his feet. He lay back again. He turned his head and saw Fisher.
“What is this? Why the hell am I tied up?”
Fisher was mildly surprised that Ames hadn’t started cursing and thrashing.
“Are you awake?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m awake. What did you do to me?”
“I darted you.”
“Why?”
Fisher didn’t answer but simply nodded at Ames’s bound limbs.
“Why?” Ames repeated.
“You’re a traitor,” Fisher said.
“That’s crap! I’m a Splinter Cell just like you guys!”
“You’re nothing like us. When you went to the outhouse, you made a call.”
“How’d I do that? My cell phone is in the Irkutsk sewer system.”
Fisher held up his OPSAT. “With this.”
“That’s for tactical comms. It routes to us, and the op center back home. You can’t—”
“You can text with it if someone teaches you how. Somebody with enough power to bypass the system.”
“This is stupid… Check my OPSAT. Check if I did what you’re talking about.”
“You cleared it,” Fisher said. “Lucky for us, I have a transcript.”
Fisher nodded at the rest of the team and pointed at their OPSATs. In unison they studied their screens. It took thirty seconds. Gillespie said, “This is Ames.”
“Yes,” Fisher replied. “Talking to Kovac at Fort Meade — but not actually Kovac. Grim intercepted the message. Ames gave up everything — our location, the make and model of our vehicles, our weapons, what few details he had about the auction and our plan to track the 738 Arsenal… Everything.”
“Why?” asked Noboru.
“Ames has been working for Kovac for a while. We’re not sure how long, but we’re about to find out.” Fisher went on, telling them the truth behind the Vianden ambush and Karlheinz van der Putten. “Since he got my position from Kovac, he needed a scapegoat. Since he worried I would go visit van der Putten, he had the man killed.”
“You have proof?” asked Valentina.
“We have van der Putten’s financials. No deposits before or after Ames says he paid for the Vianden tip.”
“But how did Kovac know you were headed to Vianden?” asked Gillespie.
“Actually, we don’t think it had anything to do with Vianden. It had to do with the guy I was there to visit — an Austrian named Yannick Ernsdorff. He’s the banker for this auction we’re chasing. Kovac was nervous because he and Ernsdorff are working for the same man.”
“And who is that?” asked Noboru.
“We don’t know.”
“Does he?” Valentina asked, nodded at the prone Ames.
Ames barked, “I’m not following
Fisher cut him off. “Best case, Ames is working for Kovac so he can push Grimsdottir out. Worst case, Kovac is a traitor and he’s helping whoever is behind this auction. Either way, Ames has been betraying you from the start.”
“It’s worse than that,” Hansen added. “Ames thought he was talking to Kovac on the OPSAT. He probably knew Kovac was going to pass on the information. When we reached the auction site, we would’ve been walking into an ambush.”
“That’s a lie!” Ames shouted. “I wouldn’t do that. Hey, Maya, come on! Nathan, man, we’re friends… ”
Gillespie said, “There’s a lot of ‘ifs’ in there, Sam.”
“True. We can settle this pretty easily. We know Ames is working for Kovac. We have the proof. What we need to know is whether Kovac’s just an ass or a traitor, and whether Ames is in on it.”
He nodded at Hansen, who walked to the canvas wall, picked up the straw mattress lying there, and shoved it beneath Ames’s bunk. Fisher leaned down, picked up the two-liter bottle, and unscrewed the cap. Almost immediately the stench of gasoline wafted through the yurt.
Ames’s eyes went wide. “No… no!”
“You’ve got a thing about fire, don’t you?” Fisher asked. “Your family died in a fire, didn’t they?”
Gillespie said, “Sam…”
Fisher kept going. “You saw it, too. Watched the whole thing.”
Ames was rapidly shaking his head from side to side. Fisher tipped the bottle over Ames’s body and soaked him from head to toe. Ames sputtered and coughed and began bucking against his restraints. The bunk banged on the wooden floor. Ames started babbling, his words running over one another.
Fisher told the group, “Unless I’m wrong, Kovac gave Ames the name of the man we’re tracking. Aside from him, there are only three people who know it: me, Hansen, and Grimsdottir.” Fisher knelt down beside the bunk. “Ames,” he said quietly. Ames kept thrashing. “Ames!” Fisher barked.
Ames stopped abruptly and looked at Fisher, who said, “Tell the name of the man we’re tracking or I’m going to set you on fire.”
“Aariz Qaderi,” Ames said without hesitation.
Fisher stood up, tapped a few keys on his OPSAT, then nodded to the others, who studied their screens. Gillespie said, “I’ll be damned.”
“Son of a bitch,” Noboru muttered.
To Ames, Fisher said, “Ben’s going to ask you more questions. Answer him.”
Ames’s eyes were glassy, but he nodded emphatically.
Fisher nodded at Hansen, then led Noboru, Gillespie, and Valentina outside. They started back toward their yurt. Gillespie touched Fisher on the elbow and waited for the other two to get ahead.
“Tell me the truth, Sam,” she said. “Would you have done it?”
“All that matters is that Ames believed I would.”
“Answer my question.”
Fisher considered the question. “Interrogation’s an art, Kimberly. To be good at it you have to be able to stuff parts of your mind into boxes and use only the parts you need. The part I used in there would have done it. The part in charge of actually letting go of the match…”
Fisher shrugged and walked away.
35
“Think he’s going to be okay?” Noboru asked from the passenger seat.
It was an hour before dawn, and they’d been on the road for ninety minutes, having packed up as soon as Fisher realized the storm was abating. A hundred yards behind, the headlights of Hansen’s SUV bounced over the rutted road. Somewhere in the blackness out the side window were the waters of Lake Baikal.
As he had been since the interrogation, Ames lay in the cargo area, flex-cuffed, gagged, and wrapped in a sleeping bag. After he’d finished questioning Ames, Hansen had done a decent job of washing away the gasoline, but still the stench of it filled the Lada’s interior. Hansen had learned nothing more from Ames. He knew no details about the auction or who was behind it. As for his association with Kovac, however, Ames did not disappoint. As Fisher had suspected, Ames and Chuck Zahm were at least partially cut from the same cloth: Ames had meticulously documented the relationship, including digital voice records that Ames swore would put Kovac on the gallows beside him.
“Ames is a survivor,” Fisher replied. “Like him or hate him, you have to respect that. Before we know it, he’ll snap out of it and be pissed off again.”
“That sounds almost sympathetic.”
