Act of War

by Brad Thor

“Do I think he’s telling me the truth?” said Tang. “I think he would tell me anything if he thought it would help. But, yeah, I think he’s telling me the truth.”

  “What about the nets? Those things are the size of football fields. We can see a lot of people coming and going, but what specifically are the buildings underneath them?”

  “Jin-Sang has not been allowed in that sector, but his sister has. According to her, they have built a small American downtown, complete with storefronts, a restaurant, those kinds of things.”

  “Why?”

  “For some reason, they think rural Americans are much more likely to survive the attack. They believe they will band together in small towns similar to what has been created here. Jin-Sang says the farmers may need to trade with them and may possibly recruit them as laborers. The town exists to teach them what they may encounter.”

  “What was his sister doing there? Was she a role-player?”

  Tang nodded. “A role-player who speaks Chinese and English.”

  “The father taught her?”

  Tang nodded again. “He saw it as a skill that could make her useful to the DPRK. Then they were arrested. He kept it up with her in the camp. Maybe it allowed them to secretly communicate, or maybe it just functioned as a way to hold on to something from their old life. It sounds like the father didn’t put much effort into teaching Jin-Sang. Only words and phrases he thought might be helpful if they ever escaped to China.”

  “What about the attack?” Fordyce asked. “Does the boy know anything about it at all?”

  “No, but he says his sister knows—a lot.”

  CHAPTER 27

  * * *

  * * *

  JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS

  FBI Special Agent Heidi Roe looked at the text that had just come across her BlackBerry. Unbelievable.

  Her partner saw her shaking her head. “What’s up?”

  “Our task force officer in Nashville says Tommy Wong never got off the plane.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I wish.”

  “What happened?”

  “I have no idea,” said Roe, “but I intend to find out. Are you good here if I duck out for a minute?”

  Her partner nodded and Special Agent Roe stepped out of the conference room they had been assigned. It felt good to stand up and stretch her legs. They had been at it nonstop since arriving from Los Angeles. The FBI had brought their best people in from all across the country. They were in Houston to conduct interviews and follow up every single lead in relation to six Muslim engineering students who had gone missing and were suspected of plotting a mass-casualty terrorist attack on the U.S.

  But just because the FBI had called for all hands on deck didn’t mean other cases could be allowed to lapse. Roe and her partner had already been working on breaking the LA arm of a Chinese transnational criminal organization involved in narcotics and child sex trafficking. After identifying the major players, they had focused on members further down the food chain. Their hope was to find cause to arrest one of them, and then offer immunity if that person would become an FBI mole within the organization. Tommy Wong was the man they wanted.

  They had placed Wong under loose surveillance and had been watching him for several months. They knew he was up to something. They just hadn’t been able to put their finger on what that something was. To do that, they’d need to devote a lot more manpower to the surveillance. Roe had run it up the flagpole at the LA field office only to be told that without something more substantive, no additional resources could be assigned at this time.

  It was a typical Catch-22. She knew the guy was dirty and her bosses knew he was dirty. He was too small a fish, though, to justify investing any more dollars in. But if they didn’t invest more, they wouldn’t get what they needed to roll him and move up the triad food chain. In her head, she understood the bureaucratic limits that she had to work under, but in her heart they still pissed her off. It was one of her biggest complaints about law enforcement. Cops and FBI agents had to operate by the rules. Bad guys were free to do whatever they wanted. Even with all the government’s tools for eavesdropping, tracking, and surveillance, the bad guys still kept coming up with ways to stay ahead of them.

  Roe, who had been an attorney before joining the FBI, understood the importance of law. Without it, freedom was impossible. She was amazed by how many Americans, when asked what kind of system of government the U.S. had, would answer, “Democracy.” America wasn’t a democracy. It was a republic, and that was because of one thing—the law.

  When each of her three kids started studying government in grade school, she made them watch a YouTube video called “The American Form of Government.” She wanted them to understand why America was different and why their mom had joined the FBI and worked a lot of late nights and weekends.

  The video began with Ben Franklin exiting the Constitutional Convention and being asked by a woman, “Sir, what have you given us?” Franklin’s response? “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”

  It then went on to describe the difference between a democracy and a republic. A democracy was where majority ruled. If a posse rode off after a horse thief, caught him, and voted fifteen to one to hang him, that was democracy. He would be hanged by the neck until dead.

  In a republic, though, the sheriff arrives and tells the posse that they can’t hang the alleged horse thief. He has to be returned to town where he will stand trial by a jury of his peers because that is what is dictated by law. In fact the word “republic” came from the Latin res publica, or the “public thing,” meaning the law.

  It took seeing the video for her kids to fully grasp that without law, there was chaos, and with too much law, there was tyranny. In order for the right balance to exist, the laws needed to be enforced and citizens needed to be vigilant stewards of the republic and strive to elect the most responsible leaders.

  What the video didn’t teach, and what she had tried to keep her young children shielded from, was the absolute evil that existed in the world. As an FBI agent she had seen horrors she hoped her children would never know about, much less experience. Man’s capacity for inhumanity was boundless.

  Roe had grown up in a solidly middle-class family with a mom, a dad, two siblings, and a cat, just outside Detroit. Her parents had taught her right from wrong and had encouraged her to become the best she could be. Their vision of the American dream was to see their children go farther in life than they had. Her parents had succeeded. Their daughter was happily married with a family of her own and she loved her job. When people screwed up, though, it made her angry.

  Wong’s purchase of a last-minute plane ticket to Nashville had immediately caught Roe’s attention. There had been no phone or email contact with anyone in Nashville, and as far as they knew, Wong didn’t have any friends or associates there either. It was completely out of character for him, which was why Roe and her partner had been so interested to see where he went and with whom he met. This could be the break they were looking for.

  Pulling up the phone number in Nashville, Roe hit Dial and raised the phone to her ear. Moments later a man’s voice answered on the other end.

  “Detective Hoffman,” the voice said.

  “Detective Hoffman, this is Special Agent Roe.”

  “So you got my text?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I got it, but I don’t understand it.”

  “What don’t you understand? Your guy didn’t get off the flight.”

  “You’re absolutely sure of that?”

  “Positive.”

  “You were there, right?”

  “I was there and your guy Tommy Wong wasn’t. Trust me.”

  “You had the picture I sent and everything?”

  Hoffman let out a condescending laugh. “Agent Roe, contrary to what a lot of folks might think, Nashville’s a pretty cosmopolitan place. We get our share of Asian visitors. If I had a plane full of them, it might have been
hard to spot your guy. This plane wasn’t full of them.”

  “Were there any?”

  “There were three—an old man in his seventies, a young girl in her twenties, and some middle-aged guy. There was no twenty-six-year-old matching the photo or description of Thomas ‘Tommy’ Wong. How positive are you that he got on the plane in the first place?”

  As progressive as the FBI was, Roe had come up through the ranks feeling that she had to work twice as hard to prove herself as any male agent. She had a chip on her shoulder, but it was a small one. It manifested itself only when she thought she wasn’t being treated with the proper respect. “I don’t know how the Nashville PD does things, Detective Hoffman, but I wouldn’t have asked you to be there if I didn’t know for certain that Tommy Wong was on that plane.”

  “Did you see him get on?”

  “No, but—”

  “So you don’t know for sure if Wong was on that plane, do you?”

  Technically, Hoffman was correct, but Roe trusted and respected her LAPD colleagues. It was the same respect she was trying to extend Hoffman as a member of the Bureau’s Nashville Organized Crime Task Force. Multiagency task forces were successful only if everyone did his job. She needed to win him over.

  “You’re right. My guys in LA might have screwed up,” she admitted. “Are you still at the airport?” she asked.

  “I’m on my way to the parking garage, why?”

  “I need a favor. I don’t like that your time was wasted. And I really don’t like that we’ve lost track of Wong.”

  “What do you want?” Hoffman asked.

  “How solid are your airport contacts?”

  “They’re not bad.”

  “Do you think you can get me a copy of the flight manifest and security camera footage of the passengers deplaning?”

  “Probably. What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to use it as Exhibit A when I rip my LA people a new one.”

  “You can’t do that without the footage or a manifest?”

  “I could,” Roe agreed. “But a picture is worth a thousand words. Besides, something doesn’t feel right about this whole thing. I don’t know what it is, but I want to see that footage for myself. Maybe there’ll be another face I recognize.”

  “Give me forty-five minutes and I’ll email you what I can. Okay?”

  Roe smiled. “Thank you, detective. I really appreciate it.”

  The minute they hung up, she called her LAPD colleague.

  Nancy Vargas answered on the third ring. “Vargas,” she said, rolling the r and pronouncing her last name with a Spanish accent, despite being a fourth-generation Angelino.

  “Nancy, it’s Heidi.”

  “Hey. How’s Houston?”

  “Cloudy with a big chance of pissed off. What happened with Tommy Wong?”

  “What do you mean?” Vargas asked.

  “What happened at LAX?”

  “Hold on a second. Let me find out.”

  Roe could tell that Vargas had taken the phone away from her ear and was holding it against her chest in order to mute her conversation. Though the sound was muffled, Roe could tell she was having a rather heated discussion with someone in her office.

  When she came back on the line, Vargas said, “My officers confirm that they tailed Wong all the way to the airport and one of them watched him go through the security checkpoint. What happened?”

  “What happened is that your people were supposed to confirm that Wong actually got on the plane.”

  “I know, but we’re shorthanded and they got called out on another case. We figured if he made it through security, everything was good.”

  “Apparently, everything is not good. Our team in Nashville says he never got off the plane.”

  “Shit,” Vargas replied. “He must have come back through after my officers left. I’m really sorry, Heidi.”

  Roe felt a migraine coming on.

  “You guys were right. Wong’s definitely up to something,” said Vargas. “That was a hell of a ruse just to slip surveillance.”

  “A hell of an expensive ruse,” Roe stated. “Why not just buy a cheap Southwest flight up to Oakland?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. In the meantime, you’re in Houston, we’re back in LA, and my guys dropped the ball. What can I do to fix this?”

  Roe was about to respond when her other line beeped. Pulling the phone away from her ear, she looked at the caller ID, then said, “Nancy, I’m going to have to call you back.”

  She didn’t wait for Vargas to respond. Clicking over to the other line she said, “Special Agent Roe.”

  A woman’s voice on the other end said, “Agent Roe, this is FBI headquarters in Washington. Please hold for the Director.”

  Moments later, FBI Director Erickson came on the line. “Agent Roe, this is Director Erickson.”

  Roe had met the Director only once, and then only long enough to shake his hand. She had never spoken with him personally. “Yes, Director,” she replied. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “You and your partner have been working on building the Tommy Wong case out of the LA field office?”

  Roe was stunned. Why would such a small-time case rise to the Director’s attention? And why now? She was tumbling all the pieces in her mind, trying to make them all fit. Walking quickly back to the conference-room door, she tapped on the glass to get her partner’s attention and wave him out into the hall.

  “Agent Roe?” the Director repeated.

  “Sorry, sir,” she replied. “Yes, we’re the ones who have been building the Tommy Wong case. May I ask why you’re interested, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you in person. We’re sending a plane for you now. In the meantime, I want to know everything you know about Wong.”

  “Does this mean we’re off the Al Ain Six search?”

  “No,” replied Erickson. “In fact, we think you may be able to help speed it up.”

  CHAPTER 28

  * * *

  * * *

  NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

  China had found its criminal organizations, particularly the triads, to be quite useful, especially as proxies abroad. No one had been more adept at leveraging them from an operational perspective than Cheng. They fulfilled a very important role within his U.S. network and he made sure they were well compensated—both financially and with favors back in China. They couldn’t move the kinds of drugs, weapons, and human cargo that they did without very powerful political figures agreeing to look the other way.

  Stepping off the plane in Nashville, Cheng wheeled his bag downstairs and purchased a shuttle ticket to the Opryland Resort and Convention Center. The buses departed at the top and bottom of each hour and took only twenty minutes to get to the hotel.

  When the shuttle arrived at the resort, Cheng’s fellow passengers walked inside, but he headed to the adjacent Opry Mills Mall. Built on the site of the former Opryland USA theme park, it was one of the largest shopping centers in the southeastern United States.

  Cheng moved in and out of stores and back and forth through crowds of people, careful to avoid security cameras whenever he could. Once he was convinced he wasn’t being followed, he ducked into a bathroom, changed clothes, put on a hat and sunglasses, and then exited the far end of the mall. He found the vehicle right where he had been told it had been left. Reaching behind the rear license plate, he removed the key fob and unlocked the doors.

  The Lincoln Navigator had been driven down from Chicago. Opening the lift gate, he found a small duffle bag inside. He placed his carry-on bag and briefcase in the cargo area, and after grabbing the duffle, closed the lift gate and walked around to the driver’s-side door.

  He climbed in and started the SUV. Looking around to make sure no one was close enough to see, he then unzipped the duffle bag sitting on his lap. Inside were a suppressor, a Smith & Wesson M&P9 pistol, two spare magazines, and a box of ammunition. Satisfied, he zipped the bag back up, placed it on the floo
r behind him, and headed for the highway.

  When he reached his hotel and checked in forty-five minutes later, the clerk handed him a FedEx box that had been delivered that morning. Cheng thanked the woman, accepted the box and his key card, and then headed up to his room where he locked the door and drew the drapes.

  While the weapon and car had come from Chicago, the FedEx package was from a different and unrelated asset in San Francisco. Inside were an envelope full of currency and three sterile cell phones. He knew better than to turn any of them on. As soon as he did, there would be a record of the phone touching the nearest cell tower. He didn’t plan on leaving any trails. There was a cord included and he plugged the first phone in to make sure that it was fully charged.

  As he did this with the second phone, he removed the envelope full of currency, counted the bills, and stacked them according to denomination. Out of all the tools intelligence operatives could wield, money was one of the most powerful.

  Removing the Smith & Wesson M&P9 from the duffle, he disassembled it and made sure all the parts were clean and properly lubricated before putting it back together.

  After plugging in the third cell phone to make sure it was topped off, he walked into the bedroom area to change his clothes.

  Putting on a pair of khakis, a short-sleeved dress shirt, and a tie, he then stood in front of the mirror and combed his hair in a different style. He slipped on a pair of glasses and reviewed his appearance. Not only did he not look menacing in any way, he appeared to be some sort of midlevel bureaucratic functionary, which was exactly what he wanted.

  Stepping over to the desk, he fired up his computer and refreshed himself with all of the details in Wazir Ibrahim’s file. Once satisfied that he had everything committed to memory, he gathered up his briefcase, turned on the TV, and left his hotel room, hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door as he did.

  Surveying the exits, he found one that led to a small smoking patio that wasn’t monitored with a CCTV camera. Stepping outside, Cheng hopped over a low fence and walked around the corner to where he had parked the Navigator.