Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

  “Let me guess,” McBurney said. “Your dog ate the tape.”

  Kosmalski cleared his throat. “Off the record, what do you think the Bureau’s assessment was—is—of who murdered Ahmadi and Prouty?”

  McBurney took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. I am going to get to the bottom of this. “I hope it’s the same assessment that we have. That Ahmadi was burned, murdered by his Iranian handler because...” Kosmalski was looking at him strangely. Suddenly he knew what the FBI agent was about to assert: the CIA had learned of Herman’s dalliance with Ahmadi and compromised the secrecy of their negotiation, which had gotten him and Katherine Prouty killed. That’s why they won’t hand over the surveillance record.

  “You dirty bunch of double-dealing bastards,” McBurney said, shaking his head.

  “Wait a minute, Sam. I think you’re—”

  “So you have never, ever trusted us, have you? Us lowbrow, Cold Warrior spies. Artifacts. Curios. Or was it just me?”

  “Now don’t get paranoid. You’re reading too much—”

  “Am I under scrutiny?” McBurney narrowed his eyes.

  Kosmalski didn’t respond.

  “If Ahmadi’s handlers did kill him, have you considered what that says about the contents of the surveillance tape?” McBurney leaned forward over the desk. “Or, how about this: the CIA arranged Ahmadi’s meeting with Senator Milner, and his murder, and...and my pestering you for the tape is part of the ruse. Yeah, those gullible FBI boy scouts—er, girl scouts. Those spit ’n polish dickheads.”

  Kosmalski’s eyes grew wide enough to explode. He pounded his fist on the table and caused McBurney to flinch. Kosmalski said in a harsh, raspy whisper: “What makes you so sure that it’s the CIA I’m worried about?”

  44

  Friday, June 5

  STUART SAT BACK in his CLI office chair, feet propped on a cardboard box while staring off into space. Open but upside down in his lap was the technical memorandum, Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels. A colleague on the pretext of professional courtesy had handed him the obscure research primer, and Stuart had detected a sneer that seemed to suggest, ‘You ought to read up on this but I doubt you’ll understand it.’ Weeks into the job at the company he co-founded, Stuart had a sense that the avalanche of mind-boggling information was designed to confuse him. Great, he thought, now I’m becoming paranoid.

  In truth, his difficulty to focus on anything or anyone was due to Emily Chang—their quagmire seemed to both begin and end with her. There was also the sad tragedy that had become Jim Cole’s life. Every man responds in his own way to personal tragedy. As a father himself, Stuart would have thought that the death of his daughter would compel Cole to delve relentlessly into the cause of the crash, a suspicious event from whatever direction one chose to approach it. At some point Cole would have to face the harrowing truth that his daughter and others were not accidental victims, they were murdered. That was not a day that Stuart was eager to see.

  He toyed with the note on his desk from his secretary. Stuart reached for the phone and dialed the number at Thanatech.

  Marlene Schwegman conveyed to him the latest round of distressing news. “Paul Devinn has disappeared.”

  Stuart recalled that Devinn was supposed to be out on temporary leave. “You mean, he’s missing in Canada?”

  “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police traced his employment history and called Thanatech yesterday. They wanted to know if he’d contacted anyone here at the office.”

  “Has he?”

  “We were hoping maybe you had heard something.”

  “He hasn’t called me.”

  “Oh, dear.” Marlene’s voice was breaking; she exhaled a recuperative breath. “I guess there was a big storm on the lake where he was fishing. They said...they said somebody found his fishing boat. I remembered you two went back a few years.”

  Stuart remembered a picture of Devinn inside his college dorm room holding a fish over his head, his fellow student passing it off as some sort of a cynical joke. “So they haven’t actually located him?” Or his body, he chose not to say.

  “The Mounties were stingy on details. I was left with the impression that they’re not so optimistic and that their call to the office was some sort of formality. I hope I’m wrong. I certainly hope he doesn’t wind up on your list, at least not this way.”

  “My list?”

  “That list of Thanatech ex-employees I drew up for you. Remember, the one you wanted to use for hiring leads...? Have you had any luck?”

  “Oh. No, not yet.”

  “Something strange happened the other day. A nice young man from the FBI came by and asked for that very same list. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  Stuart lifted his feet from the box. “What, are they hiring too?”

  “No, silly. He said it would help them investigate the Thompson murder. He was tickled when I handed it right over. I hope you don’t mind that I gave you all the credit.”

  Stuart didn’t respond for several seconds. Might this be good news? he wondered. Maybe the door had cracked open for deeper investigation, after all. “I thought they already concluded that Thompson’s murder was drug related.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “I had heard they never found the party responsible for murdering Sean. Good to know they’re not giving up.”

  Later that day, Stuart looked up from a rare disruption-free session of reading and rubbed his eyes. Standing in the doorway to his office was Milton Thackeray. Stuart had not quite gotten comfortable with his absurdly full, lumberjack beard. Stuart asked, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Your worst fuckin’ nightmare.”

  “Just the guy I need. Come in.”

  Thackeray stepped inside. With twenty-eight patents to his name in the fields of optoelectronics and multi-photon photoelectron spectroscopy, Dr. Milton Peter Thackeray was CLI’s unrivaled go-to geek and chief technology officer. Seven years after Stuart had recruited him, now lavishly vested with options and wealthy in his own right, Thack preferred his Florsheim wing tips unpolished and his auburn hair pulled into a pigtail.

  Stuart thumbed through a stack of green-and-white printout to one of many blaze orange Post-its. “I keep coming across this VLPC thing-a-mah-jig. It seems to be the object of a staggering level of spending. What can you tell me about it?”

  Thackeray jutted his chin toward the technical documents scattered about the desk. “I take it you haven’t had a chance to read about the Visual Light Photon Counter array?”

  Stuart shook his head. “But am I ever chomping at the bit.”

  Thackeray ran a beefy hand over his pate. “Okay... Think of what we’ve built downstairs as a great, big, light-scattering spectroscope. We raster a lazed beam across a target—CLI built its reputation on being able to control that type of process very well. The hard part comes with processing the lazed light-to-matter interaction in order to establish the constituents of the target. We’re talking for each target molecule its atomic structure, right down to the spin, momentum, and orbit of each individual electron. The next step, which these crazy Swiss were supposed to have brought to the party, involves organizing the trillions of bits of spectroscopic data and teleporting it to another location.”

  “Listen, Thack, all I—”

  “Of course these steps all require that our photo-diode processing is state-of-the-art, dead fuckin’ nuts-on accurate. The beauty of using a laser is you can communicate these quantum properties without changing them, without specifically measuring each of the individual subatomic properties.” Thackeray stumbled over Stuart’s expression. “You following me?”

  “What gives with the beard? I mean, really.”

  “Bearded people are afforded certain discriminatory protections.”

  “Oh, so that’s it. For a moment when you first walked in here I thought I was staring into the backside of an ape.”

  “I guess that’s a f
amiliar sight for you?” Thackeray smiled.

  Stuart shook his head. “No, I’m not following you. Sounds like we’re trying to skirt the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.”

  “In a way. The Swiss algorithms take a Heisenberg statistical approach, but not to predict the energy states so much as entangling the communicated data.”

  “Entangling...goddamn it, then how do the Swiss—”

  “Hold on.” Thackeray grinned, a twinkle in his eye. “This is where the VLPC array has become such a thorny issue. We had one bitch of a time getting our avalanche detection—”

  “I ask for the time—you build me a watch!”

  Thackeray looked at him. “You are the one who asked me about the VLPC.”

  “You’re right—I’m being a dope. Can you just give me the Wikipedia version, or something? So, why all the money?”

  “If what you’re after is a budget review, you should talk to Steve Reedy.”

  Stuart referred again to the printout. “Says here you ran the VLPC project.”

  “That’s right, all I did was run the project. Talk to Reedy about spending.”

  “I’m talking with you, I don’t need to talk to him.”

  “Then talk to Perry!”

  “What is your hang-up with Reedy?”

  Thackeray thought for a brief moment. He rose from Stuart’s desk and shut the door to his office. Stuart could see that something was troubling the man.

  Thackeray cleared his throat into his fist. “We’ve known each other awhile. Can I be frank?”

  “You feel the need to ask?”

  Thackeray narrowed his gaze. “What do you make of Steve Reedy?”

  Stuart considered what might have generated such angst. He had noticed the other day that Ralph Perry was inclined to defer to Reedy’s judgment, especially in matters of disagreement between Reedy and Thackeray. It hadn’t seemed to Stuart at the time that Thackeray’s nose was particularly bent out of joint; perhaps he was wrong. “Seems like an okay guy. I really can’t say much about his competence yet.” He shrugged. “A little opinionated. I guess the dismal state of the project might say something about him. Maybe not.”

  “Well, we worked, and worked, and worked to get the VLPC detection right. Topping it all off, we get this extra security rammed down our throats!” Thackeray paused to study his boss. “I’d bet my life it’s at least as good as we need. In fact, much better than we need.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a problem.”

  Thackeray balled his fists and lowered his head, shaking it slowly. “The problem is, Reedy’s driven the whole organization to the brink in order to make the avalanche detector more accurate than we need it to be. You know me, I may be a physicist, but I’m also an engineer. Reedy, on the other hand, insists on polishing the head of a pin. It’s ludicrous that for the last few months all we’ve done is re-write code for the sole purpose of trying to make this thing track perfectly—Jesus Christ!!”

  “Don’t blow a gasket.”

  “Look, Reedy’s a really smart dude. Don’t take my word for any of this. You should put out a feeler for what the Swiss think of Mr. Reedy. When it comes to actually working with the guy, for Perry’s sake they’re careful to put on the good team face—Perry controls the consortium budget. Privately, I know for a fact they’d like to strangle the fucker.”

  “So where is Perry on this?”

  Thackeray rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “We all know Ralph. Ralph’s no rocket...he’s not technically gifted. Since you left the company his big thing has been scurrying up to Washington, I guess to panhandle for contracts. Or off he goes to Hungary or Ethiopia for peddling medical lasers to their government clinics, whatever.”

  “Ralph’s a good salesman, always has been.”

  Thackeray flicked his wrist. “I guess. In between he beats us up to quit spending so much money. He finally hired Reedy to fill your shoes and that’s what he trusts him to do. In fairness to Steve, Ralph really doesn’t know which end of a laser is which. The upshot is, until now Perry’s fair-haired boy has pretty much gotten free reign.”

  Stuart suspected Thack’s beef with Reedy had much to do with old-fashioned professional jealousy. “And now we’ve wasted all this time and money... But won’t surplus detector accuracy put us ahead of the curve once we loft these gizmos into satellite orbit?”

  Thackeray took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “I suppose. Unless we quit fucking around and actually demonstrate the ability to teleport something, we’ll never get into orbit.”

  45

  Monday, June 8

  THE COMMISSIONER of National Defense Science, Technology, and Industry retrieved from his desk drawer the bottle kept in reserve strictly for bridging the cultural crevasse. Unlike his guest, Deng Zhen preferred a good single malt scotch to one-hundred proof vodka.

  Valeriy Alexei Korzhakov had smuggled much more into China than his Ukrainian thirst. As a gifted young scientist conducting pioneering research in high-energy physics, he had been snapped up by Yuri Andropov’s KGB, his technical memoranda swept from university bookshelves and classified. While the Kremlin publicly raged against the lunatic’s errand of escalating the Cold War to the commanding heights of space, Korzhakov and his colleagues labored feverishly to close the ‘Star Wars’ gap with the Americans. In the end, Mikhail Gorbachev lacked both the stomach for the emerging battlefield and the faith that his countrymen could prevail there. He had abandoned his vast army of loyalists without even a fight. For Korzhakov and many of his peers, leaving the fissuring states of the Soviet Empire was a matter of hard cash for an Aeroflot ticket, no questions asked.

  Valeriy Korzhakov eyed the clear fluid as Deng poured them each three fingers. “Hardly cause for celebration,” he said of his message today for the technology commissioner.

  Deng disagreed. “Victories in this business come along too infrequently. It is no small feat to successfully co-opt the services of a premier engineering organization without their being aware.”

  “On condition we truly did succeed.”

  Deng raised his glass. “To Yankee ingenuity?”

  Korzhakov smiled. “Da—to our fruitful harvest of American labor!”

  Deng endured the Russian alcohol’s harsh plume spreading through his chest. He saw the engineer eyeing the family photograph on his desk. Korzhakov had probably noticed in his numerous visits that it was not something always on display; Deng’s tolerance for painful reminders had its limits. “The picture was taken on one warm spring afternoon in April of 1965,” he confided. A familiar sadness asserted itself. “My lovely young sister would be 56 years old today.”

  Korzhakov seemed to appreciate this rare glimpse. “Would be...?”

  “They are no longer alive. So. What is the problem crippling us now? Could it be something within this new software?” The engineers so far had been unable to get the satellite’s rebooted master control to fully respond to commands. They were still unable to accurately target the orbiting laser beam.

  “I rather suspect our problem lies with adapting the pilfered American targeting code within our existing system.”

  Their latest espionage bonanza, of monumental risk in and of itself, was but one element of what may yet prove to be the weapon program’s riskiest gambit of all: having lofted the device into orbit without first proving the stabilized accuracy of the visual light photon counter array, which engineers typically referred to as the VLPC. In addressing this challenge, Deng knew his demands for technical product had pushed the State Security ministry’s spycraft to the proverbial edge. There were covert operatives in America, and elsewhere, busy at work in order to serve his technical appetite. But the Americans simply had to be getting suspicious, especially given the ministry’s repeated harvests from one East coast laser company in particular. “We anticipated complications,” Deng gently set down his glass, “did we not?”

  “I need not remind you it took two years to adapt the original, imported code to our sate
llite hardware. We’re now several software generations since then. Meanwhile, how many more generations of code have the Americans proceeded with?” Korzhakov leaned back in his chair. “We have in effect two twins separated at birth, each over time developing certain traits and skills, each encountering different illnesses. Then adolescence arrives and we decide to transplant an organ, something critical—say, a portion of one’s brain? That is essentially what we are trying to do.” He downed the last of his vodka. “One also cannot deny the impact of Zhao’s disappearance. It is his software.”

  However legitimate Korzhakov’s point, it simply smacked of another excuse. Excuses would not lead to the successful demonstration of their satellite weapon. In fact, recruiting the Soviet scientists to the project had in many ways contributed to Deng’s problems. His heavy reliance upon their expertise had built intractable delay into the process; they worked at their own pace, trusted only their own sources, while always groveling not for yuan nor dollars but Krugerrands.

  The question of whether changing the software would be sufficient to correct the laser stability problem weighed heavily on both men. Until the upgraded software package becomes fully operational, there could be no certainty that a software fix alone would remedy the problem.

  To Deng, there was one immutable certainty: with satellite Number One ineffectually orbiting the Earth in a sort of stealth mockery of his country’s proudest accomplishment, and the second vehicle nearing launch, the decision to replace existing hardware would by definition be instituted by whoever replaced him.

  Korzhakov cleared his throat. “I gather the state committee is nipping away at your heels?” he asked with characteristic bluntness.

  Deng liked that Korzhakov rarely left one wondering whether something had been lost in the transliteration to English. “In the People’s Republic of China, the venerable body to which you refer is a ministry. Yes, they are nipping at my heels.” All of his staff believed that diverting the second satellite from final assembly was their most expedient course of action. This would provide the engineers hands-on access to the identical satellite, embodied within which was all of Dr. Zhao’s latest object-oriented programming.