He returned to his chair, sat down, poured himself more chalap, and took a sip.

"Now," he said, "to business."

6

THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM

FISHERhadn't known Peter's true name or origin until he was twenty-one, when his mother and father had sat him down to tell him. Peter, his adopted brother, was in fact Pyotr Limonovich, the only son of a now-dead friend of Sam's father. It wasn't until Peter turned eighteen that their father, now retired from the U.S. Department of State, told them the whole story.

Peter was the son of a man named Ivan, a major in the former Soviet Union's KGB, their equivalent to the United States's CIA; and Fisher's father, a career diplomat, was not a diplomat at all but a twenty-five-year veteran case officer in the CIA.

It had all happened when Fisher was barely old enough to remember his father being gone for an extended period. A specialist in agent handling and defection, his father had been dispatched to Moscow. This was 1968, the height of the Cold War, his father explained, the years of North Korea's capture of the USS Pueblo, the Soviet army's brutal crush of the Czechoslovakian revolt, and the space race--events that for young Sam were only vague headline memories.

A major named Ivan Limonovich had made contact with the CIA's deputy chief of station and over the next few weeks made clear his intention to spy for the United States. The "bride price" as it was known in the tradecraft lexicon, would be that Ivan and his newly born son, Pyotr (Ivan's wife had died in childbirth), would be smuggled out of Russia after two years. The CIA agreed, and Fisher's father was dispatched to be Ivan's primary controller. Over the next two years, Ivan fed the United States invaluable information, including information that led to the release of the Pueblo's crew and details of the Soviet nuclear arsenal that later became essential to the signing of SALT I, the first series of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. As often happened in the world of espionage, Fisher's father and Ivan became friends.

At the end of the agreed-upon two years, Fisher's father made arrangements to smuggle Ivan and his son from the country, only to see the plans go awry at the last minute. In a running gun battle at the Finnish border, Ivan Limonovich was killed, and with Soviet border troops at his heels, Fisher's father managed to slip across the border with young Pyotr.

Once home, the Fishers did the only thing that seemed right and adopted Pyotr as their own and raised him along with their son Sam. Pyotr, too young to have learned any Russian or gain an accent and too young to have anything but the fuzziest of memories of his father, quickly grew into a typical American boy.

THIRD ECHELON

Dr. Seltkins was as good as his word. Two days after arriving at the army's Chemical Casualty Care Division, Peter died. Fisher, who had spent as much time as they would allow him at Peter's bedside in the airlocked hospital room, had gone to the cafeteria to catch a quick breakfast when the crash code was called. He returned to find Seltkins emerging from the airlock and a trio of nurses at Peter's bed removing the IVs and monitor leads from his now-lifeless body.

Still lacking a diagnosis, the army erred on the side of caution and flew Peter's body to the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Oregon, where it was cremated in a closed incinerator, then stored in the bowels of the facility inside a specially designed lead/ceramic composite container.

FISHERswiped his ID badge through the reader outside Third Echelon's situation room. There was a muted beep, and the reader's LED turned green. Fisher pushed through the door.

Decorated in earth tones and lit by soft halogen track lighting, the situation room was dominated by a long, diamond-shaped teak conference table. The walls were lined by forty-two-inch, high-definition LCD status boards and monitors that could be calibrated to display a variety of information ranging from weather, local and foreign news broadcasts, radar feeds--virtually anything that could be digitized and transmitted. Four computer workstations, each with enough processing power to control the electrical grids of a small country, were built into each of the long sides of the table.

Fisher had called Third Echelon his professional home for more years than he could recall. A top secret offshoot of the National Security Agency, or NSA, Third Echelon and its small collection of lone Splinter Cell operatives was a bridge of sorts: a bridge between the world of intelligence gathering and covert operations.

Splinter Cell operatives were recruited from the special warfare communities of the navy, army, marine corps, and air force, and then remolded into the ultimate covert soldiers able to survive and thrive in the most hostile of environments. The informal credo for Third Echelon was "no footprints." Third Echelon went where no other government agency could go, did what no other agency could do, then disappeared, leaving behind nothing that could be tracked back to the United States.

Itself the most secretive of the government's intelligence organizations, the National Security Agency was located a few miles outside Laurel, Maryland, on an army post named after the Civil War Union general, George Gordon Meade. Once home to both a boot camp and a World War II prisoner-of-war camp, Fort Meade has been the NSA's home since the 1950s.

Charged with the gathering and exploitation of SIGINT, or signals intelligence, the NSA could and did intercept virtually every form of communication on the planet from cell phone signals to microwave emissions and ELF (extremely low frequency) burst transmissions from submarines thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean.

Lambert and Anna Grimsdottir were sitting together at one end of the conference table drinking coffee. Three of the monitors on the wall behind them were tuned to the muted broadcasts of MSNBC, CNN, and BBC World.

Fisher grabbed a mug from the nearby coffee kiosk, poured himself a cup, and sat down at the conference table.

"Morning," said Lambert.

"That's debatable," Fisher said, taking a sip. The coffee was hot and almost bitter, with a touch of salt. Lambert must have made it.

"When did you get back?" Grimsdottir asked. As Peter had no other family than Fisher, and his remains would probably forever remain locked deep inside Umatilla, Fisher had, in lieu of a funeral or memorial, accompanied him on the flight to Oregon and stood by as the technicians slid his body into the incinerator.

"A couple hours ago," Fisher replied.

"You didn't have to come in," Lambert said.

"Yeah, I did. Do we know anything? Anything from Seltkins?" Even as Fisher had boarded the plane for Oregon, the CCCD's labs had yet to determine what had killed Peter.

Grimsdottir pulled a manila folder from the stack before her and slid it across the table to Fisher. She said nothing. Fisher stared at her eyes for a few seconds until she looked away. Very bad news,Fisher thought.

Grimsdottir's official designation was computer/signals intel technician, but Fisher thought of her as more like a free safety. To operatives in the field she provided tech and information support and she was, at least for Fisher, that constant voice in his ear during missions that represented his lifeline back to Third Echelon and the real world. Fisher had yet to see a computer-related problem too tough for Grimsdottir to crack.

Fisher opened the folder and skimmed the CCCD's report. Finally, he looked up and said, "What in God's name is PuH-19?"