by Brad Thor
Like a butcher’s knife going through a piece of birthday cake, it moved through the soft tissue without any resistance. It wasn’t the first time Tang had done this.
The trick was sliding the blade in just above the base of the neck behind the Adam’s apple, between the trachea and the esophagus. If you hit vertebra, you had done it wrong. Bone would stop even the sharpest of knives.
But Tang didn’t hit bone. He had done it correctly. With practiced precision, he rolled his wrist, sending the entire blade out the front of the officer’s throat like a fillet knife.
The man clutched and gurgled as blood sprayed from his severed carotids. With his trachea transected, his lungs began to fill with blood. There was blood everywhere, except where the man needed it most—going to his brain. Within seconds, he was dead. Billy Tang now had to move as fast as he could.
Returning to Hana, he stepped behind the sheet to find that she had expired. He tried to console himself with the thought that at least Jin-Sang would make it, but the entire team had a lot of ground to cover before they could consider themselves safe. Retrieving his pistol from beneath her blanket, he reached over and closed her eyelids. She had finally escaped the camp.
With the canvas bag over his shoulder, he kept his weapon hidden and headed for the front door. He stopped only long enough to take a picture of the Chinese officer and tear the unit patch off his uniform. Closing the exam room door, he used his picks to lock it, and then broke them off in the lock to make it harder to open in the morning.
He slipped the remaining lockpick tools back into his bag and then stood at the front door listening. He heard nothing from outside. Careful to lift the door so as not to groan the hinges, he opened it just wide enough to exit and then pulled it soundlessly shut behind him.
Tang retraced his footsteps, making sure to duck below the window line, and stopped at the rear of the building. Taking one last look around, he counted to three, and bolted for the fence.
CHAPTER 46
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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Cheng didn’t need to see the explosion at the Nashville storage facility to know that it would be seen and heard for miles. Hidden in the cardboard boxes were two large cylinders of hydrogen. They would create an incredible blast and better still, an incredible mess.
He had always believed that if you were going to make a mess, you should make the biggest mess possible. The more the authorities had to sift through, the longer it would take them to figure out what had happened. Anything that gave him more time was good. There was a lot of unfinished business yet to be done.
The first thing on his list was to get rid of the Navigator. The police would be looking for it.
The safest and fastest thing for him to do was to steal a vehicle from a long-term parking lot. He hoped that by the time anyone knew a car had been stolen, he would have already abandoned it and moved on to something else. He headed for Nashville International where he located an older Toyota Corolla and went to work on it.
Once he had it started, he transferred his belongings into the trunk and exited the lot. Steering onto the highway, he plotted a course north for Kentucky. After Louisville, he picked up I-71, which would take him north toward Cincinnati and from there, Columbus.
He knew driving late at night was dangerous. With fewer cars on the road, the odds of being pulled over for a minor or even nonexistent traffic violation increased exponentially. Nevertheless, he chose to push through. He wanted to have mapped out his target and to be there when their doors opened in the morning. He also needed to send an update to Beijing. If he could also squeeze in even half an hour of sleep, he would be better able to focus on everything he needed to achieve.
He arrived in Columbus shortly before dawn. Using the last of his sterile cell phones, he called a Chinese asset named Wei Yin and gave him a code word. When he arrived at Yin’s home in Dublin, a suburb just outside Columbus, the paunchy, middle-aged Ph.D. with glasses and thinning hair was waiting for him. He was sitting in a darkened downstairs window. As Cheng pulled into the driveway, Yin pressed the garage remote, the door opened, and Cheng drove in. Yin then pressed the button again and closed the door behind him.
They said few words. They were not friends. Theirs was purely a business relationship.
Yin was rusty and uncomfortable. He had not provided sanctuary for a Chinese operative in twenty years. His primary function in the United States was espionage. As a research fellow at the Battelle Memorial Institute, a leading science and technology development company, he had access to a wide array of sensitive and important American projects.
Forgetful of what the specific protocol was, Dr. Yin fell back on his upbringing. He offered his visitor tea and something to eat. Cheng accepted both.
As the doctor cooked a traditional Chinese breakfast, he used Yin’s computer to “link surf” the Web. He knew how the NSA’s sophisticated algorithms worked and he was careful not to conduct key word searches about what had transpired in Nashville that might be picked up and flagged. He merely clicked from one link to another, trying to zero in on what he wanted.
From what he could tell, the authorities didn’t appear to know who was behind the death of the police officer or the storage facility fire. That, or they weren’t making anything public.
There was also no mention of the murder of Wazir Ibrahim or Mirsab, the engineering student assigned to the Nashville cell. While that was a good sign, he was wise enough to know that just because the information was not in the press didn’t mean the authorities were unaware. He would have to proceed with an abundance of caution. Disguising himself wouldn’t be a bad idea either, especially considering everything that had happened in Nashville.
He knew the CCTV system had been taken offline, so there would be no record of his having been there, but the officer’s behavior still bothered him. It was too aggressive, almost as if he suspected something bad was happening. Perhaps Cheng was making too much of it, but he didn’t think so. He was worried that somewhere, dots were being connected.
After breakfast, Yin asked what else the visitor needed. Cheng wanted to lie down for a few minutes, then to shower and change. There had been no time to return to the hotel in Nashville for his belongings. Not that it mattered. There was nothing in the room, nor in his suitcase, that was incriminating. He planned to contact the hotel, check out over the phone, and have them FedEx the bag to the poultry plant in Nebraska. Then, all he would need was a new vehicle. That was where Yin had come in.
Cheng was to collect the princelings and transport them to the Second Department’s asset known as Medusa. To do that, he was going to need an appropriate vehicle. He wanted a low-key minivan, preferably white or silver, with tinted windows. He would be covering a lot of ground over the next thirty-six hours and the vehicle had to be completely reliable.
After Cheng had showered and changed into the clothes Yin provided, the research scientist drove his visitor past multiple Columbus used car lots until the man identified the vehicle he wanted. When the lot opened forty-five minutes later, they test-drove it, and Yin bought and registered the van using one of the false identities and the cash he maintained in case of emergency. Cheng instructed him to submit a request to the Second Department for reimbursement.
More an academic than a field operative, the mild-mannered Yin had been anxious to be rid of his surprise guest the moment he had arrived. After the van had been purchased, his visitor told him he would be responsible for disposing of the stolen Toyota sitting in his garage. Yin wasn’t looking forward to driving it to a bad part of town and leaving it running, in hopes that someone else would steal it, but if that’s what was required of him, that was what he would do. Anything to hurry the visitor on his way. This was more intrigue than Yin cared for and he would be glad to put it all behind him.
Cheng, though, had demanded one more thing. It was eleven hours from Columbus to Boston, and he expected Yin to do the driving.
Cheng was not happy to have been sent to collect the PSC’s precious little princelings. He had never met a single one of them who wasn’t spoiled and arrogant, but those were his orders. He would do as he had been commanded. It was exactly what he had told Yin when the man tried to make excuses about why he couldn’t drive him to Boston.
Cheng had been quite terse. His stress levels were mounting. There would be multiple radiological sensors along the East Coast. Allegedly, the shielding for the device he was carrying was 100 percent effective. The technology had been developed by the Americans, and stolen by the Chinese, to protect spacecraft from radiation. Colonel Shi had attempted to reassure him that they never would have been able to get the devices into the United States in the first place, much less keep them hidden, if the containers were not perfectly suited to their task.
It was easy for Shi to downplay his concerns. He was safely ensconced back at the Second Department in Beijing. He didn’t have to drive around with the device in his trunk.
They had driven cautiously, but not overly so. Yin had set the minivan’s cruise control appropriately and they stopped only for gas or to use a rest-area bathroom.
Despite his fatigue, it had been difficult for Cheng to fall asleep. His mind kept running through all of the things he had to do and how he would have to handle any contingencies. It was only through sheer force of will that he finally silenced his thoughts and was able to get some sleep.
When they arrived in Boston, Cheng asked Yin to conduct a few errands for him and then he let him go. He had kept him in the dark on everything, except the destination. Yin had no idea why he was in the United States, why he needed the minivan, what was in the large, hard-sided case, or what he was doing in Boston. It was better that way for both of them.
Cheng had encouraged him to pay cash for a bus ticket, return to Columbus, and forget everything that had transpired since his phone had first rung. He watched Yin get in a cab and disappear.
Once he was gone, Cheng got back in the minivan and headed for Boston’s South End. After finding a parking spot, he climbed into the back and, using the bicycle locks Yin had purchased, secured the device to the tie-down eyelets in the cargo area.
He packed his laptop and the other items he didn’t want to risk leaving behind in the backpack he’d had Yin pick up and stepped out of the minivan.
Locking the doors and turning on the alarm, he put the hood of his sweatshirt up, threw the backpack over one shoulder, and walked toward Chinatown.
CHAPTER 47
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NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
It’s called Unit 61398,” said Nicholas as he sat back from his computer screen and rubbed his eyes. “It’s one of the PLA’s best hacking groups. They’re based out of Shanghai.”
“You’re sure?” Harvath asked.
“As sure as I can be without tipping them off that we’re on their trail.”
Harvath leaned back in his chair. They were all exhausted and had caught only bits of sleep here and there. With the Chinese engaging in such risky behavior and the speed with which things were escalating, everyone was convinced the cells had likely gone operational, and whatever the attack was, it was imminent. If they didn’t catch a break soon, it was going to be game over. Nicholas’s finding was not what Harvath had been hoping for.
What Harvath wanted was a path to the handler—the person who had been watching the engineering students’ Facebook accounts from somewhere in Idaho. He had hoped that it would be the same person who had hacked the CCTV system and keypad log from the self-storage facility. That would have been a nice way to tie the strings together, but now he realized why it had been a foolish hope.
One person could never watch one storage facility around the clock, much less six. If, of course, that’s what was going on. Had Harvath had the resources the Chinese did, it was how he would have set things up. The Chinese had a billion people. They could easily afford the manpower to watch the hacked storage facility feeds and make sure that nobody was tampering with their units. He also had no doubt that their hackers could bump systems offline and erase any evidence that one of their operatives had been someplace. It made a lot of sense. It also made him think of something else.
“If the FBI is able to track down other storage facilities, how are they going to get close enough to the actual units without the PLA being able to see what they’re up to?” he asked.
Nicholas thought about that for a moment. “I suppose we could do the same thing right back at them and knock the cameras offline.”
Harvath shook his head. “Maybe that’d be plausible for one location, but anything more than that and they’d get suspicious pretty fast.”
“But suppose we’re right. Suppose that’s where they’re hiding whatever it is they plan to use in the attack. What do we care at that point?”
“That’s a big supposition. Suppose it’s wrong. Suppose that’s only where one piece is. Suppose it’s a piece they can replace from somewhere else.”
Nicholas nodded. “Good point.”
“What about looping the footage?”
“You’d need clean footage for the interior cameras.”
“Meaning?” Harvath asked.
“Meaning they’d have to be looking at something static. There couldn’t be cars and things like that going past in the background. If they notice the same car or bicycle go by twice, that’s it.”
“But it could be done.”
“Anything’s possible,” said Nicholas, “but how do you transition from a live picture to a looped one without somebody noticing?”
“You interrupt the signal somehow. Turn it off and then turn it back on.”
“You want to hit their headquarters in Shanghai? That’d be one heck of an operation. It would take months to plan.”
“Who says we have to hit them there?” replied Harvath. “It’s like two cans and a string; we just clip it at our end. But I don’t think it could just be the CCTV feeds in question. It would have to be a whole bunch of stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that it dwarfs our stuff.”
“Are you talking about turning the Internet off?”
“We don’t have to turn it off. We just jiggle the switch. Can that be done?”
“Not with this,” Nicholas said, pointing at his laptop.
“But it can be done.”
“Not only can it, it has been done.”
Harvath looked at him. “It has?”
“Not too long ago, in fact. Back in January, almost all of China’s 500 million Internet users got bumped off the Web for eight hours. We’re talking half of the world’s Internet users. It’s been called the greatest failure in the history of the Net.”
“What happened?”
“China has this vast cyber snooping and censoring system nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. Its goal is to control all of the digital traffic coming in and going out of the country. They use it to squash dissent and root out any antigovernment sentiment. The Chinese have even employed it to jail journalists and dissidents.
“Sites like Facebook and Twitter have been blacklisted. Even Bloomberg.com and the New York Times have been blocked.”
“Why Bloomberg and the NYT?”
“Because,” said Nicholas, “despite some particularly procommunist people at the New York Times, the Gray Lady still publishes unflattering stories about China’s leaders. China doesn’t like that.”
“I’m sure they don’t,” Harvath replied. “But how did the Great Firewall cause the outage?”
“If you imagine it like an old-fashioned switchboard, all the cords got plugged into one hole. Somebody screwed up and sent three-quarters of China’s Internet traffic all to one location. Ironically enough, t
hat one location was the servers of an Internet hosting company based in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was an epic failure.”
“And you think we could replicate that?”
“I think with the help of the computing power of one U.S. government agency in particular, I might be able to put together something similar. There’s just one problem,” said Nicholas.
“What’s that?”
“The NSA vowed a long time ago they would never let me inside any of their facilities.”
“You let me worry about the NSA,” said Harvath. “I want you to start figuring out exactly how you’re going to handle the Great Firewall.”
“You have a lot of faith in the FBI. We don’t even know if they’re going to be able to find any of the storage units, much less find them in time.”
“They’ll find them. Trust me. That’s what they do. In the meantime, start packing. I want to be wheels up within a half hour.”
The Logans had already been sent home, surveillance of the Cool Springs Marriott had been handed back over to the FBI, and Chase and Sloane were now sacked out on the couches in the hangar office. No one held out much hope that Deng was coming back to the hotel, not after everything that had happened. In fact, Harvath doubted that the man was even still in Tennessee.
They had turned over every imaginable stone. Even that gnawing discomfort Harvath had had about the photocopied driver’s license had finally clarified itself. He asked himself how, if he had been renting storage units under different aliases in different cities, he would have done it. The exercise had shaken an idea loose. It was a tiny needle in a big haystack, but it wasn’t impossible, so he had passed the idea on to the Old Man.
“Where are we going?” Nicholas asked.
“Back to D.C.”
CHAPTER 48