Fallout

sly grin.

Doesn’t miss much, Fisher thought.

“Give or take three feet.”

“Ah, the joys of technology. It’s all about physics, you know, all about physics.”

“Pardon me?” Fisher said.

But Robinson was no longer listening. He had pulled a Gateway laptop from his chair’s saddlebag and was powering it up. Muttering the latitude and longitude coordinates to himself, he called up Google Maps—“The bane of the National Reconnaissance Office, you know,” he said to Fisher. “Now everyone can play their game”—then punched in the coordinates and studied the satellite image there.

“Just as I thought,” Robinson said.

“What?”

“Your quarry, Sam my new friend, is in Little Bishkek.”

Bishkek. Robinson’s mention of the word was so unexpected it took Fisher several seconds to process what he was hearing. “Bishkek. As in Kyrgyzstan’s capital?”

“Yes, sir. That Bishkek. The same Bishkek that is, as we speak, in the midst of yet another civil war. Are you a big believer in coincidences, Sam?”

“No.”

“Me neither. But that’s not even the worst news. Your little red circle there — if the coordinates are accurate — is not just in Little Bishkek, it is inside the walls of Ingonish.”

“Which is?”

“The home — a castle slash fort, really — to the mayor, general, chief enforcer, and king of Little Bishkek, Tolkun Bakiyev.”

“You’d better back up,” Fisher said, “And give me a little history.”

“Back in the seventies, a group of enterprising Kyrgyz families that specialized in crime of the organized variety, started feeling unwelcome in Bishkek. Back then, before they went into Afghanistan, the Soviets got serious about injecting their proletariat gospel into the stans, including Kyrgyzstan, by helping the Bishkek government crack down on the working-class-unfriendly Mafia. Bosses, henchmen, and sundry thugs began disappearing and dying left and right.

“Knowing they couldn’t fight the Soviet bear, and being more interested in profits than in principle, what was left of the Kyrgyz Mafia struck their tents and emigrated for greener pastures. Some went to Europe, some Australia, some America, but one family — the Bakiyev clan — came to Nova Scotia. The other families failed, broke apart, or were otherwise destroyed by local organized crime or law enforcement, but the Bakiyevs played it smart. They found a rundown and mostly uninhabited village on the coast of Cape Breton, moved in, took up the local trade of fishing, and just generally worked at fitting in and making babies for six or seven years, all the while attracting other wandering Kyrgyz.

“Once the elder Bakiyev — Tolkun’s father — thought their group had properly assimilated, he quietly turned the town back to its old ways of organized crime. Now they specialize mostly in smuggling black market goods, from fake iPhones to Gucci knockoffs that they ship into the United States. No one really knows how much influence Tolkun has outside Little Bishkek, but since the town’s founding, not a single outside land developer has managed to make any inroads there. It’s a tight-knit community, Sam, and they’re not the welcoming sort. You’ve seen those westerns, where a stranger walks into the saloon and the music stops and everyone just stares at him?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what it’s like driving through Little Bishkek. You stop for a cup of coffee, and you’ve got a hundred pair of eyes watching you until you hit the town’s outskirts again. They’re not unfriendly, exactly, but it’s pretty clear that if you’re not Kyrgyz, you don’t want to be shopping for apartments.”

“I understand.”

“I truly hope so, Sam. If you’re planning on getting him out of Little Bishkek, and they’re not willing to part with him, the odds are stacked against you.”

Fisher, staring at the horses cantering through the pasture, nodded slowly, then turned to Robinson and smiled grimly. “I love a challenge.”

18

LITTLE BISHKEK

Two hours after dusk, as night fully closed in over the coast, Fisher turned south off Cape Breton’s main southern coast road, the St. Peters-Fourchu, onto a winding dirt track that took him to the beach. He rolled to a stop in the gravel parking lot in the lee of a sand dune and shut off the headlights and engine. He sat quietly for few minutes, listening to the engine’s tick tick tick as it cooled and watching the clouds gather over the sea. The rain would be here in less than an hour, and while its coming would present its own challenges for the mission ahead, the rain would dampen sound, deepen the shadows, and the clouds would cover the full moon, which had been his biggest worry.

His cell phone trilled. He checked the caller ID screen, then tapped the CONNECT button on his Bluetooth headset. “Hi, Grim.”

“I’ve got the colonel on as well, Sam.”

“Evening, Colonel.”

“I understand you’ve managed to find yourself a tough nut to crack.”

“It’s a gift I have.”

Between Robinson’s own maps and books and firsthand knowledge of the area and Grim’s computer research, they had over the last ten hours built an impressive profile on Tolkun Bakiyev’s home, the fort known as Ingonish.

Ingonish, named after the city on the northern tip of the island, was built in 1740 by the French and changed hands half a dozen times over the next eighteen years as the French and British fought first the Seven Years’ War, then the King George’s War. Intended as a siege fort to guard what was now the Grand River Estuary, Ingonish never saw battle and as such never gained a place in the history books, earning in the mid-nineteenth century the nickname, the Forgotten Castle.

Upon leaving Robinson’s house, Fisher had immediately called in to report the Kyrgyzstan connection. Like Fisher, Lambert wasn’t a believer in coincidences, and he immediately tasked Grimsdottir and Redding with finding a connection — any connection, no matter how slight — that might explain a link between Carmen Hayes, the hydrogeologist; Calvin Stewart, the particle physicist; Chin-Hwa Pak, the North Korean RDEI spy; and the PuH-19 that had killed Peter. All were pieces of what appeared may be the same puzzle, but there was so far not even a hint of what bigger picture they might form.

Right now, though, Fisher had to focus on the task at hand: getting into Ingonish.

“Your OPSAT is fully loaded,” Grimsdottir said. “The problem is, the castle hasn’t been a tourist attraction for twenty years, since Bakiyev bought it, so we don’t have any recent pictures. The good news is, the thing’s made mostly of stone, so there’s not much remodeling the guy could have done. Between Robert’s library and what I’ve been able to pull off the Net, we put together a partial blueprint of the place. There’re going to be gaps, though, so play it by ear.”

“One of my specialties,” Fisher replied.

“Sam, same ROE as before,” Lambert said. “We need to keep this pipeline open, especially if it might eventually lead to Kyrgyzstan.”

Bodies tend to clog pipelines, Fisher thought. “Understood. I know you’ve probably already considered this, Colonel, but that mortar attack on Bishkek… The North Koreans have that kind of technology — stolen, of course, but they’ve got it nonetheless.”

“Yeah, I know. And satellite access.”

Through front companies, the North Korean RDEI had for years been snatching up space on commercial satellite launches and piggybacking on existing commercial Landsats (land satellites) in orbit.

Fisher checked his watch, then craned his neck so he had a clearer view through the windshield. The rain