Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist Aftermath (3 page)

Finally, recent U.S. sanctions against countries like Syria and Iran, where Russia
had strong economic interests, continued to tax the motherland’s ability to sustain
herself.

If this was a new cold war, it was one of economics under the umbrella of MAD—mutually
assured disruption. There had to be a better way to address these problems.

Kasperov locked gazes with Chern. “This doesn’t come from Treskayev. It comes from
the men controlling him. They’ve forced him into this. They don’t think he’ll stand
up to the Americans.”

“And they’re probably right. But that doesn’t matter. We have our orders. We do our
duty.”

“I want to speak to the president.”

Chern smiled weakly. “He won’t take your call now. Igor, you’ve danced your little
dance for long enough. And, from what I understand, you’ll be able to walk away from
this. The virus hides our involvement. We blame it all on the hackers you love to
put in jail, the Estonian hackers and others. Sure, your company will suffer a blow,
but you’ll survive.”

Kasperov averted his gaze, his stomach growing sour.

Suddenly, Chern was clutching his arms. “Igor, we must all make our sacrifices for
the motherland.”

“You’re not asking me to guarantee an election here. You’re asking me to cripple the
economy of a nation that has been very good to me.”

“No one’s
asking
. You know what to do.”

A chill began at the base of Kasperov’s spine and wove its way upward, into his chest.
“I’m sorry . . . sorry for my reluctance. I was thinking of my employees and of all
the families that would be affected by this.”

“They will be okay. Will you?”

Kasperov steeled his voice. “You don’t need to threaten me. We’ve come from the same
place. We have the same heart. Do we have a timetable?”

“Yes, I’ll be communicating that to you directly. I would expect sometime tomorrow.
Now, it was good seeing you. I have a plane to catch.”

Chern reached the door, hesitated, then glanced back at Kasperov. “We’re trusting
you, Igor.” He nodded, opened the door, and left.

Kasperov fired his empty vodka glass across the room, spun around, then bit his fist,
trying to hold in the scream boiling at the back of his throat.

Last week he was in Cancun, Mexico, speaking at a convention. He had Bill Gates to
his left and former President Clinton to his right. Colleagues.

Two weeks ago he and his girlfriend, Jessica North, were in South Beach at a fashion
show and enjoying cocktails.

Three weeks ago, he was having lunch in San Francisco with Virgin empire mogul Richard
Branson and discussing his ticket aboard one of Branson’s spacecraft.

The fairy-tale life would end today. No more rock star.

He began to lose his breath, eyes burning with tears. He glowered at his old Soviet
uniform, then looked to the picture on his desk, the little boy there, the innocent
little boy who would grow up to destroy the world.

They were asking too much. Their plan would not work. The truth would emerge and the
motherland would become the pariah of the global community.

But if he failed to obey now, they would systematically tear apart his life. They
would start with those he loved, then move on to the causes he loved, undermine and
destroy the humanitarian work, punish him until he was a broken, bleeding, and bitter
old man who’d “disappeared” but was, in truth, lying in a gulag and hunting roaches
for dinner.

Again, this was not coming from the president. Kasperov knew this in his heart of
hearts. Yes, Treskayev was a nationalist like his father, but he was also a pragmatist,
spending much of his administration mending fences with the United States and Europe,
earning him the ire of the imperialists. He wanted to call the man, beg him to stop
this, but Treskayev might not even know what was going on. This could be bigger than
all of them.

Kasperov backhanded the tears from his cheeks. If he did not comply, he, like the
malicious objects identified by his own software, would be quarantined . . . then
erased.

3

THE
C147-B, call sign Paladin, had become Fourth Echelon’s mobile headquarters and was
cruising over the Atlantic at thirty thousand feet, traveling at a speed of Mach 0.74,
or 563 mph. She was a fully customized C-17 Globemaster III with special composite
matte gray fuselage that functioned as a Faraday cage, shielding her cutting-edge
components from electromagnetic pulses. Her interior was TEMPEST certified up to and
including NATO SDIP-27 Level A standards. Her avionics/comm circuits met RED/BLACK
separation standards, and her computers were shielded against electromagnetic eavesdropping
techniques called Van Eck phreaking. These countermeasures had been phased in after
the jet’s flight controls had been hacked, and Fisher had made damned sure that would
never happen again.

With a length of 174 feet and wingspan just shy of 170 feet, Paladin was originally
designed for heavy lift military cargo and troop transport and was powered by four
fully reversible Pratt & Whitney F117-PW-100 turbofan engines similar to those used
on commercial Boeing 757s. Her original cargo compartment was 88 feet long by 18 feet
wide, with a ceiling height of over 12 feet, but now much of that open space had been
converted into living quarters, a galley, a fully stocked armory with more than a
thousand pieces of ordnance, an infirmary with complete surgical center, and a holding
cell.

Located at the bay’s core was Fourth Echelon’s control center—a cocoon of flat-screen
computer monitor stations, along with giant displays affixed to either side of the
hatch leading to the infirmary. Cables lay like piles of spaghetti beneath the flickering
glow of computer stations, and dim starlight filtered in through the circular portholes
above them. The desktops of several junior analysts were piled with hard-copy files
and seemingly every portable electronic device known to mankind: Kindles, iPads, iPods,
and tablets of varying sizes, colors, and shapes. Heavily padded computer chairs sat
on tracks bolted to the deck, and you could tell where Charlie Cole was working based
upon the coordinates of a jar of extra-crunchy peanut butter with a fork jutting from
it. The kid said Skippy helped him think.

Positioned at the center of this technological nest was a rectangular-shaped table
about nine feet long and six feet wide constructed of magnesium and titanium to support
a glass touchscreen surface. This table with its linked processors was Fourth Echelon’s
Strategic Mission Interface, or SMI, an advanced prototype analytics engine capable
of news and Internet data mining, predictive analytics, and photo and video forensics.
The SMI enabled them to have backdoors into foreign electronic intelligence, or ELINT,
systems, as well as facial recognition integration from the CIA, NSA, DHS, and FBI.
They were linked directly to the National Counterterrorism Center and to the watch
teams inside the White House Situation Room. In the blink of an eye they could pull
up surveillance video from a hundred different locations simultaneously, analyze those
videos, and issue a report.

Opposite the SMI, Sam Fisher leaned back in one of the computer chairs, pillowed his
head in his hands, and reflected on his new life. Talk about a reboot. A breath ago
he’d quit Third Echelon—once a top secret sub-branch within the National Security
Agency—but then he’d been caught up in a 3E conspiracy that had resulted in the entire
covert ops organization being grounded and gutted, dismantled forever. Fisher assumed
he’d never again be a Splinter Cell. He was done.

But then President Caldwell had come to him with an operation that required a man
not only with his skill set but one with the internal fortitude to get the job done:

A coalition of rogue nations had come together to bankroll and support a terrorist
group called the Blacklist Engineers, who were bent on forcing the United States to
withdraw its military forces from around the world. Their leader was Majid Sadiq,
a former MI6 deep cover field agent and sociopath. The group’s plan involved a “blacklist”
of American targets that would be hit if the Americans did not comply.

Caldwell had sweetened the deal, told Fisher the entire op was off the books, no NSA
jurisdiction, no open government involvement. She had granted him “the fifth freedom”
to use any means necessary to take out the terrorists with no fear of prosecution.
The freedoms of speech and worship, along with the freedoms from want and fear, had
first been articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt. The fifth freedom was the
freedom to protect the first four. Fisher had the right to defend our laws—by breaking
them; the right to safeguard secrets—by stealing them; and the right to save lives—by
taking them.

No more bureaucratic bullshit. No more politics. No more red tape. It was a covert
operator’s dream come true. Clandestine backing from the government without interference.

That Majid Sadiq had been dispatched and members of his group were dead or on the
run was an important victory in the never-ending war on terrorism because it had proven
that Fisher and his team were a viable asset.

Indeed, this was Fourth Echelon, and Fisher answered only to the President of the
United States. He no longer worked alone in the field but relied upon his team. He’d
come a long way since his early days of hanging out in a ventilation shaft at the
Tropical Casino in Macau. However, the ghosts still hovered at his shoulders, the
ghost of his old boss Lambert, a man whose life he had once saved but then had been
forced to take . . .

“We’re going over the files from Istanbul,” came a voice from behind Fisher, jarring
him back to the present. “But you still want to go back there?”

Fisher swung his chair around to face Anna “Grim” Grimsdóttir, her strawberry blond
hair pulled back in a ponytail, her blue eyes narrowing with skepticism. She wore
a black striped blouse and the shoulder harness for a SIG P229R 9mm pistol.

When he’d first met Grim, she never carried a weapon. She’d been secretly watching
him run a CIA obstacle course at “the Farm,” Camp Peary, Virginia. Her spying on him
should’ve been his first clue that he couldn’t trust her, but as they say, hindsight
is twenty-twenty. She’d begun her career as a programmer, hacker, and analyst, providing
assistance for Fisher while he was in the field. Over the years they became friends,
sharing jokes about the use of lasers being so 1970s and hi-fi versus Wi-Fi in such
globetrotting locations as skyscrapers in New York and banks in Panama City. Grim
relished reminding him that he was “old,” but her taunts were good-natured, and Fisher
never took them lying down; in fact, he usually took them while suspended, inverted,
from a rope.

Then, regrettably, their relationship had taken a very dark turn. They’d told him
that his daughter, Sarah, was killed by a drunk driver.

That was a lie.

Grim had known the truth. For three long years he’d thought he had no reason to go
on living, and she’d done nothing. Then, when 3E became gripped in conspiracy and
corruption, she began working as a mole inside the organization, reporting directly
to President Caldwell. Grim had used the promise of Fisher being reunited with his
daughter to manipulate him into a mission he didn’t want to take.

He’d thought what she’d done to him was unforgivable, but she’d apologized, told him
she’d had little choice, that it was all for the greater good and that she’d do it
all again if necessary. The venerable nickname “Ice Queen” had been used to describe
her before, but that seemed insufficient. He’d never known she’d go to such great
lengths to protect their country. He’d never known her at all, and the emptiness he
felt over that revelation ached every day.

He studied her now, acutely aware that she had
not
wanted him in this position, that Fourth Echelon had originally been her initiative
and she’d wanted to be its commander. She hadn’t trusted his motives, but he thought
he’d proven himself to her during the Blacklist mission.

“Grim, I know it’s a long shot, but maybe we missed something. There has to be another
connection.”

“If there is, we’ll find it. Charlie’s acting like he’s possessed right now.”

“I’m glad you guys are getting along.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“I’m telling you, Grim, when we worked for Victor, the kid was amazing. And you have
to admit, the SMI would be nothing without him.”

Fisher was referring to his time working for his old Seal Team Two buddy Victor Coste,
who’d formed Paladin 9, a private security firm. That’s where Charlie Cole, the twenty-five-year-old
technophile and brilliant programmer, had gone to work after Grim had booted him out
of Third Echelon’s R&D department—they’d been working on the SMI together—and that’s
where they’d taken the call sign for their aircraft after Vic was injured in the first
Blacklist attack and closed up his firm. The name “Paladin” was a tribute to him and
a historical reference to chivalrous and courageous knights.

Grim shook her head. “Charlie hasn’t changed a bit. Still an uncompromising know-it-all
who almost got us killed—”

Fisher frowned. “What’re you talking about?”

Grim winced, as though she’d let something slip. “Look, he’s great at what he does—”

“But what?”

“But I still don’t know if I can trust him.”

“Give him a chance.”

“Oh, I will. That doesn’t mean I’ll take my eyes off him.”

“Maybe I never earned your trust, but he will.”

She took a deep breath. “Sam, we’ve been through a lot together. And we’ll go through
a lot more. The work always comes first.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

“I know, but we can’t let the past come between us.”

“I’m glad you finally said that.”

“Really?”

He smirked. “Yeah, because it’s the understatement of the year. You think we’ll ever
trust each other?”

“We’re gonna have to.” She started off.

“Hey, Grim?”

She paused and glanced back.

“You made me realize I belong here. Not Vic. Not anyone else . . .”

A sheen came into her eyes before she turned and headed back to the SMI table.

Her reaction surprised him. It always seemed that her warmth and sympathy had been
accidently uploaded and stored in the cloud instead of her heart. And admittedly,
she was often a far better strategist than him, yet at the same time she was risk
averse, unable to call an audible, and too worried about the consequences of going
with your gut. But he needed her. More than ever.

Before he could ponder that further, the seal of the President of the United States
appeared on their big screens, and Charlie came rushing out of his chair, tugging
on the strings of his hoodie and raising his voice: “Got the POTUS on the line!”

“Good morning, everyone,” said the president.

Patricia Linklater Caldwell was an absolute rarity in American politics, having reached
the highest office in the land while single. Her husband, Tobias Linklater, had lived
long enough to see Caldwell become a senator before he’d succumbed to pancreatic cancer.
In many ways Caldwell was a survivor, having suffered the loss of her husband even
as she weathered a tumultuous bid for the presidency and an assassination attempt
after she’d been elected. As chief executive, she was results driven, did not frighten
easily, and her willingness to get things done by taking quick action had easily won
over Fisher. Knowing she lacked Fisher’s perspective from the ground, she wasn’t afraid
to listen to his advice.

“Hello, Madame President. If this is about Rahmani, let me assure you—”

“I’ll cut you off right there, Sam. I know you’re on your way to Istanbul, but there’s
been a change of plans.”

The SMI began flashing with imagery and data bars, and the big screens above the infirmary
hatch displayed images of a handsome middle-aged man with long sandy blond hair and
piercing eyes.

“I assume most of you recognize Igor Kasperov, founder and CEO of Kasperov Labs in
Moscow.”

“And one of the greatest antivirus programmers ever,” added Charlie. “A legend like
Gates, Jobs, and McAfee.”

“That’s right,” said Caldwell. “And I’ve met him before. He’s quite a character.”

“What’s going on?” Fisher asked.

“Just a few minutes ago his headquarters in Moscow abruptly shut down and his employees
scattered. His offices around the world have been left hanging. No one knows where
he is, but we just received some good HUMINT. Our agents in the Kremlin suspect that
he wasn’t taken prisoner by the government because a localized virus just infected
security systems all over the city, bringing down surveillance cameras. They also
report that the Federal Security Service has dispatched agents to all the transportation
routes.”

“I’m checking on all that now,” Charlie said, drumming hard on his keyboard.

Fisher nodded. “Sounds like Kasperov is on the run.”

“That’s a pretty loud exit,” said Grim. “If he wanted to bail, why didn’t he sneak
away?”

“Yeah, and why shut down the company—unless he was worried about reprisal or something?
Did he want to save his employees? From what, though?” Fisher asked. “What’s he running
from?”

The SMI now glowed with a map of flashing blips marking the locations of Kasperov
Labs offices around the globe. Grim tapped on Moscow and zoomed in on the Kasperov
HQ.

Caldwell went on: “Between the robbery at Mayak and now Kasperov on the run, we’ve
got something very dangerous going on in the Russian Federation, and maybe he knows
what it is. Maybe he knows why the Russians are, as we speak, pulling their sovereign
wealth funds out of American markets.”

“You want us to find him?” Fisher asked. “We’ve still got a hundred pounds of weapons-grade
uranium floating around out there—”

“Which I’m well aware of,” she snapped. “It’s time for a little multitasking. I want
you to find Kasperov and extend my offer for protection and political asylum. While
you’re doing that, the Special Activities Division will back up your investigation
to find the uranium. I need you to find that material
and
Kasperov.”