She was ravenously hungry and shoveled the stir fried pork and noodles into her mouth, grunting with satisfaction. “Mmmm yummy” she said into her empty apartment, smiling.
It was nearly eight when she put the radio together running over the communication instructions in her head to reinforce her memory. She put the earbuds in and made the call.
“Hello Blue Eyes, this is Snow Farts”
“Come on, this is serious Snow Forest.”
“Oh get over yourself Blue Eyes. Everything is cool. I got the job!”
“That’s a relief.” Sam didn’t sound relieved or surprised. He seemed to have a bit too much confidence in her, she thought. He had no idea how close that poor girl had come to being strangled and dumped somewhere.
“You know…it was touch and go there for a minute. I was about to go to Plan B just as the job offer arrived.”
“Well..good. We prefer no mess. You got your tools?” he asked.
“Yep, that guy is a little shifty. Is he solid?” Xue Lin asked, doubtful.
“Keep your bullshit detector on. Just use him for what he’s good for. He’s on a need to know basis and there’s not much he needs to know, for now. He’s Roet’s asset, not mine. So don’t expect too much.”
“Copy that.” Xue Lin responded, making a mental note about Jimmy.
“So I start work tomorrow. I’ll drop a line after my first big day and give you the rundown about the lab. Make sense?”
“Good work. You’ve done well. Far as we can tell you got in to China undetected. I hope the ride wasn’t too rough.”
“Nearly drowned, but whatever.”
Sam paused, not sure what to say.
After an awkward silence Sam said: “Stay safe, Snow Forest. Have a nice first day at work.”
“Over and out” Xue Lin signed off and pulled the radio apart and stashed it all away, and got ready for bed.
*
The morning sunshine was streaming through the living room windows in Sam’s high-rise apartment as he pulled apart his radio and stashed it in various devices around the office and kitchen of his apartment. He poured his second cup of coffee for the morning and cracked two eggs in the pan, relieved that Snow Forest was ‘in and established’ at the lab. It was an extremely dangerous assignment that she’d been given. An unforgiving job with potentially drastic consequences.
American prisoners caught in China who had been exchanged for Chinese prisoners had brought back horrific accounts of conditions and treatment in Chinese jails. Torture was a standard part of questioning in China. There were no laws overseeing the behavior of Chinese Government agents when it came to interrogating spies or, indeed, their own citizens.
Sam picked up his phone and called Roet.
“Morning Sam.”
“Snow Forest is in, and she’s got a job!”
“That’s good news. She got tools and cash?” asked Roet.
“Yep, and papers. She’s all set. Tell your team good job on the interview file. It worked.”
“I..will do that Sam. Thank you. I’m glad to hear it.”
“See you at the office.”
“OK Sam, thanks for the update.”
Chapter 19
A Black Bag Job
The sun hung low in the sky after Xue Lin’s first day at work. Her bike leaned against the red brick wall as she loosened her secret brick and retrieved the bug sweeper. This was going to be her routine every evening. Her life might depend on it. She had been taught that mistakes can easily happen at the beginning of a mission when things are unfamiliar. She had to go forward carefully.
She crept quietly up the stairs to the third floor. No point being noisy. Xue Lin paused at her front door. She could tell that someone had opened it, as the hair she had stuck along the bottom of the door had been dislodged.
Standing in the corridor, she took the bug sweeper from the ziplock bag in her backpack, turned it on and switched it to vibrate and stuck it down the front of her pants, pulling her blouse over the top of it. If there were cameras, she wanted to make sure that they didn’t catch her sweeping the room with the device.
She pulled her metal chopsticks from her hair, gripped them in tight fists as Sam had taught her and slowly opened the door. Nobody. The apartment was exactly as she had left it.
Maintaining a normal ‘I just got home’ routine, she went to the fridge and opened it. Then closed it and swept the kitchen with the device still down her pants. She then moved to the bathroom to wash her hands, look in the mirror and open the cabinet mirror. Still no vibrations from the sweeper. She moved toward the bedroom, and as she passed through the doorway, the sweeper began to vibrate intermittently. She moved to the bedside, and the vibrating became constant. She stretched, and casually looked around the walls for a camera, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, so she sat on the side of the bed, and fumbled for the bedside lamp, looking closely inside the lampshade. No camera, but…. ‘what IS that ?’ she thought peering closer at where the lightbulb was screwed in.
“Gotcha!” she mouthed silently, leaving it in place. She made her way around the rest of the apartment finding two more tiny microphone transmitters in the living room, both installed on lamps.
Xue Lin pulled the sweeper out and put it on the kitchen bench, knowing that there were no cameras. She checked her plastered hidey-hole, all good.
She then pulled out each of the radio parts from their clever hiding places, checking them one by one. Everything in its place still.
She made a social call to her new lab assistant girlfriend to say hi, and ask her how her first day was. She hung up and put the sweeper in its ziplock and went out to return it to its brick wall. She went and sat in a busy local restaurant to go over the ‘audio bug protocol’ in her head.
Her tradecraft instructor had taught her how to utilize an enemy’s audio bugs for counterintelligence. The people listening assume they are getting reliable information, while you lead them down the garden path with a preplanned scenario.
As she ate her steamed Wuchang fish, she went over what she would say to Sam on the radio. It was possible that the bugs were standard for employees at the lab, but she had to assume that she was a special case until she could check the other girl’s apartment to see if it was clean.
She paid her bill and headed back to put the radio together. She pulled out her mobile phone and the new burner phone that she’d bought, turning its ringer to silent. She put the radio together and plugged the headphones in. Then, just as she made the radio call, she called the burner phone from her mobile. They would not be able to trace the call, and would not be aware that she was using a radio to communicate, and the phones were just decoys.
*
The audio tech and the analyst both listened in on the call coming out of the adopted girl’s apartment. The signal was clear, but the recipient phone was not registered. “Must be a burner” said the tech.
“Good evening, this is Xue Lin. How are you?” she said, using the alternative dialogue designed to alert Sam if she’d found a bug.
The techs listened but only silence followed. She was not using speaker phone, so they could only hear her side of the conversation.
“Good! I’m fine too” she said.
More silence
“Yeah it was really fun. A great first day, though I was nervous. Everybody works very hard there, but the pay is good, so I’m happy. What did you do today?”
Xue Lin paused, sitting at the kitchen bench talking into the radio with the phones in front of her. She allowed a really long silence this time, and had a long pull on her beer while imagining what a long winded friend might be saying, meanwhile Sam was answering her through her headphones over the radio: “OK Snow Forest, see if you can find out if they are on to you or if it’s just standard operating procedure of a paranoid government.”
The tech guy drummed his fingers waiting for Xue Lin to speak again.
“Good!” she said. “How is your boyfriend doing?” s
he asked
Sam’s voice crackled in her headphones. “Very funny, Snow Forest. Now, say: ‘yes’ if there’s a room they didn’t bug, like the bathroom for instance”
“Yes” she replied.
One of the tech guys rolled his eyes and the other yawned.
She continued: “Do you keep tampons in your handbag when you are not on your period? You know, for a friend if she needs one, or if your period sneaks up on you? That reminds I have to buy some, I only have one box in the bathroom.”
Sam laughed. “OK smart ass. So you can radio me from the bathroom after this call. Just leave some music on near their bugs. Something loud and awful.”
One of the techs lifted his arm and smelled his armpit. They had been on for twelve hours today. This job was murder….
“I’d love to!” she said. “Well it’s been lovely talking to you. You make sure to get a bra that fits you properly. If you are going out with a hot man you need to put on some makeup and show some cleavage! Anyway, bye for now. Love you.”
The call ended. The techs logged the call and filed it. Nothing unusual to report.
Xue Lin turned up the music on her phone and put it between the two lamps in the living room. She closed the bedroom door, then picked up a chisel and a screwdriver from the plastic bag on the floor, then the radio from the kitchen bench, and carried them all into the bathroom, using her training to rig the aerial to the plumbing.
“Hello Blue Eyes this is Snow Forest” she said.
“Good work Snow Forest”
“Shit I have three bugs. At least there are no cameras. That would suck.”
“Remember to check your own spy cam. You can ID the people who bugged your place. In any case, they did you a favour. You can just talk to me in the bathroom, and then when you need to you can feed them lines near their mic transmitters. It’s perfect really. Just keep sweeping each night to make sure they don’t sneak any cameras in.”
“Roger that. So…the lab is big. Dr. Wu has a secure area that nobody else is welcome in. He’s always in there by himself. Two guards, machine guns. Metal detector. It’s secure alright…so something’s going on in there.”
“I’ll talk to Roet and see what he’s prepared to share. He’s been a total prick about it so far. Trust issues I guess.”
“Alright Blue Eyes. I’ll go check my Hello Kitty for a good movie. Talk soon!”
“Over and out.”
Xue Lin dismantled the radio and stashed it. She pulled the eye out of her Hello Kitty and plugged it in to her laptop.
Two guys, searching the room, but not very professionally. One of them planted the three audio bugs while the other looked under the table and checked the floorboards and in all the drawers. She got a good freeze frame of each of them looking almost directly at the camera, and took a moment to memorize their faces in case she should see them again.
*
Chapter 20
Drinks
During her next day at the lab, Xue Lin suggested to the other new girl that they have drinks to celebrate starting their new jobs. They decided on eight o’clock, and as Xue Lin pleaded that her apartment was still ‘unfurnished and messy’, the other girl suggested that they do it at her place.
Xue Lin dropped by her red brick wall to pick up the bug sweeper and arrived on her bike at the girl’s building a few minutes after eight. She parked her bike and turned the bug sweeper on, still on vibrate, and put it back in her backpack, pulling out a bottle of plum wine imported from Korea. Pressing the buzzer, the front door soon clicked open and she headed up the stairs to the fourth floor where the door was already open and the girl whom she had come close to strangling a few days earlier was standing there smiling sweetly, beckoning her to come in.
Xue Lin held out the bottle of plum wine, keeping her backpack slung over her front. Xue Lin made her way around the room commenting on the decorations and the furniture.
“Let me give you a tour!” the girl said, offering to take her bag and coat.
“I’ll put them down in a minute. Show me your beautiful place!”
By the end of the three minute tour, the sweeper had not vibrated at all. She turned the device off inside her bag.
“Here!” the girl said, insisting now that she hand over her coat and backpack to hang up in the hall.
Xue Lin sat on the couch thinking about how she was being singled out for surveillance, and what that might mean. All she could think of was that there was a leak or a rat. Jimmy was clearly open to suspicion, but he’d given her the tools to find the bugs, so that ruled him out.
“Do you want to start with beer? I have dumplings too so we don’t get too drunk. I just have to quickly fry them” said the girl when she came back.
“Yes, beer! I could really use a beer.”
Xue Lin ran through the people in her circuit. There was only Roet, Sam and Jimmy. No-one could have followed her on her complex route to Wuhan from America. She’d been too careful. Maybe it was someone higher up at the CIA.
Her attention returned to the beer now being poured in the kitchen by her lab colleague with the delicate neck. Looking at her reminded Xue Lin that she really must get around to sharpening her chopsticks soon.
The girl handed Xue Lin a glass of beer and they both began to drink. It felt good to finally relax.
*
Chapter 21
Casing the Lab
The two armed guards stood on either side of the security door of the Biosafety Level IV lab, down the hall from Xue Lin’s cubicle. They wore black suits and cheap black business shoes. She noted their weapons, with which she was only summarily familiar with. She had never used a JS9mm noise suppressed submachine gun, but she had been made familiar with its specs during training.
Without knowing how many weeks or months she might be working at the lab, she launched in on her recon from the outset with intensity. Running all possible scenarios in her head was standard procedure for a mission that had unspecified goals.
The shift change that she was most interested in happened in the morning. The night guards silently changed position with the two day guards. It was likely that they could all handle themselves in close quarters, probably with specialized training on top of their PLA basics. None of them were large men, but they would need to be neutralized together, making it a much more challenging take-down. There was a long tradition of hand-to-hand combat training in the People’s Liberation Army. Xue Lin was deadly, with or without a weapon, but she would be alone against whomever would stand in her way. The quietest approach would be to divide and conquer. Ideally she needed the whole thing to go without a shot fired.
She would have to find the guard’s patterns of behavior. When they used the bathroom, typically, or took a break. This would take her some time to observe routines.
She considered the need to use Dr. Wu’s security pass to get inside the Level IV lab. It would have to be during working hours so she could enter and exit the building without arousing suspicion.
*
Jimmy had decided that he needed to be in the loop about what Roet’s plan was regarding Dr. Wu and what he was doing for the CIA. Jimmy was in very deep now, and he had to watch all angles to make sure he wasn’t blindsided. Bugging Wu’s car was a simple solution, and a long term one.
Jimmy drove into the Institute of Virology carpark, flashing his Government ID at the attendant. Once inside, he drove to Dr. Wu’s parking spot and stopped behind Wu’s Mercedes. Leaving his engine running, Jimmy opened the driver side door of Wu’s car, using the special Mercedes issued security key that he had picked up at the dealership using his credentials. He got to work under the dashboard connecting the audio bug’s transmitter to the electrical circuit and the audio line to the internal microphone of the Mercedes. It would only pick up Wu’s side of any phone calls he would make, unless of course he used speaker phone, which was likely as it was illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving. The audio would be transmitted to his laptop. The bu
g would serve multiple purposes for Jimmy. He could not listen in on conversations with Roet, he could use the information to report back to the Chairman, so he appeared to be doing his job. It would also make his job of babysitting Wu easier.
Jimmy cleaned up the wiring and screwed the panel cover back in place.
*
Chapter 22
Need to Know
The smog of Wuhan had gotten even worse since that first ominous meeting with the Chairman. For several months Doctor Wu had been driving to the lab in this Mercedes every work day, often wondering what would happen to him after he had created the virus for the Chairman. Today his thoughts happened to be of the new lab assistant, Xue Lin, riding her bike to work in this pollution. She was just an average worker, but her coquettish nature and her beauty tipped the scales in her interview. She was coy with him and he liked it. The lab assistants were the only real joy he had left in his life. Jobs in laboratories were hard to find so the lab girls were somewhat at his mercy. It gave him a sense of power, but his life was now devoid of much choice. He was a slave to the Chairman.
His phone rang, it was his daughter Ning, calling from New York City.
“Daddy! It’s me. What time is it there? I’m just about to go out to dinner with a friend.”
“Hi Pumpkin! I’m just driving to work. Who are you having dinner with tonight?”
“Just a girlfriend from NYU. We are going to Chinatown to eat. How’s work?”
“Work’s the same. Saving the world one test-tube at a time” Wu rolled his eyes at his own lie.
“Anyway Daddy, I just wanted to call to say hi.”
“Bye Pumpkin. Be safe.”
Dr. Wu was concerned and a little frightened for his daughter. But as long as the CIA thought that he was doing what Marcus Roet was telling him to, Ning should be safe. Roet probably had no way of checking up on his work in the lab. He worked alone, with no oversight from anyone. Roet had not complained of any lack of progress on the so-called ‘Yellow Virus’ that he had ordered.
The Wuhan Mission Page 7