A dozen FBI agents suddenly emerged from the building with their weapons drawn, all wearing uncompromising expressions as they confronted the four Hong Kong police officers.
‘Cleared up?’ the sergeant shot back. ‘Don’t you mean covered up?’
Hinkley did not reply as the police released Hannah and Vaughn and backed off as more agents from within the building arrived to support Hinkley. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Hong Kong police officers retreated under armed escort, their sergeant calling over his shoulder.
‘This isn’t over! We’ll be back!’
Hannah watched as the police were led out of the Embassy and then turned to Hinkley.
‘Good job,’ she said.
‘It needed to be,’ Hinkley replied. ‘You’ve been here less than twenty four hours and you’re already wanted for murder. You need to be out of the country within the hour, understood? I’ll arrange transport.’
‘They’ll intercept us,’ Vaughn pointed out, ‘and we can hardly maintain a low profile looking like this.’
‘You’ll travel on diplomatic plates, private charter. I’ll sort it now. Get yourselves cleaned up and ready to leave. I’ll check in at the Barn and find out what’s been going on, okay?’
Hannah smiled at Hinkley as she turned to leave with Vaughn.
‘I appreciate it, Brad,’ she said, relieved that somebody outside of LeMay’s direct influence was finally supporting them.
*
Special Agent in Charge Brad Hinkley waited until Hannah and Vaughn were out of sight before he pulled a pack of Luckies from his pocket and lit one, savoring the nicotine hit as slipped a cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number he had memorized some years before. It took only moments for the line to connect.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s done,’ Hinkley said. ‘They’re wanted for murder in Hong Kong and are now on their way. They’ll be in DC by the morning, but they’re officially fugitives from justice now.’
‘Excellent,’ replied the voice through dense digital distortion. ‘We’ll take it from here. Your career prospects will improve greatly within just a few days.’
Hinkley smiled as the line went dead and he lowered the phone from his ear. He took one last drag of his cigarette before he dropped the glowing butt down a storm drain in one corner of the lot. The cell phone followed it moments later.
***
XXXI
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW,
Washington, DC
The limousine pulled into the White House grounds after a thorough search of the vehicle by dogs and explosives experts. Ethan sat quietly and watched as the vehicle drove slowly up to the iconic building, one that he had seen perhaps a million times and yet never set foot in before.
Tourists were admitted to the White House every day but they saw only limited areas of the building, others highly classified and off–limits to the public. The limousine drove to an entrance on the west side of the building and pulled up alongside a heavy looking door guarded by Secret Service agents. The agents responded with robotic efficiency, opening the limousine’s doors and ushering Ethan, Lopez and Jarvis out of the vehicle and inside the White House with the minimum of exposure.
The interior of the White House was pretty much exactly as Ethan had believed it would be; immaculate red carpets, chandeliers and elaborately framed paintings on the walls. The building was enveloped by a hushed atmosphere, perhaps because of the dense layers of electromagnetic protection built into the walls.
‘This way, please.’
The Secret Service agents led them through the building, which seemed to Ethan to be surprisingly busy with members of the President’s staff hurrying to and fro, weaving around Ethan and Lopez and casting curious glances at the two unfamiliar faces dressed in casual clothes. Ethan figured that at least Jarvis was wearing a suit, whereas he and Lopez looked as though they’d been dragged in from the street outside.
They were led down the hall to the Diplomatic Reception Room, used as the primary point of entry for the President and his family into the White House. Federal style furnishings were arranged in front of a spectacular panoramic landscape wall covering.
‘This way.’
‘Where are we going?’ Lopez asked.
‘The Deep Underground Command Center,’ Jarvis guessed as they were led to a stairwell that Ethan figured was adjacent to the West Wing.
Ethan knew that the White House had a labyrinth of tunnels beneath it, some leading to the Capitol, others to DC’s subway network with an entire station beneath the White House itself. But the DUCC was a more mysterious construction, built during recent years to allow the President and his team to relocate to a safe location in the event of a major crisis.
‘He’s already bunkered down?’ Ethan asked Jarvis.
‘The threat is both credible and direct,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘If Abrahem Nassir is on his way here we can’t be sure of when and where he will strike until we have further information. The President will stay here until the arrival of the President of the People’s Republic of China tomorrow.’
The Secret Service agents led them down a corridor at the bottom of the stairwell, the plush carpets and elaborate paintings of the White House a memory now. Bomb proof walls, harsh lighting and polished tile floors led to an armoured door, outside which stood two armed soldiers. Both men stood to one side as the Secret Service agents accessed the door and it hissed open.
They stood aside and gestured for Ethan, Lopez and Jarvis to enter.
Ethan walked into the bunker and was surprised to see a warmly lit room dominated by a long table, around the far end of which sat the President and several of his advisors. The President smiled and stood the moment he saw Ethan, walking around the long table and extending his hand.
‘Ethan Warner,’ he greeted him with a firm handshake. ‘We only ever seem to meet when I’m in jeopardy.’
‘Just can’t stay out of trouble, can you Mister President?’
Despite having met the President years before when he had still been a senator, Ethan found himself somewhat star–struck all the same. The man he had known seemed to have grown in stature, become more a statesman and leader than he had been all those years ago. The President turned to Lopez and shook her hand also before he gestured to the table.
‘Shall we?’
Jarvis stepped forward. ‘May we have the room, Mister President? You’ll understand, once we tell you what we’ve discovered.’
The President glanced at his advisors. ‘My team are here to both take records and advise, Mister Jarvis.’
‘They can listen to a recording, Mister President, although once you hear what we have to say I don’t think that you’ll be passing the message on.’
The advisors all looked at one another for a long moment and then the President nodded and asked them all to leave. Only a pair of Secret Service agents remained, standing either side of the bunker door as it was closed behind them. The rest of the Secret Service would assemble in the “Horsepower” command post, as it was known, in the basement of the West Wing. Ethan knew that the President’s Oval Office contained a trap door that led straight down to the bunker in which they stood and the command post, a vital rapid escape route in time of emergency.
The President sat down at the table, as did Ethan and Lopez.
‘So what it is that’s so important that you don’t want the directors of our country’s chief intelligence agencies present, Mister Jarvis?’
Jarvis sat down and folded his hands before him on the table as he replied.
‘Mister President, we believe that there is a coordinated effort on the part of radicalized terrorist outfits to take control of United States military personnel and use them as human avatars to infiltrate and destroy our country from within. The death of Major General Thompson and the soldiers under his command was the first test of a technology that will allow our enemies to perform such actions, to physically and mentally control a human being from afar and use
them to cause harm to others.’
The President stared at Jarvis for a long moment and then glanced at Ethan.
‘This is almost harder to believe than what happened with Kelvin Patterson all those years ago.’
‘But no less real, Mister President,’ Ethan replied. ‘We already know that Major Thompson was implanted with a device that took control of the frontal lobes of his brain and allowed others to remotely control his actions, an act that led to the deaths of many of the general’s recruits at Fort Benning. The same thing likely happened to Commander Sandy Veiron aboard USS Carl Vinson. We now believe these attacks have been tests before a major strike on our country.’
The President thought for a moment.
‘I have a major ceremony to attend on the South Lawn tomorrow to welcome China into the Trans Pacific Partnership, and I can’t simply cancel that or go out there and tell the people of this country that the person standing next to them may be some kind of flesh–and–blood robot intent on killing anybody they can get their hands on. It will send the entire country into panic. It would be like revealing that half of my military staff are all Terminators or something.’
Ethan realized that to some degree the President was right. It was no longer the stuff of Hollywood myth that perfectly camouflaged enemies of the state could attack at will the citizens of any country using utterly emotionless machines. The difference was that the machines were not cyborgs but ordinary people acting without control of their bodies or minds.
‘There’s more,’ Jarvis said.
‘Go on.’
‘We have connected the perpetrators of this act of sabotage to two main groups: one is a terrorist outfit operating out of Basra, Iraq, and the other is a state–sanctioned unit of computer hackers and scientists based in China.’
The President nodded, almost smiled at the irony.
‘China,’ he echoed. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
China’s recent military expansion and growing cyber–warfare capability were known to anybody with the ability to read the news. A recent breach of federal government computers at the Office of Personnel Management had compromised the records of four million employees, even as China was establishing military installations that threatened countries with US treaties in place such as the Philippines.
‘They’ve already hacked our Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Commerce,’ Jarvis pointed out, ‘and have an active and skilled force of cyber–warfare specialists constantly probing US cyber–security in an attempt to find vulnerabilities. This is simply their latest and most technologically advanced step in the game.’
‘How the hell did they acquire technology like this?’ the President asked. ‘Even we don’t have the capacity to hack into human minds.’
‘That’s not quite true,’ Lopez said, speaking for the first time.
‘What do you mean?’ the President asked.
‘The Identity Mine,’ Jarvis replied, ‘is a highly classified Black Budget program tasked with monitoring criminals through their own eyes, by seeing what they see and hearing what they hear. It was developed using technology that was stolen from us by Chinese operatives, who abducted four National Security Agency staff operating out of Hong Kong in 1997. We developed The Identity Mine from that same technology, but the Chinese went a lot further than we dared, going beyond merely monitoring criminals.’
The President appeared to struggle to keep up with the revelations.
‘So they stole something that we developed and then weaponized it?’
‘That’s pretty much what happened,’ Ethan said. ‘They forced the NSA abductees to perfect the technology and then tested it on them. The body of one of the abductees washed up on a Kowloon shore two days ago, his frontal lobes a mess. We’re assuming the other three operatives are now dead.’
‘What about the terrorists out of Basra? How do they connect to all of this?’
‘They were hired by the Chinese to smuggle the technology into hospitals used by United States military personnel working in Iraq. During routine medical procedures, the Chinese had paid off senior medical staff to insert the implants into victims under general anesthetic, either within Iraq or at other military installations around the globe. We believe that this was how General Thompson and Commander Veiron were implanted.’
The President didn’t take long to figure out the rest.
‘Something with the deal goes bad, the terrorists take off with the technology and the know how to implant people and they head here.’
Jarvis gestured to one of the screens in the bunker, where an image of a rugged looking Middle Eastern man had appeared.
‘Abrahem Nassir,’ he identified the grainy image of a swarthy man photographed in a bustling market street in Iraq. ‘His father, an engineer, is believed to have been forced by the Chinese to smuggle implants into Iraq to be inserted into American service personnel during the 2003 invasion. Abrahem’s family were murdered shortly afterward in a place called Aljazaer Park, an act which we think he believes was conducted by American soldiers but we think may have occurred at the hands of Chinese spies disguising themselves as Americans, intending to clear up any loose ends.’
‘So the Chinese ensure that Abrahem targets the United States,’ the President surmised.
‘That may have been their intention,’ Jarvis confirmed, ‘but we have information that Abrahem’s wife and two children were killed in 2008 during an American bombing raid over the south of Basra. If he harbored any doubt over who was behind his father’s death, he won’t care about that any more. He’s the one we’re looking for because he has both motive and means.’
The President stood and looked up at the image of Abrahem; the dark and hooded eyes, the dense stubble on his chin, the thick neck and arrogant glare.
‘Is he in the country yet?’ he asked.
‘We don’t know,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘Despite tracking him down to a militant hideaway in Somalia, a Special Forces team that accompanied Ethan and Nicola here was unable to apprehend Abrahem. We’re sure he’s coming here from the interrogation of his accomplices, so we must assume that he is even now planning his attack and attempting to enter the country.’
The President turned back to Jarvis.
‘Is this brain control even possible?’ he asked. ‘I cannot believe that we would have created technology like this, that we would have attempted something so inhumane?’
Jarvis sighed.
‘Sadly Mister President, it’s not the first time that something like this has happened and this time there may be elements of our own intelligence service hoping that Abrahem’s attack goes through.’
The President froze in motion as he stared at Jarvis.
‘That’s a weighty claim to make, Mister Jarvis,’ he rumbled. ‘I hope for all our sakes that you have something to back it up.’
Ethan spoke for Jarvis as he looked up at the President.
‘Our agencies did something like this once before,’ he replied, ‘and the country compensated the families of the victims as a result.’
The President sat down.
‘Tell me, everything, right now,’ he said.
***
XXXII
The President sat expectantly at the head of the table as Jarvis stood up and paced back and forth across the bunker as he spoke.
‘The whole thing was started by the CIA back in the 1950s. They initiated a series of experiments that by any measure would be considered the stuff of science fiction even today, let alone back then. The whole initiative was operated under the umbrella of something called MKULTRA.’
‘What was MKULTRA?’ the President asked.
‘That project’s details are veiled under Executive Order three–zero–one–zero–five,’ Jarvis replied.
An Executive Order was a directive signed by the President of the United States and a policy that transcended administrations.
‘Which one of my predecessors signed,’ the President re
minded him. ‘The Executive Order shields the project from the public, not from this office. Go on.’
‘MKULTRA was the name of a covert project run by the CIA under various different guises throughout the second half of the twentieth century,’ Jarvis explained. ‘Its origins occurred during Operation Paperclip, a mission to apprehend German scientists after World War Two who had been responsible for torture under the Nazi regime. Project Bluebird developed from this operation and was tasked with the study of mind control, enhanced interrogation techniques and behaviour modification. It was renamed Project Artichoke in 1951 and run by the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence, before then becoming Project MKULTRA in 1953. The program was run by the CIA’s Technical Service Staff, via the designator MK, and it received the highest security classification rating, ULTRA.’
‘And what did this project do?’
Jarvis continued to pace as he spoke.
‘It started with a comprehensive study of the phenomena of hypnosis, before moving into exploratory projects using forced morphine addiction and withdrawal, the use of chemicals and deprivation of sensory stimuli to produce amnesia and vulnerability in subjects,’ Jarvis explained. ‘In a memo dated 1952, an officer involved stated that the project’s main goal was being to ask: “Can we get control of an individual to the point that he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self–preservation?”’
The President looked at Ethan. ‘That’s just the kind of mind control that you’re saying the Chinese, and by extension Abrahem Nassir, are wielding.’
‘The work of MKULTRA was semi–passive,’ Jarvis said. ‘It worked using drugs rather than direct manipulation of the brain, weakening the victim’s resolve and resistance to suggestion. The project continued right through the 1960’s with experiments on unwitting American subjects both military and civilian. Agents injected drugs like LSD into drinks and water supplies, hallucinogens were administered without the subject’s knowledge or consent and so on. It eventually progressed to deep–hypnosis programs designed to create unwitting assassins who were then stationed in politically volatile countries and could, upon a given command, carry out attacks on enemies of the state. It was intended that their actions could be explained away as psychosis or similar, divesting any blame on the USA.’
The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Page 20