The tip punched through. He pressed his eye to the hole. He saw bright sun.
The water reached his shoulders.
He thrust the knife back into the hole and began levering the haft in a circle, grinding away at the grout. A thumb-sized chunk of cinder block popped free, then another, and another. And then, with a sucking sound, the water found the hole and surged through. The water lapped at his chin and into his mouth. He sputtered and kept chopping at the block. The fifty-year-old grout began disintegrating. Horizontal and vertical gaps appeared, revealing daylight. The water level dropped an inch, then bubbled up again.
Fisher clamped the knife between his teeth, shoved both hands into the hole, and, using them as leverage, rammed his knee into the wall. Then again, and again, until his leg was numb.
A whole cinder block broke free and tumbled out. Fisher adjusted his aim and drove his knee into the neighboring block until it shifted sideways and slid halfway out. He drew his knee back, set his jaw, and—
A three-by-three section of the wall gave way and Fisher tumbled out onto the snow-covered ground and lay still. Hansen found him ten minutes later. Not content to sit on his hands at the entrance vent and wait for something that might never come, he’d left Gillespie to stand watch and taken the other team members on a perimeter search. Their first stop had been the hut.
Fisher watched the car pull down the driveway and stop beside the flagstone path leading to the front door. Fisher got there before either of them could ring the bell. Having left Washington two weeks after returning from Russia, Fisher had seen neither Hansen nor Grimsdóttir for three months. He’d stayed around only long enough to recover from the surgery on his ankle and sit through three days of debriefing.
Fisher invited them in. “Mojito?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Grimsdóttir, and Hansen nodded.
“Head down to the deck. I’ll meet you there.”
Ten minutes later they were sitting beneath an umbrella overlooking the water. Hansen took a sip of his mojito and smiled. “It’s good.”
“They’ve grown on me,” Fisher said.
“So this is it,” Grimsdóttir asked, “the villa of the late, great Chucky Zee?”
Fisher nodded. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
Through her contacts at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Grimsdóttir had enlightened the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA, about Zahm’s nonliterary endeavors. From there Zahm’s now-defunct criminal empire unraveled. Surprisingly, most of the jewelry and art and gems Zahm and his Little Red Robbers had stolen had never been fenced. SOCA found the bulk of the loot in a storage unit outside Setúbal. At her encouragement, the British Home Office had given Fisher a free, one-year lease on Zahm’s villa.
“The least I could do,” Grimsdóttir said. “I see they took his yacht, though.”
Fisher smiled. “A few days after I got here some very polite gentlemen from the Home Office came and asked for the keys. It’s okay. I’ve had enough of water for a while. Besides, if I change my mind, I’ve still got the rowboats.”
“How’s the ankle?”
“Getting there. How’s Kovac?”
Two hours after his arrest for treason, Kovac had tried to hang himself in his cell but was saved by an alert guard. As it turned out, Ames’s insurance cache had been more than enough to break the deputy director.
“Pliable,” Grimsdóttir replied. “Officially, he retired after discovering he had colorectal cancer. Unofficially, he spends in his days in an FBI safe house answering questions and naming names.”
“Is it going to do any good?”
Hansen answered, “Eventually. Lambert was right. This goes very deep. The good news is, the Laboratory 738 Arsenal is sitting at the bottom of a sinkhole near Lake Baikal. It’s out of circulation. Permanently. Turns out Zahm leased the complex from one of the men I saw in Korfovka — Mikhail Bratus, former GRU. As for the other two, Yuan Zhao and Michael Murdoch, we’re working on it. The auction guests didn’t fare very well. Only six made it out of the complex, and all of them were scooped up by the FSB.”
“Ernsdorff?”
“About a week after Baikal he disappeared, and he took a few hundred million in investors’ money with him. Ten days ago they found in him a St. John hotel with his throat cut. Someone didn’t appreciate his accounting methods.”
“What about our old friend Ames?”
“No sign of him. If he’s dead, somewhere in the sinkhole, we’ll never know.”
“And if he’s alive?” Fisher finished. “He’s not the kind of guy to hide forever. You and the others watch your backs.”
“You, too.”
“How are they, by the way — Nathan, Maya, and Kimberly?”
“All good. They send their regards.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the ocean, before Grimsdóttir said, “Sam, if you want to come back, I can arrange it.”
Fisher shook his head.
“Is that a no?”
Fisher looked around the deck for a few moments, then turned his face into the sun and took a deep breath. “That’s an ‘ask me again when my lease is up.’ ”