Razing Beijing

by Sidney Elston

Herman stirred. “Are you sure he’s the right guy? I don’t think he’s back from Japan. Some of the international flights—”

  “Just get him in here, would you?” The President fell into his chair as his two advisors headed away to leave him in privacy. “Tom!”

  Herman turned at the door and froze.

  “I always seem to be reacting to news coming from China.”

  Herman nodded.

  “Figure out why.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Fix it.”

  Herman disappeared.

  Turning once more to the items on his desk, the President took a long, deep breath. He could no longer delay his preparation for that evening’s operational briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He forced himself finally to open the binder, as he had so desperately tried to put off. Shaking his head, his eyes skimming over the tedious military doctrine and clinical death toll projections, Denis wondered why in the world he ever decided to hang up his stethoscope.

  109

  EMILY PAUSED OVER HER KEYBOARD and flexed the muscles in her hands, which she noticed were trembling. Periodically swapping the sofa for naps, neither she nor Thackeray had gotten much in the way of sleep. Reports of the Golden Gate attack had driven them to pretty much forsake it altogether. On a more personal level, Emily could imagine no better way to strike at those responsible for mistreating her parents than by seizing control of their weapon. She clasped her hands in front of her mouth, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Justice, quoting the words of her Maoist grandmother, is a pearl in the hand when plucked from the eye of your enemy.

  The only thing positive to be said of the latest attack was that it occurred early on a Saturday morning instead of during rush hour. Even so, another two hundred ninety people were either dead or presumed to be. The news had impressed upon her, and now even Thack, a realization of the consequences should their plan fall apart. So they tried to ignore the confusing amalgam of FBI arrests, presidential speeches calling for war, and rumors of nuclear retaliation from the Middle East, all of which gave rise to the question of whether their tampering with a dangerous weapon might be better left to government experts whose role was defending the country.

  “Yo, Emily,” Thackeray hailed from in front of his own monitor. “Stop fretting over whatever you’re fretting over and come take a look at this handshake routine.”

  Emily stepped around boxes and over wires in order to stoop behind Thackeray’s shoulder. Circumventing the interrogation protocols of the satellite was important if they had any hope of hacking their way into the machine code that controlled its various systems. From what she saw, Thack seemed to be following her coding suggestions...

  Emily straightened and placed her hands on her hips. “This is all a waste anyway if we point the dish into an empty sky. Are we going to be able to track this thing?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” Thackeray brought a spreadsheet up onto the screen. He swirled a computer mouse on its pad to focus her attention with the cursor to the lower left corner of the screen. A series of numbers were actively tracking days, hours, minutes, and seconds, the latter advancing rapidly in tenths. A dozen other cells displayed unspecified, rapidly changing digits. He explained that the calculations were derived using the satellite transmissions intercepted during the GW Bridge and Jersey refinery events. “What I did was go back and see if there was a single orbital mechanics solution which satisfied the times and locations. Turns out there is. My Virginia Tech buddy helped me with that, poor gullible soul that he is.”

  Emily recalled from her college physics that mass somehow canceled out of the equations. “Better hope they don’t decide to change the satellite’s orbit.”

  “Yeah, that’s no shit. Stu told me he thinks they have stealth to mask orbital maneuvers. First you see it, then you don’t know where to look for it.” Thack rolled his head around while massaging his neck. “Maybe their maneuvering fuel is limited.”

  “Thack—oh my God! It just occurred to me. What if there’s more than one, like maybe two or three satellites?”

  Thackeray turned from the screen, a dawning look of fear in his eyes. “Oh my God...Stu told me there’s only one satellite.” He smiled broadly.

  Emily rolled her eyes. “Have you figured in the Golden Gate Bridge attack?”

  Thack reminded her that they could not access CLI’s satellite terminal from outside the facility. “But I did check the time and location against the orbit for the other attacks, and—” Thackeray reached over to his second terminal and typed a few keystrokes. “Presto.” Overlaid on a graphical display of North America was a wavy line, delineating the sinusoidal track that was characteristic of an orbiting satellite. The northernmost lobe of the path passed over northern California, dipped south, and then looped back up over the northeastern United States.

  Besides recognizing the pretty good match, something in the advancing numbers on Thackeray’s screen caught Emily’s eye. Thackeray, she realized, really did have the tracking down accurately. “These attacks are coming off, well, like clock-work. I didn’t realize that.”

  “Sure you did.” Thack swiveled his chair to look up at her. “Stu told us twenty-five orbits.”

  “But you’ve pinned down the precise fraction of orbit. Don’t you see the problem?”

  AN HOUR LATER, the sixth ring prompted Emily to quit waiting for Thackeray and answer the telephone herself. She crossed the room and snatched up the handset. It was Stuart.

  “Where are you?” Emily asked. “We’re running out of time.”

  “We’re on our way to Toronto.” A buzz in the background made her think the connection was broken. “...why I’m calling. How are you coming with the software?”

  “We’re about ready to begin running simulations, but it’s going to be difficult to say without conducting an actual test.”

  “Uh huh. Do you still think the refinery explosion was brought about by the satellite?” Stuart’s voice sounded tired.

  “Except for the arrests we keep hearing about. Thack appears to be tracking its position now. We also think it might be responsible for attacking the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “Agreed. The timing and everything don’t leave much room for coincidence.”

  “Then you already know we can expect another attack tomorrow morning. You have to hurry.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m not sure when we’ll be allowed to fly back into the country.”

  “Stu—we have to have the encryption! Even that will only get us to square one.”

  “We should already have the encryption, along with everything else you asked for. Have you checked your e-mail account?”

  “My e-mail? At work?”

  Stu lowered his voice. “I gave him your work address, you know...”

  “But I can’t access my e-mail account.”

  Silence. “I thought you and Thack were working over a remote link from his place.”

  “Only for the supercomputer. We cannot access the satellite terminal by remote, and e-mail accounts are on another system yet. Plant Security prevents off-site Internet access and that includes downloading our e-mail.”

  “Dammit, Emily. Can’t you just hack into it or something?”

  “Fine! I’ll stop work on hacking into the satellite, and start hacking into my e-mail!”

  “Shit...”

  “Something else came up. It looks as if the satellite won’t be fully charged by the time we take control of it.”

  MCBURNEY SAT DOWN and looked hard at Stuart.

  Stuart got the message. “I’ll have to call you back, Emily.” He ended the call and handed McBurney his satellite phone. “What is it?”

  McBurney showed him a cable that had just come over the communications console in the cockpit.

  :1510Z

  IMMEDATTN:DDO:E ASIA

  PRC AIR & NAVAL ASSAULT CAPTURES SPRATLY ISLANDS APPROX 2230Z SATURDAY. US EMBASSY/BEIJING REMAINS CORDONED OFF. SLOC/REGIONAL PANIC ASIAN MARKETS
OPEN MONDAY STEEP DECLINE. RETURN LANGLEY HIGHEST PRIORITY. STOP MSG.

  Stuart finished reading it. “Maybe now we’re beginning to see.”

  McBurney found Stuart’s reaction peculiar. “If you mean the first of a series of assaults leading to the forced reunification of Taiwan, and the outbreak of the next world war, you could very well be right.” He leaned forward and asked, “Just what is it that you and your chums are scheming to do?”

  “I thought you don’t trust anything I say.”

  “Answer the question.”

  Stuart seemed to be mulling it over. “If Uncle Sam can’t or won’t stop that thing from ripping up my back yard, maybe the people who designed it can.”

  “You’re off your nut. You’re trying to hack your way into it.”

  “If we succeed, we should be able to neutralize it.”

  “It belongs to the People’s Republic of China. Aside from committing a felony and going to prison, you and your happy geeks will have committed an act of war. Maybe even unilaterally gotten us into one. Why do you insist on doing this?”

  Stuart laughed. “I guess you’re entitled to know. The final straw dawned on me sometime during our White House chat. I saw a bunch of decent folks, probably well-intentioned, who nonetheless seemed to me a little lost in the bureaucratic bog, or maybe preoccupied with their own political skins. I can honestly say I don’t know what it was I observed in there.”

  McBurney felt his temper flaring. “Who do you think you are?”

  “You’re really going to sit there and tell me I’m wrong?”

  McBurney struggled to think of anything lately not wrong about this guy. “Forgive my prying, but something you said on the phone sounded suspiciously like, ‘We already have the encryption.’ ”

  Stuart met his question with an expressionless stare.

  “Deng actually gave you the encryption keys?”

  “He’s going to e-mail them, along with the whole cryptographic algorithm and the communication frequencies.”

  McBurney wasn’t accustomed to having his agents take matters into their own hands, especially if they happened to be right when they did. “Did nothing you two say adhere to our brief?”

  “You can relax, I followed your precious brief. I just went a little bit further.”

  110

  DENG ZHEN RECALLED it was at the impressionable age of five—the year was 1949—that he was led by his mother and sister into the cool darkness of their vegetable cellar to escape a brutal sweep through their village by Kuomintang troops. His plea to be free from the coddling of women, so as to join his heroic father’s fight for the Communist Revolution, had earned an adoring pat on the head. Well into adulthood, it would be easy for Deng to conjure up his boyhood bitterness at being told that he would first have to grow up in order to fight.

  Seven years later, having liberated China, Chairman Mao proclaimed that a ‘Hundred Flowers bloom.’ Deng’s father had believed the campaign was merely a sop to the intellectual elite to indulge their reactionary bombast. Their subsequent abuse of Mao Zedong’s charity left the Great Helmsman no choice but to launch his Anti-Rightist campaign.

  Then China’s Great Leap Forward was to have bred industrial prosperity and an end to starvation—it wrought financial ruin, famine, and death, as even his Maoist father had broken rank with the Party to proclaim.

  Finally, the Cultural Revolution would once and for all bring an end to bourgeois tradition and capitalist greed, which hung like a yoke on the necks of the working class—the death and destruction it wrought had eternally silenced his father, mother, and sister.

  Deng Zhen had never, not even once, questioned his own patriotism. Yet like most of his generation, he could be forgiven his fundamental tendency to confront any lack of contradiction with uneasy suspicion.

  Such was the apprehension working on Deng Zhen while he sat alone in his study, pondering an irony so cruel as to condemn a man to the wrongful fate of his father—more ironically yet, by the very same hand. Could it truly be possible? It had taken an American entrepreneur, of all people, to finally name Liu’s gaogan who had led the slaughter of his loved ones four decades ago—an association only determinable, realistically, by an invasive organization such as the CIA. The evidence of this he accepted in the words written on two sheets of paper, slipped into his hands by two independent sources. Stuart had also proposed that by helping to hijack control of their satellite, Deng could defy the illegitimate strength which the weapon conferred upon such men. In fact, Deng had to admit that he admired the scheme, with its engineer’s penchant for eloquence. The idea also confirmed his earliest impressions of this American’s independent character. Why would such a proposal not follow naturally from the revelation of Rong’s murderous guilt? Where was the contradiction?

  Were it not for the fact that he, and not the American, had initiated their contact, it would be easy to paralyze himself by suspicion that within Stuart’s scheme lay the deceptive seeds of coercion. That the CIA might attempt to exploit the opportunity was incontrovertible. To suspect that Rong Peng was somehow involved, presumably to ensnare him in a political trap, was simple paranoia. His decision whether or not to complete this walk along the path he had chosen boiled down to whom, and to what, were his loyalties.

  The Xinhua News Agency reporting on events in the South China Sea was quick to trumpet ‘recapturing what rightfully belonged to the Chinese people.’ Had the American naval presence not been drawn away from the region, Deng doubted that any such opportunity would have presented itself. Could he doubt who had engineered the opportunity—or even the tool he had used?

  Deng rested his head in his hands, studying Liu Qun’s forever silenced words, our old acquaintance, Kang Long—find him, pass on my final farewell. He had considered investigating birth and residence records in and about Beijing, but surely Rong had long ago purged the records; this particular Kang clan had high access within Zhongnanhai. What more evidence did he really need?

  His remaining decision involved the paradox of whether to risk the life of his son in order that he preserve it. Seeing no alternative, he stuffed the envelope containing the computer disks into his raincoat.

  Deng placed the note given him by Stuart with Liu’s, and tore them into strips. He then placed them in his ashtray, struck a match, and lit them on fire. The time for questioning his loyalties had actually expired decades ago. He simply hadn’t known it.

  111

  EDWARD HILDEBRANDT ACCEPTED the key card and thanked the Hilton receptionist, herself an FBI agent from the Richmond field office. He crossed the lobby to the elevator, stepped inside, and pressed the brass button for the sixth floor as the doors slid shut. The Smith & Wesson K-frame revolver bore under his armpit, prompting him to play over in his mind the proper hookup and defensive tactics so as to avoid the need for brandishing it.

  Until now the perpetrator had shown—no, Paul Devinn had flaunted, Hildebrandt rather thought—a gift for staying two steps ahead, almost as if he knew each of their moves in advance. Though Hildebrandt knew that was unlikely, he did have a lingering suspicion that some element of the investigation had somehow spooked the suspect.

  There was little chance that their suspect would be able to slip past an entire SWAT team. Devinn’s capture appeared imminent due in no small part to the responsiveness of the Richmond division. Early that morning, he was in the Richmond office filling out paperwork when the bank issuing C. Smith’s credit card called to alert him that the VISA account had been used to check into a Reston, Virginia hotel. Other investigations were put on hold. Hildebrandt received the go-ahead to assemble his surveillance team.

  The hotel parent corporation’s policy for assisting law-enforcement was a good one, requiring in return that precautions be taken to secure the safety of their guests. A twenty-minute call between the Richmond SAC and the Reston hotel manager produced a fax describing the building’s floor and security plans. The manager confirmed their ‘guest’ had indeed
deposited belongings and used the shower upon checking into his room.

  Hildebrandt’s optimism was tempered by that nagging Quantico voice inside his head, reminding him that the allure of finally having his cuff posed the greatest distraction to actually pulling off the arrest.

  The team had selected as their tactical operations center the room across and just down the hall from the suspect’s. Hildebrandt entered to find Gail Carter attacking a submarine sandwich at her post in front of a communications set. Nick Brophy fairly kept one eye positioned behind a tripod-mounted Burris spotting scope angled down at the street.

  Hildebrandt walked over to the white marker board pilfered from one of the conference rooms. “How are we with the preparations?” he asked. One of the agents had constructed a working layout of the hotel with surrounding streets and office buildings, restaurants, retailers, and homes. A code designated each location where an agent was currently posted; TOC for Tactical Operations Center there inside room 607; Hotel One and Two for the agent at the receptionist desk and the other seated inside the lounge, respectively; Charlie One, Two and Three for squad cars parked unobtrusively overlooking both approaches to the Hilton, and so on.

  “I think everything’s set,” Special Agent Gail Carter replied. Closed-circuit video feeds were providing her with coverage of the lobby and parking garage.

  Their plan was intended to be simple. Devinn’s every movement would be monitored upon first sighting him within the surveillance zone, through his entry to either the hotel garage or parking lot, into the main lobby and finally to his room’s door on the sixth floor. Hotel Four would round the corridor pushing a room service cart. From the other direction, Hildebrandt would join in converging on the suspect attempting to unlock his door, which would prove unsuccessful due to a change in the entry code.

  “I double-checked with the manager on that particular detail,” Carter assured him. What they wanted to avoid was a potentially armed suspect barricading himself inside his room. “Agent Brophy will accompany Ceruzzi from the bar in providing your back-up.” She pointed toward the sawed-off Remington 870 leaning in the corner by the door. “The manager confirmed that all the other sixth floor guests were asked to move to a different floor. He thought to leave a few of the lights on. I guess there weren’t that many to begin with.”