Lethal Circuit (15 page)

“Those guys on the bridge were MSS,” Ted said. “Ministry of State Security.”

“How do you know?” Michael asked.

“My gut. My gut and the fact that I think I saw an ear piece on one them. Your typical farmer doesn’t wear earpieces. Earrings maybe, or ear plugs, but not earpieces.”

Ted was walking quickly now, Michael and Kate struggling to keep up. “Suddenly you’re an expert on Chinese Intelligence Services?” Michael said.

“I never said that.”

“Kate’s been telling me things, Ted. Stuff about my dad. Stuff you’d never mentioned.”

“Like what?”

“Like the fact that he was CIA for starters,” Michael looked to Kate before adding the next part. “The fact that she’s MI6. That they spent a couple of years partnered together looking for an old Nazi airplane. That maybe the reason he’s gone missing is because of it.”

Ted clicked his tongue and redoubled his pace up the street.

“Is that all you have to say? You were his best friend. Are you going to tell me you didn’t know about any of this?”

Ted ignored Michael, instead leading the way toward an establishment that was about as different from the ramshackle guest houses lining West Street as you could get. Its expansive gardens and reflecting pools made it look more like a palace than anything else. Kate seemed to know the place.

“The Yangshuo Hotel?” Kate said.

“I’m getting too old for the backpacking thing.”

“And?”

“And it’s time to read the writing on the wall.”

T
HE
WALL
IN
this case was to be found in the resort’s gracious glass paneled lobby. Outside, the landscaping was lush, waterfalls and exotic plantings covering the inner courtyard. Inside, the floor to ceiling windows were broken up by traditional bearing walls at fifteen-foot intervals. A polished marble floor separated them from the empty reception desk at the far end of the lobby. Other than the bellhop outside the swinging glass doors, they were alone.

“Check out the artwork,” Ted said. “See anyone you know?”

Michael noted that the walls between the glass panels were covered in framed photographs. He turned his attention to the nearest one — a framed photo of what looked like some Japanese tourists in front of the hotel. Strike that, they were Japanese dignitaries; their suits were formal. Michael turned to the next picture and saw a similarly laid out photo of the British Royal Family. Continuing along the wall, the next shot was of President Nixon standing with a cadre of Secret Service; the next showed President Carter with his Secret Service; then President Clinton alongside his protection detail; then George W. Bush.

“So this place is popular with Royals and ex-presidents?”

“Presidents,” Ted said. “They were in office when they visited.”

Michael’s eyes skipped across the glass panels overlooking the courtyard to the solid wall behind the reception desk. There was a bell on the desk and on the wall behind it were more of the same photos, each sporting an identical layout to the last. There were dignitaries from Africa, India, South America, the list went on.

“So what do you think?” Ted asked. “Why so many official visitors?”

“The banana pancakes?”

Ted ignored Michael’s quip. “What if I told you I have firsthand knowledge as to why one of these guys was here, flawless intelligence on two more, and a lot better than a guess on the rest of them?”

“I’d say start talking.”

Ted eyed the front desk. Even though there was nobody there, he beckoned Michael and Kate to follow him outside just the same. Once they were clear of the bellhop he spoke quietly.
 

“All those presidential visits from Nixon on up amounted to one thing.” Ted quietly surveyed the area as they walked to ensure nobody was within earshot. “They were official cover to get a CIA team into Red China under the auspices of a Secret Service Security Operation.”

“How do you know any of this?” Michael asked.

“Kate didn’t tell you?”

“Tell him what?”

“I was on the CIA team,” Ted said to Michael. “So was your dad.”

•
 
•
 
•

M
ICHAEL
BIT
DOWN
on his tongue as a group of Japanese tourists shuffled past on their way back to the hotel.

Kate said, “I had no idea, Michael. I swear.”

“Calm down, nothing to get uppity about,” Ted said. “I just assumed you knew. Nixon on his trip to China in seventy-one. I was a new agent. Your father and I had just finished the basic operative training course at Camp Peary. Everybody calls it The Farm now. Both of us were pretty psyched when we got the assignment.”

“You’re saying my dad was here all the way back in nineteen seventy-one?”

“Michael, your father ran one mission for more or less his entire career — the recovery of the Horten 21. Everything else, every single other thing he did for the CIA, was filler.”

“Yeah, but you’re saying he was looking for this thing for decades?”

“That’s what I’m saying. It was our first assignment together. He just never let go. Back when we started, half our classmates were stuck in embassies somewhere and we were out here on the frontlines posing as Nixon’s security detail. You’ve got to remember, back in the Nixon era coming here was big news. His was the first US presidential visit ever and the Chinese wanted to impress him. They even built a bloody highway for him. They call it the Nixon Road, from the airport to the city, and they did that just to make Tricky Dick feel welcome. You can imagine how they’d feel if they knew a big old chunk of the reason for his trip to this part of the country revolved around a CIA plan to find the Horten.”

“Let me make sure I got this,” Michael said. “You’re basically telling me Nixon came to China in seventy-one to look for a Nazi airplane?”

“Look, I can’t speculate as to every reason Nixon had for his presidential trip to China. I can’t even tell you how much he knew about the Company’s plan to locate the Horten. But I can tell you this. Posing as his security detail provided us with about as good a cover as we were going to get back then. We traveled up and down these hills doing bogus security reconnaissance in anticipation of his visit. Chinese Intelligence followed us the whole time but we still managed to cover a lot of ground.” Ted paused. “In the end it didn’t matter much though. We didn’t find a thing.”

“And Carter and Clinton? Bush?”

“Same deal. Though I was out of the Agency by the time Bush came around. Word has it that the British did the same thing with their security teams. And the Japanese. Everybody wanted a piece of that lost Nazi tech.”

They reached the main road. Locals still sat on bicycles, backpackers wandering up and down the street.

“Your dad stayed with the project and became something of an expert on the Horten. The way I hear it, he even kept the search for it alive when nobody else seemed to think it was worth finding. Your father realized that the Horten was more than a plane. It was the holy grail of the energy crisis. Its reactor could solve the planet’s energy needs and redraw the world map in the process. If the word passion wasn’t as played out as a Thai hooker, I’d say he had a passion for it — a passion to find that technology. He managed to get himself reassigned to the project multiple times that I know of. It looks like this last time, with Kate here, he just didn’t come back.”

Michael slowed to a standstill, crickets singing in the sweet night air. He took a long moment breathing it all in before finally speaking. “So let me make sure I’ve got this,” Michael said. “She’s MI6, he’s CIA, now you’re CIA too? Did any of you ever consider the private sector? You make better money and you’re less likely to get shot.”

“No job security,” Ted said. “But you’re right about the getting shot part. That’s why I took early retirement. I work part-time as a lecturer for the Royal Asiatic Society now. With the exception of what happened to your father, I haven’t looked back since.”

“So is there a reason you didn’t tell me any of this back in Hong Kong?”

“Yeah. You were better off not knowing.”

Michael shot a glance at Kate, but her expression was hard to read. There was no doubt she wanted to hear more, but her body language seemed to suggest that the discussion was between Michael and Ted and that she should be left out of it. It didn’t matter. Michael could conduct this conversation on his own.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why do I need to know now?”

“Because I can see now there’s no keeping you out of it.” Ted lowered his voice. “When I first brought you into this, I was thinking closure. I thought the whole mess would end with Larry. That he’d cop to what he knew and you could go to the police with it and put the whole thing behind you. With everything you’ve been though, both before and now, I knew that would be important to you.”

“And now?”

“Now I can see you’re in way deeper than that. Nothing I say or don’t say is going to make a difference. And if that’s the case, you might as well know it all.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much.” Ted turned back toward the lobby. “Now get some rest. I’ll meet up with you two in the morning.”

Watching him go, Michael finally opened his mouth. “Ted?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“No problem, kid.” Ted grinned in the moonlight and continued on his way.

25

M
OBI
WAS
ESCORTED
out of the restroom and down a waiting elevator by two men who were about as far removed from the prototypical laid back JPL employee as you could get. They wore buzz cuts and plain gray suits, and even though they weren’t in uniform per se, it wasn’t much of a stretch to see that they were military, most likely Air Force like Rand. The men silently escorted him to a secure lower level of the laboratory that Mobi had never been to. Though this lower level of the facility was officially designated as storage, it was rumored to be much more: a covert laboratory for projects requiring many times the normal civilian security clearance. So despite the pain from the handcuffs on his wrists and the foreboding in the pit of his stomach, Mobi’s eyes were wide as his escorts led him down the worn corridor. A moment later, a key card was swiped through a cipher lock and Mobi found himself inside a mid-sized room.

The space was closer to a broker’s office than the torture chamber Mobi had been expecting. An Ultrasuede sofa sat in one corner, a Mission Revival desk in the other. One of the military types removed Mobi’s cuffs while the other entered some kind of code into a Blackberry. Then, without another word, they both exited the room, the steel reinforced wood paneled door clicking shut behind them. Less than five seconds later, an automatic panel slid open on the far wall and Deputy Director Alvarez entered the space.

“I see you made it past security,” Alvarez said, handing Mobi a cup of coffee. “I’d have spared you the escort, but that’s how they run this section of the lab.

“Exactly which section are we talking about?” Mobi asked.

“The fun one.”

Alvarez beckoned Mobi to follow her out the open panel in the wall. He was right to think of the preceding area as some kind of waiting room, because the corridor he found himself in was all business, though significantly more sterile business than Mobi was used to. The original structures at JPL dated back to the nineteen forties and even though there had been substantial construction since then, the buildings, for the most part, had a tired feel to them. This underground corridor, however, was different. The walls were sheathed in white polycarbonate panels that bore no sign of wear, while an illuminated yellow line embedded in the floor indicated direction of travel. It was weird. Even though Mobi realized that the corridor was probably designed in this way to minimize airborne contaminants, he still felt like he was treading the corridors of the Death Star. If R2D2 had reared his head, Mobi had no doubt he would have chirped right back at him and taken another slug on his java.

Alvarez led Mobi past several closed doors into a marginally wider section of corridor overlooking a massive clean room. Mobi now realized that his hypothesis as to why the walls were coated in the polymer panels was correct. It would be a means of keeping the particulate count in the air low given that this corridor no doubt provided entry and egress to the clean room, a room that unequivocally had to stay sterile. There was a reason for that of course; it was because they assembled spacecraft there. And looking down through the transparent polymer panels of the observation corridor, Mobi laid eyes on a team of scientists in bunny suits tending to the most unusual spacecraft he’d ever seen.

“The JPL Horten Project,” Alvarez said.

Mobi took a moment. He had seen the blueprints. He knew what the Horten was supposed to look like and this wasn’t it. Not even close. The object in question was roughly the shape of a shallow bowl, about fifteen feet in diameter, and composed of what looked like a molybdenum skeleton covered with a titanium skin. Inside the bowl were a series of outtake valves and tubes that clearly constituted an engine or propulsion device of some kind. It was only partially assembled. Mobi could see that. But he was having difficulty imagining what he saw as part of a larger machine. Still, Alvarez was a serious woman. If she said this was the JPL Horten Project, this was the JPL Horten Project.

“Not impressed?” Alvarez asked.

“No, it’s not that.”

“Is it that in the last however many minutes you’ve been arrested, brought to a level of the lab that isn’t supposed to exist, and shown a secret project that doesn’t look anything like you thought it would?”

“That about sums it up,” Mobi said.

“Then you’re really going to like what comes next.”

Alvarez opened a door in the corridor revealing an office. It was a sterile cube, about fifteen by fifteen with a polished steel desk and three chairs. There was a window overlooking the corridor and a multi-line telephone on the desk, but other than that the space was bare. She led him inside, closing the door behind her.