scans and four-by-six photos in both color and black and white but also a Sony 4 GB Memory Stick Pro Duo.
After making sure Zahm’s guests were still bound and unconscious, Fisher made sure the former SAS man understood both the benefits of forgetting what had occurred over the past two hours and the consequences of pursuing the matter after Fisher’s departure.
It was almost 3:00 A.M. before Fisher returned to his Setubal home. Just before 8:00 in Washington. He inserted the Memory Stick into the OPSAT’s multiport, uploaded the data, then waited for a response from Grim. It didn’t take long:
Data received.
Proceed ASAP to Madrid safe house.
Lisbon Portela Airport. Flight 0835. Ticket at Iberia desk.
Contact upon arrival.
He caught three hours of sleep, then got up, packed, and drove his rental car to Cabo Espichel, a promontory overlooking the ocean. There he set the OPSAT for timed self-destruction and dropped it, along with the rest of his gear, in the backpack, into the ocean. However slight the chance of its being noticed, he was wary of repeating his DHL gear-shipment procedure one too many times. Patterns attract attention. And, though Fisher was not a superstitious man, he half believed in not pushing one’s luck too far.
He arrived at the Lisbon airport an hour before his flight, had a bite of breakfast in one of the concourse food courts, then boarded his flight, arriving in Madrid an hour later, two hours on the clock. He was at the safe house by eleven thirty, and talking to Grim on the LCD a few minutes after that.
“We got a break,” she announced. “Multiple breaks, in fact.”
“You have my attention.”
“First, this is mostly hunch work, but the three men other than Ernsdorff that Zahm claims to have dealt with… I think I know who they are: Yuan Zhao, Chinese intelligence; Mikhail Bratus, GRU, Russian military intelligence; and Michael Murdoch, an American. Does import and export, runs a handful of companies, most of them tech related. He’s also elbow deep in defense contract work.
“Second, we extracted another name from Ernsdorff’s server data: Aariz Qaderi, a Chechen from Grozny.”
Fisher knew the name. Two years earlier, after assassinating his predecessor, Qaderi had taken control of the Chechen Martyrs Regiment, or CMR. It was well financed, tightly organized and disciplined, and made no bones about its mission: the subjugation or eradication of all nonbelievers.
“What kind of data?” Fisher asked.
“Just his name, an account number, and a pending payment of ten million U.S. dollars.”
“Big money. Pending to whom?”
“Ernsdorff. Or whomever he’s fronting for. Here’s part two of the story: One of the serial numbers from Zahm’s China job—”
“He didn’t remember where exactly… ”
“The Jilin-Heilongjiang region, near the border with Russia, about a hundred miles northwest of Vladivostok. Anyway, one of the serial numbers from Zahm’s job turned up during a raid of a CMR weapons cache outside Grozny. It was a land mine.”
“Hardly worth ten million dollars,” Fisher observed.
“No. I’m thinking the ten million is buy in. The land mine was a teaser — a freebie to get Aariz Qaderi interested.
“That’s the bad news. I’ve waded through Zahm’s ‘insurance’ records from the theft. What Ernsdorff had him hit was a doppelganger factory.”
Fisher paused, sighed. “Oh, hell.”
For decades China’s foreign intelligence agency, Ministry of State Security — the MSS or Guoanbu — had been focused on industrial espionage. Through its Tenth Bureau, Scientific and Technological Information, the Guoanbu had been successfully targeting private military contracts in the West. The existence of doppelganger factories — laboratories applying the raw intelligence data gathered by the Guoanbu — had been suggested by the CIA in the late nineties, but solid evidence had never been found.
Doppelganger factories were dedicated to one purpose: creating perfect knockoffs of the West’s latest and greatest weapons, often systems that weren’t yet even in use by Western militaries.
“The official name was Laboratory 738,” Grimsdottir said. “But based on Zahm’s data, there’s no doubt what it was.”
“You said ‘was.’ ”
“I went back and checked the satellite imagery. About a month after Zahm’s job, all activity at that chicken farm stopped. In the space of forty-eight hours it became a ghost town.”
“Can’t say I blame them,” Fisher replied. “What else are they going to do? Admit to the rest of the world they stole the biggest and baddest secrets, then used those secrets to create an uberarsenal that they then lost? What are we talking about, Grim? What kind of weaponry?”
“I’ll download the encrypted list to your new OPSAT when you’re ready, but suffice it to say that Zahm wasn’t exaggerating: If this arsenal falls into the wrong hands, they’ll become a first-world power overnight.”
Here was one of the reasons — the other had been settled months earlier — Fisher had been on the run for the past year and a half. Long before Lambert died he’d become one of the few U.S. intelligence officials convinced that doppelganger factories were, in fact, real. Worse still, Lambert had come to believe the Guoanbu had been getting help from within the Pentagon, the private defense industry, and the U.S. intelligence community, including high level NSA officials — all of whom were, in essence, sowing the seeds of America’s destruction. Armed with the most sophisticated — and often improved-upon — weapons and systems, China, its nuclear weapons, and its billion strong People’s Liberation Army would become invincible.
While it hadn’t taken much time for Lambert to convince Fisher and Grim that his theory was sound, it had taken much more to convince them that his plan was their only viable course. In killing his boss, Fisher had not only laid the groundwork for his entry into the mercenary underworld, but he’d also removed the specter of Lambert uncovering the corruption and treason that had infected virtually every aspect of the U.S. military-industrial complex. With Lambert dead and Fisher on the run and hunted, those involved would breathe a sigh of relief, go about their business, and hopefully make a mistake on which Fisher and Grimsdottir could seize.
“So let’s put the pieces together,” Fisher said. “Ernsdorff is playing money man to whomever hired him to hire Zahm.”
“Mister X,” Grimsdottir suggested.
“Okay. Mister X takes delivery of the 738 Arsenal… Did Zahm indicate where this happened?”
“Korfovka, Russian Federation, about sixty miles from Laboratory 738 and five miles over the border. I’ll send you the particulars later.”
“Mister X takes delivery of the 738 Arsenal, then uses Ernsdorff to put the word out to the world’s major terrorist groups about the auction. They invited anyone with the resources to provide the ten-million-dollar ante. To sweeten the deal, he sends out party favors — like the land mine they found at the CMR cache.”
“I can buy that.”
“What was it, by the way? The mine, I mean.”
“Antitank. Essentially a miniature MIRV,” Grim replied, referring to a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. “It uses range and bearing tremble sensors to target multiple tanks. When they’re in range, the mine pops up and launches up to six kinetic-energy armor-piercing penetrators — tungsten carbide combined with depleted uranium — moving at about eight thousand feet per second.”
“About five thousand miles an hour,” Fisher added. “Even with a thirty percent miss rate, one of those things could take out a tank platoon.”
“In the space of about ten seconds,” Grim added.
