“What!”
“You heard me.”
“But they’re not interested in espionage. Shit, the
president funds the friggin’ NCTC. What’s he think they do? Terrorism is about
the only damn thing on the FBI’s radar.”
“They invited you in on Ahmadi, didn’t they? Just think of
it as an opportunity for you to network, establish better ties.”
“Where do I fit
that
into my schedule?”
Director Burns glared at him. “Herman assured me that the
president was fully confident in the FBI’s handle on domestic espionage
matters. I’m not aware of any reason to disagree. Neither are you.”
8
Friday, April 3
Hong Kong, China
THE SQUALL LINE
of
thunderstorms barreled through Kowloon trailing a silence as heavy as the humid
spring air.
Hunched over the desk inside his hotel room, McBurney
snapped off his satellite phone. Satisfied that the dolts in Langley had
followed through with their payment to Sun Stone, the unsavory snakeheads whom
the CIA had contracted for the physicist’s extraction, he next dialed up the
e-mail account of a small Shanghai meat-packing outfit. That the entity didn’t
exist was probably a stroke of overkill. Any messages intercepted by
unauthorized parties were thoroughly encrypted, and indecipherable even in the
unlikely event the key had somehow been compromised.
McBurney pressed the cursor and the liquid crystal
display scrolled down through the customary routing jargon and re-read the text
of the message:
Export thru border unchanged,
delays, paperwork, all unpredictable. Advise your shipment will arrive well fed
any way. Poachers a risk, they outnumber but aimless now. Will post advisory
when clear for final meat-on-hoof inspection\\
The bastardized message confirmed that the ruse of sending
the couple north was in fact misleading Chinese security forces. By no means
had this objective been considered probable. The original route and
preparations for exfiltrating the Chinese physicist and his wife—so far as Sun
Stone understood, pro-democracy activists seeking political asylum in the West
and one of them seriously ill—was to move the defector and his wife by train
from their home in Xichang to Kunming. From Kunming, the border to Laos was
still a yawning 400 kilometers—but
south
, the most direct route. Amid
great gnashing of teeth, this plan McBurney rejected on advice of his Beijing
station chief, who had passed along a warning from the only reliable Beijing
asset under Agency control. According to their source, codenamed SIREN, China’s
security apparatus response to the physicist’s unapproved absence would be
instantaneous. Despite the very best travel document forgeries, pursuing the
most direct route to the border would be suicidal. SIREN believed that the
Ministry of Public Security would not expect the couple to head
north
,
deeper into the mainland. The agent’s warning triggered much head-scratching
within Langley’s operations cubicles. North is where McBurney decided to send
them.
McBurney glanced at his watch; China time 11:27
a.m.
Roughly a day and a half had
transpired since the defector and his wife set out on their journey. In a few
hours they should be boarding their flight from Wuhan to Hong Kong. What concerned
him even more than Sun Stone’s operation of misfits was that the e-mail message
had not been updated since the Agency’s Beijing agent posted it some twelve
hours ago.
What McBurney needed was the final green light to proceed
with the extraction through Chek Lap Kok, and his last communication had
allowed no possibility for SIREN to misinterpret that need. Should SIREN so
advise, the alternate route via the harbor would be executed. This contingency
McBurney didn’t much care for. Last fall the Chinese authorities apprehended a
political dissident whom the Brits were trying smuggle out; Victoria Harbor and
its environs had since been descended upon by mainland security. The airport was
risky enough, but Chek Lap Kok did offer an element of surprise. Here again,
input from SIREN had convinced him that the airport was an unlikely extraction
point given the defector’s origin so far afield of Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, McBurney was twenty-five minutes late with
his signal to the extraction team. He could either call off the extraction
altogether, at this point logistically impractical, or interpret the lack of
word from SIREN as a green light. He reluctantly made his decision, and keyed
in the coded message to scrub the alternate plan.
McBurney heard the sound of another approaching car. He
watched a passenger van roll to a stop in front of the hotel lobby, where it
discharged a crew of airline pilots and flight attendants. One of the men, tall
and graying, stepped out from beneath the portico and briefly studied the
clouds overhead before disappearing behind the others into the lobby.
McBurney tucked the satellite phone inside his coat. He
casually arranged his belongings should maid service venture in, this to play
to the camera lens peering from somewhere, long a fact of life for any
foreigner visiting China. McBurney slipped the card key to the room into his
pocket. Time for lunch and a little shopping.
BY THE TIME
he
returned to the hotel it was almost two o’clock in the afternoon. He went to
the bar carrying his small bag of gifts and ordered tonic water with a wedge of
lime from the bartender, whom he figured was probably assigned his post by the
People’s Liberation Army. When the clock behind the bar read 2:27, McBurney
finished his tonic, left his tab on the bar and headed for the elevators.
A short time later, having dozed off on the sofa in his
room, McBurney was surprised when the telephone rang.
“Ello, Kenneth?” said the voice on the other end.
“Yes?”
“The airline called and asked us to leave as early as
possible for the airport.”
McBurney saw from his watch that this was some sixty
minutes earlier than planned. “Why, is it the weather?”
“Still calling for clearing skies,” he heard the man say. “Apparently
it is going to take extra time to check ourselves in. Security is being
tightened for some reason or other.”
9
A DEEP RUMBLE
announced
another arriving flight as McBurney peered through binoculars across the span
of darkness to the terminal’s bright interior. People’s Liberation Army
soldiers and uniformed police were inspecting tickets of all the departing
passengers. No Chinese officials had so far boarded their aircraft, a Singapore-bound
Swissair 747-400, whose flight crew would provide McBurney with limited
assistance as a favor granted to Lester Burns and the CIA. The tarmac glistened
beneath a diesel-powered cart pulling away from the plane with an empty luggage
train. A passenger tram sitting idle beneath the plane’s wingtip appeared to be
empty.
Twenty minutes earlier, one of Sun Stone’s men posted
inside the terminal had contacted McBurney first to confirm arrival of the
targets—the husband pushing the wife in a wheelchair—and second to say they
were about to proceed with their planned distraction. He had not received any
subsequent updates.
“Every out-going flight is being delayed,” Hans Schuetter
informed his copilot. Seated behind the controls, the Swiss pilot looked beyond
his cockpit and whistled at the sight of aircraft, luggage carts, fuel trucks
and passenger trams clogging the gates and taxiways surrounding the terminal
building, many abandoned wherever space would allow. “If they keep this up they
will have to re-open Kowloon.”
McBurney lowered the glasses. “Can they do that?”
“No, but soon there will be nowhere to park incoming flights.
Just look at it. How could anyone expect to control such a mess?” Schuetter
held one hand to his headphones and muttered something as he altered the
frequency selection on one of the aircraft’s receivers.
McBurney felt the vibrating alarm inside his coat. He
retrieved his satellite phone and pressed it to his ear. “Speak to me.”
“We lost them.”
The heavily accented words, nearly a whisper, burst into
his brain. “What do you mean? Where?”
There was a pause, the sound of a toilet flushing. “Near
the gate. Wheelchair. We lost them.” The connection went dead with a decisive
snap.
McBurney held the phone to his ear, gazing at the terminal
and looking for wheelchairs. He was vaguely aware of Schuetter moving his hands
about the cockpit, speaking into his microphone in efficient, professional
phrases.
McBurney turned off the phone and placed it inside his
coat. “Save me a seat.”
Schuetter cranked his head around. “Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“You cannot. We are number eight for departure.”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes, before you finish your
checklist.”
“We do not have any minutes!”
“Just stall the fuckers. Make something up. I need more
time.”
“Holy Christ, look at this,” the copilot cut in.
All three men watched a Cathay Pacific 767 on final
approach and about to touch down. Flying abreast of it were two Sukhoi
fighters. The China Air Force jets continued low over the runway after the 767 landed.
They then veered off in bank turns and disappeared into the gloom.
Schuetter said, “I wonder how many people understand what
it was they just witnessed.”
With PLA flooding the terminal, McBurney knew it meant that
Beijing had strong-armed the Hong Kong Authority into a complete abdication of
local control. “You will
not
move this aircraft without my saying so,”
he ordered the men. “Is that understood?”
“Look there.” Schuetter pointed outside toward the
departure gate. “Are they by any chance our special guests?”
McBurney looked through the windscreen. A broad-shouldered
man in a hospitality jacket was swiftly pushing a woman in a wheelchair through
standing pools of water, thin streams of water flinging up from the wheels. Beside
them an older man struggled to keep up. They were heading toward the plane. A rumble
accompanied a gray puff of smoke as the co-pilot started an engine.
Schuetter said to McBurney, “Somebody will be watching
them, no?”
McBurney strained his eyes. Two PLA soldiers stood inside
the boarding gate peering out through the darkness. “Not if they can’t be
blamed for an obvious error. Most of all they abhor a bad scene.” Zhao and his
wife did not appear to have been apprehended, after all. That had to be one of Sun
Stone’s people walking with them...
fifty meters to go.
“Okay! Wait here while I—” McBurney choked off his words
when suddenly the interior of the tram idled beside the Swissair jet was
illuminated. Two passengers stepped down to the tarmac—McBurney felt a stab in
the pit of his stomach. Instead of boarding the flight, the figures headed for
the trio with the wheelchair—the man pushing the wheelchair redirected it
toward them.
“Is there a problem?” asked Schuetter.
They were close enough now for McBurney to recognize the
physicist; in the wheelchair, his wife’s head lolled and she appeared to be
unconscious. One of the men from the tram unbuttoned his suit coat, perhaps to
reveal to Zhao a pistol holstered under his armpit. The words presently being
exchanged between the physicist and the men were not difficult to imagine;
sick...quietly...immediately...hospital...die.
Zhao rather abruptly elbowed the airport hospitality escort
aside and began wheeling his wife toward the passenger tram. He paused only once
to look back at the jumbo jet’s boarding stairs—at the freedom he was being
denied. Above the din the tram’s engine roared to life for the return to the
terminal.
McBurney swore loudly and slammed his fist against the side
of the cockpit.
10
Monday, April 20, Four Weeks After the Crash
Cleveland, Ohio
STUART UNDERSTOOD IT
was
posible to be both drawn and repulsed by the very same image. The enlarged
aerial photograph of Mojave Municipal Airport was taken the day after the
crash, the twisted and charred aircraft debris vaguely reminiscent of a World
War II bombing raid. Whenever he looked at the chart, Stuart still found it
difficult to prevent other images from forcing their way into his thoughts
until, finally, the tightening in his chest forced him to look away. At the
same time, he was by necessity drawn to it. Its role in re-creating the
sequence of events would eventually allow them to isolate the single flaw that
had precipitated so much destruction.
Yet another unproductive meeting had come to a close. Those
leaving the conference room with their various tablet devices in hand included
the usual twenty or so of Stuart’s staff, engineers who for the most part went
about investigating the crash with a sort of detached objectivity. These folks,
by their very nature, would normally be drawn to so daunting a forensic puzzle—though
not one involving body parts belonging to people whose lives they had
previously shared. Stuart wondered how each was coping with the explicit
details, especially in the evening while home with their families.
He turned his attention back to the chart. Aircraft and
engine fragments had been recovered and catalogued, thousands of items, each a
potential key to solving the riddle. Engineers kept track of that information
by pinning onto the chart a mosaic of small labels and multi-colored thread. Red-colored
thread fanning out both sides of the runway depicted the sequence of release
and trajectories of projectiles upon ripping free of Thanatech’s disintegrating
engine. Surrounding the charred hulk of what was once a satellite video
transmission van were labels identifying many of the victims: Mulally, Karen,
office director California state legislature, age 27; Hickok, Thomas,
cameraman, WMJV-TV, age 33; Greene, Candace, journalist, WMJV-TV, age 25;
Kress, Charles, Thanatech executive officer, age 53; fourteen others labeled as
deceased or with various injuries. A mile and three-quarters further down the
runway from the van was where the forward fuselage had come to a fiery halt: Reilly,
Victor, age 51, and Harris, Christopher, age 54, Thanatech test pilots. Not far
from where the tail section and both of the engines had tumbled to a stop were
found the remains of Sandra Cole, Thanatech engineer, dead at the age of 29.