Fallout

it…” Stewart coughed. He opened his mouth to speak again, but it was full of bubbling blood.

“I’m sorry, Calvin.”

Stewart gave the barest shake of his head, then he went still.

From somewhere below, Fisher heard a muffled crump, then another, then a third. A vibrating rumble rose through the stairs and shook the walls, followed seconds later by the shriek of tortured steel.

The remote, Fisher thought. Getting rid of the evidence.

Fisher gave Stewart’s hand a final squeeze, then laid it across his chest and started down the stairs. He stopped. Turned back. One last thing…

He rushed back up the stairs into the laboratory. He took close-up pictures of the LINAC and the welded ring connector on the chamber’s door, then pressed his face to the porthole window. The angle was tight and the single bulb inside the chamber dim, but he took three quick shots of the interior connectors, hoping to catch enough detail.

Below his feet the deck was canting to the left. Somewhere he could hear the rapid-fire pop pop pop of rivets giving way and the wrenching of steel on steel.

He was about to turn away from the chamber when something caught his eye. He pressed his face back to the porthole. It took him a full ten seconds to register what he was seeing. Up and down both of the chamber’s walls were crisscrossing streaks of blood, and here and there, also stamped in blood, partial palm prints.

Fisher felt his stomach rise into his throat.

Peter’s fingertips had been shredded nearly to the bone.

This is it. This is where it had happened. Where they killed him.

The deck was slanting badly now. Behind him, chairs and desks were skittering across the floor and crashing into the wall. Still staring into the chamber, Fisher grabbed the wheel to steady himself. Somewhere in the back of his head a faint voice prodded him: Get out… get out!

He tore his eyes from the porthole and headed for the door.

26

GERMANTOWN, MARYLAND

After a night of observation and restless sleep in Bethesda, Fisher drove himself home, a 1940s farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine about thirty minutes northwest of Washington. At Fisher Farms, as Grimsdottir called it, his closest neighbor wasn’t within a stone’s throw, and the road he lived on simply wound deeper into the Germantown countryside, so the only traffic he saw was that of neighbors or the occasional wanderer. There was no hum of car engines, no honking of horns — few noises, in fact, save those produced by nature: the chirping of chickadees, the croaking of frogs, the wind fluttering through the maples.

He’d bought the property on the cheap from the former owner, who had moved out of state years earlier and let it fall into disrepair. Fisher’s home improvement list never seemed to shorten, but that didn’t bother him. He found the “unextraordinariness” of retiling a bathroom or fixing a broken shutter therapeutic — the perfect antidote to a job that was anything but workaday.

Fisher climbed out of the car and mounted the front porch steps. Sitting at the foot of the front door was a round hatbox brimming with envelopes. On the way home he’d called Mrs. Stinson, the retired librarian who lived half a mile down the road. Taped to the side of the box was a note:

Welcome back. An apple pie on the back porch for you.

Edna

Fisher smiled. No place like home.

* * *

He took a shower, made some coffee and a plate of ham and eggs, then stretched out on the couch under the bay window and read for a while—The White Rhino Hotel by Bartle Bull — then dozed fitfully for an hour, so he got up, changed clothes, and went outside to weed the garden. He gave up after ten minutes. He took off his gloves and walked to the middle of the lawn and sat down cross-legged in the sun.

His mind wouldn’t turn off and kept returning to the platform, to Calvin Stewart, to the claw marks on the chamber wall, the bloody, shredded fingernails…

He should have never promised Stewart he would get him out. He knew better. There were few sure things, and even fewer in his line of work. What bothered him most is he couldn’t decide whether he’d made the promise to secure Stewart’s cooperation or because he’d truly meant it. To survive and thrive in special operations you had to have a mission mind-set: whatever it took to do the job. It wasn’t a matter of setting aside your morals, per se, but a level of dedication, a silent oath to get the job done, regardless of hurdle or hardship.

Had he subconsciously been following this oath when he made the promise to Stewart? Before he’d dropped aboard the Gosselin, he’d known Stewart had a wife and a seven-year-old daughter. Now they didn’t have him. Had Stewart died still believing Fisher was going to save him?

Peter. Fisher tried to imagine what it must have been like for his brother, trapped inside that chamber, that iron coffin, listening to the accelerator’s motors spool up, and then… what? What had he felt? Had he—?

Stop, Sam. Just stop.

He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and stared at the sky, seeing but not seeing the clouds.

This was another hazard of the job. Some operators never let themselves think like this; they simply wiped their mental slate clean after a mission and moved on. Others, like Fisher, did just that but only after a mission. Shove your worries, fears, and emotional speed bumps into a mental vault, lock it shut, then reopen it later when you’re safe at home. Opinions varied about which method was the healthiest, but for Fisher there’d never been any doubt. There’s only so much stuff you can shove in the vault before it starts leaking. Better to keep it swept out.

No, he decided, he hadn’t lied to Stewart. He’d meant what he’d said, and he’d tried to get him out. He’d failed. Period. It was a promise he shouldn’t have made, but he had, and it was done. His intentions had been good; his follow-through, not so much.

And as for Peter… Come what may, scores would be settled. Anyone and everyone who’d been a party to Peter’s death would pay in full.

Fisher’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He flipped it open. It was Grimsdottir: “So, what’s your preference? Morton’s or Outback?”

“You’ve lost me, Grim.”

“For your steak. Never mind, just turn on your TV and call me back.”

Fisher walked back inside and flipped on the kitchen set; it was already tuned to MSNBC.

“… again, stunning news out of war-torn Kyrgyzstan…” The inset image beside the anchorwoman changed to show a podium, the same one the Kyrgyz president had stood behind while resigning two days ago. Standing behind it now was Bolot Omurbai. “Let’s listen,” the anchor said.

“… the grace of Allah and the will of the Kyrgyz people, I have returned to lead our country back to the ways of Islam — the ancient ways of Manas, before all was poisoned by the West, by technology, by modern soullessness.” Omurbai’s eyes seemed to glaze over as he spoke, his gaze fixed straight ahead as though he were in his own world. “Turn your eyes to Kyrgyzstan and behold our greatness. Watch the scourge of Manas return the lost Kyrgyz race back to greatness!”

Omurbai stopped suddenly. He blinked several times, emerging from this trance, then continued. “I am told that most of the world believed me dead.” Here Omurbai offered a disarming smile and a spread of his hands. “As they say, news of my demise was misreported.

“The outlaw government, backed by the evil forces of the United States, foisted a lie upon the world and the people of Kyrgyzstan — a lie meant to crush the spirit of my people…”