by J. G. Sandom
There. Right below the edge of the roof. Just a few feet above the letter L in Shanghai Hotel.
Decker took a couple of breaths and, upon the exhale, took aim and fired.
There was a sharp thwap as the bolt shot out of the crossbow, arched high in the air, and buried itself in the parapet of the Hotel Shanghai almost sixty feet distant. Decker pulled on the line and secured it to a brace which he bolted to the roof. Then he slipped on a pulley and attached it by steel carabineer to his harness. The line was certified to carry up to three hundred pounds, yet it was thin as a straw. Decker took a deep breath. He looked over at Seiden and said, “I guess this is it. Look, I...I just wanted to—”
“You can thank me when you’re home, safe and sound.”
Decker smiled and shifted onto his back. Slowly but surely, he lowered himself to the surface of the roof until the line held his weight. Then, carefully, he wrapped his gloved hands round the line, swung his feet up, and pulled himself out over the edge of the building.
For a moment, the line seemed to give. Decker felt himself fall. His feet slipped from the cable and his hands chafed as he slid backwards away from the building and down toward the street.
Then the line tensed and he came to a halt.
Don’t look down, Decker said to himself. He could feel the harness cut into the flesh of his thighs, around the back of his arms. Don’t look down. But he did.
He was dangling now, all his weight on his harness and hands. Far below, cars and scooters whipped by. With great difficulty, Decker swung his feet up and over the line until he was stable again. Then he started to pull himself forward, hand over hand down the line.
For years, Decker had suffered from an aversion to heights. For eight years and two months, to be precise, he recalled, ever since watching his partner Bartolo fall to his death. Before that, heights had never really affected him. He’d even done a fair amount of rock climbing in college. Then, they had chased those three suspects in the early stages of the El Aqrab incident, across those rooftops in Long Island City, New York, and Bartolo had slipped at the last moment on the glistening parapet, as he was jumping from one building to the next. He had fallen just short, and the lip of the next building had caught him full on the chest with a loud thump and knocked the wind out of him.
Decker could still see him, even now, to this day—the way he had struggled and kicked and waved about in the air. As if it were yesterday. “Help me,” his partner had screamed. “Help.” But Decker had not been able to save him.
“Stop it,” he said to himself, looking down at the street. Stop thinking. React. He dragged himself forward.
When he finally arrived at the other end of the line, it took him several minutes to secure a good handhold on the edge of the roof and to haul himself upward and over the parapet. The place seemed deserted. But there were too many air conditioning units, brick walls and chimneys to see very far. He unfastened himself from the harness and started to make his way carefully across the roof of the Shanghai Hotel.
He was more than halfway across, threading his way through a labyrinth of chimney pots, when he caught his first glimpse of the guard. The soldier was standing near the edge of the roof, about twenty yards away, smoking a cigarette. His silhouette was outlined against the nightscape of the city and sky. He was oblivious, with not a care in the world. There was a rail hub on the far side of the Shanghai, and beyond that a few blocks of low buildings, mostly brick, before the glimmering high-rises on the bank of the river.
The soldier may have been guarding a North Korean installation, but he was dressed in PLA Chinese green. Decker could make out the telltale red collar as he puffed on his cigarette. For a moment, he turned in Decker’s direction.
Decker froze. Has he seen me? he wondered. He pressed himself to the chimney pots, trying hard not to breathe. The hackles rose up on his neck.
Then, the guard turned away. He took another drag off his cigarette and continued to stare at the glimmering city.
Don’t think, Decker said to himself. Don’t think...except about those shiny black burns baked into her thighs and her arms, like the carapace of a beetle. Think of Becca.
A moment later, he found himself sprinting across the last few yards of the roof. The guard turned just in time to feel a hand on his forehead, another on his neck. Decker twisted, there was a bone-grinding snap, and the soldier slumped to the ground. It was over in seconds.
Decker squatted beside him. He was only a boy, barely twenty. And, now, he would never grow a single day older.
Decker slipped off his backpack and pulled out a new line. Moments later, he’d secured it to a pipe near the edge of the roof. With his heart in his mouth, he peered over the lip of the parapet.
The Unit 110 team was bivouacked on the top four floors of the hotel. The top floor, the eighteenth, was where they kept most of the servers and where the hardware specialists worked, according to the latest Mossad intel. The seventeenth and sixteenth floors housed the analysts. And the fifteenth featured meeting rooms and security.
Decker lowered the rope carefully over the edge of the roof. Fearing security leaks from within the hotel, a nominally public location, the new fiber-optic cables had been strung up on the outside of the building. They would eventually be housed within a reinforced PVC casing. But, as they were still adding new lines, the cables around the top two floors had yet to be covered. He could see the black mass snaking out of the building only a few yards away. They were exactly where Seiden had said they would be.
Decker stared down at the blackness below. He must have been at least two hundred feet off the ground yet he couldn’t make out the bottom, despite the ambient light. It was simply too dark off the train yard. All the better, he thought.
Without pausing to reconsider, Decker connected an ascender, hooked his harness to the line, and lowered himself over the edge. Moments later, he was dangling in free space.
There! A rat’s nest of cables sprouted out of the building.
Decker tried to grab them but they were just out of reach. He needed to lower himself further so he could swing in underneath the edge of the roof and get at the cables, but he was afraid that if he slid down too far, someone might spot him from one of the windows. The eighteenth floor was only a few feet below him. Already his feet might be visible if someone were to walk by and look up.
With great care, Decker lowered himself further, inch by inch. He started to pendulum back and forth on the line until, with a grunt, he managed to snag the outermost cable with the very tips of his fingers. He pulled himself into the building. Then, holding on with one hand, he reached into his chest pouch and removed the transponder.
As he worked to affix it, Decker thought about the dead guard on the roof. He could still see his face, the bald look of surprise in his eyes. What else was he going to have to do to silence that nagging voice in his head? And he wondered again, for the ten thousandth time, what the hell was he doing there? Why had he really come to Dandong? Was he justified in thinking there was a mole at the Center? Is that why he had gone rogue, staged this mission? Was he indeed being framed, or was he simply afraid that he knew who the mole really was?
Eight years earlier, Decker had spent time as El Aqrab’s prisoner. Who knows what the Islamist extremist had done to him. Perhaps El Aqrab had programmed him somehow, embedded a post-hypnotic suggestion in his psyche, turned him into some kind of sleeper agent—like The Manchurian Candidate.
Occam’s Razor, thought Decker. The simplest explanation was usually the correct one. Perhaps his had been the only terminal compromised at the NCTC because he was the mole.
And, try as he might, he couldn’t set aside the memory of what Ali Hammel had told him just before bombing his house, when Decker had asked him how he had gotten the number to the secure phone at the Center: “You gave it to me. Don’t you remember? On La Palma.”
But that was ridiculous. Decker hadn’t even been working at the Center at the time. Then what
had he meant by that?
All those times over the last few years, those bewildering incidents when Decker had sort of blacked out, fallen into a fugue state, only to wake hours later unsure of his whereabouts and uncertain of what he had done.
Who was he? What was he becoming? Who had he already become?
The rope suddenly loosened. Decker swung out through the night, started falling, only to come to a sudden sharp stop. The harness dug into his shoulders and crotch. He’d dropped nearly ten feet. Then Decker saw him, a soldier, staring down over the lip of the building.
He was untying the line!
The second soldier, thought Decker, as his hand reached for his gun. Where the hell had he come from?
But before Decker could pull out his weapon, the soldier seemed to rise up on the tips of his toes. He shivered and shook, then tumbled to the roof out of sight.
Seiden was standing behind him, a knife in his hand. He waved crisply at Decker, stepped back, and was gone.
You’re on your own, Decker thought with a smile. He looked up at the cables. The transponder was still fixed to the black plastic mass. It was still safely transmitting. Time to go.
He reached for the ascender and began to haul himself back up the rope. His whole lower body was illuminated now, exposed to the window. Frantically, inch by inch, he climbed up the line. He had almost vanished back into the darkness when a shadow slipped past the glass.
Decker froze. Another soldier. And he was standing right there in the window.
For a moment the soldier seemed to hesitate, unsure, perhaps, of what to make of the oddly shaped object dangling down from the heavens, when his brain finally made sense of the image. He unslung his QBZ-95. And then, as if in slow motion, Decker saw the progression.
Legs. And a pair of black boots. What the...
The gun barrel rose painfully slowly. Decker reached for the Glock 19C on his hip, pulled it out. The soldier took a step backward. He swung the assault rifle round, when he suddenly stopped.
Decker leveled his weapon, he aimed, but the soldier simply stood there, unmoving. Then, like a puppet whose strings have been severed, he simply dropped to the floor.
Decker continued to look down his gun sight. The soldier didn’t move. He lay motionless in a heap.
After a moment, Decker holstered his Glock. He started to pendulum his body back toward the window, trying to get a better view of the room. With an effort, he managed to latch onto the cables again. He pulled himself closer.
The soldier wasn’t moving for a very good reason. He was dead. Decker could see that now. There was a hole in the side of his head. Beside him, Decker could also see the hand of another man. Another soldier. He was lying there motionless too.
Ten minutes. That’s what Seiden had said. He should just climb up that line and cross back to the Hualian Department Store roof. That’s what he should do. But Decker couldn’t seem to tear himself away from the window.
Seiden hadn’t shot those two soldiers. Not through the roof. Then who had?
Decker lowered himself carefully to the window. He could see the two soldiers clearly now. The second one was shot in the neck. The window was an old-fashioned affair, with a wooden frame, and it took Decker no time at all to jimmy it open. He sat on the windowsill and swung his legs through the opening, down into the room. There was no one about, except for the two men on the floor. The room was packed full of routers and servers, linked together by cobwebs of colorful cables. Decker unclipped his harness and pulled out his gun. He made his way toward the door. The corridor was eerily empty. He took a couple of deep breaths to settle his heart and started to move down the hallway.
It was the same everywhere. Each room he passed was littered with corpses. Most of the dead soldiers were curled up on their cots. Others were slumped over rows of PCs. A few simply lay on the floor. They’d all been shot at close range.
Decker passed by another doorway when he glimpsed something move at the rear of the room. He dropped to his knee, lifted his weapon...when he saw who it was.
Emily!
Decker lowered his gun. He entered the room. His dead wife was sitting at the end of a table, a hole in her forehead, her hair matted with blood. She was wearing a Chinese military uniform, Decker noticed, khaki green with those crimson diamond-shaped swatches on each collar. She stared at him with a pained look in her eyes, raised a hand and pointed behind him. “Get out,” she said voicelessly, mouthing the words, until blood bubbled up over her lips.
Decker turned toward the door. Someone was moving outside in the corridor. Someone was running nearby; he could hear him. Whoever it was, he was right there, only a few yards away. Decker glanced back at Emily but his dead wife was gone, replaced at the end of the table by a young Chinese man with the same neat little hole in his forehead.
Decker lifted the Glock 19C to his face and took another deep breath. Get a hold of yourself. He peeked round the corner, then ducked back.
A man. Dressed in black. A white man with blond hair. He was fiddling with some sort of panel. No. Not a panel. Decker replayed the image again in his mind. Some kind of device affixed to the wall of the corridor. His back was to Decker.
Decker lifted his gun, aimed and stepped through the doorway.
The man was staring right at him. He’d already turned, and their eyes locked for an instant—long enough for Decker to take in the bright sky-blue eyes, the blond hair, more white than pure blond, plus that scar on his cheek. Decker almost fired when his attention was distracted by a blinking light on the wall.
On that panel. A timer. Pressed to a wad of C4.
A bomb!
The man smiled, raised his gun, but before he could fire, the wall by his head came apart like a seam in a shower of gunfire.
A Chinese soldier appeared down the hallway, his assault rifle stuttering.
The blond man leapt through a doorway. Then he popped out again, aimed and fired.
Decker glanced at the panel, at the red LED counting off, and without waiting to see the result of the firefight, took off down the corridor. Within seconds, he’d passed by the rooms full of corpses and was poised by the open window again.
The gunfire had stopped now, replaced by a shrieking alarm. Decker didn’t even bother to clip on his harness. He threw himself onto the line and began shimmying down as fast as he could—when the first of the charges went off.
Decker was blown through the air on the edge of the blast. Fire poured from the window. He swung out through the night, barely holding on to the line, and then back again as a second explosion ripped through the building.
The top of the Shanghai Hotel seemed to lift itself off the foundation as all the windows on the top floors shattered in a great ball of fire. Decker sailed down the line, hands burning, in a shower of glistening glass.
He hit the ground hard, with a terrible thud. For a moment, he couldn’t move. The wind had been knocked from his chest. Above him, he could see the bright ring of fire rolling back on itself, followed by a luminous cloud of gray smoke, and then pieces of burning debris began to rain down from the heavens.
He rolled out of the way just in time as a chunk of smoking black masonry crushed the earth by his head.
Car alarms wailed. People screamed.
Decker leapt to his feet. He looked down the tracks and took off at a run, disappearing into the heart of the night.
CHAPTER 19
Wednesday, December 11
“What the hell were you thinking?” said Associate Director Ed Hellard as he paced back and forth in his office. He glared down at Decker, started to say something, and then squeezed in behind his desk once again. With a sigh, he settled into his chair, leaned forward and dropped his head in his hands.
The desk was a sinuous affair, hand-crafted, of Swedish design, with a large kidney-shaped top made of maple. Far too large for this office, thought Decker. But, as Hellard had confided to him at the Christmas party two years earlier, after several glasses of
cognac, it had been acquired with the next office in mind.
Decker was sitting in an uncomfortable metal seat immediately in front of the desk. He stared at the desktop, at the reading lamp with the smoky green glass, at the stapler and Scotch tape dispenser, the chrome calculator, trying to figure out if he should answer or not.
“I’ve tried everything with you, Decker,” Hellard continued. “I’ve tried teaming you up with different agents. McCullough seems to be the only one who can stand you. I’ve tried giving you room, letting you pursue some of your crazy experiments, but you only seem to become more isolated and—”
“My last crazy experiment helped us uncover the Westlake Defense Systems breach,” Decker said.
“And stop interrupting me. Jesus Christ, Decker. Don’t you ever learn? Can’t you just sit there and be quiet for five minutes? Do you know how to do that?”
Decker continued to stare at the calculator.
“And then I find out that you’re not going to therapy, as ordered. Worse, you’re falsifying reports from the therapist and inserting them into your own personnel files.” He rolled his basset-hound eyes. “And don’t think I don’t know who helped you with that one. I’ve already called NSA to make sure that crazy Russian is censured.”
“Ivanov had nothing to do with it,” Decker said.
“So, you admit it! Do you have any idea what kind of shit storm you’ve started over at State? They’ve been trying to pressure Pyongyang to come back to six-party talks for years now. Relations between the North and the South were already going to hell since the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong? Do you think your little stunt helped? Kim Johng-un is furious. Folks are saying this never would have happened under his father’s regime. And now, thanks to you, the Chinese are threatening to back out of the Administration’s new trade deal. Of course, we’re disavowing any involvement. But they’re livid, making all kinds of allegations and threats. If you’d been caught—”