third Echelon's administrative and budgetary requirements.
Having been in the military intel business since he was a young man, Lambert was well connected in Washington. He could request--and receive--an audience with the president if he wanted. He could initiate covert operations that no one else in the U.S. government knew about--or needed to know about. He often held America's security in his hands--something else that wasn't widely known or appreciated. And yet despite all this, Lambert often felt as if he were the bottom of the bureaucratic totem pole. His colleagues in the FBI and CIA received more respect. The military commanders looked down their noses at him. Only a handful of Congress members knew he existed.
It was no secret that Third Echelon was hanging on to threads. The past year, while productive in terms of crushing certain threats aimed at U.S. interests, had proved disastrous in terms of manpower and cost. The Shop had eliminated several Splinter Cells. How the Shop had obtained the agents' names was still a mystery. Lambert had been ordered to find the leak and plug it up. To date he had been unsuccessful.
Lambert entered the room and was thankful that he wasn't the last to arrive. Senator Coldwater was already in her seat at the head of the table. She gave Lambert a curt nod and went back to the notes she was studying. An easel, covered by a drape, stood at the head of the room next to the senator.
U.S. Navy admiral Thomas Colgan sat to her left. He stared into a cup of coffee, obviously concerned about something. Next to him was a man Lambert didn't know. He appeared to be a civilian--a brainy type with mechanical pencils in his shirt pocket. He was the only one who had removed his jacket and draped it over his chair. Lambert could see that the guy was nervous to be there.
Assistant FBI director Darrell Blake sat to the senator's right. He, too, ignored Lambert and continued to look at printouts that lay in front of him. The head of the National Security Agency and Lambert's boss, Howard Lewis, was the only one who smiled at Lambert. He sat away from the others, holding a seat open. The colonel squeezed Lewis's shoulder and sat beside him.
"How's it going?" Lambert whispered to his boss.
"We'll see," Lewis whispered back. Lambert rubbed the top of his graying crewcut, something he did involuntarily when he was anxious.
The other people in the room consisted of Homeland Security representatives, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of the DEA, and a handful of other military and political advisers.
The Committee was a top secret think tank put together by the president to tackle classified issues and to police clandestine organizations within the government. Third Echelon fell into this category. The only people in Washington who knew Third Echelon existed, other than the president and vice president, were in the conference room. No one was reallysupposed to know about Third Echelon. The NSA's function as the nation's cryptologic establishment was to coordinate, direct, and perform highly specialized activities to protect U.S. information systems and produce foreign intelligence reports. Since it was on the edge of communications and data processing, the NSA was naturally a very high-tech operation.
For decades the NSA engaged in what was called "passive" collection of moving data by intercepting communications en route. The First Echelon was a worldwide network of international intelligence agencies and interceptors that seized communications signals and routed them back to the NSA for analysis. It was a network vital to the United States' efforts during the Cold War. As the Soviet Union disintegrated and communications evolved, high technology became the name of the game. The NSA created Second Echelon, which focused entirely on this new breed of communications technology. Unfortunately, the immense volume of information combined with the accelerated pace of developing technology and encryption overwhelmed Second Echelon. NSA experienced its first systemwide crash. As communications became more digital, and sophisticated encryption more expansive, passive collection was simply no longer efficient. So the NSA launched the top secret initiative known as Third Echelon to return to more "classical" methods of espionage powered by the latest technology for the aggressive collection of stored data. As Lambert thought of it, Third Echelon went back to the nitty-gritty world of human spies out there in the field, risking their lives for the sake of taking a photograph or recording a conversation or copying a computer's hard drive. The agents--the Splinter Cells--physically infiltrated dangerous and sensitive locations to gather the required intelligence by whatever means necessary. That said, the Splinter Cell's prime directive was to do the job while remaining invisible to the public eye. They were authorized to work outside the boundaries of international treaties, but the U.S. government would neither acknowledge nor support the operations.