mission to locate the auction site and prevent the Laboratory 738 Arsenal from winding up in the hands of terrorists. When Hansen got to the part where Kovac might be involved, he turned his gaze to Ames, who was already shaking his head.
“If you’re going to stand there and try to convince us that the deputy director of the goddamned NSA is involved in some ridiculous scam to sell Chinese weapons knockoffs to terrorists, then I’m going to turn around and walk out of here because it’s pretty goddamned clear that you, boss man, have gone insane.”
“This whole thing is linked to my first mission in Russia. Lambert, Grim, and Fisher were working on this well before we ever became Splinter Cells. Lambert sacrificed himself for this — and it’s not some ridiculous scam. That’s why Fisher’s taking this to the limit. No one can stop him. And I don’t blame him. The blood’s been drawn. He will end this.”
“How do you know, Ben?” asked Gillespie.
“Because I do.”
“What about Kovac? If we were putting on a show for him—” began Valentina.
“He won’t have time to do anything. The clock’s already ticking. The auction will happen.”
“So where’s Ivanov?” asked Noboru.
Hansen ignored the question and quickly said, “One last thing. We’re taking on a new member. He’s going to be our team leader from this point on.”
“Who the hell—” Valentina began.
“Why would Grimsdottir make a change at this point?” asked Gillespie, who abruptly turned toward the office doorway, where stood Fisher.
As she reached for her gun, Hansen called, “Stand down, Kim. Everybody, hands at your sides.”
“You gotta be kidding me. Look who it is,” said Ames, wearing his blackest grin.
“Ben, what’s going on?”
Hansen steeled his voice. “I think I’ll let Mr. Fisher explain that… ”
37
“I don’t buy it. Not a word of it,” said Ames, wondering how the hell he was going to navigate around this unforeseen complication. Fisher linking up with the team was not part of the plan and would make terminating him all the more difficult. “This is just another circle jerk,” he told the others.
Fisher tried to argue. Ames cut him off, told the others they were fools and that Fisher was probably setting them up to take his fall.
No one spoke for a moment; then Gillespie, that dumb-ass redhead, said she believed Fisher (of course she would; she’d screwed him); then she looked at him, all glassy eyed and puppy-dog-l ike, and said, “That night at the foundry… I almost shot you. You know that?”
He nodded.
Thankfully, Noboru went off on Fisher, saying that the team should have been notified up front of Grim’s plan. Fisher said they couldn’t have risked that, but the time had come now to drop the ruse, for two reasons:
“One, to stop this auction I’m going to need your help. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. We won’t know until we get there, but my gut tells me this won’t be a one-person job. And two, when I went off the bridge at Hammerstein I bought myself some time, but I knew they’d find the car. Kovac would get suspicious and accuse Grim of anything. Any excuse to get her out. If I resurface, you guys get deployed and Kovac has to back off for a while.”
Gillespie, her voice cracking, questioned Fisher about how he’d survived the plunge into the Rhine, and he described his use of an OmegaO unit that had allowed him to breathe underwater. He’d waited until the car hit the bottom of the lake before getting out.
Noboru and Fisher spoke once more of their encounter at the Siegfried bunkers, and Noboru thanked Fisher for taking out Horatio and Gothwhiler, the mercs on his tail.
All this happy talk made Ames nauseous. He wanted to step outside and call Stingray, but then he remembered that Grim had issued them new phones and OPSATs before they’d flown out to Odessa. He stared down at the OPSAT on his wrist as though it were a piece of alien technology. Did they know about him? Had they given him a “special” phone and OPSAT so he could be traced? He’d been careful about that in the past.
“Now that we’re in on the con,” Valentina said, “we’ll need to be real careful about what gets back to Kovac. If he’s involved with this auction stuff, he can’t get a hint of what we’re doing. If he’s not involved but wants Grim out, we can’t give him any reason.”
“Agreed,” said Fisher, glancing around. “Are we good?”
Everyone nodded, but perhaps Ames made his disdain a little too obvious.
“In or out, Ames?” asked Hansen. “Either you’re with us or I’ll kick your ass back to Fort Meade.”
Ames stepped up to him and stiffened. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Hansen cracked a grin.
Ames answered with a sarcastic smile of his own. “Yeah, okay. I’m on board. We don’t have to hug or anything, right? I ain’t doing that.”
Hansen and the others waited outside the annex for Fisher to square things away with Ivanov. A mere fifteen thousand rubles would keep him happy and silent. Once Fisher returned, they split up and checked into two hotels near the passenger port terminal. Fisher reported, via phone, that he’d spoken with Grim and that Qaderi, the auction attendee he’d tagged, was heading east toward Irkutsk. The nanobot tracking technology Fisher had employed, a technology code-named Ajax, was working flawlessly so far. Fisher was still hesitant to say much more about it, though he assured Hansen that one day he’d get a chance to read the full report. Fisher was also emphatic about not disclosing Qaderi’s identity to Ames, and Hansen agreed. Qaderi would be known simply as “the target.”
Fisher added, “Clarity is overrated — especially in our business.”
Hansen grinned at that. “I’m sure Ames will have something to say about your unwillingness to fully disclose all details.”
“He can say whatever he wants.”
Grim managed to book them on a Czech Airlines flight leaving at 4:00 A.M. They had connections in Prague and Moscow and would be touching down in Irkutsk about eight hours behind Qaderi. They would, unfortunately, have to abandon most of their gear, including weapons, in order to fly commercial and make it past customs. Fisher had a very special set of shaving cream cans that he guarded fiercely, each containing more of the Ajax tracking darts. He felt certain he’d make it past customs with them, as even X-rays wouldn’t reveal anything suspicious to security. Their OPSATs could pass for PDAs, but pretty much everything else, including their subdermals, would have to be left behind, in a cache, to be picked up later by Third Echelon personnel.
In the wee hours prior to leaving, Hansen managed to “accidently” knock Ames’s cell phone into the toilet, now limiting him to OPSAT communications. Oops.
Irkutsk, though situated in Siberia along the Angara River, and among rolling hills and thick taiga, was still a metro area of more than six hundred thousand citizens. While it hardly measured up to Western standards, the city was the largest in the region. What troubled Hansen, however, was the place’s subarctic climate and extreme temperature variations. Recent reports of spring snowstorms didn’t help matters.
Nevertheless, there was still something nostalgic about returning to Russia, the country of his first mission.
During the first plane ride of their journey, Ames found himself sitting across the row from Fisher, and after thirty minutes of simmering, Ames finally had to say something. “You tried to wash me out, didn’t you?”
