Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3)

by Michael C. Grumley

  The article was two years old and posted by a relatively small Norwegian publication from a town just outside of Stavanger. It appeared a small group of antiwar protesters had gathered outside a quiet shipyard. They had demanded that the government stop aiding “the global war machine” by building warships for its allies, which typically meant Russia. The group had caught wind of the construction of a warship being built in their small town. Yet once some of the group members found their way into the locked building, what they found was not a warship at all, but a submarine.

  The picture in the article was centered on the protesters and only captured a piece of the vessel behind them. And from what Clay could make out, the dimensions appeared to be very close to those of the Forel. The article failed to mention, and Clay already knew that Norway didn’t build submarines. At least not officially. In fact, the country’s own small fleet of just six submarines was assembled in Germany. Finally, what the article did include was that the shipyard was privately owned and operated by a Russian conglomerate.

  But the last piece still didn’t fit since the Forel was destroyed along with the Chinese warship near Rio de Janeiro. Two boats on the same path and found in the same location. The Forel was not an adversary as they’d originally thought, but an ally to the Chinese. Slowly the pieces were lining up, but still kept bringing Clay back to the same question. Why were the Chinese Corvette and the Forel destroyed?

  He glanced at his phone in front of him as the tiny screen lit up, followed by the familiar ring of an incoming call. He reached forward and answered it.

  “Hey, Wil.”

  “Hi, Clay. I wake you up?”

  “No. I was just sitting here wondering why we don’t talk more.”

  Borger laughed on the other end. “Good, because we may be in for another long night. First though, I think we need to get the Admiral on.”

  Langford logged in from his own computer and his face promptly appeared in a video window. His short gray hair was still neat, indicating he hadn’t slept yet either. On the contrary, his eyes seemed to blaze intently in the glow of his computer screen.

  “What do you have?” he asked immediately.

  Borger began typing on his keyboard. “Sir, I think we have some answers, but unfortunately more questions too.”

  “Then let’s start with the answers.”

  “Yes, sir.” An image filled the rest of their screens as Borger shared a picture from his own computer. It was a waist-high shot of a senior Chinese officer in uniform. He looked to be in his early sixties with a tight haircut similar to the Admiral’s. In the picture, the man looked relaxed with dark eyes focused on the camera.

  “This is General Wei. Head of China’s PLA, or the People’s Liberation Army, and the man I believe our Lieutenant Li delivered the DNA samples to after he left South America.”

  Both Langford and Clay leaned forward, studying the picture.

  “How do we know?”

  Borger displayed a second window on the screen, filled with numeric codes. “I found the logs from Li’s cell phone carrier and traced them back to the day he arrived. The triangulation from the cell towers isn’t as exact as GPS, but he was in the building of China’s Central Military Commission. That I’m sure of. I then searched and compared the coordinates until I found people whose phone locations were close to Li’s. The most likely person out of that group was General Wei.”

  “Admiral, it appears General Wei was the one in charge of the Guyana find. I’ve found emails from him and others showing that he was giving the orders. And get this, the initial discovery was made almost nine months ago. It took them another six months to get there.”

  “Plenty of time to gut a warship.”

  “Right. And from what I can tell, they pulled it off with surprisingly few people knowing about it.”

  “Okay, so what happened to our briefcase?”

  Borger frowned on screen. “That’s a good question, sir. I just finished plotting the General’s phone coordinates on a map. It’s a little messy.” A map appeared on the screen with thousands of blue dots all around or near the government center of Beijing. “I can clean this up a little, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it.”

  “Why is that?” asked Clay.

  “Because the coordinates of his phone are much more interesting after Lieutenant Li delivered the case.” Another map suddenly replaced the first. One with fewer dots. “You can see here that most of the dots, or coordinates, are almost on top of each other until this.” He circled some of the outlying dots with his mouse. “What this shows is that Wei left the building less than thirty minutes later on that day. And judging from the distance and speed of the coordinates after his departure, he was probably in a car.”

  Borger’s mouse highlighted a string of dots moving in one direction. “This was his path until the tower lost signal.”

  “What does that mean…he drove out of range?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. I think he turned off his phone.”

  16

  Langford raised an eyebrow. “He turned it off?”

  “Yes, sir. There were a few towers he was still close enough to connect to. And even if he didn’t have a strong enough voice signal, he should have been well inside the range of the control channel used for text messages. Text messages can be received farther away, which still would have allowed the towers to triangulate.”

  “So he receives the case from Li, immediately gets in his car and heads north, then turns off his phone.” Langford’s face was somber. “Then what?”

  “That’s where things go from strange to bizarre.” Borger hesitated before continuing. “He disappeared from the grid for almost fourteen hours before his phone came back on, at roughly the same place as it went off.”

  “So he turned it back on?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Langford crossed his arms, thinking. “Do we have any indication whether he still had the case with him?”

  “There’s no way to know,” Borger replied. “But my bet is that he didn’t.”

  Langford nodded. “I wouldn’t exactly call that bizarre. My guess is our good General hid it somewhere, or with someone.”

  “Uh, that’s not actually the bizarre part. It’s that General Wei’s reappearance on the grid was short-lived, literally. He never returned home. Instead, he drove himself back to Beijing, found a parking lot, and killed himself in his car.”

  “What?!” Both Langford and Clay were stunned. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, sir,” Borger shook his head.

  “Jesus,” Langford groaned. “This just keeps getting worse and worse.” He looked at his screen with exasperation. “Any of this making sense to you, Clay?”

  “I’m afraid not, Admiral. But I agree with Wil. If this General Wei went to so much trouble to get that case and then disappeared just before ending his life, I think we can be pretty certain it wasn’t with him when he came back.”

  This wasn’t making sense to any of them.

  “Why on Earth would a man with that kind of power, who now has something virtually every person on the planet wants, simply kill himself?”

  “To keep it quiet,” Clay mused. He looked back to Wei’s picture on the screen and it suddenly fell into place. “That’s it. That’s the answer.”

  “What is?”

  Clay’s voice rose excitedly. “There is no coup in China’s Standing Committee. It’s in the Central Military Commission. General Wei is the coup!”

  “Wei?”

  “Wei was in charge of the find in Guyana. So he knew what they had. He had the authority to launch a strike on the Bowditch. And he also had the authority to order the sinking of their own ship and the Forel. He was trying to destroy the cargo. The last remaining piece was the DNA-infused bacteria in the case that Li flew back to him. Wei was systematically destroying any evidence of what they’d found.”

  “But why?” Langford asked. “Why destroy the one thing that could change everything?” H
e shook his head and thought it over, then looked back at Borger’s image. “Wil, if he wanted to destroy the samples, couldn’t he have done that just about anywhere?”

  “I suspect so.”

  “So why disappear with it while trying to avoid being tracked?”

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “It does,” said Clay, “if Wei wasn’t intending to destroy it.”

  Border nodded. “For example if he were hiding it.”

  Langford folded his arms again with a stern expression. “He destroyed what he wasn’t able to contain and hid the rest.”

  “It appears so.”

  “Which means that briefcase may still be within a seven-hour drive from his phone’s last coordinates.”

  “Or less,” added Borger. “If he had to sleep.”

  After a long silence, Langford looked back at the screen. “How’s your Chinese, Clay?”

  Clay was already searching for more on Wei when he looked back to Langford’s image in surprise. “What?”

  Langford checked his watch. “Pack your bags. I’ll arrange for your ride. In the meantime, Borger, you have approximately thirteen hours to figure out exactly where Clay is going.”

  By 3:30 a.m. Clay was already at thirty-two thousand feet aboard the C-20D Gulfstream III. The model C-20D was the most common variant used by the U.S. Navy and retrofitted with special naval communication equipment. It was also the same aircraft which Clay and Caesare had taken to Brazil just a few weeks earlier. A trip which set in motion a chain of events that none of them could have anticipated.

  Clay peered out of the small window to his left, into the morning darkness with twinkling stars above him. There was an eerie feeling inside the cabin, sitting alone listening only to the roar of the two Rolls Royce Turbofan engines outside as they rocketed the aircraft through freezing air at top speed.

  The Gulfstream would have to make multiple stops to reach its final destination in Manila. It was as far as he could go without raising flags in a government plane. From there he would have to travel aboard commercial flights, first to Taiwan and finally in through Hong Kong. With the help of a falsified passport, it would be his best chance at entering China without too much attention from customs. Once inside, it would be another 1,200 miles to Beijing and hopefully enough time for Borger to narrow down his search area. Assuming the target was still there.

  Clay tried again to relax and lay back against the chair’s soft headrest. He struggled to imagine what had motivated General Wei to destroy or hide the treasure which his soldiers had worked so hard to recover in that jungle.

  He closed his eyes and instead thought of Alison. He pictured her face, with long brown hair falling over her shoulders. Her beautiful eyes smiling back at him. He was falling for her and let himself smile as he began to drift off to sleep.

  In the end, it was his exhaustion that had prevented Clay from figuring out Wei’s motives that night. And when he finally did two days later, it would already be too late.

  17

  Alison sat in her office, thinking about John. She had been expecting a call the night before, but it never came. She wasn’t overly concerned, but it was just another example of the challenges in trying to maintain a long-distance relationship, especially with their jobs. Still, she had no regrets. A man like John was a diamond in the rough. The kind of man every woman wished for but rarely found. There were certainly plenty of wonderful men out there. But someone had truly broken the mold after John Clay.

  Her thoughts wandered back to the week they’d just spent together after returning from Trinidad. The walks on the beach holding hands, the feeling of safety she felt with him, and the way he spoke to her. They stirred emotions Alison hadn’t experienced in a long time, if ever.

  It made it all the more ironic that she hadn’t yet realized her cell phone was still in her car. Nor that John Clay would be well over the Pacific before she discovered the voicemail he’d left while his plane was refueling in California.

  With a sigh, Alison shook herself out of her daze and stood up from her chair. She rounded the desk and walked to the door where, with a quick pull, she stepped through and proceeded downstairs. Something had been haunting her since Trinidad. Something she’d been reluctant to pursue without really knowing why. So much had happened in the last few months. So much had been discovered that Alison was almost afraid of what they might learn next.

  The breakthrough with Dirk and Sally was truly a miracle of modern technology. It had blown open the doors to a real, genuine conversation between the two most sentient species on the planet. But what they’d found was not just exciting, it was frightening. Frightening in its potential to disrupt what they as humans had assumed for so long: that somehow animals without familiar or recognizable communicative abilities were little more than cute creatures in a kingdom over which humans claimed dominion.

  But now…now they had discovered not only a shocking level of understanding in Dirk and Sally’s communication, but also exposed an almost shameful level of human hubris. And a level of disconnectedness with the world around them that left Alison worried for her own species. Even Alison’s own personal connections were beginning to feel devoid of any true meaning. Instead, it felt like a detached view of the planet. Mistakenly superior. Materialistic. Clinical.

  The truth was, Alison was growing fearful of finding out that humans might not be very human after all. That rather than contributing to the world as it really was, they were instead gradually destroying it under a veneer of “progress.” The last thing she wanted to do was become even more disappointed in herself or her race.

  Alison forced a smile and pushed open one of the doors into the observation area. She’d often thought that the dolphins, especially Sally, could almost sense her coming. Which made it all the eerier when Sally seemed to be waiting for her as she arrived.

  Hello Alison.

  “Good morning, Sally. How are you and Dirk?”

  We happy. How you?

  “I’m happy too.” She was thankful the dolphins were not able to read human faces yet. Nevertheless, if Sally detected something different from Alison’s response, she didn’t show it.

  Where Chris?

  “Chris isn’t here yet. He will come soon.” She approached the tank and leaned against a desk just a few feet from the giant glass wall.

  Chris funny. Dirk replied as he glided in.

  “Yes, he is.”

  Alison paused, thinking how best to begin. Starting with the journey seemed a logical place. Especially since it had turned out to be much more than any of them expected.

  “Sally, Dirk. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  Yes Alison. We talk.

  “How…often do you go on your journey?”

  Many.

  She frowned, suspecting IMIS had mistranslated. “I mean, how many times in a year?”

  One.

  Alison knew the match for “year” was what the dolphins referred to as a “cycle.”

  “One every cycle?”

  Yes.

  “Why do you go?”

  Journey beautiful.

  “Yes, it is.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. Diving with them near the island of Trinidad was beyond beautiful. An underwater oasis like nothing the team had ever seen.

  And the population of dolphins there was simply breathtaking. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds covered the surface of the ocean like a giant, moving sea blanket.

  “So, you go because it’s beautiful?”

  We go for connect. For strong.

  “For connect?”

  Yes. And for strong.

  It was the first time Alison had seen that word translated: connect. But it verified what she had suspected. It wasn’t just a journey they carried out every year, it was a migration of some kind. A return to something deeper and more meaningful to them. And not just individually, but collectively. As a group. It was culture!

 
She stared at the screen, reading the translation again. What did “for strong” mean? To strongly connect? For a stronger connection?

  “Sally,” she asked. What is so special about your place?”

  A beep sounded and IMIS flagged the word “special.” She rephrased.

  “Why do dolphins go to that place?”

  Place from live.

  Alison frowned, unclear on the meaning.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Place from live. Sally repeated. One cycle.

  Alison mumbled to herself, trying to understand. “Yes, every cycle. I understand that.”

  Live.

  “I don’t understand.” She shook her head. Still at a loss, she decided to try another question. “Sally. Dirk. How far back do you remember?”

  The room became silent while she waited for a response. When nothing came, she glanced at the computer screen to see if there was a problem. No errors. “Sally? Dirk?”

  No understand Alison. Dirk replied.

  Alison opened her mouth to say it a different way but stopped abruptly. Rephrasing the question suddenly appeared more difficult than she thought.

  “I mean, how do your-” she stopped again. Dammit. How the hell would someone describe a memory?

  “Sally. Dirk. Do you know yesterday?”

  Yes.

  “Do you know yesterday yesterday?”

  Yes. Yes. Dirk followed his response with a laugh. Alison frowned again.

  “I mean, do you know yesterday’s yesterday?”

  Yes.

  “Do you know yesterday’s yesterday’s yesterday?”

  On the other side of the glass, Sally’s dark eyes glanced at Dirk and then back at Alison. She wondered if Alison were joking herself.

  Three day back. Yes.

  From the edge of the desk, Alison smiled. “Do you know ten days back?”

  This time Sally’s response came quickly. Alison you play?

  “No, I’m not playing.”

  Dirk edged closer to her. Yes Alison. We know ten day. We know hundred day. We know all day. You question funny.