After their long nap, Julia and Sam both observed an uncomfortable silence, not sure how to address what had transpired on the plane. Julia adjusted her watch to account for the 13-hour time difference as they sat quietly for the remaining 20 minutes of the flight. Julia had traveled fairly extensively around the world, mostly for work related “events,” but had not been to China. She was traveling on a tourist visa and was dressed casually in jeans and had packed to match the cause. She passed through customs without a hitch: typical tourist without a life-and-death agenda.
Upon exiting the Beijing Capital International Airport, Julia was greeted by a chilly wind incensed with pollution well known to the city’s residents and headlines worldwide. March blew in the tourist traffic as the colder months gave way to the milder temps, low humidity and a relatively dry period before the monsoon season in the summer. This played well for Julia’s cover as she blended in with the many foreign travelers arriving in the city.
As required to obtain her visa, Julia had booked her accommodations prior to leaving the U.S. She had picked a mid-level hotel in the Wangfujing area which was very popular with tourists due to its central location and proximity to some of the cultural sites of importance.
The only object Julia had brought that was not a typical tourist accoutrement was a satellite phone, which she now got out of her purse as her taxi negotiated the traffic toward her hotel. Similar in size to her iPhone, although much thicker and with an inch long antenna, this latest sat phone model was less strange looking than earlier versions which had gigantic antennae. It was still clearly not a normal phone, so she kept it below the window line to avoid notice. Pretty much everything in China was under surveillance, so communicating via local networks was risky. With the sat phone Julia could connect directly to U.S. satellites using end-to-end encryption that could not be broken.
Turning it on, she connected the phone to her agency email where there was a message waiting. It said “Start with Zhongnanhai” and included a map showing the location. She then switched over to a web browser and looked up Zhongnanhai. Searching the web via satellite was slower than terrestrial networks, and after a few seconds she got some good links indicating it was the central headquarters for the Communist Party of China and the State Council or Central government. This was where the president and other senior leaders worked on a daily basis, sort of the Chinese equivalent of the White House. Switching to an interactive map she found that it was next to the Forbidden City, which was within walking distance of her hotel, about 20 minutes or so by foot. The Forbidden City is a huge tourist attraction, so she had good reason to be right there in the area.
Perfect, almost too perfect, she was thinking. There was still some time in the day so she would drop her bag at the hotel and take a scouting walk to the area and formulate a plan.
With nothing left to do but wait for the taxi to reach the hotel, Julia looked out the window at the endless landscape of dense buildings. They had both been silent for a long time and Sam hazarded another apology.
“Julia, I am really really sorry for what I did on the plane. I clearly wasn’t thinking. I don’t know why I thought it was okay to dig through your personal memories. It was not. And I promise I will not do that again. I don’t want to do anything to hurt —”
“Sam, it’s okay,” Julia said cutting him off. “This is new territory for both of us. I knew the risks.”
Sam sensed some remaining distrust and worry which saddened him. “I don’t want you to feel threatened by me, Julia.”
“I’m not threatened!” Julia snapped back. Again that feeling of being a little out of control of her emotions washed over her. Now she felt she needed to apologize for some reason. “Look Sam, we all have things in our past that we want to forget about. Maybe that’s hard for you to understand in your unique situation. But if you respect my boundaries, I believe we can be very effective as a team.”
Julia was keeping her side of the discussion very professional. Sam felt as if they had lost something; the camaraderie that he had enjoyed with her previously was missing. He hoped in time it would return. But for now, he understood he needed to do exactly as she directed to try to earn her trust fully again.
“I understand and I will. Absolutely,” Sam said becoming quiet again as they returned their attention to the buildings passing by out the window.
Julia spent a few hours playing tourist at the Forbidden City and managed to identify that there were two main entrances into the walled enclosure of Zhongnanhai next door.
Per the information online, the primary entrance was on the south side of the compound where Julia positioned herself. She witnessed a number of chauffeured cars coming and going in the brief period she was able to watch without being conspicuous. There was not much foot traffic which made sense with the security concerns and the importance of the people involved. Ideally she would be able to make physical contact with someone exiting on foot, so she could follow them and initiate contact a distance away from the facility to stay anonymous.
Throughout the walk around the city she kept thinking back to the strange dream from the plane. On the way back to the hotel she broke the silence with Sam.
“Sam, do you dream? When your host sleeps,” Julia asked.
Sam perked up at the sound of her voice and the fact she was talking to him again. “Sometimes,” he said.
“Did you have a dream on the plane? About being in a battle or something?” She asked.
“You mean the one you have been thinking about all afternoon?” Sam said.
“Oh right. Still not used to you seeing all my thoughts. Yes. The dream seemed like I was experiencing something from your perspective…but it felt so real, I can’t stop thinking about it,” Julia said.
“It’s interesting that you experienced it also. I had a similar episode at the hospital when I was sedated. But I’m starting to think these aren’t dreams…”
“What do you mean? What else would they be?”
“I don’t know. I had assumed they were dreams but like you said it felt so real. The fact that you had a similar visceral reaction is making me think it is something…else…”
“Uhhh…I don’t like the sound of that Sam.” Sam could feel Julia’s anxiety kick in as she said this.
“You said your other experience happened when you were sedated. I took a sleeping pill—”
“Two sleeping pills,” Sam interjected.
“Right, TWO sleeping pills. But my point is, maybe the drugs created the enhanced dreams.”
“Is this the first time you have taken drugs?” Sam asked.
“No…”
“But it is the first time you have had a dream like that.”
“I guess. I don’t know. I don’t remember all my dreams.”
Sam could tell she was struggling to think of this as anything but a high intensity dream.
“I’m guessing if you had, you would have remembered it. Let’s face it, it was strange. Why else would we be talking about it?”
“I don’t know…”
They walked the rest of the way to the hotel in silence.
DAY 18
28
COMMANDER LI KUNG’S PULSE QUICKENED and his eyes widened like a child on Christmas morning. It happened every day when he clicked on the Potential Persons of Interest list; it fueled his passion for his work and had proven his value to his superiors. Today he quickly narrowed his excitement to a single person: a woman.
Li sat at his desk in one of the main buildings at 6:00 am per his usual schedule. The printed summary of the daily external threat reports, from his system of managing potential threats to Zhongnanhai and the president, were stacked neatly on his desk awaiting his arrival. Duplicate copies were on the President’s desk. The hardcopies were created for the President’s benefit and Li ignored them as he logged into his computer to access the system and data behind the reports.
Li assumed everything and everyone was a threat until proven otherwise
. This was the only way Li could be confident that all bases were covered and opportunities for threats to prevail were eliminated. Li relied heavily on the latest technology and computing power to analyze the immense of amount data required to operate in this fashion, which would not have been possible even five years ago.
Li started by clicking on the Day One Identifier log which consisted of the pictures, names, and all initial known data of anyone who had been in sight of Zhongnanhai the day before. There were many people on the list due to the popular Forbidden City tourist attraction next door and the allure of Zhongnanhai itself, not to mention the multitudes of locals going about their business.
The system could parse the individuals by innumerable data points, but Li found it simplest to initially sort them by: Known Verified, Unknown Verified, and Potential Persons of Interest.
Known Verified were people the system had on file and could reliably trace back to birth, by far the majority of daily individuals. These people were statistically verified to not pose a threat, and as usual Li did not waste time on this list and skipped over it.
Unknown Verified, included people who were not in the system (but now were), and who could be reliably traced back to their birth. The system cross-referenced all the available data for each person including social media, work history, family history, travel history, and bank transactions in order to determine their risk probability. The system was not confined to China data bases and found ways into most countries’ supposedly secure information troves. If people made this list, they were Verified low or no risk to the State and its interests. Li also ignored this list.
The Potential Persons of Interest list was the exciting list. These could be people with Verified status who had done something to raise their statistical risk level. Or, Li’s favorite, they were Unknowns who could not be Verified as statistically low risk and needed to be investigated as potential threats. Incredibly, the system’s massive global reach and infiltration capabilities had the power to reduce the 40,000 daily visitors in and around The Forbidden City and Zhongnanhai to a manageable list of 50 or so Potential Persons of Interest.
Li’s team began investigating the people on this list at 5:00 am each morning and whittled it down to fewer than 10 by the time he arrived at 6:00. Anyone the team couldn’t reliably take off the list through their research was left for Li’s review. This morning the list included 33 Potential Persons of Interest. Li saw that his team had already analyzed 29 of the people and determined they were not threats, moving them to one of the other lower risk lists. Four individuals remained, three of whom Li could see were still being researched by his team, leaving one which they could not reliably eliminate and had marked for his review. The person’s name was Elizabeth Parker, and Li smiled with anticipation.
Li clicked on Elizabeth’s name and a new screen of detailed information came up. From the point at which she had been close enough to Zhongnanhai for any of its cameras to initially see her, she was tagged in the system, her data gathered and activities actively tracked. It was up to Li to determine whether the anomalies were benign and move her to a low risk category or elevate her to an actual Person of Interest.
Facial recognition software, with the help of China’s powerful computing facilities, had crunched the available data around the world and matched Elizabeth’s face with a number of other names. This suggested either software errors or someone deserving of Li’s attention. Until proven otherwise, it would be the latter. Li clicked on the screen to make her a “Person of Interest.” This put a number of things in motion, including full time camera tracking, initiation of more in-depth background research, and specific notifications if she were to come within 100 yards of any ZG personnel. Li then opened the map which overlaid the path of her aggregate camera encounters, showing her moving from the front of the Forbidden City to the street between it and Zhongnanhai’s eastern wall. Elizabeth had walked north along some of the streets between the two landmarks. Li pulled up some of the footage from cameras along the way and didn't see anything overly unusual about her behavior. She walked all the way to end of the Zhongnanhai wall enclosure and then turned around and came back, eventually entering the Forbidden city and then meandering back to her hotel, which Li could see was in the popular tourist district of Wangfujing.
Next Li pulled up the photos purported to be her face but connected with other names. Not all of the photos had good resolution, but of the ones that did, Li indeed saw a resemblance to Elizabeth Parker. Interesting, he thought, and decided he would need to dig further.
Li assigned one of his team to the research task that the system had cued up when she was identified as a Person of Interest. Part of the background research was to identify any relatives of the target, which could sometimes trigger facial recognition false positives, especially in the obvious case of twins.
29
JULIA AWOKE TO HER ALARM, briefly disoriented, not remembering where she was. It was 10 am and she had given herself a little extra sleep to help with the jet lag. She threw on the clothes she had laid out the night before, noted the sunny weather through the window, and grabbed her sunglasses and a scarf for her neck. Then she headed out for something to eat and a little touristing to keep her cover before going back to ZG to find their mark.
Wandering through the nearby shops and street stalls she bought a sun hat and put it on with her sunglasses and scarf. It felt like it was in the 60’s. The sun was shining and this would be a good change of look from the previous day. Stopping at a fruit stand for breakfast, she selected some fruits she recognized, some she didn’t, and started eating as she walked along, meandering back toward ZG and the Forbidden City. The only nice thing about jet lag was that when you awoke you were wide awake so she skipped the coffee; it would be later in the evening when she would have trouble staying awake.
Sam hung back in Julia’s mind, continuing to allow her some space and rode along silently, enjoying their new experiences from a distance.
One of the unknown fruits was so delicious that Julia stopped at the next fruit stall to buy another. The second fruit lady looked at the white meat with embedded little black seeds and said “dragon fruit” in a heavy accent, and smiling sold her two more.
Julia had timed her arrival at the Forbidden City for 11:30, and she strolled slowly toward the south entrance of ZG, continuing to eat her fruit. When the main entrance came into view, she again saw various official cars coming and going, and as she had hoped, there were a couple of people leaving on foot. They looked to be security personnel, who she assumed were stepping out for lunch.
“Sam, one of these security officers will be your ride into the compound.”
“Okay, how will we pick one?” Sam asked, glad to be talking with Julia again.
“The safest bet is someone who is going out for lunch, since they will probably return right after they are done eating. So you don’t have to take full control and reveal yourself until you want to.”
Julia stood across the street from the South Gate amidst a few tourists taking pictures of the ancient entrance, and held up her phone blindly taking pictures while tracking one of the security men who had just walked out. He crossed to her side of the street and headed around the far corner.
“He looks hungry to me,” Julia said, a bit of her old humor returning.
She reviewed her pictures, which were surprisingly pretty good, and nonchalantly continued in the same direction as the man, following him around the corner.
Julia kept a 75-foot distance for a couple of blocks until she saw him enter a little open air noodle shop. She entered and found a seat where she could observe her new friend. There was a tarp roof over the 20 or so tables, with open coal braziers on the floor throughout, which she almost stepped on. An older woman came over with a Chinese menu and took her order of noodles and something, by pointing to a dish that was on a neighboring table. The order was shouted to an even older man, who might be her husband judging by how they yelled at each
other, operating two large woks. Although it seemed like everybody here kind of yelled at each other, so who could say.
Julia paid her bill right away to be ready to continue her pursuit and did her best to slurp up her surprisingly tasty noodles the same way everyone else was doing.
“Be ready Sam. We’re going to make our move at the next opportunity.”
“I’m ready,” Sam said, and integrated fully to engage with all of Julia’s senses and the telltale energy signature when they were in range of their quarry.
Their mark was a quick and efficient eater, and Julia had to leave some of her noodles uneaten. The restaurant was defined by the boundaries of the overhead tarp. Without any walls there were a number of directions the mark could leave the restaurant, but as she had anticipated, he picked the easiest route, which passed by her table. As he neared she made a fuss of fumbling her hat which was on the table, and stood up abruptly to catch it, at which point she managed to bump into her man and the Slip was away.
“Oh excuse me, I’m sorry,” she said to the mark, who returned a tense look, a tiny bow and a slight hand wave, the global sign for no problem, as he continued on his way back toward ZG.
Julia put herself back together and headed toward her hotel. She felt completely drained once Sam had departed. Julia compartmentalized the various facets of her life and naturally avoided connecting with people, feeling most comfortable on her own. Sam’s constant presence in her every thought for the past few days had taxed her more than she had realized. Julia was excited that the mission was underway. A few hours alone was exactly what she needed to recharge for the next phase.
The Slip Page 10