Fisher muted the television.
Of course, Omurbai was lying. The man captured by the U.S. Army Rangers in that cave had been dressed in Omurbai’s uniform, had answered to his name, and stood by it throughout his trial.
Had Omurbai already left the country by then? Fisher suspected so. He’d probably fled across the Kazak border even before the bombs started falling. Then, aided by loyalists in the stans, he’d made his way to Little Bishkek and disappeared into Tolkun Bakiyev’s Ingonish. What remained to be answered was the nature of Omurbai’s connection to the North Korean government. What was driving that partnership?
Fisher flipped open his cell phone to call Grimsdottir, then stopped, hesitated, and flipped it closed again. On the kitchen table was his hatbox full of mail. One of the envelopes jutting from the stack had caught Fisher’s eye; he walked over and slid it out.
He felt his heart lurch. He knew the handwriting on the envelope.
27
“No doubts?” Lambert asked.
Fisher, his eyes fixed on the cellophane-sealed letter lying in the center of the conference table under a circle of light, seemed not to hear. Redding and Grimsdottir, also leaning over the letter, waited for Fisher to respond.
After a few moments, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I’m sorry?”
“The letter. No doubt it’s Peter’s handwriting?”
“No, it’s his.”
Quashing his urge to tear open the letter as soon as he’d seen it, Fisher had instead immediately called Lambert, who’d called the Department of Energy operations center, which in turn dispatched NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) to Fisher’s home. Though primarily tasked with the identification and handling of nuclear weapons, NESTs were also the best general-circumstances radioactive response teams in the country. However unlikely, if the letter contained even the barest trace of PuH-19, it needed to be handled appropriately.
With the letter on its way to Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Fisher himself was whisked to George-town University Hospital, where the doctors, already made aware of the nature of the possible contamination, gave him a full physical, from head to toe, inside and out. No trace of PuH-19 was found.
Four hours later the letter, too, was declared clean of any contamination, so it was transported to the FBI’s Quantico labs, where it was pushed through Latent Prints and Trace Evidence units, then returned to Fort Meade. Peter’s prints were found on the letter; no remarkable trace findings.
The letter had been postmarked in Nuuk, where Peter had been first taken after being picked up by the fishing boat, about four days before Peter had been transferred to Johns Hopkins. How the letter had gotten mailed Fisher could only guess, but the most likely answer was a kind-hearted nurse or orderly. What remained a true mystery was how Peter had escaped the chamber aboard the platform and made his way into a life raft.
“That’s not his normal handwriting, I assume,” Grimsdottir said.
Fisher shook his head. “He must have already been sick. Plus, he never wrote anything down. He had a snapshot memory.”
The handwriting, while clearly belonging to Peter, was shaky, as though written by a palsied hand. Even the letter itself, which was headed by the words, “
There were references to Site 17, the now-destroyed drilling platform; to Little Bishkek; to the missing Carmen Hayes — all of which Fisher understood. But then there were other notations, words and numbers that seemed unconnected to anything he’d encountered:
Sun
Star
Nile
Wonder ash
49- 2303253/1443622
Oziri
Red… tri… my… cota
“The problem is,” Redding said, “we don’t know how far the PuH-19 had spread through him when he wrote this. All this could be nonsense. It might have made sense to him at the time, but we have to at least consider it’s meaningless.” Redding caught Fisher’s eye and grimaced. “Sorry, Sam, no offense.”
“None taken. You’re right; it’s possible.”
“Maybe,” Grimsdottir said, tapping a pencil on the table, “but maybe not.” She turned around, walked to a computer workstation, and started tapping keys. They watched her in silence for a couple minutes, and then Lambert said, “Grim…”
“Hang on… Okay, thought so.” She curled an index finger at them, and they walked over and clustered around the monitor. On-screen was a Discovery Channel website article entitled “The Lost
…
Lambert straightened up and whistled softly. “I’ll be damned.”
Grimsdottir said, “I knew those words sounded familiar.”
“Those numbers,” Fisher said. “The first two before the dash match the year Wondrash disappeared. The others — two sets of seven numbers divided by a slash — latitude and longitude?”
“Could be,” Redding said. “What about the other words—‘Red… tri… my… cota’?”
“No idea,” Grimsdottir said. “I’ll have to do some digging. But here’s the real shocker, boys,” she added, hands flying over the keyboard as she brought up Google, typed a word, and hit ENTER. She pointed triumphantly to the screen, which displayed a genealogy website’s database. “Wondrash’s manservant… Oziri? That’s a traditional Kyrgyz name.”
“What we have to decide,” Lambert said as they retook their seats around the conference table, “is whether any of this is worth pursuing. Grim, where do we stand on putting the puzzle together?”
Grimsdottir sighed and spread her hands. “Stewart’s gone, sunk in six thousand feet of freezing water, along with any evidence we might have found on Site 17; right now, we have zero leads on Carmen Hayes; Chin-Hwa Pak and his cohorts have disappeared. I’m still working on both Legard’s and Bakiyev’s financials and data dumps Sam got, as well as the intercepts I got from Ingonish, but… In a word, we’re dead in the water.”
“On the other hand,” Redding said, “we’ve got Peter’s doodle letter, which turns out to be not as disjointed as we thought—”
