Fisher changed course, steering away from the men and around the skate park until he reached the north wall. The bowling alley, which sat at the foot of the stairway, was directly opposite Fisher now. The guard who'd wandered off was now standing beside a lighted popcorn kiosk complete with a red-and-white-striped awning, scooping his hand inside and shoving popcorn in his mouth. His AK sat propped against the kiosk's wheel. Fisher found a dark corner and crouched down to wait. The guard gorged himself for another astonishing ten minutes, then let out a belch, picked up his AK, and wandered back toward his buddy, who had returned to playing the dune buggy game.
In his ear, Fisher heard Grimsdottir's voice: "Sam, we've got activity again."
Since focusing the NSA's electronic attention on Tolkun Bakiyev and Ingonish, she'd picked up several cell phone transmissions from two different cell phone numbers, all of which she was picking apart, and an intermittent satellite Internet signal. The problem was, Bakiyev had installed not one but two servers in the fort, both Hewlett-Packard Pro-Liant DL360 G5s, one acting as his own private web server, the other as what Grimsdottir had called an "anonymizing intercept gateway proxy server," the use of which, Fisher gathered, was a high-tech and expensive way of cloaking your Internet activities.
Grimsdottir was making progress in breaking through the firewalls, but it was slow going. One of Fisher's goals was to find the server room and perform a hard link. There aren't many practical reasons for law-abiding private citizens to own such systems. If there were any skeletons in the closet, those servers might be the door.
"What kind of activity?" Fisher asked.
"Cell phone and server. Somebody's talking and surfing in there."
"Point me."
"South of you, say sixty yards, and up forty feet. Feeding to your OPSAT now."
Fisher checked his screen. "Got it."
HEwaited until Orville Redenbacher had resumed the dune buggy race, then slipped along the wall and around the corner to the stairway. The stones were covered by a red, black, and ochre Persian rug runner that Fisher's estimate put at US$10,000.
He was five feet from the top when he heard a door slam somewhere to his right. Hunched over, he padded up the final few steps, then dropped to his belly and peeked around the corner. At the far end of the arched passage, where it curved around the bulge of the tower, a man in a gray velvet track suit was leaning on the railing, looking down at BakiyevLand.
"Hey, you two, what's the racket?" the man said in heavily accented English.
Fisher switched his goggles to NV, zoomed in on the man's face, and snapped a photo.
One of the men--Orville, it sounded like--said, "Sorry, boss, sorry."
On Fisher's OPSAT, the picture he had just taken had been rotated in three dimensions and the missing features filled in. Beside it was another photo that appeared to be a Canadian immigration shot. Beneath the photos the words MATCH: TOLKUN BAKIYEV flashed.
"Just keep it down," Bakiyev replied. "I'm going to work for another twenty minutes, then I'm going to bed. I want it quiet."
"Sure, boss, no problem."
"And don't eat all my popcorn, damn it."
Bakiyev turned and strode back through the tower door and slammed it behind him. Twenty minutes to nighty-night,Fisher thought. He checked his OPSAT; Stewart's beacon lay to his left and above him, inside the north tower.
ONCEthrough the tower door, Fisher found himself facing a narrow spiral staircase that ascended around a center column of stone and heavy oaken crossbeams. Ten feet above his head he could see floor joists. He mounted the staircase, testing each step with his foot, testing his weight, before moving on.
On the first floor he found the space divided by four rooms, like wedges from a pie. Fisher stopped at each door to scan the interior with the flexicam. All four rooms--sleeping quarters--were empty. He moved to the second floor and again found only empty bedrooms, though only three this time as the tower narrowed with each floor. On the third floor, the final one below the archer's cupola, Fisher found, predictably, only two rooms. The first room, another bedroom, contained what appeared to be a figure under the covers of a single trundle bed. Fisher switched to EM and immediately saw a troubling signature: a tight funnel of swirling gray light in the far corner of the room near the ceiling. Security camera. He switched back to NV, centered the flexicam on the security camera, then tapped the OPSAT screen: CURRENT IMAGE>SLAVE AND TRACK MOTION>SCREEN OVERLAY. The OPSAT processed the request and replied, FINISHED. He switched screens. On the fort's blueprint screen, Stewart's room now showed a partially transparent red cone emanating from the corner in which the security camera lay.
Now, the question was, why did only this room have a security camera? He thought he knew the answer, but it took thirty seconds of panning and zooming to confirm it. There.The sleeping figure's right hand was resting outside the covers on the pillow; attached to the wrist was what looked like a handcuff. Stewart.
Fisher moved to the final room. Inside, Chin-Hwa Pak was sitting on the edge of his bed in his pajamas using a stylus to tap on a smart phone. On the nightstand, under the glow of a shaded reading lamp, was a semiautomatic pistol.
Fisher checked his watch. Pak looked ready to go to bed; he would wait a few minutes, then check again. He found a corner and crouched down, leaning against the wall.
Something. . . Fisher thought. Something was nagging at his subconscious. Something about one of the other bedrooms . . .
Fisher got up and crept back down the spiral staircase to the first floor, then found the room in question, the first one to the left of the stairs. He gave the room another precautionary EM scan, then picked the lock, slipped inside, and shut the door behind him. He walked to the nightstand beside the bed and turned on the reading lamp.
This room, unlike the others, which were almost spartan in their furnishings, was well-appointed: a queen-size bed with a down comforter, a rolltop desk, a built-in bookshelf across from the bed, artwork on the walls . . . This was no ordinary guest room. Bakiyev hadn't gone to special lengths for his other two guests--even his North Korean spy--so why this room?
Fisher went to work. He took his time, searching every nook and cranny of the room. In the nightstand drawer he found a laminated map of Kyrgyzstan with traces of grease pencil on it. Trapped behind the nightstand and the wall he found a faded envelope. On one corner of the envelope's rear, written in blue ink, was a doodle, some scratched-out added numbers, random lines. The main address and return address were written in English--the clumsy block letters of someone unfamiliar with the language. The return address was Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; the main address read, "University College London." All were in black ink.
Inside Fisher found a letter, written in Kyrgyz by a feminine hand. The date was March 1967. Fisher's grasp of Kyrgyz was weak, but he was able to piece together and translate the letter's salutation: My Dear little Soso. . .
Soso,Fisher thought.
He sat down on the bed, scanned the remainder of the letter for any other recognizable phrases, then thought for a couple minutes. He keyed his SVT. "Grim, you there?"
"Here."