The fairy-tale life would end today. No more rock star.
He began to lose his breath, eyes burning with tears. He glowered at his old Soviet uniform, then looked to the picture on his desk, the little boy there, the innocent little boy who would grow up to destroy the world.
They were asking too much. Their plan would not work. The truth would emerge and the motherland would become the pariah of the global community.
But if he failed to obey now, they would systematically tear apart his life. They would start with those he loved, then move on to the causes he loved, undermine and destroy the humanitarian work, punish him until he was a broken, bleeding, and bitter old man who’d “disappeared” but was, in truth, lying in a gulag and hunting roaches for dinner.
Again, this was not coming from the president. Kasperov knew this in his heart of hearts. Yes, Treskayev was a nationalist like his father, but he was also a pragmatist, spending much of his administration mending fences with the United States and Europe, earning him the ire of the imperialists. He wanted to call the man, beg him to stop this, but Treskayev might not even know what was going on. This could be bigger than all of them.
Kasperov backhanded the tears from his cheeks. If he did not comply, he, like the malicious objects identified by his own software, would be quarantined . . . then erased.
3
THE C147-B, call sign Paladin, had become Fourth Echelon’s mobile headquarters and was cruising over the Atlantic at thirty thousand feet, traveling at a speed of Mach 0.74, or 563 mph. She was a fully customized C-17 Globemaster III with special composite matte gray fuselage that functioned as a Faraday cage, shielding her cutting-edge components from electromagnetic pulses. Her interior was TEMPEST certified up to and including NATO SDIP-27 Level A standards. Her avionics/comm circuits met RED/BLACK separation standards, and her computers were shielded against electromagnetic eavesdropping techniques called Van Eck phreaking. These countermeasures had been phased in after the jet’s flight controls had been hacked, and Fisher had made damned sure that would never happen again.
With a length of 174 feet and wingspan just shy of 170 feet, Paladin was originally designed for heavy lift military cargo and troop transport and was powered by four fully reversible Pratt & Whitney F117-PW-100 turbofan engines similar to those used on commercial Boeing 757s. Her original cargo compartment was 88 feet long by 18 feet wide, with a ceiling height of over 12 feet, but now much of that open space had been converted into living quarters, a galley, a fully stocked armory with more than a thousand pieces of ordnance, an infirmary with complete surgical center, and a holding cell.
Located at the bay’s core was Fourth Echelon’s control center—a cocoon of flat-screen computer monitor stations, along with giant displays affixed to either side of the hatch leading to the infirmary. Cables lay like piles of spaghetti beneath the flickering glow of computer stations, and dim starlight filtered in through the circular portholes above them. The desktops of several junior analysts were piled with hard-copy files and seemingly every portable electronic device known to mankind: Kindles, iPads, iPods, and tablets of varying sizes, colors, and shapes. Heavily padded computer chairs sat on tracks bolted to the deck, and you could tell where Charlie Cole was working based upon the coordinates of a jar of extra-crunchy peanut butter with a fork jutting from it. The kid said Skippy helped him think.
Positioned at the center of this technological nest was a rectangular-shaped table about nine feet long and six feet wide constructed of magnesium and titanium to support a glass touchscreen surface. This table with its linked processors was Fourth Echelon’s Strategic Mission Interface, or SMI, an advanced prototype analytics engine capable of news and Internet data mining, predictive analytics, and photo and video forensics. The SMI enabled them to have backdoors into foreign electronic intelligence, or ELINT, systems, as well as facial recognition integration from the CIA, NSA, DHS, and FBI. They were linked directly to the National Counterterrorism Center and to the watch teams inside the White House Situation Room. In the blink of an eye they could pull up surveillance video from a hundred different locations simultaneously, analyze those videos, and issue a report.
Opposite the SMI, Sam Fisher leaned back in one of the computer chairs, pillowed his head in his hands, and reflected on his new life. Talk about a reboot. A breath ago he’d quit Third Echelon—once a top secret sub-branch within the National Security Agency—but then he’d been caught up in a 3E conspiracy that had resulted in the entire covert ops organization being grounded and gutted, dismantled forever. Fisher assumed he’d never again be a Splinter Cell. He was done.
But then President Caldwell had come to him with an operation that required a man not only with his skill set but one with the internal fortitude to get the job done:
A coalition of rogue nations had come together to bankroll and support a terrorist group called the Blacklist Engineers, who were bent on forcing the United States to withdraw its military forces from around the world. Their leader was Majid Sadiq, a former MI6 deep cover field agent and sociopath. The group’s plan involved a “blacklist” of American targets that would be hit if the Americans did not comply.
Caldwell had sweetened the deal, told Fisher the entire op was off the books, no NSA jurisdiction, no open government involvement. She had granted him “the fifth freedom” to use any means necessary to take out the terrorists with no fear of prosecution. The freedoms of speech and worship, along with the freedoms from want and fear, had first been articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt. The fifth freedom was the freedom to protect the first four. Fisher had the right to defend our laws—by breaking them; the right to safeguard secrets—by stealing them; and the right to save lives—by taking them.
No more bureaucratic bullshit. No more politics. No more red tape. It was a covert operator’s dream come true. Clandestine backing from the government without interference.
That Majid Sadiq had been dispatched and members of his group were dead or on the run was an important victory in the never-ending war on terrorism because it had proven that Fisher and his team were a viable asset.
Indeed, this was Fourth Echelon, and Fisher answered only to the President of the United States. He no longer worked alone in the field but relied upon his team. He’d come a long way since his early days of hanging out in a ventilation shaft at the Tropical Casino in Macau. However, the ghosts still hovered at his shoulders, the ghost of his old boss Lambert, a man whose life he had once saved but then had been forced to take . . .
“We’re going over the files from Istanbul,” came a voice from behind Fisher, jarring him back to the present. “But you still want to go back there?”
Fisher swung his chair around to face Anna “Grim” Grimsdóttir, her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her blue eyes narrowing with skepticism. She wore a black striped blouse and the shoulder harness for a SIG P229R 9mm pistol.
When he’d first met Grim, she never carried a weapon. She’d been secretly watching him run a CIA obstacle course at “the Farm,” Camp Peary, Virginia. Her spying on him should’ve been his first clue that he couldn’t trust her, but as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty. She’d begun her career as a programmer, hacker, and analyst, providing assistance for Fisher while he was in the field. Over the years they became friends, sharing jokes about the use of lasers being so 1970s and hi-fi versus Wi-Fi in such globetrotting locations as skyscrapers in New York and banks in Panama City. Grim relished reminding him that he was “old,” but her taunts were good-natured, and Fisher never took them lying down; in fact, he usually took them while suspended, inverted, from a rope.