Fallout

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.”

“Steak dinner says I can guess what your Kyrgyzstan news is.”

“You’re on.”

“Bolot Omurbai isn’t dead.”

There was a solid five seconds of silence, and then she said, “What? What are you talking about?”

“I think I’m sitting in Omurbai’s temporary mausoleum.”

21

“You’ve lost me, Sam,” Grimsdottir said. “Hold on, let me patch in the colonel…”

Lambert came on the line: “What’ve you got, Sam?”

Fisher repeated what he’d said to Grimsdottir, then added, “If I’m not mistaken, Omurbai’s mother used to call him ‘little Soso’—after Stalin’s childhood nickname.”

“Checking,” Grimsdottir said. “Yeah, that’s right. What about the letter?”

“March 1967, University College London. He would have been…”

“Eighteen or nineteen,” Grimsdottir answered. Fisher could hear keys tapping in the background; after half a minute, she came back. “Omurbai studied there — economics — for a year before he dropped out.”

“Speculate,” Lambert ordered.

“Omurbai was there years and years ago,” Grimsdottir replied. “Long before he took over the country.”

“Or the letter is new, and whoever the Kyrgyz government killed was one of Omurbai’s body doubles.” He told them about the blue-ink doodle on the back of the envelope. “Plus, this room is untouched — almost a shrine. I doubt it would’ve been kept like this if Omurbai had visited before his rise to power. He would have been just another fellow Kyrgyz to Bakiyev. And the laminated map — the copyright reads 2007.”

“Let’s play this out,” Lambert said. “Omurbai escapes Kyrgyzstan, leaving a body double in his place and telling his commanders to fight on until he returns. From there, with the help of Tolkun Bakiyev he makes his way to Little Bishkek, where he hides out, licks his wounds, and regroups—”

“And makes friends with the North Koreans,” Fisher added.

“Right. And uses their advisers, their weapons, and their money — and Bakiyev’s network — to plan his return to power.”

“That sounds about right,” Fisher replied. “A lot of unanswered questions yet, but it’s plausible. The biggest question is: What’re the North Koreans getting out of the deal? What does Omurbai have to offer them?”

“Speaking of Omurbai’s big comeback,” Grimsdottir said, “that’s the other news. The latest reports show the Kyrgyz government on the edge of collapse. There’s fighting inside Bishkek now; the rebels are pushing in.”

“They always had the numbers but not the direction,” Fisher said. “Without Omurbai they were aimless — a gaggle of warlords that couldn’t agree on what kind of tea to serve at meetings, let alone wage a war.”

“And now,” Lambert said, “maybe they have their rudder back.”

22

They talked for a few more minutes, then Fisher signed off and returned to the third floor. He checked in on Pak and found him lying in bed reading, so he moved to Stewart’s room, picked the lock, and slipped inside. He stood motionless for a few moments, pressed flat against the door, listening. He started side-sliding along the wall, following the contour of the room, checking the security camera’s detection cone on the OPSAT as he went, until he was standing directly beneath the camera itself.

He studied the camera’s underbelly. He saw no signs of a microphone, but he did see a manufacturer’s name and model number. He relayed them to Grimsdottir. “I need an encode for a loop switch.”

While both Fisher’s SC pistol and rifle were EM jammer capable, he used the feature sparingly. His concern wasn’t about whether or not the jammer was effective (it was), but rather about the intangible part of the equation; that is, the human part: what a security guard does when one of his or her monitors turns to static for no apparent reason only to resolve itself seconds later. And what do they do when another camera displays the same static, then another. Human judgment is an unpredictable beast. Some guards will write off the interference; some will not. It was those who worried Fisher, so whenever possible he preferred the now-antiquated and admittedly more tedious “loop switch” method.

“No problem. Stand by.” She came back ten seconds later. “Got it. Encoding now.”

On his OPSAT screen, a series of seemingly random numbers and letters were marching across the screen.