by Brad Thor
Tang cited an obscure province near the border with China and said, “I know, I speak strangely. I was deaf for most of my childhood. Measles. At sixteen, some of my hearing returned, but not enough. I was unable to join our illustrious military because of it or become a fine police officer like you gentlemen.”
The man looked at him, unable to decide whether he believed his story.
Tang returned to the subject of food, something every North Korean fantasized about, even policemen.
“What hot meal would you like to see me remove from my bag?” he asked again. “Please, be creative.”
The police commander smiled once more and after thinking for a moment replied, “Duck. And barbecued pork.”
“Excellent choice,” said Tang. “How about grilled beef with vegetables, too?”
“And rice.”
“Of course. Lots and lots of rice.”
Never losing his smile, the police commander stated, “I’m now hungry, very hungry. I hope for your sake, as well as your colleague’s, that you have all of these things and more remaining in that very little bag.”
“But of course I—”
The commander held his hand back up in the stop position, interrupting him.
“Because if you don’t,” he said, “then there had better only be goose feathers in the back of your truck and they had better be going to someone very, very important.”
Tang bowed, respectfully conceding the point. And from his bag he produced a small roll of currency, secured with a rubber band.
“Make sure to buy your men dessert as well,” the CIA operative said as he handed over the money.
The commander removed the rubber band and thumbed the currency. “You certainly travel well-prepared.”
“And as I said, you and your men do an excellent job of keeping the roads safe.”
“It is our duty and we strive to do our best.”
Tang’s nervousness was beginning to abate. He had gone through these kinds of checkpoints before. The transaction was almost complete. A little more chitchat and then he and Hyun Su would be sent on their way.
“Before you go,” the police commander continued, “I think we should inspect your cargo. I have never stopped a truck full of goose feathers before.”
The CIA operative maintained his cool. Nodding at the items the commander had been given, he said, “You already have the best parts of the goose, sir. Please leave me the feathers so that my family will be able to have food in their bellies tonight as well.”
The commander was done being flattered. With a quick jerk of his head, he sent his men to conduct the inspection. Pointing at Hyun Su, he ordered, “Out of the truck. Now.”
The smuggler complied, but slammed his door as he climbed down.
The policeman took it as an act of disrespect. “You’re angry. Am I keeping you from something?”
Hyun Su bowed to the commander and then turned to Tang and exploded at him. “You idiot! I told you we should not take this road. I told you! I told you!”
“Quiet!” the police commander bellowed.
Tang doubted the SEALs needed any further warning that trouble was at hand. But if they did, Hyun Su’s slamming of his door and yelling would have done the trick.
“Let’s go,” the commander said, directing everyone to the rear of the vehicle.
When they arrived at the back of the truck, Tang implored the police officer one more time.
“Enough!” the man ordered. “Open it up!”
Tang bowed and grabbed one of the doors, as Hyun Su grabbed the other. Then, throwing the lever, he and Hyun Su stepped back and opened the truck.
The shooting started instantly.
Fordyce, Johnson, and Tucker fired in fast, controlled bursts. Head, chest. Head, chest. Head, chest. Brass shell casings rained down and bounced onto the floor around them.
Only two officers were able to return fire. One drilled a hole through the roof of the truck. The other drilled a hole through the head of the officer in front of him.
When the shooting stopped, it was Navy SEALs six, North Korean police zero.
The SEALs leaped out of the truck to examine the carnage.
Picking up the unbroken bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Johnson handed it to Tang. “Like they say—pigs get fed, but hogs get slaughtered.”
Tang accepted the bottle and then retrieved the Playboy magazines, his cigarettes, and his currency. “What are we going to do about this mess?”
Fordyce studied the landscape. “We can’t leave them here. Not on the road like this. We’ve got to find someplace to get rid of them.”
Tang spoke with Hyun Su, who suggested a smaller road about five kilometers ahead that wound into the forest. Fordyce agreed.
They backed up the van the policemen had been driving and loaded their bodies inside. Then the SEALs climbed back into their truck.
Tang drove the van and monitored the radio. No one was looking for the officers, and probably no one would for some time.
When they reached the turnoff, Hyun Su drove about a mile and a half up the winding road, pulled onto the shoulder, and stopped. With the van already filled with blood, it was pointless to try to stage something. By the time it was found, the team planned to be long gone anyway.
That didn’t mean, though, that they wanted to leave it looking like a military-style assault. After taking the officers’ watches, wallets, and weapons, they tossed the Playboys in the van, poured Jack Daniel’s on the corpses, and left the bottle near the commander.
Whether the North Koreans would ever figure out what had really happened didn’t matter. Six well-armed police officers had been killed. That story would spread far and wide, and would scare the hell out of every cop, soldier, and government official in the country.
Piling back into the truck, everyone was on edge, especially Fordyce. Trouble had a way of compounding itself, and they had a lot of ground yet to cover.
CHAPTER 54
* * *
* * *
MCLEAN, VIRGINIA
Unpacking the storage units was an agonizingly slow process, but without knowing what was inside each box, they had no other choice.
Harvath had explained to Carlton why he believed the cylinders contained hydrogen and not helium.
“Helium doesn’t explode. That’s why they use it for weather balloons now. Hydrogen, though, does explode. But it also provides much greater lift. If they’re trying to float bombs of some sort, hydrogen would be dangerous, but it would make sense. Plus, seeing that explosion in Tennessee, it’s not hard to imagine that something highly flammable like hydrogen was involved.”
“Why would they want to float bombs?” the Old Man wondered.
“You could get around, or over, a lot of security that way.”
“But you’d be at the mercy of the wind. You couldn’t control where the bomb landed.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t have to,” Harvath replied. “If these were designed to be airburst weapons, all you’d have to do is arm them and launch them.”
“From places like Des Moines and Nashville? Why not do it over major population centers like Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York?”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
“Hold on,” Carlton said. “Even if these weren’t bombs, let’s say they were biological dispersal devices, you would still need them to release their payload over major population centers. Remember the intel saying there’d be a ninety percent mortality rate within a year?”
Harvath nodded.
“Let’s say it’s not biological, but radiological, and it is a bomb of some sort. It still needs to be over a major population center. I don’t get it.”
“What if it’s neither?”
“My answer’s the same even if the device is chemical.”
“We keep looking at this as if the device itself is what’s going to kill people. What if we’re wrong?” Harvath said. “What if it’s something else?”
“Like what?”<
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They were standing next to the workstation Special Agent Roe had been assigned to and Harvath asked her to pull up a map of the United States on her computer. Once she had, he asked her to highlight the six cities associated with each cell.
“These cities form a chain across the country,” he said.
“And?”
“And what if six devices were not only launched at the same time, but detonated at the same time?”
Roe layered concentric blast radius circles above each city until they were almost touching and the country was blanketed from coast to coast.
“Now,” said Harvath, “what if this wasn’t chemical, biological, or even radiological, but electromagnetic?”
Suddenly, the color drained from Carlton’s face. “An EMP weapon.”
Harvath nodded.
“Everything would stop,” said Roe. “There’d be no electricity, no running water.”
“No 911. No police, no fire, no ambulances,” Carlton added.
“No Internet. No grocery store deliveries. No deliveries for pharmacies and hospitals. No heat. No air-conditioning. No fuel. No machines to harvest crops. No trucks to deliver them to market. There would be complete and utter chaos. Anarchy. Our entire country would collapse within weeks.”
“That’s got to be it,” the Old Man said. “That’s got to be what they have planned.”
Harvath pointed up at the flat-screens and the situations unfolding in Las Vegas, Dallas, and Des Moines. “What they find in there will tell us a lot.”
“In the meantime, we need to let General Johnson and the President know what we now think this is.” Looking then at Agent Roe, Carlton asked, “Can we get these feeds in the DNI’s conference room?”
“I’m sure you can,” she replied. “I’ll have someone set it up.”
The Old Man thanked her and signaled for Harvath to follow him.
As they arrived at the conference room, Nicholas and Draco were coming from the other direction. Harvath held the door open for them and motioned for Nicholas to be quiet as Carlton picked up the Secure Telephone Unit and dialed the White House.
After he had relayed the information to General Johnson and hung up the STU, Nicholas was nodding. “It makes perfect sense.”
“But we’ve only found three storage units. Four if you count Nashville,” the Old Man said. “Even if we do find units in Baltimore and Seattle, how do we know we have all the devices? How do we know there aren’t more sleepers out there?”
It was an excellent point. Only by completely dismantling the entire plot would they ever know for sure. But to do that, they would need to do more than just uncover a few storage lockers. In fact, Harvath was already convinced that whatever device might have been in the Nashville storage unit, Bao Deng had taken it with him before he had burned everything else to the ground. There was no way he would leave something like that behind.
Harvath was just about to say as much when he saw Agent Roe running toward the conference room.
“What’s up?” he said as she came rushing in.
“Boise,” she replied, out of breath. “You nailed it. Todd Thomas. We’ve got him.”
“You’ve got him?” Nicholas said.
“Not him, but the Xerox machine he used.”
“How?”
Roe looked at Harvath.
“The man using the Todd Thomas alias showed up in Nashville with a just passable photocopy of his driver’s license,” said Harvath. “As long as he was standing in front of you and showed you his real license to compare to, you’d accept it. There was no reason for the storage facility manager to make another copy. We now know he did the same thing in Vegas, Dallas, and Des Moines. That’s what got me thinking.
“If I was going to do this, I’d use a grocery store Xerox machine or one at a small pack-and-ship place and I’d practice. Once I had it to the point where you could read the info but my photo was just dark and out of focus enough, I’d whip out all my other fake IDs and make copies on the spot.”
“And copy machines have hard drives,” Nicholas said approvingly.
Harvath nodded. “They keep a record of everything. All you need is a cable and the right software to access it. Which is what we asked the FBI to do. They looked for public copy machines in and around Boise, paying specific attention to those closest to the free Wi-Fi locations the handler used to access his Facebook accounts. They downloaded as many hard drives as they could find and that data was fed to the NSA.”
“Who then used one of their algorithms to sift the data and look for matches of the blurry driver’s license photos?”
“Exactly,” said Harvath as he turned back to Roe. “What do we know?”
“The copy machine was in a small pack-and-ship place in downtown Boise called Going Postal. They offer PO boxes, shipping services, that kind of thing,” Roe replied. “The hard drive had copies of the driver’s licenses used at the storage units we already know of, plus a license from Washington State and one from Maryland. Now that we’ve got those aliases, we’re pretty confident we’ll be able to track down the storage units in Seattle and Baltimore.”
“How many licenses total were on the machine for this guy?”
Roe smiled. “Seven. Just like you suspected, he practiced with a local, Idaho driver’s license first. We’ve already run it. Unlike the others, this one is legit. It belongs to a fifty-seven-year-old naturalized American citizen of Chinese birth named Ren Ho. He lives in Indian Valley, Idaho, about two hours north of Boise. We’re doing a full workup on him now and the FBI has already scrambled an HRT team. DoE is also sending a NEST team.”
Harvath looked at Carlton. “We need to be there, on site, as soon as they grab him, so we can do the interrogation.”
The Old Man nodded. “Who do you want to take?”
“Sloane and Chase, plus Nicholas for anything we find computer-related.”
“Done. Anything else?”
“Stephanie Esposito.”
“The Agency’s China analyst?”
“I want someone who knows the culture,” replied Harvath. “Who can speak and read Chinese.”
“I’ll call the President and DNI and brief them right now.”
Scribbling down his email address and cell phone number, Harvath handed them to Agent Roe and said, “As soon as we’re in the air, I’ll check my inbox. Please send everything you’ve got to that address.”
“Will do,” Roe replied. “Stay safe.”
“I’ll try,” he said, and then, looking at Nicholas, nodded toward the door. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 55
* * *
* * *
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Four out of the five princelings had done a good job. They had practiced excellent tradecraft and had not brought any surveillance with them into Chinatown. The fifth princeling, though, had been atrocious. Not only had she dragged a tail along behind her, but she had also brought her cell phone.
Cheng could forgive her for the tail; even the best operatives made mistakes. The phone, though, was unforgivable. From the moment he had first picked her up on the surveillance cameras, she had been either talking or texting. She was oblivious to the things going on around her. It infuriated him, because if she had chosen to ignore this part of the protocol, she had likely ignored everything else she had been taught. The arrogance. This was not a game.
The restaurant was noisy, crowded. It was filled with boisterous American Chinese. There was a fish tank with cloudy water. Everything smelled like crab.
Cheng watched to make sure the rude waiter had given the note to the right person and then he slipped into the handicapped bathroom.
When she knocked, he unlocked the door and stood back. She was wearing knee-high boots, a short skirt, and a flimsy top. Stepping into the small space, she kicked the door closed behind her and shot daggers at him.
“Lock it,” he said.
Her cold gaze was averted only long enough to turn and do as he h
ad asked. When she turned back around, he reached out and wrapped one of his hands around the back of her neck.
“Give it to me,” he demanded in Chinese.
The daggers were gone. Her eyes were now wide with fear. She didn’t like his hand on the back of her neck like that. “Give you what?”
He was done playing games. He ran his free hand over her body until he found it. She had tucked her iPhone in her bra and he brushed roughly against one of her breasts pulling it out.
“Hey!” she exclaimed.
“Shut up.”
“My grandfather will—”
Cheng tightened his grip around her neck, forcing her to look at him. “Listen to me, princess. We are not in Beijing. I don’t care who your grandfather is. I’m in charge. Do you understand me?”
The young woman didn’t reply, so Cheng squeezed even tighter. When she nodded, he released his grasp.
“Do you know that you have an FBI agent following you?”
The girl rubbed her neck, hoping he had not bruised her. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“Of course not. You were too busy talking and texting on your phone.”
“Where is he?”
“Shut up and pay attention,” he snapped.
Pulling out one of the new, prepaid phones he’d had Wei Yin purchase when they had arrived in Boston, he handed it to her. “Take this. Then I want you to go back into the restaurant, sit down, and order dinner. When this phone rings, you will pick it up and you will do exactly as I tell you. Is that understood?”
The young woman shrugged.
He was ready to grab her by the neck again. “This is not a game, Daiyu. This is very serious. Do you understand me?”
“I guess,” she replied. “Now give me my iPhone back.”
“No,” he said, unlocking the door. “Time to go.”
As she stepped past him, the daggers were back.
“Enjoy your dinner. I’ll call you soon.”
He watched her disappear down the hall and back into the restaurant. He didn’t need to look for the FBI man. He was out there somewhere.