Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist Aftermath (11 page)

Fisher hurriedly inspected the items—tickets from concerts she’d attended, old ID
cards from school, and a plethora of receipts from bars, restaurants, and cafés. She
was big on saving her receipts. Nothing unusual or interesting caught his eye. He
took a peek inside the walk-in closet. Her clothes had been shuffled apart, but most
still hung from the hangers.

He moved on to the adjoining bathroom with the large garden tub and stall shower.
Her medicine cabinet and drawers had also been emptied, with makeup strewn across
the white tile floor.

“What’re we doing here, Sam?” Grim asked, her tone implying that they were, indeed,
wasting their time.

“Details, Grim. Details.”

“I hope so. The cops can’t wake up Harry, so they’re trying to pry open the door.”

Fisher was about to leave when something flashed off his penlight. He crossed to the
sink, where he found a very odd pendant on a gold chain. It was a glass orb encapsulating
a bolus of clay-like material, and it reminded him of those once-popular sealed glass
baubles containing mustard seeds. It was not the kind of fancy, stunning, ornate,
or otherwise “flashy” jewelry he imagined a co-ed might wear. In fact, it appeared
handmade, a souvenir from some vacation somewhere, perhaps. Fisher tugged open a Velcro
pouch on his belt and slid the necklace and pendant inside. He left the bathroom and
noticed Nadia’s desk on the other side of the room. The monitor was there but the
computer was gone. No surprise.

With no more time to waste, Fisher gathered up a few more items of mild interest—those
receipts and tickets, and lo and behold, a diary she’d kept in the nightstand that
had been wedged inside the drawer. He hustled out to check the other two bedrooms.
One was entirely empty, no furniture prints on the carpet, just never used. The other,
a guest room, had been searched as well, but the nightstand and dresser drawers were
empty. He checked the second guest bath, then the adjoining closets. Nothing.

He returned to the front door, stood there for a moment, and sighed. Maybe the diary
or the jewelry would give them something. “All right, I’m coming out,” he said.

“Cops got Harry’s door open. They’ve called for an ambulance and are trying to revive
him,” Grim reported.

“Well, that’s a nice diversion,” Fisher said. “Briggs, you there?”

“I’m here, Sam. Packing up my rifle, getting ready to head down.”

“Meet you at the rally point.”

“Will do.”

“Hey, Sam, we just got a call from Kobin back on the plane,” said Charlie. “Says he’s
got a good lead on Kestrel’s whereabouts in Russia.”

“Oh, yeah. Where is he?”

“Kobin’s not saying. Says he wants to talk to you and only you.”

Fisher snickered. “You tell him he’ll be spilling his guts figuratively. And if not?
Then literally.”

“Nice. I’d buy tickets to see that.”

Fisher returned to the roof, rappelled down the back of the building, then took off
running to link up with Grim and Charlie.

* * *

WHILE
in the SUV en route back to the airport, Fisher showed Grim the diary and necklace.

“We’ll have everything checked for DNA. Could even be a clue there, someone who was
in her apartment, a friend we don’t know about who’s offering them a place.”

Fisher lifted the pendant toward the window for better light. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. What’s inside the glass?”

“That’s for you to figure out.”

“Hey, I picked up another piece of evidence at the café,” said Charlie from the driver’s
seat.

“What’s that?” asked Fisher.

“The cute barista’s phone number.” Charlie wriggled his brows as he held up a slip
of paper.

“You idiot,” said Grim, shaking her head.

Charlie seemed unfazed. “I have a Swiss girlfriend now. That’s the way I roll.”

Fisher turned to Briggs, who’d been deathly silent since entering the vehicle. “What’s
wrong with you?”

“Just replaying that shot in my head.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. Like you said, the wind shifted. You still got him.”

Briggs sighed in disgust. “Not good enough.”

“All right, then, make it up to us next time—don’t miss.”

Briggs’s tone hardened. “I won’t.”

12

ACCORDING
to Grim, Oliver “Ollie” Fenton, twenty-seven, was a graduate of North Carolina State’s
analytics program and the first member of his family to attend college. He’d assumed
he was headed for a career in “big data,” but after a rather serendipitous meeting
with a CIA recruiter, he was quickly drafted into the ranks of the agency’s young
“quants.” His analysis of the Arab Spring’s effects on the nation of Qatar had caught
Grim’s eye, and his conclusions concurred with a recent report she’d read produced
by the Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States,
a program based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Of the handful
of young analysts on board Paladin, he was the best, and Fisher felt comfortable with
Grim giving Ollie the pendant and diary for analysis.

Meanwhile, she would go through the NSA’s most recent report of comm intercepts, analyzing
calls made by Kasperov prior to the man’s disappearance, along with those received
or placed by his girlfriend, by Nadia, and by a branching tree of dozens of others
related to them.

Fisher took a seat beside Kobin, who was studying a map of Russia from one of Charlie’s
computer stations.

“Hey, asshole,” Kobin said without looking up.

Fisher spun the man’s chair around and leaned forward, getting squarely in Kobin’s
face. “I heard you got something for me.”

“I’ll need some guarantees.”

“Guarantees?”

“I’m a businessman.”

“Well, all right,” Fisher began slowly, lowering his voice. “I guarantee that if you
don’t give me what I need, there’s going to be pain in your future. A lot of pain.”

“Come on, Fisher, you know what I’m saying . . . I’m just talking about him, Kestrel.
I don’t want him brought back here. I don’t want to see him . . .
ever
 . . . again.”

“Because you shot him in the head?”

“I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“Hard to tell anymore, right? Good guys . . . bad guys . . .”

“So, you’re not planning to bring him back here, right?” A tremor had worked its way
into his voice.

“Actually, my plan was to put the two of you in your cell, stand back, and watch the
smackdown. We could take bets on how long you’d last.”

Kobin drew his head back. “Give me some fucking credit. Where Chuck Norris ends, I
begin . . .”

Fisher couldn’t help but grin.

“See, see, I made you laugh. Now you’re amused and we can strike a deal.”

“Tell me where Kestrel is, otherwise—”

“All right, all right!”

Fisher stood back and folded his arms over his chest. “Talk.”

“He’s not coming here, right?”

“I doubt it. But if he does, you won’t have to see him.”

“You promise?”

Fisher raised one brow. “Does a promise mean anything to a scumbag like you?”

“Coming from you it does.”

“I’m flattered. Now . . .
talk
.”

“Okay. Two of Kestrel’s old army buddies used to work for me. Point is I hired a lot
of those old Russian spec ops boys. The government doesn’t pay ’em shit and then fucks
’em over in retirement, so they used to do a lot of freelance work for me once they
got out. I even recruited a few of them right out of the exclusion zone.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Fisher. “Been there before. Long time ago.”

Kobin turned and pointed to the map. “It hasn’t changed. Twenty-six hundred square
kilometers around Chernobyl—where the nuclear reactor blew and they have three-eyed
fish and trees that glow in the dark.”

“What the hell were they doing there?”

“If these guys couldn’t find work in private security or something else, a lot of
’em got really desperate, turned to game poaching, illegal logging, and metal salvage
operations inside the zone. Some of them got legit jobs giving tours, but a lot of
them became criminals—especially the ones with a disability like a limp or something.
They’d get help from the
samosely
—the people who refused to evacuate, like a lot of old people, or the ones who resettled
illegally. You wouldn’t believe how many people are still going in there, looking
for a quick score.”

“Nothing surprises me anymore.”

“Yep, some of ’em are that desperate. If you’ve been there, you might remember the
place is controlled by the State Agency of Ukraine on the Exclusion Zone Management.
They call it S-A-E-Z. Of course yours truly—being a Ukrainian American—has friends
in the agency. Good friends.”

“So you picked up Kestrel there? I can’t believe he’s that desperate.”

“He’s not. I just talked to one of his army buddies, actually an old mentor who got
him into special forces in the first place. He told me that before Kestrel moved to
St. Petersburg, he spent some time as a kid with his foster parents in a little town
called Vilcha; it’s right there in the exclusion zone.”

“So he’s gone back to a contaminated town to what, reminisce?”

“No, here’s where it gets good. Security’s tight, like I said. You don’t get past
the checkpoint without papers. So I talked to my friends at SAEZ, and they issued
a temporary contractor’s clearance pass to a man named . . . wait for it . . . Glib
Lakeev.”

“That’s one of Kestrel’s aliases.”

“Bingo. And according to my contacts at SAEZ, he hasn’t entered the zone yet. But
the pass is only good for three days, so that Russian fucker is planning something—
and we know where he’s gonna be.”

“And you think it’s Vilcha?”

“Tell you why. He never worked in the exclusion zone like his buddies. Vilcha is his
only
connection to it. If he’s going into the zone, I bet everything that he’s going there.”

“To do what?”

Kobin laughed through his big nose. “What the fuck do I look like? A mind reader?
Maybe he’s going in there for a beer with a radioactive corpse.”

Fisher turned to Grim, who’d been eavesdropping on the conversation. “What do you
think?”

“I think we can be in Kiev in less than three hours.” She faced Charlie. “Can you
get us into the SVR’s comm network in less than three hours?”

“Are you crazy? I’m still sifting through Kannonball’s code—it’s slow going . . .”

“I thought so. Flight deck, prepare for departure. We’re heading to Kiev.”

Fisher crossed to the SMI table and frowned at Grim. “No argument?”

Her voice turned grave. “None—because I think I know why Kestrel’s going to Vilcha.”

13

TWO
hours and fifty-one minutes later, Paladin touched down at Kiev’s Zhuliany Airport,
where Fisher and Briggs rented Suzuki C90T touring bikes for the trip over to Vilcha,
with plans to arrive before sunset. The irradiated ghost town lay about seventy-nine
miles northwest of Kiev and twenty-five miles east of Chernobyl in Ukraine.

Since its 1991 breakaway from the old Soviet Union, Ukraine remained a country vacillating
between its past and uncertain future. The official language was Ukrainian, although
Russian was the native tongue of a quarter of the country’s forty-five million citizens
and was designated an official language in thirteen of its twenty-seven regions. The
country had a working partnership with NATO yet remained home to the Russian Black
Sea Fleet. Inside the exclusion zone, where all time had ceased in 1986, everything
that was unequivocally Ukraine said so—only in Russian. The photos Fisher had reviewed
during the flight over left a hollow feeling in his gut. Vilcha had been ripped straight
from some postapocalyptic novel like
I Am Legend
by Richard Matheson. The place would make them feel like the last men on earth.

They reached the main checkpoint—a meager striped pole barrier along with a ramshackle
guardhouse that had a familiar red stop sign in English hanging crookedly from its
side wall. They slowed, then came to a halt, and Fisher lifted the visor on his helmet,
wincing slightly at the frigid air. He handed the old man smoking an unfiltered Camel
an envelope stuffed with greenbacks.

The man narrowed his gaze on Fisher before accepting the envelope.

Fisher returned a hard gaze of his own and said curtly in Russian, “Andriy Kobin sends
his regards.”

The guard seemed unimpressed—meaning he’d probably met Kobin before. He counted the
money, turned back to his younger partner, then nodded. He faced Fisher and asked
in broken English, “Why you go into zone?”

Fisher answered in Russian and without hesitation: “We’re on vacation.”

The old guard rubbed the corners of his eyes, removed his cigarette from his chapped
lips, and revealed to Fisher the ugliest missing-toothed grin this side of Siberia.
He turned back to his partner, then began to chuckle so violently that he broke into
a fit of coughing. Once he finally cleared his throat, he beamed and cried, “Send
postcard. Have fun! Good times!” He waved them on.

Fisher gave a quick nod to Briggs, the barrier lifted, and they sped on through.

The Suzuki was a far cry from the bike Fisher had stolen back in Bolivia, and the
road, while glistening here and there with streaks of ice, had certainly not claimed
more than two hundred lives this past year. However, it did present a different kind
of danger.

They cut through a heavily forested area, the barren limbs already suggesting the
lifelessness of the towns to come. Grim had gained them access into one of the satellites
of the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, and while they’d only had the Keyhole
on target for a few minutes, she’d been able to photograph a 2009 Renault Kangoo minivan
heading into Vilcha less than an hour ago. Grim had photographed the tag; it was a
rental signed out to one Glib Lakeev. Moreover, Kobin had confirmed that, yes indeed,
Kestrel had gone through the checkpoint and was heading home.

Consequently, they were losing precious time. Fisher had planned to arrive at the
town
before
Kestrel in order to stage an ambush, but maybe it was better they didn’t spend additional
time here. During the first five years after the catastrophe, the level of radioactive
isotopes of cesium had reached 60 curies per square kilometer, with plutonium at 0.7
curies and strontium at 15 curies. Such radiation levels were deadly for humans; however,
Grim had assured Fisher that while some of the radioactive isotopes, such as strontium-90
and cesium-137, still lingered, they were at tolerable exposure levels for limited
periods of time.

The narrow road began showing signs of serious neglect as they left the forest and
passed through several fields. Larger cracks and ruts rattled Fisher’s bones, and
weeds heavily encroached up from the embankments. Leaves and branches booted by high
winds were strewn everywhere, cleared only by more winds, and in some sections Fisher
found himself leaning hard into turns to navigate around a branch and even a few fallen
trees. Soon the fields surrendered back to the more dense woods, with trees beginning
to tower over roofless houses and barns whose pale white walls were streaked in heavy
layers of rust visible even in the dim headlights. A few signs written in Cyrillic
and English proclaimed:
DANGER
.

Fisher’s skin began to crawl. He imagined he could feel the radioactive particles
entering his lungs, then flowing into his bloodstream. He shuddered off the thought
and checked his rearview mirror.

Briggs kept his bike about five meters back, allowing Fisher to pick the route across
the potholes and debris. He’d been beating himself up over that missed shot, and while
Fisher appreciated his determination, Briggs needed to accept and learn from setbacks.
The lessons were sometimes bitter tasting, but you took your mental notes and moved
on. Although he’d never admit it, Fisher thought that maybe, just maybe, Briggs was
a better rifleman than he was. Fisher spent much more time firing pistols, perfecting
his quick draw and close combat skills. Briggs did demonstrate an appreciable advantage
with his various sniper rifles. One day they’d have to compete to see exactly where
they stood.

As they neared the outskirts of the town, marked by a blue faded placard that read
simply
, they pulled over, killed their engines and lights, then began walking their bikes
quietly down the road, with the buildings lying about two hundred meters ahead.

For a moment, the pervading darkness and silence were overwhelming. The plinks and
pings of their cooling 1,462cc engines, along with the scuffle of their boots, barely
rose above the soft wind.

They seemed to be the only living creatures here.

But then out in the forest to their left came the half-muted chuffs and shuffling
of an unknown number of four-legged animals. They paused to remove their helmets and
slip on their trifocals, the twilight now pushed back by their night vision.

Grim had said she’d known why Kestrel had come to Vilcha, and it sure as hell wasn’t
to get nostalgic. A Voron agent the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring was found
murdered in his hotel room in Kiev. A second agent operating in the same area was
reported missing, according to their intel sources on the ground. That second agent
was ID’d as Vasily Yenin, who, according to the CIA, had been a double agent working
under former 3E director Tom Reed and possibly one of the men who’d been holding Kestrel
prisoner.

If Kestrel was going into the contaminated zone, it was for one purpose, according
to Grim: to interrogate and murder Yenin.

“Why get special permission and drive all the way into a contaminated zone just to
kill a man?” Fisher had asked.

“It’s quiet. No one to hear the sounds of torture. Easy to get rid of the body.”

“If he killed one guy in Kiev, why would he take this guy to Vilcha?”

“Maybe Grim’s right. Maybe he wants to drag it out,” Briggs had suggested.

“And he’s also got another reason for going there. Killing Yenin and dumping the body
is convenient,” Fisher had suggested. “He’s killing two birds.”

The answers were only minutes away.

They neared a row of shops emerging from the trees like broken teeth, their awnings
shredded, their signs caked in a thick layer of dirt and dust. Fisher noted the briefest
flash of light from a filthy window about midway down the row. A sign above read:
, or
MEAT
.

“Grim, he’s gone into an old butcher shop.”

“I’ll try to confirm,” she answered.

Running now, they reached the first alley and ducked into it to park their bikes.
Fisher gestured for Briggs to head out across the street and climb up into the small
church with Orthodox crosses rising from its stained steeples and what looked like
a small, mold-covered balcony above the archway entrance.

Briggs took off with his SIG SSG 3000 sniper rifle slung in its soft case over his
back. The rifle was chambered in 7.62mm and featured a modular chassis system, making
it perfect for an operation like this.

Fisher reached into his holster and deployed another of their micro UAVs like the
drone they’d used up in the Caucasus Mountains. He reported the bird was in the air.

“Okay, Sam, I’ve got control,” Charlie answered.

Fisher watched as the tri-rotors purred more loudly, and the device flew away, rising
high above the alley.

“I see Kestrel’s van out back behind the old butcher shop,” Charlie said.

“Hey, Sam, it’s Kobin here.”

“What the hell’s he doing on the channel?” Fisher asked.

“I wanted him to monitor,” said Grim. “Not talk.”

“Yeah, but I got something else, comes straight from Kestrel’s old mentor. So that’s
not just any butcher shop. Kestrel used to work there when he was fourteen. His foster
father made him lie about his age. It was all the blood and gore that made him run
away to St. Petersburg.”

“It seems the blood and gore don’t bother him anymore.”

“No shit. Do us both a favor and leave that fucker there to rot.”

Fisher groaned. “Okay, Grim, get him off the line. Briggs, you in position?”

“Roger, up top, weapon ready in thirty seconds.”

“Okay, stand by.” Fisher skulked his way around the corner, along the frozen earth
behind the buildings, then reached the butcher shop’s rear door, whose tarnished brass
handle and splintering wood around the knob were darkened by decades-old bloodstains.
He slowly turned the knob, finding the door unlocked.

When noise of any kind was your enemy, you always came prepared. From his breast pocket
he withdrew a pen-sized bottle of silicone spray and doused the door’s hinges; the
pump action was quiet enough to be dampened by the wind. He waited a few seconds more
for the silicone to soak in.

Now, clutching his Five-seveN in one hand, he eased open the door, which pulled effortlessly
aside, then he moved in, becoming one with the darkness. Holding his breath, he reached
back and shut the door after himself.

A voice came from another room ahead, the Russian cadence at first strange, but then,
as he pricked up his ears, Fisher recognized the voice.

Before advancing, he scanned his surroundings. He was crouched in a warehouse area
of sorts where orders must’ve been wrapped and prepped to be delivered out the back
door. The butcher-block tables had remained, the cabinets mounted to the walls emptied,
the doors hanging open.

The narrow hallway ahead led straight out to the customer cases and butcher shop proper,
with an intersecting hall lying between. Dim light filtered down from the right side
of the intersection, with long shadows shifting across the wall.

“Sam, Briggs here. I got you on sonar. Looks like just two ahead, right of your position.
One guy might be standing on something.”

Briggs had beat him to the punch. Fisher had been a breath away from activating his
own sonar. He used his OPSAT to reply silently:

Good. Mark targets. Wait for me.

“Sam, Kestrel’s too important to lose,” said Grim. “And if he’s got Yenin, they’re
both valuable assets.”

He knew that, too, but Kestrel had assumedly found and removed his tracker, meaning
he was not honoring his end of the bargain to feed Fourth Echelon information when
they needed it. If he had gone completely rogue, then what would stop him from trying
to kill Fisher? A whole lot of cash, maybe, but not much else. Kestrel might assume
they were even now. He owed Fisher and Briggs nothing for saving his life. No more
deals.

In truth, Fisher had no idea how Kestrel would react, and so as he eased forward,
wary of every creak of floorboard, he shoved up his trifocals and held his breath.
Once he reached the intersection, he brought himself to full height and clutched his
pistol with both hands before turning the corner—