Checkmate

“Who is the Iranian?”

Fisher reached out and jabbed Marjani in the foot. Not so gently this time. Marjani screamed, reached for his foot. “Don’t move,” Fisher said, “or I’ll take you toe off.”

Reluctantly, Marjani leaned back. His lower lip was trembling.

Almost there, Fisher thought. The stress of being blind and not knowing when or where the next jab was coming was quickly breaking Marjani down.

Fisher hooked Marjani’s pinky toe with the tip of the Sykes and stretched it backward. Marjani flinched, drew back his lips until his teeth showed. “Don’t… please don’t… ”

“Give me the Iranian’s name.”

Marjani hesitated, squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t know, please… ”

Fisher let the blade rest between his toes for five more seconds, then removed it. “Do you want to reconsider your answer?”

“I don’t know who he is, I swear. He showed up and—”

Fisher picked up the pillow and tossed it into Marjani’s lap. “What… what is this?”

“It’s a pillow,” Fisher said. “Put it over your face.”

“What? Why?”

“The gunshot is going to be loud in here.”

All the color drained from Marjani’s face. “Please, I can’t… ”

Fisher let him sob for a half a minute, then said, “Do you want to change your answer? Do you want to tell me who the Iranian is?”

Marjani nodded and started talking.

49

When Marjani finished talking, Fisher had some answers and a lot more questions.

He darted Marjani, bound his hands and feet with flexi-cuffs, then fireman-carried him down to the garage, where he found a gleaming-white H1 Alpha Hummer. He shoved Marjani in the back, bound his feet to one of the tie-down eyelets, then climbed into the front seat. The keys were in the ignition.

Thirty seconds later, he was rolling the down the driveway, the air conditioner blowing at full blast. He turned left at the arch and headed northwest, headlights off as he kept to the depressions and used the moonlight to guide him. He drove for fifteen minutes until the hills began to smooth out into the fringe of the Garagum Desert. He coasted to a stop and shut off the engine. He keyed his subdermal.

“Pike, this is Sickle, over.”

“Go ahead, Sickle,” Bird replied. After refueling at Kabul, Redding and the Osprey had followed an hour behind the Gulfstream, slipping across the Turkmenistan border and setting down sixty miles from Ashgabat in the desert.

“Request extraction, break; two passengers, break; map coordinates one-two-two-point-five by three-two- point-three; beacon is transmitting, over.”

“Roger, Sickle, en route.”

* * *

The Osprey appeared twelve minutes later, skimming low over the ground, its rotor blades glinting in the moonlight.

“I have visual on you, Pike,” Fisher said. “Confirm same.” He flipped the Hummer’s fog lights on and off.

“Confirm, Sickle, we have you.”

The Osprey put down a hundred yards away atop a small hillock, and Redding came down the ramp to help Fisher with Marjani. “Friend of yours?” Redding asked.

“He doesn’t think so, but he’s going to come in handy.”

While Redding took care of their passenger, Fisher walked forward to the cockpit. “Bird, how’re we looking on radar?”

“Fine. Hell, Turkmenistan hasn’t got a military radar station for a thousand miles. We could sit here for days.” He glanced at Fisher. “We’re not going to sit here for days, are we?”

“No. Just keep an eye out.”

Fisher walked aft and sat down at the comm console. Lambert came on the monitor and said, “What’s your status?”

“Out and safe. Marjani was paid by Zhao through Heng, but he doesn’t know who was behind the money. He’s never heard of Zhao. I don’t know if I believe that, but there wasn’t time to press him further. He says Heng’s meeting was with an Iranian named Kavad Abelzada. He’s from a village called Sarani, right across the border. He was born and raised there.”

Before Lambert could ask her, Grimsdottir said, “I’m looking… ”

Lambert said, “I’ve got Tom Richards here. I’ve filled him in on the Zhao angle. I think he’s got the piece we’re missing.”

“Let’s hear it.”

The screen split and Richards’s face appeared. “You already know this, of course, but yes, we’re running an op against Zhao — us, the Brits, and the Russians.”

“Let me guess: Jagged.”

Richards nodded. “Three years ago, the President signed a top-secret executive order declaring the spread of Jagged was a clear and imminent threat to national security. Moscow and London were seeing the effects in their countries as well, so it didn’t take much convincing to get them to sign onto the operation. We code-named it Jupiter.

“For the past twenty-eight months, we’ve been waging war against Zhao along with the Russian SVR and British MI6. We started with his peripheral operations, cutting off the money, attacking the transportation, snatching low-level operators — that kind of thing.”

“Does Beijing know about this?”

“Hell, no. Zhao has so many politicians and generals in his pockets we’ve lost count.”

“Go on.”

“Once we’d made a dent in his side businesses, we took the fight straight to him,” Richards said. “Starting with his key personnel.”

“How key?” Fisher asked.

“Very. Most of Zhao’s empire is run by family members — brothers, cousins, uncles. We began eliminating them, one by one.”

“Say again?”

“Each country put specially trained teams on the ground. There was no choice; we’re at war as surely as if bombs were exploding.”

Fisher wasn’t shocked by Richards’s admission that the CIA had fielded assassination teams, but rather that the President had made such a bold move. Right or wrong, if Jupiter ever became public knowledge, the resulting scandal would end his career and the careers of everyone attached to the operation.

“How many so far?” Fisher asked.

“Sixty-two. Twenty-three family members and thirty-nine non-family subordinates.”

“And his empire?”

“It’s running on fumes. Another six months and he’ll topple. The flow of Jagged will slow to a trickle and then stop.”

And there was Zhao’s motive, Fisher realized. Revenge and self-preservation. Twenty-three members of his own family murdered; tens of billions of dollars at stake. Zhao had answered the U.S./Russian/U.K. declaration of war with his own, but knowing he couldn’t win a head-to-head fight, he’d devised a strategy straight out of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

Launch the most devastating attack on U.S. soil in history and implicate Iran, which is already the world’s new boogeyman; the U.S. responds in kind and begins marching toward war; then drag Russia into the fiasco using