Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3) (18 page)

32

The lonely, well-maintained road between Ji’an and Wuhan, China, was surrounded by sprawling farmland in every direction.  Dotted by thousands of clusters of dark green metasequoia trees, the landscape passed by silently, silhouetted in a thick gray haze beneath a bright full moon.

Traffic was sporadic at best, which caused Jin Tang to nearly veer off the road when John Clay suddenly burst upright in the passenger seat next to him.

Clay looked through the front window before searching the interior of the car.

“Jesus!” Tang said.  “That must have been one horrible dream.”

Clay ignored the remark and finally found his satellite phone still in his left pocket.  He pulled it out and quickly turned it on.

He hadn’t been sleeping.

Several minutes later and seven thousand miles away, Wil Borger stopped on the white granite steps of a wide stairway and pulled out his ringing phone.  His chest heaving, he answered it, grateful for the interruption.

“Clay?”

“Wil, where are you?”

“In a stairwell.  On my way to Langford’s office.”

Clay raised a curious eyebrow.  “You’re taking the stairs?”

“I think Caesare’s been feeding me subliminal messages about my lack of exercise.”

“I believe it,” Clay joked. His expression quickly became serious again.  “Wil, I need you to listen very carefully.”

“Clay?” Barked Langford.

“I’m here, Admiral.”

“Good.  I’ve got a very excited and nearly hyperventilating Wil Borger in front of me, insisting I get you on the phone.  What’s up?”

“It’s about General Wei, sir.  I think I know what’s he’s done with the case.”

Langford pointed Borger to a chair on the other side of his desk and placed the call on speakerphone.  “Go ahead.”

“Wil and I have been trying to put the pieces together since I left.  But things weren’t fitting.  Wei’s actions before his suicide, the deaths of his wife and daughter, even his cell records were all pointing to something we kept missing.  Something big.”

“So what is it?”

Clay took a deep breath and glanced back over his shoulder at Tang, who was waiting by the road in the dark, next to the car.  “Admiral, the only way I can get things to make sense is if we change one of the variables.  Something we’re assuming is true but may not be.”

“Spit it out, Clay.”

“Sir,” Clay said.  “I don’t think General Wei’s daughter is dead.”

Langford looked at the phone on his desk with surprise.  “What?”

“I don’t think she’s dead.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Langford peered thoughtfully at Borger.

“There is very little on his daughter’s death,” Clay continued.  “Too little.  I think he orchestrated it and had the records scrubbed.”

“But if his daughter is still alive, then why kill himself?” Borger asked.

“To protect her.  If she
were
suffering from a heart disease, which I do believe she was, he would have had to fake her death to keep people from making a connection after he was gone.  If his whole family was believed to be dead, then the investigation stops.”

Langford frowned, thinking.  “So, what about the case?”

“I’m betting only a few people knew about it.  And that he moved his daughter to someplace safe, then carefully left a trail of clues that led
away
from her.  The one thing he couldn’t easily control was the cellular towers tracking his location.  So he turned off his phone when he traveled to see her.”

“So he hid the case with her?”

“He may have done more than that,” Clay replied over the speaker.  “If his daughter was dying, Wei may very well have been holding the one thing that could help her.  The DNA from the plants in Guyana.  And if they did find a way to transfer it to humans, he may have used the last of it on her.  If he did, killing himself was the only way to prevent an investigation from finding her.  A last and seemingly delusional act by the grief-stricken husband and father.  But I don’t think he was delusional at all.”

“So he let everyone assume he was crazy and smear his name.”

“Exactly.”  Clay switched the phone to his other ear.  “Purposefully destroy his family honor to save the only family he had left.”

Borger nodded.  “It makes sense, except that family honor is more important to the Chinese than anything.  Could he sacrifice his family’s entire name for his daughter?”

The room fell silent when Clay didn’t answer.  He didn’t need to.  Whether Borger knew it or not, it wasn’t a question for Clay…it was a question for Langford.  Clay was one of the few people who knew what Langford had gone through with his own daughter.

Admiral Langford had grown quiet but finally nodded.  “Yes, he could.”  With a grave face, he turned and looked out the window.  “I would have.”

Silence returned to the call.  Clay waited almost a full minute before speaking again.  “Wil, we need to find where Wei hid his daughter.”

“Right.”

“Probably someplace remote, but still with enough medical equipment to treat her.”

33

Seventeen-year-old Li Na Wei’s eyelids fluttered open weakly.  The darkened room around her was blurry with just a few streams of light edging in from a nearby window.  The old and tattered shade gradually came into focus along with the peeled paint around the wooden window sill. 

She rolled her head more to the left and traced the wall back to a small shelf with dead flowers and a few other items she didn’t recognize. 

From the top of her left hand, a clear IV tube ran up and over her pale arm to an old-looking machine.  She looked at her hand and then raised it, gingerly wriggling her fingers. 

On the other side, past her right hand, she spotted the faded chair and smiled, images of her father sitting next to her coming to mind.  She often felt the warmth of his hand in hers even before waking up.  But not today.  He was probably back in Beijing.

Li Na took a breath and looked curiously down at the blanket on top of her.  Her curiosity grew with her second breath and she took a third one, deeper this time.  Something was different –– she could breathe again.  Still with some difficulty but better than before.  And less pain.

She didn’t recognize the room.  How long had she been asleep?  Days?  Weeks?  It felt like a long time.

It couldn’t have been that long, she decided.  Her muscles would have been even weaker.

She reached up with her right hand and tapped a small silver bell with her fingertip.  A low “ding” sounded.

A minute later, a doctor leaned in.   Upon seeing his patient awake, he smiled and entered.

“Hello, Li Na.  How do you feel?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Dr. Lee.”

She blinked, then remembered his question.  “I feel better.”

“Good.”  He stood at the foot of her bed, touching her toes through the blanket.  “Can you feel that?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and removed his hands.  “Can you move your toes?”

She complied.  Satisfied, Lee moved to her right side and inserted the tips of his stethoscope into his ears.  “Can I listen to your heart for a moment?”

“Okay.”

He placed the round diaphragm lightly against her chest and listened.  The beats were stronger and more regular.

“Squeeze for me,” he said, placing his right hand in hers.

She squeezed.

“Excellent.  Are you in any pain, Li Na?”

“A little.  Not much.”

“Good.”

The doctor gently raised her arm and slipped it through a blood pressure cuff.  He then held the diaphragm of the stethoscope against her vein and pumped several times, staring at his wristwatch.

He was stunned.  A few weeks ago she’d been days away from death.  Then her condition began to improve.  Her body seemed to be strengthening.  And now, she was awake. 

He’d seen miracles before, but not like this.  Li Na’s heart was beating twice as strong as it was before, and faster.  Her temperature was back under thirty-seven degrees Celsius, bringing a huge sigh of relief from Lee and his nurse.  And it all happened after her father’s final visit.

Barring a relapse, Lee was growing increasingly confident the young girl would survive.  Which meant fulfilling the promise he made to her father.  And soon.  Because the one thing General Wei had repeatedly pressed was that if his daughter
did
survive, there would soon be people searching for her.

34

M0ngol’s dark eyes sifted methodically through the computer logs of one of China Mobile’s system servers.  The giant file was one of several that contained the company’s geolocation metadata for most of its customers in the greater Beijing area. 

However, what M0ngol was searching for was not Wei’s phone number.  He already had that.  The geo data tracked signals from the SIM cards of each cell phone and more importantly logged the signal strength of each signal as it was polled.  Comparing the strength against multiple towers allowed him to discern in which direction a unit was moving, such as General Wei’s just before it had been turned off.

What he’d found in the older logs showed him more of the same: a northbound direction prior to the tower losing the signal, then reestablishment of that signal days later, traveling south.

M0ngol’s thin lip curled as he copied the last piece of data.  He started to close the window on the server and reached for his phone but abruptly stopped, his hand frozen on the mouse.  Something had caught his eye as he was looking away, and he stared back at the screen carefully.  The directory of computer files was sorted by date and time, along with several other columns of information.

What M0ngol noticed was that some of the log files had a slightly different time stamp than the rest.  It was a very subtle difference few would have noticed.

After studying the screen, he opened a new window and brought up the server’s audit logs.  He manually scrolled through the giant list.  What he was searching for wasn’t there.  All other audit activity was listed, except for the six time-stamped files he was looking for.

M0ngol slowly leaned back in his chair without taking his eyes off the screen.  He knew exactly what he was looking at.

Deleting audit logs was easy.  Much easier than trying to change a file’s time stamp.  Doing that would require temporarily changing the server’s clock, which would create a huge ripple effect that could take hours to fix.  Instead, the files were opened and closed at almost precisely the same time but twenty-four hours later.  And it was done to make the time stamp difference as subtle as possible.

Someone else had been looking through the cell tower files.

Wil Borger was now typing feverishly on his keyboard.  Manually finding a small medical building within a thousand-mile radius would take forever.  He needed a faster way.

The new ARGUS satellite didn’t have the right path to give him an aerial view of Beijing.  But there were two other satellites that did.  He didn’t need a live feed like he could get from the ARGUS either.  He just needed one with a good enough resolution, and both of these older birds could still read a T-shirt from space.  More than strong enough to spot a car.

Of course, it was not as easy as it sounded.  Even for Borger.  He had to use a program like he did for the Forel that searched pixel by pixel.  But this time, he had to tell it what it was looking for.  More importantly, he needed it to look for the same pixel signature traveling the same direction and time for each of the days when Wei turned his phone off.

And now that Borger had the make and model of Wei’s car, finding it was at least
theoretically
possible.  The question was how smart could he make his program and whether it would work in time.  For this, he would have to commandeer more servers.

Hours later, after testing and launching his modified program, Borger looked at his watch and opened another can of Jolt.  Clay had a while before he would even be close, which Borger hoped would give him enough time.

Until then, he needed to check up on his Brazilian friends and get Caesare some more intel.

He popped open the top of the can, and from the third monitor on his desk, watched the overhead flight path of the team’s C-12 Huron.

35

Steve Caesare had a serious problem.  He moved forward to speak quietly to the pilots as he peered out through the cockpit’s front windshield.  Even from fifty miles out, it was clearly visible.  A fast moving thunderstorm headed northeast, over the western half of Colombia.

Unlike other weather patterns, thunderstorms were not something to be flown through.  The combination of rising warm air and sinking cold created dangerous surprises, including air pockets that could drop an aircraft’s altitude by thousands of feet in just seconds.  Flying around them was the only safe option.

Their problem was they didn’t have enough fuel for a significant deviation.  After being denied to land and refuel in both Venezuela and Colombia, their situation was quickly growing into a serious problem.

If they did fly around it, the extra distance would use up far too much of the precious fuel they had left.  And trying to fly
through
the storm would present a headwind and consumption drain almost as bad as going around it.

Caesare watched the copilot finish plotting the change before turning to look at him over his shoulder.  It was too far.  An outside route was out of the question unless they all wanted to be buried in Colombia.

Their only remaining option was a risky one –– to cut inside and hope the storm’s trajectory didn’t change.  In other words, to pray it continued moving along its current path.  Because if it changed on them, all bets were off.

Caesare nodded and turned around, moving back down the narrow aisle to his seat. 

DeeAnn sat across from him in a rear-facing seat with Dulce nestled against her chest.  “Everything okay?”

“Sure,” Caesare said, smiling and winking at her.  “I was just checking to see when the movie starts.” 
Worrying them at this point would serve no purpose.

DeeAnn frowned.  The problem with Steve’s sense of humor was she couldn’t tell what was a joke and what was a diversion.  She studied him as he sat back down, but his face gave nothing away.

On her lap, Dulce was watching Corso –– his huge frame sitting diagonally across from them.  When he turned away from the window, their eyes met and Dulce smiled widely, exposing nearly all of her teeth.

Corso seemed less than amused.

The small plane dropped suddenly, surprising everyone but Caesare, who glanced at DeeAnn.  “You’re going to want to put your seatbelts on.”

She nodded and stood up, still holding Dulce.  DeeAnn turned and placed the gorilla back into the seat. She then fastened the belt around Dulce’s small stomach and moved across the aisle to sit in the seat facing Corso.  She fastened her own belt and looked back across the aisle where Dulce was now grinning at Caesare.  Unlike Corso, Caesare was grinning back.

She watched them for a moment before glancing at Corso’s long face.  “You don’t seem to like her very much.”

Corso turned his heavy gaze to her.  “I didn’t join the Navy to babysit monkeys.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

“True.  We’re bringing a monkey to find another monkey,” he replied sarcastically.

“Gorilla.”

Corso stared at her with a look of indifference.

“Don’t worry about him,” Anderson grinned from two seats back.  “He’s always in a bad mood.  Even when he sleeps.”

“And he’s still a kid,” Corso retorted, looking back out his window.

“Not according to the government.”  Anderson was still grinning.  “I’m old enough to kill the enemy but not old enough to drink.  Makes perfect sense, right?”

DeeAnn smirked.  She was beginning to understand how Alison had become so disillusioned with the government.  She then heard the “click” of Juan’s seatbelt behind her. 

So far, the flight had gone smoothly and what little turbulence they had experienced was mild.   The bumps didn’t seem to bother Dulce much.  They didn’t seem to be any bother at all to Tiewater, who could still be heard snoring from the rear of the plane.

She let herself relax, in spite of Corso.  They would be on the ground in a couple hours.  Perhaps the trip wouldn’t be as bad as she or Juan feared.  It was unfortunate they had to take a longer route, but after Caesare had explained the political problems involved, it made sense. 

Her only major concern now was how easy it would be to find Dexter after they reached the mountain.  Lee and Juan had captured Dexter’s exact pitch from the data in her previous vest and were confident that, once close enough, they could identify him again.  The question was how close did they need to get?  The vest’s microphone was sensitive, but the sheer amount of noise the vest had to sift through for normal communication left her wondering how effective it was going to be.  And they still had to get within range for which they were relying completely on Dulce’s instincts. 

The small gorilla was still insisting she could find Dexter, but DeeAnn wasn’t sure what that actually meant.

DeeAnn sat quietly, contemplating, while Caesare remained just as quiet next to her.  This storm was another problem he didn’t need.  Flying through a thunderstorm was damn dangerous.

It took less than thirty minutes to get the bad news.  The storm had indeed turned east, and straight into their path.  The two pilots seated in front of Caesare stared through the windshield with a look of dread. 

Avoiding most of the storm, they would have made it with at least some fuel left.  But now…their odds were fifty-fifty at best.  It was growing in size and both pilots knew that no one would fly through what was ahead of them unless they had absolutely no choice.  Which they now didn’t.

Colombia’s Medellin and Bogota airports had followed Venezuela’s lead and denied them permission to land, which left Iquitos, Peru, as the only runway now long enough to accept them.  They could, of course, try to force their way down using the international distress frequency –– but once on the ground, Colombia would know who they were and where they were likely headed.

Now at less than ninety minutes from Iquitos and a top speed of 320 miles per hour, the C-12 Huron was four hundred and fifty miles away and burning fuel at an alarming rate. 

Another sudden gust shoved the plane sideways in the air, causing everyone in the cabin to grasp something to avoid being thrown.  Outside, the sky had darkened into an ominous gray as the giant storm began to envelop them.

Caesare moved back down the narrow isle to Juan and DeeAnn, the latter having stolen his seat across from Dulce.  After activating the vest, she was talking to Dulce to keep her calm.  Following another severe bounce, the young gorilla wrinkled her nose with concern.

No fly like bird.

DeeAnn shook her head in agreement.  “No, this is not like a bird.  But don’t be afraid.”

She and Juan looked up when Caesare motioned her to mute the vest.

“This storm isn’t going our way,” he said.  “An emergency landing in Colombia would out us and there’s a good chance they wouldn’t let us leave.  Which means our only option is to fight through this and get to Iquitos as fast as we can.”  They all grabbed hold as the aircraft plunged again by several feet.  “The good news is that this is a hell of a plane and Iquitos is going to be ready for us.  The bad news is that conditions are going to get worse.”  He looked to DeeAnn.  “How are you guys holding up?”

“Not great.”  DeeAnn looked to Dulce, who had her two long arms wrapped firmly around the metal armrests.  She was talking less and less and DeeAnn could see increasing signs of anxiety.

“Juan?”

“I’m okay for the moment.  But I may need a bag.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” he said, patting the top of Juan’s seat.  “We’re gonna make it.  Just hang in there.”

It was the best thing he could think to say.  And it was true what he said about the durability of the plane.  Even the storm’s powerful winds couldn’t flip it, but running out of fuel was a different matter.  If they could make it to the airport, there would be only one danger remaining: landing.  Because as bad the wind sheers were at altitude, they were far worse at ground level.

As Caesare turned to leave, the small satellite phone in his pocket rang.  He braced himself against the low ceiling with one hand and pulled the phone out with the other.

“That you, Wil?”

“It is,” Borger answered.  “How you guys doing?”

“Getting pretty bouncy, but we’ll make it.” 
Hopefully,
Caesare thought.

“You’ve got a big storm headed right at you.”

“That’s very helpful, Wil.  Any other good news?”

“Yes.  Otero and his army are about a third the way up the mountain.  They’ve stopped for the moment, but they’re moving faster than we thought.  What’s your ETA?”

Caesare rolled his eyes. 
ETA?  Chances of survival might be a better question. 
He raised his voice over a sudden wave of thunder.  “Soon.”

“How soon?”

“VERY soon!  I’ll call you back when we’re on the ground.”

“Okay.  Be safe.”

Caesare ended the call and shook his head.  His estimated time of arrival on the mountain was complicated.  Their situation had gotten considerably more difficult…and he still hadn’t told DeeAnn the worst part.