Of course, there were corollaries in his own life. Xiangqi, one of his passions, was an exercise in manipulated synchronicity. At its heart, the mastery of Xiangqi, and its lesser cousin, chess, was nothing more than recognizing the patterns your opponent was trying to hide, and creating patterns your opponent will fail to see until too late. Great Xiangqi players never move a single piece. On the board, it may be a paomoving five squares, but in the mind of a master, it is the pao’s move, combined with the myriad moves available to his opponent, combined with a countermove, and so on until victory or defeat.

Though pleased that Xiangqi might inspire a solution to his dilemma, he was also unsurprised. All he’d needed was the hint of an opening move, and now he had it. From there his mind would expand across the board—or in this case, across nations.

IFnot for an underling’s father who had left China thirty years earlier to find greener pastures, he would have never found the linchpin of his plan. Like the rest of the world, he’d believed the public stories, but of course public stories were usually generated by governments, and governments weren’t known for their forthrightness—especially the Russians, whose natural gift for deception was second only to that of Beijing’s politicians.

A coal mine in Evenki collapses, killing hundreds, and the world knows nothing about it; a Russian submarine sinks to the bottom of the Kara Sea with all hands, and it simply ceases to exist; a Russian death squad sneaks onto Chinese soil, breaks into a man’s home, and murders him in front of his children and it’s called war.

Why would this secret be any different? All the better,Zhao thought.

What better way to begin the greatest game of his life than with a move no one would ever see?

“ IT’Sthere, I tell you,” the old man said.

“You’re sure of this? You’ve seen it with your own eyes?”

The old man nodded. “I was there, with a shovel like all the rest.” The old man took a gulp of tea and timidly held out his cup for a refill. “It’s a cursed place, I can tell you that.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s haunted. I saw things . . . strange things.”

Zhao tried not to suppress a smile. The old man was addled. Even so, his background had checked out; he was who and what he said he was. “How easy is it to find?”

“As easy to find as your own toes. It might take a little work getting to it, but it’s there.”

“Tell me this: You did this for how long?”

The old man scratched his scalp. “I lived there for twenty years. When I got sick, I wanted to come home, to be buried in Chinese soil—not that garbage over there.”

“Why did you remember this one detail? Out of everything you’d been through, why this one?”

“Because I watched them do it and I thought how stupid they must be. I’m a simple man—not a smart man—and even I couldn’t believe what they were doing.”

“Who else knows about this?”

The old man pursed his lips, thinking. “Many, I imagine, but many are dead as well. Those that remember probably do their best to forget. Besides, who would want it?”

Who indeed?Zhao thought.

“Who have you told?”

“No one!” the old man said, stiffening in his chair. “My son, no one else.”

“That’s not quite true, is it, old man? You’ve told me.”

“That’s different. It’s my granddaughter, you see—”

“Yes, yes . . . very sick—you told me that, too.”

“She’s all I have. I convinced her to join me there. I wanted her to go to school, make something of herself. Instead . . . They’ve done things to her. Drugs. Men. She can’t get away from them.”

Of course she can’t,he thought. The teenage prostitution market had always been profitable, and in the right country a petite Chinese girl would bring thousands. Drugged or sober, the clientele didn’t care. In fact, drugs made them easier to handle.

“I heard you were a decent man,” the old man said. “I don’t believe the stories. They’re all liars. You’re a decent man. You can help her.”

He refilled the old man’s cup. “And I will. You’ll have your granddaughter back before another month passes. But first, you’re going to draw me a map, aren’t you?”

The old man nodded vigorously.

1

39°00’ NORTH, 74°01’ WEST

SIXTYmiles and thirty thousand feet above Washington, D.C., the MC-130H Combat Talon began its second hour of circling in the dark night sky. Designed to covertly insert special operators into sensitive areas, the Talon could fly in rain, snow, high winds, pitch darkness, and radar-saturated environments.

The lone man in the black Nomex bodysuit sitting in the cargo bay was worried about none of these things. He’d ridden, jumped from, and in some cases flown, the Talon dozens of times into dozens of hot spots, and it had always delivered him safely. Of course, “delivery” usually meant being dropped into a denied area full of heavily armed bad guys only too happy to kill him. It came with the job.

Tonight what Sam Fisher was worried most about was death by boredom.

He shifted his body on the bench seat, trying to find a position that didn’t put either his legs or butt to sleep, and wondered if the Talon’s designers had gone out of their way to find the most uncomfortable seats they could find. Either way, they’d succeeded.

The glamour of special ops,he thought, extending his foot and stretching his calf.

Between missions and looking to keep his skills honed, he’d volunteered to test one of DARPA’s newest gadgets, in this case an extended-range radar-absorbent HAHO (High-Altitude, High-Opening) parafoil code-named Goshawk. Not only was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the Pentagon’s ultrasecret think tank for all things military, but it also supplied Third Echelon with much of the gadgetry and weapons that made Fisher’s job easier—and survivable. If nothing else, when the Goshawk finally went into service, he’d be assured of its reliability. Providing it didn’t kill him, of course.

The two-hour wait was courtesy of a malfunctioning radar station on Rhode Island that NORAD had set up to track—or hopefully fail to track—Fisher’s descent on the Goshawk. If the stations failed to detect him, the Goshawk would go operational as the first stealth parachute, capable of dropping soldiers 150 miles outside a target area and allowing them glide in, invisible to radar.

And Third Echelon would probably get the first working model.

As a subdivision of the National Security Agency, Third Echelon was tasked with handling covert missions either too sensitive or too risky for traditional entities, such as the CIA or standard special forces. Like all of Third Echelon’s operatives, Fisher was known as a Splinter Cell—a self-contained and lone operator. How many other Splinter Cells existed Fisher had no idea, nor did he wish to know. Third Echelon was about invisibility. Deniability. Zero footprint. Only a handful of people knew where Splinter Cells went and what they did.

A voice crackled to life in Fisher’s subdermal: “Incoming traffic for you, Major.”

As far as the Talon’s crew knew, Fisher was a major in the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment out of Fort Benning, Georgia. Not that they cared; given the nature of their work, Talon crews knew how to not ask questions.

“Patch it through.”

“Roger. On your button five.”

Fisher’s communications system was a far cry from the traditional headset he’d worn in his pre-Third Echelon days. The two-part system was comprised of a nickel-sized subdermal receiver implanted beneath the skin behind Fisher’s ear. The subdermal bypassed the route normally traveled by sound waves—through the outer ear to the tympanic membrane—and sent vibrations directly into the set of tiny bones within the ear (known as the ossicles), or the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, which then transmitted the signal to the brain for decoding.