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
Fisher sat before the computer screen, sipping a double shot of espresso and occasionally clicking on the browser’s REFRESH button. The Internet café 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.
He heard a soft buzz, then a click, and the latch opened under his hand. There was no one home, of that he was certain — or mostly certain. He wouldn’t have been sent here if the safe house were occupied. Even so, with his SC pistol at his side he searched the apartment’s two floors. The decor and furnishings had been chosen straight from a hotel supply catalogue: comfortable but without personality. On the second floor he found a similarly furnished office. One wall was dominated by a fifty-inch LCD television monitor. Sitting on the dark cherry desk, on a leather blotter, was what looked like a standard telephone. He punched SPEAKERPHONE, waited for the dial tone, then hit the pound button three times and the asterisk button twice. The speaker emitted thirty seconds’ worth of squelches and clicks as the encryption buffers engaged; then a computerized, Stephen Hawkingesque voice came on the line. “Please hold… transferring…”
Then a female voice: “Sam, are you there?”
“I’m here, Grim.”
It had been eight months since he’d heard Anna Grimsdóttir’s voice, and a lot longer than that since they’d stood in the same room together. The LCD monitor glowed to life, and on the upper edge of the TV’s case a tiny green light blinked on, indicating the built-in webcam was on. Grimsdóttir’s face and shoulders resolved. Fisher didn’t recognize the background, but it clearly wasn’t anywhere at Fort Meade. He guessed that she, too, was using a Third Echelon safe house.
She looked the same as she had the last time they’d seen each other. Despite his misgivings about his old friend’s loyalty, it was good to see her. He missed his old life.
“You look tired, Sam,” Grim now said.
“I am tired. When was the last time you heard from Hansen?”
“Couple of days. I’m afraid we might have a mutiny on our hands.”
“How so?”
“The team knows we’re holding back on them. Moreau’s got his hands full.”
“He’s in the field?” Louis “Marty” Moreau was one of Third Echelon’s best technical operations managers — in other words, a Splinter Cell “handler.”
Grim nodded. “Coordinating. And getting shot at.”
Fisher smiled. “But surviving, right?”
“Right. Anyway, Hansen’s trying to keep the team on track, but I can hear it in his voice: He knows something isn’t kosher. There’s more than a little frustration there, too.”
“Don’t blame them. Well, for what it’s worth, they haven’t been making it easy on me. Almost had me a few times.”
“Uh-huh,” Grimsdóttir replied skeptically. “You’ve given them some breaks.”
“Some. Have to make sure the show’s convincing enough to sell Kovac,” Fisher replied, referring to the National Security Agency’s deputy director, Nicholas Andrew Kovac. Grimsdóttir’s boss. In addition to being an all-around idiot and dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat, Kovac was also on their too-long list of high-ranking NSA Brahmins who may have sold out the United States. Until Fisher and Grimsdóttir finished this mission, she would have to placate Kovac. Unfortunately, that meant fielding a team to hunt down Fisher.
“So far, so good,” Grimsdóttir said.
“Grim, we’ve got a problem. They were in Vianden — Hansen and the others. They almost caught me in Ernsdorff’s backyard.”
“What?”
Fisher brought her up to speed, starting with his arrival in Vianden and ending with his escape from the Siegfried-Line bunker. He left out any mention of Vin’s close call at the bridge.
“They shouldn’t have been there,” Fisher explained. “I left them no trail to follow.”
“You’re sure?” When Fisher didn’t reply, Grim said, “Of course you didn’t.”
“There are only a couple of ways they could’ve gotten there.”