Had he subconsciously been following this oath when he made the promise to Stewart? Before he'd dropped aboard the Gosselin, he'd known Stewart had a wife and a seven-year-old daughter. Now they didn't have him. Had Stewart died still believing Fisher was going to save him?

Peter. Fisher tried to imagine what it must have been like for his brother, trapped inside that chamber, that iron coffin, listening to the accelerator's motors spool up, and then . . . what? What had he felt? Had he--?

Stop, Sam. Just stop.

He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and stared at the sky, seeing but not seeing the clouds.

This was another hazard of the job. Some operators never let themselves think like this; they simply wiped their mental slate clean after a mission and moved on. Others, like Fisher, did just that but only after a mission. Shove your worries, fears, and emotional speed bumps into a mental vault, lock it shut, then reopen it later when you're safe at home. Opinions varied about which method was the healthiest, but for Fisher there'd never been any doubt. There's only so much stuff you can shove in the vault before it starts leaking. Better to keep it swept out.

No, he decided, he hadn't lied to Stewart. He'd meant what he'd said, and he'd tried to get him out. He'd failed. Period. It was a promise he shouldn't have made, but he had, and it was done. His intentions had been good; his follow-through, not so much.

And as for Peter . . . Come what may, scores would be settled. Anyone and everyone who'd been a party to Peter's death would pay in full.

Fisher's cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He flipped it open. It was Grimsdottir: "So, what's your preference? Morton's or Outback?"

"You've lost me, Grim."

"For your steak. Never mind, just turn on your TV and call me back."

Fisher walked back inside and flipped on the kitchen set; it was already tuned to MSNBC.

". . . again, stunning news out of war-torn Kyrgyzstan . . ." The inset image beside the anchorwoman changed to show a podium, the same one the Kyrgyz president had stood behind while resigning two days ago. Standing behind it now was Bolot Omurbai. "Let's listen," the anchor said.

". . . the grace of Allah and the will of the Kyrgyz people, I have returned to lead our country back to the ways of Islam--the ancient ways of Manas, before all was poisoned by the West, by technology, by modern soullessness." Omurbai's eyes seemed to glaze over as he spoke, his gaze fixed straight ahead as though he were in his own world. "Turn your eyes to Kyrgyzstan and behold our greatness. Watch the scourge of Manas return the lost Kyrgyz race back to greatness!"

Omurbai stopped suddenly. He blinked several times, emerging from this trance, then continued. "I am told that most of the world believed me dead." Here Omurbai offered a disarming smile and a spread of his hands. "As they say, news of my demise was misreported.

"The outlaw government, backed by the evil forces of the United States, foisted a lie upon the world and the people of Kyrgyzstan--a lie meant to crush the spirit of my people . . ."

Fisher muted the television. Good Christ. Until now, his suspicion that Omurbai was still alive had been notional; now it was tangible.

Of course, Omurbai was lying. The man captured by the U.S. Army Rangers in that cave had been dressed in Omurbai's uniform, had answered to his name, and stood by it throughout his trial.

Had Omurbai already left the country by then? Fisher suspected so. He'd probably fled across the Kazak border even before the bombs started falling. Then, aided by loyalists in the stans, he'd made his way to Little Bishkek and disappeared into Tolkun Bakiyev's Ingonish. What remained to be answered was the nature of Omurbai's connection to the North Korean government. What was driving that partnership?

Fisher flipped open his cell phone to call Grimsdottir, then stopped, hesitated, and flipped it closed again. On the kitchen table was his hatbox full of mail. One of the envelopes jutting from the stack had caught Fisher's eye; he walked over and slid it out.

He felt his heart lurch. He knew the handwriting on the envelope.

Peter.

27

THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM

" NOdoubts?" Lambert asked.

Fisher, his eyes fixed on the cellophane-sealed letter lying in the center of the conference table under a circle of light, seemed not to hear. Redding and Grimsdottir, also leaning over the letter, waited for Fisher to respond.

After a few moments, Fisher turned to Lambert. "I'm sorry?"

"The letter. No doubt it's Peter's handwriting?"

"No, it's his."

Quashing his urge to tear open the letter as soon as he'd seen it, Fisher had instead immediately called Lambert, who'd called the Department of Energy operations center, which in turn dispatched NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) to Fisher's home. Though primarily tasked with the identification and handling of nuclear weapons, NESTs were also the best general-circumstances radioactive response teams in the country. However unlikely, if the letter contained even the barest trace of PuH-19, it needed to be handled appropriately.

With the letter on its way to Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Fisher himself was whisked to George-town University Hospital, where the doctors, already made aware of the nature of the possible contamination, gave him a full physical, from head to toe, inside and out. No trace of PuH-19 was found.

Four hours later the letter, too, was declared clean of any contamination, so it was transported to the FBI's Quantico labs, where it was pushed through Latent Prints and Trace Evidence units, then returned to Fort Meade. Peter's prints were found on the letter; no remarkable trace findings.

The letter had been postmarked in Nuuk, where Peter had been first taken after being picked up by the fishing boat, about four days before Peter had been transferred to Johns Hopkins. How the letter had gotten mailed Fisher could only guess, but the most likely answer was a kind-hearted nurse or orderly. What remained a true mystery was how Peter had escaped the chamber aboard the platform and made his way into a life raft.

"That's not his normal handwriting, I assume," Grimsdottir said.

Fisher shook his head. "He must have already been sick. Plus, he never wrote anything down. He had a snapshot memory."

The handwriting, while clearly belonging to Peter, was shaky, as though written by a palsied hand. Even the letter itself, which was headed by the words, " Sam . . . important . . . piece together . . . answers here," wasn't so much a letter as it was a disjointed collection of doodles, some writing along the ruled lines, some in the margins, some upside down and trailing off the page into nowhere. It was as though Peter were trying to prize from his fevered and failing mind the most pertinent pieces of his investigation in hopes that Fisher could pick up the trail.

There were references to Site 17, the now-destroyed drilling platform; to Little Bishkek; to the missing Carmen Hayes--all of which Fisher understood. But then there were other notations, words and numbers that seemed unconnected to anything he'd encountered:

Sun

Star

Nile

Wonder ash

49- 2303253/1443622

Oziri

Red . . . tri . . . my . . . cota