Checkmate (11 page)

The television screens went dark. Standing behind Fisher, Grimsdottir laid the remote on the table and said, “I can’t watch this anymore. I can’t, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Anna,” Lambert said. “Tell us about the
Duroc
.”

“Right . . .” She went to the table and paged through a folder, then selected a file. “Here. I haven’t had any luck tracing an owner, but based on the data Sam downloaded from the helm console, I know where she came from: Port St. Lucie, Florida. Shouldn’t take too long to narrow down a list.”

A phone on the table trilled. Lambert picked it up, listened for a few minutes, then replaced the receiver. “Good call on the Bahamian fire bands, Sam. Twenty minutes ago the local police found nine bodies inside a burned-out coffee warehouse outside Freeport City. We should have preliminary autopsy results in a few hours.”

“That explains what happened to the
Trego
’s crew, but not how the
Duroc
got involved. The one prisoner we’ve got is Middle Eastern and I’m betting those nine bodies will be, too.”

“The question is,” Grimsdottir asked, “why were they picked up, then executed by a yacht full of Chinese? What’s the connection?” Nearby, her computer workstation chimed. She walked to it, sat down, and studied the screen for a few moments. “Gotchya,” she muttered.

“Got what?” Lambert asked.

“Remember the virus from the
Trego
laptop? Well, I knew its code was unique—the work of a pro. It took a while, but our database found him: Marcus Greenhorn.”

“Please tell me you know where he is,” Lambert said.

“I’ll do even better than that, Colonel. I’ll give you his room number.”

WHILE
Sam had never heard of Marcus Greenhorn, both Grimsdottir and Lambert assured him Greenhorn was as dangerous as any terrorist—so much so he’d earned himself a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

A mathematical prodigy who graduated from high school at age seven, from Princeton at ten, and MIT at fourteen, Marcus Greenhorn, now twenty-two, had at the age of eighteen nearly handed a nuclear weapon over to Iranian-backed Hamas extremists, having used his cyber-wizardry to hack into the Air Force’s security grid and steal access codes to the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex in New Mexico, home to a plethora of nuclear warheads, including the W56 Minuteman II and the W84 GLCM, or Ground Launched Cruise Missile.

Brilliant as he was, Greenhorn fell victim to a pedestrian flaw—greed. After collecting his half-million-dollar advance from Hamas, Greenhorn had turned around and tried to extort the U.S. government, promising to turn over details of Hamas’s planned raid on Kirtland for two million dollars. While Greenhorn’s skills were impressive, they weren’t a match for the full and focused effort of the National Security Agency, which tracked the extortion demand back to Greenhorn, extracted the details of the Hamas raid from his computer, then proceeded to wipe clean the Swiss account he’d set up for his early retirement.

Broke, on the run, and hiding from his disgruntled Hamas customers, Greenhorn had gone underground and become a cyber-mercenary.

Since that incident, the authorities had kept Greenhorn’s former friends and compatriots under electronic surveillance, but to no avail. Until now.

“This virus he wrote for the
Trego
laptop is pure Greenhorn,” Grimsdottir said, “but with a twist—a bit of security code he’s used once too often. I took the code and turned the mainframe loose on all the e-mails we’ve intercepted from Greenhorn’s old friends. We got a hit.”

“Explain,” said Lambert.

“We ran the same encryption protocols in Greenhorn’s virus through all the e-mail intercepts. It seems one of Greenhorn’s ex-girlfriends has been getting love letters—all disguised as spam: mortgage offers, discount pharmacies . . . the usual stuff. Well, yesterday this woman got an e-mail from Greenhorn. Decrypted, it read, ‘Ticket waiting for you at airport. Meet me, Burj al Arab. Champaign and caviar.’ ”

“Where’s Burj al Arab?” Lambert asked.

Fisher answered. “Not where—what. The Burj al Arab is a hotel—probably the most luxurious resort on the planet. It’s in Dubai.”

Lambert squinted at him. “How do you know this?”

Fisher shrugged, offered a half smile. “Guy’s got to vacation somewhere, doesn’t he?”

“Well, consider yourself on vacation. Bring me back a souvenir.”

THE
taxi pulled over and Fisher paid the driver and climbed out. Though in mission prep he’d read every piece of literature and memorized every drawing and schematic, seeing the Burj al Arab in person took his breath away, as did the heat, which, despite it not yet being noon, had risen to ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

Sitting on a palm-lined, artificial island a quarter mile offshore, the hotel was connected to the mainland by a raised two-lane bridge bordered by high guardrails and secured at each end by a gate manned by a pair of armed guards. At sixty stories and 1,053 feet, the curved, stark white Burj al Arab was not only the tallest hotel in the world, but also the most lavish, featuring a six-hundred-foot-tall atrium, a helipad, a rooftop tennis court, suites with more square footage than the average person’s home, personal butlers, and chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces.

Designed by its architects to resemble a giant, wind-filled sail, the hotel’s impact was dramatic, both at a distance and up close. Taking it in, Fisher’s eyes and brain were momentarily tricked into believing they were watching a clipper ship gliding into port.

And a security system second to none,
Fisher thought, snapping off a photograph. He wasn’t alone in his gawking. Dozens of tourists stood at the head of the bridge shooting pictures over the heads of the smiling, white-shirted guards. The Burj al Arab’s reputation as a prime Middle Eastern tourist attraction made Fisher’s surveillance much easier.

While he’d been in the air, Grimsdottir had been doing her own reconnaissance, albeit of the cyber variety. According to the Burj al Arab’s mainframe intranet, Marcus Greenhorn was staying in the three-thousand-square-foot, six-thousand-dollar-per-night penthouse suite. And he wasn’t alone. Aside from his girlfriend, who had arrived the previous day, Greenhorn was being attended by no less than five bodyguards supplied by the Emir himself and drawn from the ranks of UAE special forces troops known as Al-Mughaaweer, or “The Raiders.”

This told Fisher two things: One, whoever Greenhorn was working for had unparalleled influence in the Middle East; and two, his own penetration of the Burj al Arab had just become an even tougher proposition.

He checked his watch. Three hours till nightfall.

THE
lack of security boats patrolling the waters around the hotel spoke volumes about either the security staff’s laziness, or its confidence in the internal security system. Fisher assumed the latter, and this was backed up by his final call to the Situation Room.

“I’ve download the hotel’s blueprints and schematics to your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir said. “I’m not going to lie to you, Sam, it’s ugly.”

“Define ugly.”

“Redundancies upon redundancies. I’m hacked into their security grid, but in most cases I’ll only be able to bypass alarms and sensors for twenty seconds before backup systems kick in. When I say ‘move,’ you’ll have to move fast. When I say ‘freeze,’ you’ll have to freeze.”

“I’m at your command.”

Lambert said, “Sam, I’ve confirmed your equipment drop. Just follow the GPS marker and dive straight down.”

Given the nature of the target, he and Lambert had agreed a typical insertion method was a nonstarter. The hotel was kept under watch by a nearby Naval radar station, which meant any air approach would draw the attention of UAE fighter-interceptors. Even without that complication, Fisher wasn’t confident about parachuting in. The winds around the hotel were volatile and the rooftop small. If he missed the target, he’d find himself in a one-thousand-foot free fall.

That left only one option: underwater. To that end, earlier that day the CIA’s deputy station chief in the Dubai consulate had been sent on a fishing trip up the coast from the Burj al Arab, where he’d dropped a weighted duffel containing Fisher’s equipment load-out.

“How far down?”

“Twenty-five feet, give or take. Nothing for you.”

Years earlier Fisher had taken up open-ocean free-diving, in which divers hold their breath and plunge to depths ranging from one hundred to four hundred feet. Initially attracted to the sport by simple curiosity, Fisher had immediately found himself hooked by not only the physical challenges—which were substantial—but also the mental ones. Free-diving was the ultimate test of one’s ability to focus the mind and control fear.

“It’s never the dive, Colonel, it’s the ascent.”

Getting in was only half the battle; getting out, the other half.

AN
hour after the sun dropped below the horizon, Fisher left his hotel and took a taxi to Dubai’s nightclub district, where he got out and strolled around until certain he hadn’t been followed. Then, following his mental map, he walked two blocks west to the shore. A quick check with his mini-NV monocular showed no one on the beach. He walked to the tide line.

To his left, a mile away, the Burj al Arab was ablaze, lit from within by amber light and from without by strategically placed green floodlights shining up against the snow-white exterior. As designed, it looked like the massive, glowing sail of a clipper ship resting on the ocean’s surface. On the rooftop, Fisher could see ant-sized tennis players scurring back and forth under the glare of stadium lights. The sky was clear, but the stars were dulled by the pollution of nearby refineries and wells.

He checked his watch’s built-in GPS readout: He was where he needed to be.

He took a final look around, then sprinted ahead, and dove into an oncoming wave.

 

 

 

FOLLOWING
the GPS, he reached the correct spot after only a few minutes’ swimming. He took a breath, flipped himself into a pike dive, and kicked to the bottom. The coordinates were dead on. As he neared the bottom, a pulsing red strobe emerged from the gloom. He reached out. His hand touched rubber.

He stipped off his civilian clothes, under which he was wearing his tac-suit, then, working from feel alone, he unzipped the duffel and found the rebreather’s face mask. He placed it over his face and tightened the straps until he felt it seal on his skin, then pressed the bleed valve and blew out a lungful of air, clearing the mask. He sucked in a breath. He heard a hiss, which was quickly followed by a bitter taste on his tongue as the rebreather’s chemical scrubber started working. He felt the flow of cool oxygen entering his mouth.

Next came the rebreather’s harness, his fins, and weight belt. Finally, he strapped the OPSAT to his wrist, the pistol to his leg, and slid the SC-20 into its back-holster.

He clicked on his face mask’s task light, and was surrounded by a bubble of soft red light. He clicked it off, then keyed his subdermal. “Comm check.”

“Read you loud and clear, Sam,” said Grimsdottir.

“Heading to insertion point.”

 

 

 

AFTER
twenty minutes, Fisher’s first indication he was nearing his target was the sound—a distant roar and a low-frequency rumble in his belly. He checked the OPSAT’s readout: four hundred yards to go.

Having ruled out an airdrop, Fisher had chosen what he felt was the Burj al Arab’s most vulnerable point: its water supply. Rather than rely on the mainland for fresh water, the Burj al Arab’s architects had equipped the hotel with its own desalinization and pump stations, which were supplied by massive, propeller-driven intake ducts, two of them embedded in the island’s concrete foundation. According the schematics, each duct was as big around as a bus and driven by propellers worthy of a battleship. Working together, the intakes fed enough salt water into the desalinization/pump stations to supply the guests and staff with fresh drinking and bathing water while maintaining the fire-suppression systems at the same time.

There was a hitch to his plan, however: getting through one of the intake ducts without being chopped into chum. His first hurdle wouldn’t be the propeller blades themselves, but rather the protective mesh screen on their outside. Still, that was little comfort. If he lost control and found himself trapped against the mesh, the force would pull him through like tomato sauce through a sieve.

“I’m a quarter mile out,” he reported.

“Watch yourself,” Lambert said. “Keep an eye on your current gauge. By the time you feel those pumps drawing you in, it’ll be too late.”

“Got it.”

He swam on.

 

 

 

HE
kept a steady pace and a steady watch on his OPSAT, checking his Distance-To-Target against Speed-Through-Water.