"Yeah, we're set."

"Do we have a deal?"

Zahm nodded. "Now, for the love of bloody Christ, get me out of here!"

Fisher hauled him over the gunwale, leaving his feet jutting over the side and the anchor line trailing in the water. Fisher rolled Zahm onto his back and waited until he'd caught his breath. "Yannick Ernsdorff," Fisher prompted.

"Yeah, he hired us about eight months ago. One job, six million dollars, U.S. Don't know how he found us, but he had proof--enough to put us away for good. Knew every job we'd done. He never said the words, but I got the message: Do the job, take the money, and stay out of jail."

"Where was the job?"

"China. Someplace in China, near the Russian border. I've got documents in my safe."

Fisher smiled. "I thought you might. Insurance?"

"With a guy like Ernsdorff? Hell, yes, I got insurance."

"You deal with anyone other than Ernsdorff?"

"Nobody by name."

"Descriptions?"

"A Chinese bloke . . . lean, hair graying at the temples; a Russian . . . hoop earring and ponytail; an American . . . gray hair, crew cut."

"Okay, go on."

"So we spend three months prepping for the job. Turns out the place is a government-run research laboratory in the middle of nowhere. Disguised as a chicken farm. Good internal security but almost no external stuff. Tough nut, that place."

"But you did the job?"

"Yeah, yeah. Ernsdorff didn't tell us what we were after. Just told us where to go and what to look for. Just shipping crates--high-end Lexan stuff--with serial numbers on it. He told us not to look inside."

"But you looked inside," Fisher said. "You took pictures."

"Damn straight we did. One of my guys is good with seals. We broke open the cases, took inventory, then sealed them up again, pretty as you like."

"And? What was inside?"

"Weapons," Zahm said.

"I assume we're not talking about AK-47s."

Zahm shook his head. "No, mate, we're talking about World War III stuff."

23

HAPPILY,Fisher found he was wrong about Zahm's technological foibles. The man had no issues with modern conveniences. He simply enjoyed life too much to partake in them. In that alone, Fisher admired him.

What he'd found upon opening Zahm's safe was not only a cardboard accordion folder filled with document scans and four-by-six photos in both color and black and white but also a Sony 4 GB Memory Stick Pro Duo.

After making sure Zahm's guests were still bound and unconscious, Fisher made sure the former SAS man understood both the benefits of forgetting what had occurred over the past two hours and the consequences of pursuing the matter after Fisher's departure.

ITwas almost 3:00 A.M. before Fisher returned to his Setubal home. Just before 8:00 in Washington. He inserted the Memory Stick into the OPSAT's multiport, uploaded the data, then waited for a response from Grim. It didn't take long:Data received.Proceed ASAP to Madrid safe house.Lisbon Portela Airport. Flight 0835. Ticket at Iberia desk.Contact upon arrival.

Short and sweet,Fisher thought. He'd worked with Grimsdottir long enough to know what that meant: She'd found something of value.

HEcaught three hours of sleep, then got up, packed, and drove his rental car to Cabo Espichel, a promontory overlooking the ocean. There he set the OPSAT for timed self-destruction and dropped it, along with the rest of his gear, in the backpack, into the ocean. However slight the chance of its being noticed, he was wary of repeating his DHL gear-shipment procedure one too many times. Patterns attract attention. And, though Fisher was not a superstitious man, he half believed in not pushing one's luck too far.

He arrived at the Lisbon airport an hour before his flight, had a bite of breakfast in one of the concourse food courts, then boarded his flight, arriving in Madrid an hour later, two hours on the clock. He was at the safe house by eleven thirty, and talking to Grim on the LCD a few minutes after that.

"We got a break," she announced. "Multiple breaks, in fact."

"You have my attention."

"First, this is mostly hunch work, but the three men other than Ernsdorff that Zahm claims to have dealt with . . . I think I know who they are: Yuan Zhao, Chinese intelligence; Mikhail Bratus, GRU, Russian military intelligence; and Michael Murdoch, an American. Does import and export, runs a handful of companies, most of them tech related. He's also elbow deep in defense contract work.

"Second, we extracted another name from Ernsdorff's server data: Aariz Qaderi, a Chechen from Grozny."

Fisher knew the name. Two years earlier, after assassinating his predecessor, Qaderi had taken control of the Chechen Martyrs Regiment, or CMR. It was well financed, tightly organized and disciplined, and made no bones about its mission: the subjugation or eradication of all nonbelievers.

"What kind of data?" Fisher asked.

"Just his name, an account number, and a pending payment of ten million U.S. dollars."

"Big money. Pending to whom?"

"Ernsdorff. Or whomever he's fronting for. Here's part two of the story: One of the serial numbers from Zahm's China job--"

"He didn't remember where exactly. . . ."

"The Jilin-Heilongjiang region, near the border with Russia, about a hundred miles northwest of Vladivostok. Anyway, one of the serial numbers from Zahm's job turned up during a raid of a CMR weapons cache outside Grozny. It was a land mine."

"Hardly worth ten million dollars," Fisher observed.

"No. I'm thinking the ten million is buy in. The land mine was a teaser--a freebie to get Aariz Qaderi interested.

"That's the bad news. I've waded through Zahm's 'insurance' records from the theft. What Ernsdorff had him hit was a doppelganger factory."

Fisher paused, sighed. "Oh, hell."

For decades China's foreign intelligence agency, Ministry of State Security--the MSS or Guoanbu--had been focused on industrial espionage. Through its Tenth Bureau, Scientific and Technological Information, the Guoanbu had been successfully targeting private military contracts in the West. The existence of doppelganger factories--laboratories applying the raw intelligence data gathered by the Guoanbu --had been suggested by the CIA in the late nineties, but solid evidence had never been found.

Doppelganger factories were dedicated to one purpose: creating perfect knockoffs of the West's latest and greatest weapons, often systems that weren't yet even in use by Western militaries.

"The official name was Laboratory 738," Grimsdottir said. "But based on Zahm's data, there's no doubt what it was."

"You said 'was.' "

"I went back and checked the satellite imagery. About a month after Zahm's job, all activity at that chicken farm stopped. In the space of forty-eight hours it became a ghost town."

"Can't say I blame them," Fisher replied. "What else are they going to do? Admit to the rest of the world they stole the biggest and baddest secrets, then used those secrets to create an uberarsenal that they then lost? What are we talking about, Grim? What kind of weaponry?"

"I'll download the encrypted list to your new OPSAT when you're ready, but suffice it to say that Zahm wasn't exaggerating: If this arsenal falls into the wrong hands, they'll become a first-world power overnight."