“Yes.”
“What about last month, when Buvchenko came the first time? Was that the same van?”
When he heard the translation, Gideon smiled. “A BMW. Nice. Blue. We should have that also. The video’s saved a year at least.”
“Get us that, maybe we’ll pull a rabbit out of the technical hat.” Wells knew he should end the conversation there, but he couldn’t help himself. “Are we good? What’s done is done?”
Gideon hesitated after he heard the translation. He looked at the tabletop, seemed to consider a half-dozen answers. “If I’d wanted to shoot you, I would have already,” he said finally. “Let’s get Orli.”
He pushed back, walked out without a word to Shafer or Wright. He still had the limp.
21
BEIJING
Cheung sat alone in his office, trying to focus on a report on the problems with the air-to-air missiles for the J-31, when his phone rattled. Somehow he knew even before he looked at the screen who was calling. He picked up the handset with his fingertips, like an archaeologist pulling a cursed relic from a tomb.
When he saw the number, a wish-prayer came to him: Erase what I’ve done. The most selfish and juvenile of pleas. He wasn’t asking for the girl, only for himself. Anyway, even the most powerful god couldn’t make time run backward.
Cheung sent the call to voice mail and pushed the phone into his top desk drawer. Hide the relic, hide the curse. Irrefutable logic. Inside the drawer, it rattled again. Cheung felt his panic slide into something else, a sick eagerness. Do it to me already, whatever it is. Finish it. He grabbed the phone.
“General.”
Xiao. For some reason Cheung had expected Duberman. But Duberman didn’t speak Chinese.
“My employer would like to extend another invitation for a visit.”
Cheung laughed now, the sound backfiring in his throat. Was this how it felt to go mad? Each individual word made sense but together they added to less than nothing.
“He would, would he?”
“Tonight. One a.m., to be precise.”
“Not possible.”
“He can send his own plane if you’d like. If that would be more convenient.”
“Did you hear me, Xiao? I said no.”
“He says your friends insist. That they have questions they need answered, and soon.”
Xiao’s voice was as small and deferential as ever, yet the words turned the phone to lava in Cheung’s hand. Questions, indeed. His friends, indeed. The thumb drive that Duberman had passed to him the day before asked for detailed technical specs on the J-31 and the next-generation ballistic missile program that the Chinese were secretly designing. Cheung had imagined the Americans would start slowly and build, but they seemed intent on grabbing all the information they could right away. What would they want next time? Every drone program?
Typical American impatience.
“Also if you’d like, he can promise you more entertainment like last week.”
Now Cheung knew he was going mad. Doubly so, because despite everything, he felt himself stir. They’d slapped him, and now they were offering him a plate of dates. A treat. He still couldn’t remember what had happened the week before.
Didn’t he deserve a time that he remembered? Next time he’d remember.
No. There would be no next time.
To silence the voices in his head, he snapped at Xiao. “Does he think I’m some functionary? That I drop everything and come south whenever he asks—”
“I understand your importance, I promise. So does he. I can tell you that he intends to give you a very good excuse for meeting on such short notice.”
“What’s that?”
“The plane order he plans to place with you.”
Duberman had that much right. No one would question Cheung’s visit if he came back to Beijing with a launch order for the Smoothwind. Anyway, Cheung knew he couldn’t say no. “All right. Tell him I’ll be there. Maybe I’ll even come early, so I have some time to gamble.” The last words escaped Cheung’s lips before he could stop himself.
Mad, truly.
22
HONG KONG
Wells’s frustration rose after Gideon disappeared into the mall’s recesses. They had barely a half day to find Orli and disrupt the FSB’s game. Yet they couldn’t go straight at Duberman, and they had no obvious way to find Buvchenko unless the NSA came through.
So he and Shafer headed back to the American consulate and the CIA station there. The consulate was on Garden Road on Hong Kong Island, the lower slopes of the Peak, only blocks from the restaurant where Wells had killed Peretz and Makiv. The Chinese security services watched everyone who entered. The FSB might well be trying to monitor it, too. But Wells and Shafer had to risk the surveillance if they wanted help from the NSA.
The CIA and NSA knew only too well that the Chinese and Russians trawled the public Internet as aggressively as they did. So, at a cost of twenty-two billion dollars, the NSA had built its own worldwide fiber-optic network, physically separate from the privately owned cables that carried data over the Internet. The agency used the network for what it called routine-classified cables, anything at the For Official Use Only, Secret, or Top Secret levels. For more important transmissions, such as discussions of ongoing operations, the CIA depended on the satellite network that the NSA had launched during the Cold War and been updating ever since. The satellites had less capacity than the fiber lines, but they were effectively impossible to hack. The Pentagon shared some traffic and the multibillion-dollar annual cost of maintaining both networks.
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks, NSA had tightened its security further, especially for stations inside or bordering China and Russia. It simply would not respond to requests that weren’t sent through the American-controlled networks. Operatives who didn’t have their own portable sat connection or couldn’t get to a station had to call Langley and route the request through a desk officer, as Shafer had done for Wells more than once. That move didn’t improve security, but it did save the NSA from responsibility if something went wrong. But with Shafer in Hong Kong, they were stuck with the NSA’s rules.
Wright set them up in a coms room two doors down from his office, the usual windowless acoustically baffled electromagnetically shielded if-the-world-ends-you’ll-read-about-it-now-but-you-won’t-feel-it-until-tomorrow cubbyhole. A pleasant enough place to spend an afternoon. From there, Shafer called the senior duty officer at Fort Meade to ask for a trace on Duberman’s number.
The time difference meant that they were making the request in the early morning in Washington. But the NSA operated on a true twenty-four-hour timetable, a necessity since most of its targets lived in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Considering the simplicity of the request, Wells figured the agency would have an answer for them in an hour at most.
Nope. The problem that had plagued them since the start of this mission popped up yet again. Duberman was an American citizen, and for better or worse, the NSA no longer treated requests to tap or trace American phones as cavalierly as it once had. Before Snowden, the agency could have “self-certified,” a polite phrase for breaking the law today, telling Congress in six months. Now it demanded court preauthorization in all cases, unless the person making the request would confirm in writing that the information was needed to stop an imminent terrorist attack on United States soil.
Wells heard this explanation firsthand, as Shafer put the duty officer on speaker ten seconds into what turned into a three-minute speech. Along the way, Wells watched Shafer go through all five stages of telephonic bureaucratic grief: head-shaking, eye-rolling, forehead-slapping, twin-middle-finger-raising, and finally finger-pistol-to-temple mock suicide.
“We need this now,” Shafer said, when the guy was done. “We’re looking at a major intelligence operation involving the FSB, the PRC. With a
meeting in less than twelve hours.”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t meet the benchmark I’ve outlined.”
“Subsection 3A or 5B?
“I’m sorry, Mr. Shafer.” His tone suggested otherwise.
“I can ask Vinny Duto to call, if that’ll help.”
“The standards are the same for everyone. Even the President.”
Shafer cradled a pretend assault rifle and opened up on the phone, rat-a-tat-tat. “Fine. What happens next? You call one of your lawyers, tell them to take it to FISA?” The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, the special federal judges who oversaw the NSA.
“Correct. Then our attorney decides whether the request merits waking a FISA judge tonight or if it can wait for a regular emergency hearing in the morning.”
Even Wells saw the duty officer had just told them they’d be waiting.
“And how will this paragon of legal excellence decide?” Shafer said.
“If it gives us a chance at an HLT”—high-level target—“in ISIS, AQ, or some other designated group, we’ll call tonight.”
“Vladimir Putin. You may have heard of him.”
“Waking the judges is a last resort.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“Mr. Shafer, I promise we will get that emergency hearing when the court opens. Then it’s up to the judge. Assuming he signs off, we’ll trace two levels down, every number for the last ninety days. We find anything you want us to follow, and it doesn’t belong to a U.S. citizen, we’ll run it immediately. I assume we’re looking for Russian or Chinese numbers of suspicious origin as a first priority.”
“Correct.” Shafer was resigned to defeat, Wells saw. “So when will we have that first trace?”
“If the judge okays it, I’d guess noon.” Meaning midnight Hong Kong time. Ten hours away. An hour before the meeting between Cheung and Duberman.
“That’s not even close to good enough.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“One more question. If I call you back with a Russian number, or numbers—”
“That we should be able to do right away.”
With that minor win, Shafer ended the call.
“All of a sudden, they’re dotting every i?” Wells said. Irony that smelled like sewage, so thick Wells needed to pinch his nostrils. This emphasis on legal procedure had been nowhere to be found when the President locked him on the Reagan.
“The judge’ll give it to us.”
“Orli could be anywhere in ten hours.”
“She could be anywhere now. If it’s any consolation, it doesn’t matter whether they run the trace in ten minutes or ten days. No way Buvchenko is dumb enough to let us catch him on an incoming call. Better hope your buddy Gideon comes through before he goes to Macao with his boss tonight.”
Shafer’s mention of Macao gave Wells a fresh idea. “Why don’t we ask the White House for help with that?”
“You mean hit the meet, send in a Delta team to pick up Cheung and Duberman? Hypothetically speaking, assuming we lock down the location and we’re confident we can do it without civ casualties?”
“Sure.” Black Hawks skimming over the South China Sea.
“First off, you know DoD hates ops with no notice, no prep. Second, who knows what we even have in the area? Probably the closest teams are in Mindanao—” The island where the United States helped the Philippine military fight Islamist terrorists.
“So put the team on a plane.”
“Think it through, John. Going at the FSB is one thing. They started this when they offered asylum to Duberman. The Chinese, that’s different. No way can we put American soldiers into PRC airspace to grab a four-star PLAAF general. Especially when we don’t know exactly what the guy’s done.”
Shafer was right. The President would never agree. If the Chinese caught American soldiers trying to kidnap a senior PRC general, the repercussions would be unfathomable. As in World War III unfathomable.
“I mean, if you want, I’ll call Duto, ask him to ask.”
“Forget it. What if I go in myself? Ask Wright to helicopter me in?”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“What’s that? Security? I doubt Duberman or Cheung will want witnesses for this—”
“What you’re going to do when you get there. It won’t exactly be a clean grab. Probably they’ll die before they let you put them on a helicopter.”
“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.”
“As a rule, I admire your can-do spirit, but you’re going to need more than that this time.”
“Why am I the only one who cares what’s happening here?”
“If there were an easy answer, we would already have found it, John.” Shafer flipped open his laptop. “While we wait for Gideon, let’s see what we have on the FSB here. Never know if it’ll come in handy.”
—
WELLS FIGURED Shafer was trying to distract him. But he had nothing else to propose. So the afternoon shrank as they looked through the station’s records on the FSB. But the CIA’s top priority in Hong Kong was China, not Russia. The files didn’t have much, though they did include photos of nine local FSB case officers, including Sergei and Nikolai, who was believed to be the most senior operative. The station estimated the Russians had at least a dozen officers in Hong Kong, plus twenty or so logistics, support, and administrative staff. The FSB’s core mission in Hong Kong was assessed as economic espionage, with a secondary focus on monitoring China’s naval moves in the South China Sea. Russia didn’t have a direct stake in the body of water, but its ally Vietnam did. The information was all interesting enough in an academic way, but it brought them no closer to finding Buvchenko or Orli.
“See what we’ve learned, John?” Shafer said, after two hours.
“That you’re content to waste the afternoon because you think she’s expendable.”
“Let’s say I have a different view than you as to what we owe her.”
Wells was saved from answering when one of his burners buzzed. He grabbed it, found a text from Gideon. Not a phone number, but photos of two license plates, one noted as “van,” the other as “BMW.” Neither was a diplomatic plate, good news. Diplo plates would have meant the cars were openly registered to the Russian consulate, a dead lead.
Wells pushed the phone at Shafer.
“Don’t think of it as saving her. Think of it as blowing up whatever Oleg Nemtsov”—the Director General of the FSB—“has going.”
“When you put it that way.”
—
EVEN THE COMS ROOMS didn’t provide access to the most highly classified data at Langley—raw images of stolen documents, for example. Those could be viewed only from what the CIA called Loop Zero, the networks inside the Langley campus itself.
Still, they could reach into almost two hundred CIA databases that collectively held a staggering amount of information. Some of the databases, like the white pages, were publicly available to anyone with an Internet connection. Some had been bought from third-party providers like Dun & Bradstreet. And the rest had been stolen by the NSA. Like, for example, automobile, property, and corporate records from all over the world, including Hong Kong.
Within five minutes, Shafer had found registration and ownership records for the BMW and the van, translated from the original Chinese filings. After another five minutes he began to purr like a cat waiting outside a hole where a mouse was trapped. Wells was content to let Shafer work, knowing he was as good as these hunts as anyone in the world. Forty-five minutes later, he pushed his laptop to Wells.
“Check it out.” The registration records showed that a Hong Kong company called Kowloon East West PLC owned both cars. The filings for the company showed that its address was a post office box in Tsim Sha Tsui. No employees, no sales, all records care of a Kowlo
on law firm.
“So a shell owns the cars? That helps us how?”
“Good back-office tradecraft, you set up a new company for every registration or ownership record. Ideally, you go a step past that, use lots of different lawyers for the filings so there’s no pattern even at the nominee level. No connections. Unnecessary connections are sloppy tradecraft. But that’s expensive and hard work. People get lazy, especially if they think no one’s ever going to look. So now we know the cars are linked.”
“Which we already did.”
“Yeah, so what are the odds that those are the only two cars that company owns? I reversed the search, went from the corporate side.” Shafer tapped the keyboard, pulled up three more auto registrations.
“Good, now we know they own more cars.”
“Now you’re being intentionally difficult.” Shafer closed four ownership records, left one open. “Okay, if you look, you’ll see they transferred the title of this fifth one last year to another shell company”—called 839653 Ltd. and registered to an apartment in Kowloon. “Six presumably random digits. Now, that’s tradecraft.”
“I’m glad you approve. So, good, the Russians decided to sell one of their cars.”
“To another shell company. And that wasn’t just any car. It was a Mercedes AMG sedan, barely two years old. The big souped-up one. Runs more than a hundred thousand dollars in the U.S., a million-plus HK?” Shafer pointed at the screen. “Check out the recorded transfer price, which our friends at the Hong Kong Transport Department were good enough to provide.”
Fifty thousand Hong Kong.
“Five percent of what it was worth,” Shafer said. “I’ll bet you all Duberman’s money that the person behind 839653 Ltd. is an FSB case officer.”
Finally, Wells understood. “Stripping assets.” Many of Russia’s richest men had built their fortunes just this way. They used other people’s money to take control of companies or government-owned property. Then, secretly, they sold themselves valuable pieces for pennies on the dollar.
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