The helicopter was overhead now, the rotor wash whipping through the storm. That would be a Mil Mi-24 Russian-made helicopter gunship, one of a small fleet the government of Bolivia had purchased from the Russians to combat the drug trade. Fisher had sent Briggs to link up with the pilot and weapons system operator the moment their target had bolted.
A spotlight shone on Fisher, then the nylon fast rope dropped at his shoulder, within arm’s reach. He reached out for the rope even as, from above, an African-American man dressed in full Kevlar-weave tactical operation suit and wearing trifocal sonar goggles came sliding down, looking for all the world like Fisher himself.
Clutching the rope, Fisher managed to climb back up and onto the road, then he guided the rope toward the wall so that the man, Isaac Briggs, could hop onto the mud.
Briggs was a kid, really, just twenty-seven, former U.S. Army intel officer, former paramilitary ops officer with the CIA, current member of Fourth Echelon—which he liked to call 4E because he hailed from a world of e-books and theories and military history, a world dominated by acronyms and PowerPoints that, in the world according to Fisher, didn’t mean jack when you were in the field. Briggs was a good guy, handpicked by Fisher, and he was just now escaping from the clutches of theory and learning to trust his instincts. No more company man for him. He worked for Fourth Echelon now.
“Got here as soon as we could,” Briggs cried, tugging up the goggles and lifting his voice over the sound of the chopper.
Fisher shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. This thing’s gone to shit.”
Ignoring the needling pain that seemed to come from every part of his body, Fisher led Briggs back toward the taxi, which was now hanging partially off the ledge. The stench of leaking gasoline and oil still rose through the rain as they drew near.
“Damn,” Briggs gasped.
The taxi’s engine was somewhere in the backseat. The driver’s head—just his head—was lying on the rear dashboard, his severed left arm jutting from a rear window.
Fisher frowned at Briggs. “You’re not gonna be sick, are you?”
“I was already sick of chasing this bastard around the world.”
“Well, you got your wish. It ends here. And not well for us.” Fisher glared at the chopper. “Call that bird. Tell him to bug out for a few minutes till we’re ready for him.”
Briggs nodded and barked orders into his radio.
Tensing, Fisher dropped to all fours, called for Briggs to hand him a flashlight, and let the beam play under the wreckage. He spotted one of Rahmani’s legs, IDed by the color of the man’s pants, shoved up into the cab’s transmission, but the rest of him was missing.
Releasing another string of curses, Fisher sprang to his feet and directed the light across the road, the beam slowly exposing a trail of body parts near the wall, one they’d missed walking over because it was hidden in the shadows. They found the torso with the head still attached; it was lying among some rocks, the blood washing off in the rain.
Fisher was ready to strangle someone, and Briggs sensed that. He kept his distance, and without a word, they began a meticulous search of the body and scoured the rest of the road for anything Rahmani might have been carrying. Fisher found a small pistol, a beat-up old Makarov, but nothing else. Briggs snapped as many photos as he could before they gathered up the body parts in a “glad bag” and sent them up to the chopper when it returned.
Rahmani had been the best lead they’d had in locating that stolen uranium. That his group had pulled off the robbery was nothing short of miraculous, which had the world’s intelligence communities assuming that it was an inside job. The general public had no idea what was happening, and the Russians were thus far tight-lipped about the entire affair. Sorry, nyet, this is state secret information.
The Mayak facility was two hours south of Ekaterinburg, at the end of unmarked back roads, near a forested plateau of lakes and small rivers. It was protected by chain-link barbed-wire fences and a deforested strip of land that provided no cover. The facility had just been updated with a new electronic surveillance system provided by the United States and a radiation monitoring system that was well-nigh impossible to defeat—unless your name was Sam Fisher. The rest of its defenses were classified, but it was not reckless to assume that the Russians had a keen interest in guarding their nuclear material—especially when they’d been backed by the U.S. Congress to the tune of 350 million dollars to build a heavily fortified warehouse or “Plutonium Palace” to store approximately 40 percent of their military’s excess fissile material.
Nevertheless, Rahmani and his unidentified cronies had not only broken into the facility but had managed to escape from it with their pockets glowing green. Their smuggling route was still a point of conjecture. Kazakhstan was only a four-hour drive to the south, but that course would’ve taken them through Chelyabinsk and many border checkpoints. They had more likely gone southwest, traveling some 1,200 miles or more to the Caspian Sea, with the goal of smuggling the uranium through Azerbaijan and into Turkey.
What’s more, it took the Russian government more than three days to officially report the incident, giving the thieves ample time to escape the country. Whether the Russians were doing their own damage control or the theft was entirely unnoticed by their staff at the facility was a second point of conjecture.
A tip from the National Intelligence Organization of Turkey—Milli I.stihbarat
Their raid—a joint effort between the United States and Russia’s own foreign intelligence service, Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR—had turned up little. Rahmani’s group had already pulled up stakes before they’d fully moved in and begun constructing their weapon. The SVR agent operating with them was a sour-faced mute who offered little more than shrugs between playing on his smartphone. Fisher had suggested that Istanbul was merely a diversionary stop along their route. The SVR agent had agreed. Then shrugged. Then agreed again.
Bottom line: Rahmani had known where to find the uranium. And if he hadn’t, he would’ve at least known the players who could point Fisher and his team in the right direction.
For now, though, all Fisher could do was stare through the rain as he was hoisted up to the chopper.
The mountainside seemed darker and even emptier now. El Camino de la Muerte had claimed three more victims, and Fisher should have been grateful that he hadn’t been the fourth, but he wasn’t. He felt only anger—knots of anger—tightening in his gut.
2
“MONEY is like alcohol,” Igor Kasperov was telling the reporters from the Wall Street Journal as they toured his Moscow headquarters. “It’s good to have enough, but it’s not target. I’m here to be global police and peacekeeper. I’m here to do charity work everywhere. I’m here, I guess, to save our world!” He tossed a hand into the air and unleashed one of his trademark smiles that had been featured on the cover of Time magazine. The two gray-haired, bespectacled reporters beamed back at him.
Kasperov was no stranger to entertaining the press in the old factory that was now the headquarters of Kasperov Labs, one of the most successful computer antivirus corporations on the planet. That was no boast. According to Forbes, between 2009 and 2012 retail sales of his software increased 174 percent, reaching almost 5.5 million a year—nearly as much as his rivals Symantec and McAfee combined. Worldwide, he had over 60 million users of his security network, users who sent data to his headquarters every time they downloaded an application to their desktops. The cloud-based system automatically checked the code against a “green base” of 300 million software objects it knew to be trustworthy, as well as a “red base” of 94 million known malicious objects. Kasperov’s code was also embedded in Microsoft, Cisco, and Juniper Networks products, effectively giving the company 400 million users. His critics often quibbled over the accuracy of those numbers. He’d send them cases of vodka with notes that instructed them to relax and simply watch as Kasperov Labs became the world’s leading provider of antivirus software.