A hundred feet to the south he could see the bridge; the team's two Audis sat at its head. His own vehicle, the belly-up Range Rover, lay in the creek where he'd abandoned it. What do we have here?Three figures stood on the shoulder of the road before the bridge. He unslung the SC-20, laid the forestock on the log, and zoomed in on the trio. He was surprised to see only one familiar face: the Japanese Vin Diesel, whose narrowed eyes and furrowed brow told Fisher that the other two men, who stood side by side across from him, were not friends.
The first man was fortyish, bald, with a wrestler's build; the second was gaunt and pasty with dark black hair. They were standing in profile to Fisher, the stout one closest to him, the taller one closer to the road and standing a couple of feet back from his partner. As had Vin's eyes, their postures told Fisher this was a bad situation about to get worse.
The stout man shifted his feet, turning slightly, and now Fisher could see the squarish outline of a semiautomatic pistol dangling from his left hand. Fisher panned slightly to the right and scanned the gaunt man: He, too, was armed.
Could these two men be the tail he'd spotted at Doucet's warehouse outside Reims? Who were they, and was their interest in Vin alone or Hansen's team or Fisher himself? None of that mattered right now, of course. As he watched, the stout man raised his semiauto to his waist and leveled it with Vin's belly. Fisher couldn't hear the man's words, but Vin's reaction told the story: He clasped his hands behind his back and knelt down in the dirt. Execution.
Fisher zoomed out slightly, adjusted his aim. As the stout man raised his weapon, extending it toward Vin's forehead, Fisher laid the SC-20's reticle over the upper rim of the man's ear and pulled the trigger. Even as he was dropping like a puppet whose strings had been cut, Fisher was adjusting his aim. His second shot came less than a second after the first, the 5.56mm bullet drilling into the tall man's head two inches behind his temple.
Fisher zoomed out and refocused on Vin. He was still kneeling, gaping at the two crumpled forms before him. He rotated his head right, looking for the source of the shot, then rose from his knees into a crouch and began sidling right, reaching for something--his own gun he'd been forced to toss away, Fisher assumed. He adjusted aim again and fired a round into the dirt six inches from Vin's groping hand. Vin froze, raised his hands above his head, and gave an "okay, okay" shrug.
Eyes fixed on Vin, Fisher got up and picked his way through the trees along the edge of the ravine until he was within twenty feet of the bridge. When he stepped from the trees and crouched down, Vin saw the movement and began to turn his head.
"No," Fisher ordered. "Face the cars."
Vin complied. "Was that you?"
"Was that me, what?"
Vin jerked his head toward the two dead men. "Them."
"I needed their car. Something told me they weren't the cooperative type."
"Well, thanks."
"Don't mention it."
Fisher flipped the selector to COTTONBALL and fired one into the point of Vin's right shoulder. Vin gave out a slight gasp, then toppled over sideways, unconscious before he hit the ground. Fisher got up and walked over. He frisked Vin's would-be executioners and found a few hundred euros, a set of car keys, two passports, and a half dozen credit cards between them. The money was real enough, but not so the passports and cards, he suspected. He took everything. Next he checked Vin's pulse; it was steady.
Time for an eye in the sky. Fisher thumbed the selector on the SC-20 again and pointed the barrel into the sky at a seventy-degree angle over the bunker. He pulled the trigger. The projectile was of course saddled with an alphanumeric DARPA-inspired name, but Fisher had long ago dubbed it the ASE, or All-Seeing Eye--essentially a miniaturized version of a Sticky Cam embedded in an aerogel parachute.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and has a surface area that boggled the mind: Spread flat, each cubic inch of the stuff--roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another--could cover a football field from end zone to end zone. In the case of the ASE, its palm-sized, self-deploying aerogel chute could keep the camera aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird's-eye view of nearly a square mile.
He lifted the OPSAT up, tapped a few buttons, and the ASE's bird's-eye view appeared on the screen. He switched modes from night vision to infrared; doing this drew enormous power from the ASE's internal battery, cutting its life nearly in half, but the view was rewarding. From five hundred feet above the ground, Fisher had a view of the bunker and the field to the east. In familiar rainbow hues he could pick out two figures lying prone in the field, their SC-20s aimed at the bunker. A third figure was walking across the bunker's roof near the emplacement where he had exited. The fourth figure was nowhere to be seen. Probably still inside, Fisher assumed. He tapped a few more keys on the OPSAT's screen, sending a self-destruct command to the ASE, which triggered an overload in the battery, frying the camera's internal circuitry.
One last task.
He got out his Gerber Guardian and went to work.
14
BITBURG , GERMANY
FISHERsat before the computer screen, sipping a double shot of espresso and occasionally clicking on the browser's REFRESH button. The Internet cafe was busy, filled with late-morning commuters stopping by for a caffeine fix before work and the early-lunch crowd looking for a boost to get them through the afternoon. The babble was all in German, and Fisher used his waiting time trying to catch snippets of conversation; his German was good, but it could always be better.
He hit REFRESH once more and was rewarded with a newly saved message in his drafts folder. He clicked on it, scanned the contents, and nodded. Finally, the answer he wanted. His request for a meeting--if only a voice-to-voice one--had been met with resistance. Until now.
The night before, after punching holes in the rear tires of both Audis, Fisher had taken the dead men's car, a Volvo, and driven to the L1. He headed south to Obersgegen, and then northeast for twenty miles to Bitburg, a city of thirteen thousand. It was nearly dawn when he pulled into the city limits. He drove through downtown, the eastern edge of town, following signs for an overnight rest stop where he pulled in, changed out of his tac-suit, and caught four hours of sleep in the Volvo's backseat.
Now, shortly after eleven, rested and alert after three double espressos, he reread Vesa's message one last time, committed the details to memory.Meeting approved. Proceed immediately to
Aachen.
There was a street address, but it was unfamiliar to Fisher. He deleted the message, signed off the computer, got a coffee to go, and left.
He arrived in Aachen ninety minutes later and, after consulting his iPhone's map, found a crowded shopping area, where he abandoned the Volvo, then caught a taxi and rode aimlessly for thirty minutes before telling the driver to stop. He spent another hour walking, checking for signs of surveillance, before stepping into an Enterprise office and renting a BMW 7 Series. Twenty minutes later he pulled to a stop before a brownstone apartment on Kockerellstrasse. He got out, trotted up the steps, and punched the correct code into the keypad lock; as with the Pelican case, the code consisted of the brownstone's latitude and longitude coordinates combined with some division and subtraction.