by James Rosone
Tom nodded and lifted the beer to his lips. He took a couple of swigs as he did his best to fit in with the crowd.
As the music continued to pound, a dry ice machine puffed some smoke onto the stage and a strobe light flashed. The girl dancing on the stage was doing her best to shake her moneymaker. As she neared the chairs at the edge of the stage, the patrons started pulling out singles and five-dollar bills.
Right on cue, when the music ended, the next girl began her routine. The biker, who Bill called Nugget, did indeed stand up and approach them. He stood next to Bill and ordered a bucket of beer as he pointed to a free table and chairs. The bartender nodded.
“Follow me,” Nugget said as he walked away to the table.
Bill and Tom followed and took a seat opposite him. A topless woman then brought them a bucket with six beers in it, half-filled with ice. “You guys need anything else?” she asked.
“Nah, we’re good for now. Make sure you put this on my friend’s tab, not mine,” Nugget said as he winked at the nearly naked twentysomething.
“Sure thing, Nugget,” replied the waitress.
Tom watched her as she walked back to the bar, noting she must be on a college sports team to have toned and defined legs and rear end like that.
“She’s nice, ain’t she?” Nugget said to Tom as he saw him eyeing her.
Tom tried to play the part he’d been given. “I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I’m Tom, by the way.”
Nugget lit another cigarette. “Nice to meet you, Tom.”
After some cordial small talk and another beer, Bill got down to business.
“Nugget, is there a supply problem with dynamite I don’t know about?”
Nugget chuckled. “There’s always a supply problem with dynamite. You boys are always stealing it.”
“OK, let me rephrase the question. Is there a reason why someone would be restocking or ordering more than usual?” Bill pressed.
Nugget lifted an eyebrow. “Why all the questions about supply? You know something I don’t?”
“We’ve intercepted more than fourteen hundred kilos of dynamite in the last six weeks. Either someone new is setting up shop or something else is going on,” Bill explained softly.
The music continued to thump and boom, providing good cover for their conversation.
The man called Nugget didn’t say anything right away. He opened his mouth, then stopped. “I need some fresh air. Follow me out back in a couple of minutes.”
Nugget got up and walked toward the back room.
Bill traded a sideways glance with Tom. “I’ll follow him, you go out the front and meet me in the back. Stay alert.”
Tom nodded and went out the front door that they had come in an hour earlier. A few minutes later, they were all standing along the wall of the building as Nugget lit up another cigarette.
“OK, what’s going on, Nugget?” Bill demanded now that they were alone.
“Look, man, I don’t know what’s going on or who’s placing all the orders. All I know is there’s basically an endless supply of dope coming in from China right now. They’re practically giving the stuff away. All you have to do is tell ’em how much you want, and they arrange it.”
“Whoa, what do you mean ‘how much you want’?” Bill asked.
“Like I said, they’re giving the stuff away. They aren’t charging the middlemen anything. You tell ’em you want fifty kilos, they send you a text saying when and where to pick it up. I don’t know who’s doing it or what they’re doing, but they’re crashing the market. In a few weeks, dynamite will be cheaper than water.”
The three of them talked for a few minutes longer before Nugget said he had to bounce.
Tom and Bill got in their car and headed back to the office.
“It’s important to write up your contact report from your meet as soon as possible,” said Bill. “Then the information is still fresh in your head. Look it over the next day and add anything you might have forgotten the night before.” He spent a few more minutes drilling into Tom the importance of the reports and getting them right.
“I might be retiring soon, but that doesn’t mean I want all my sources I’ve spent fifteen years recruiting going to waste once I’m gone,” he concluded.
Neither of them understood why the suppliers would be pushing this much product into the country during the middle of a pandemic. Even odder was the price. Who would want to intentionally tank the heroin market? Why would someone be giving away the product? None of it made any sense.
*******
National Security Council
Pentagon
Arlington, Virginia
Katrina Roets, Kat to her friends, wasn’t sure what to make of the report that had landed on her desk. It was about some unusual stock trading activity over the last few weeks.
We’re in the midst of a pandemic—of course there’s a lot of crazy trading going on, she thought. What makes this so special? Why is this being flagged for my review?
“Morning, Kat. Ah, I see you’re looking at that financial report I flagged for you last Friday,” Richard said as he walked over to the chair in front of her desk, coffee in hand.
Richard Drake was the senior advisor on the Council of Economic Advisors. He had a team of four analysts that supported the Treasury Department and a few other economic advisors to the President. His team did most of the grunt work for the big boys advising POTUS. They were also incredibly overworked and understaffed.
Katrina reached for her own coffee cup. “Sorry, Rich, last week was a bear. I’m only now looking at the report. What exactly am I looking for and why does it matter? Just the cliff notes if you can. I’ve got a ten o’clock meeting about Iran.”
Rich didn’t seem fazed. “I gotcha, Kat. OK, so here’s what’s going on. Over the last couple of months, we spotted some odd trading activity taking place. It started in the bond market. Then it moved into some of the larger pension funds and a few ETFs. The reason I flagged them for review by your office is because of the dollar amounts. Something’s off and our group doesn’t have the manpower or the classified reach-back to look into it any further than we already have.”
Katrina scanned the paper quickly, noting some of the transaction amounts. She raised an eyebrow at a few of them. “That’s a lot of money. What do you think is going on?”
“Well, that’s what we’re concerned about. The positions within these pension funds, ETFs, and bonds are being steadily liquidated and then moved to some offshore accounts. We’ve tracked the initial transfers to Bermuda, the Caymans, and London, but from there, we have no idea where it’s going. I was hoping you might be able to task someone from the NSA’s threat finance cell to see if they can further trace it,” Rich explained.
Huh, this is interesting…
Katrina flipped another page, looking at some of the assets being sold off. She lifted another eyebrow when she saw the highlighted line denoting Treasury notes. “Rich, I’m looking at this line item here,” she said as she turned the paper and showed him. “If I’m reading this right, it’s saying TL Bank out of Hong Kong just liquidated one hundred billion dollars in Treasury notes over the last month. Is that normal?”
Rich sat forward in his chair as he looked at the paper. “That’s also part of the problem we’re trying to understand. Look at the date, it’ll say this took place three weeks ago. When we pulled the bank’s records, we saw the bank was buying Treasury notes from another bank in China. Each time they reached one hundred billion in notes, they dumped them for whatever price they could get. Then they bought another one hundred billion from a different Chinese bank and repeated the process. We thought this was odd behavior, so we pulled all their records going back five years.
“For the last eighteen months, they’ve been buying and then dumping roughly one hundred billion in Treasury notes every month. We’re not sure if this is isolated to this specific financial institution or a broader problem. As you know, we have a small threat fi
nance cell at the Treasury, but we don’t have the same tool sets or deep bench the NSA has. If you could task them with helping us investigate this, it’d really help us connect some dots. I mean, maybe nothing nefarious is going on, but I think it’s worth verifying.”
Katrina thought about this for a moment. She knew his team had done about all they could. He was right, it was time to rope in some deeper-level intelligence reach-back. The NSA’s threat finance cell had a knack for unmasking shell companies and following the money.
“OK, Rich. I agree. Send me a formal request with all the data your team collected and I’ll approve it being tasked to the NSA,” Kat said.
The two of them then got up and left her office: Rich to work on getting the formal request submitted, and Kat on her way to a meeting on what to do with a belligerent Iran once again threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz.
Chapter Nineteen
Chess, Not Checkers
White House
NSA Office
Blain Wilson glanced at the report on his desk, and then the couch in his office. He realized he should probably call his wife and tell her he wouldn’t be coming home tonight. It was almost dark and he really needed to get caught up on the latest intelligence summary the DNI had sent over and compare it against some of the reports he’d received from the JTF down in Florida. Between those reports and the latest findings from the CDC, something felt off.
Then there was this horrific shoot-out at some unknown naval research facility in Idaho. Not to mention all the undercover intelligence operatives starting to turn up dead or having accidents—something was definitely up.
Once he finished calling his wife, Wilson placed a call down to the kitchen. He ordered a turkey club sandwich along with a fresh pot of coffee to be brought up to his office. It was going to be a long night.
As he waited for his dinner to arrive, Wilson looked at the latest summary from the COVID task force. When the pandemic had appeared in China and then hit Australia, Europe, and America, no one had been sure of what to expect. After the last COVID virus four years ago, the government and average citizen were a hell of a lot more prepared to deal with it. Still, this second Chinese virus was once again crushing the global economy and killing a lot of people.
Damn…the death toll has surpassed three million…unemployment continues to hover around seventeen percent…
Clicking on the email from the DNI’s office with the daily intel summary, Wilson perused the titles:
(U) Sell-off in US Treasury notes continues.
(U) Russia experiences massive uptick in COVID cases, particularly in the regions bordering China and Mongolia.
(U) COVID infection rates soar among the homeless and active drug users, spreading the virus throughout the inner cities and suburbs.
(U) Heroin of Chinese origin that has been flooding the market is suspected to have been laced with COVID.
(U) COVID deaths in the US surpass two hundred thousand; number of infected continues to climb as testing ramps up.
(TS) COVID appears to be a lab-created virus. Genetic markers to increase its contagiousness have been manipulated. Virus also appears to be less deadly than originally thought.
(TS/SCI/NOFORN) Chinese flu vaccine smuggled out of Cuba appears to be a COVID vaccine. It appears Chinese Belt and Road Initiative members are not experiencing a COVID outbreak. The CDC and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) are currently reverse engineering the COVID vaccine so it can be moved into mass production.
(U) US Coast Guard seized three hundred kilos of heroin and fentanyl in the Caribbean and the Straits of Florida.
(S) CDC discovered trace elements of COVID in the heroin and fentanyl seized by the Coast Guard. Analysis of the narcotics confirm they originated from China.
(TS) Additional Chinese Army units continue to arrive in Cuba and Venezuela as part of a new joint military training exercise.
This headline about the COVID vaccine and the last headline caught Wilson’s attention. He clicked on them to read the body of the reports.
The more Wilson read, the more he realized this would become a serious problem that needed to be addressed now, and not after the election. They now had the proof the Chinese had not only created the virus in a lab but had distributed a vaccine to it prior to its release. If this didn’t constitute malicious intent on the part of the Chinese, Wilson wasn’t sure what would.
I’ll need to brief the boss on this in the morning, Wilson thought. They needed to figure out how they were going to handle this and why the Chinese weaponized this new COVID virus. More than three million people had died worldwide as a direct result of China’s actions. That can’t stand.
*******
The Following Morning
Situation Room – White House
“Mr. President,” Wilson began, “what I’m about to tell you may come as a surprise, but I’m confident that it’s true.” The others in the room leaned forward in their chairs, listening intently.
“Nine months ago, we briefed you on the existence of a new advanced quantum supercomputer in China, code-named Jade Dragon. We believe Jade Dragon is being used to power another program called Project Ten, the world’s first semiautonomous AI supercomputer. It is my opinion, and the opinion of my staff, that the US, Europe and even Russia were attacked by this AI supercomputer across multiple domains in an ongoing attack—”
Peter Morris, the Secretary of Defense, interrupted, “Mr. Wilson, are you referring to that CDC report about the COVID virus being genetically engineered in a lab, or the fact that China appears to have created it and then provided their allies with a vaccine for it prior to the outbreak?”
This comment elicited some irritated chatter from the others at the table before the President raised his hand to hush them.
“That’s a bold claim to make, Blain. Why don’t you walk the dog on that accusation a bit and explain what you mean?” the President asked as he eyed him suspiciously.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Wilson said as he surveyed the room. “I will outline a series of events that have taken place over the last eighteen months that have led us to where we are now. I believe everything that’s happened up to this point has been a concerted effort on their part to take down the West—and, yes, I’m including Russia in this as well.”
This last part of Wilson’s statement caught a few people by surprise, including Vice President Victoria Jackson, who was sitting in on this meeting. Not many people had been paying attention to Russia recently. Too much had been going on in the rest of the world and at home.
“Eighteen months ago, the Bank of China among other Chinese financial institutions slowed their purchase of US Treasury notes to fifty billion dollars a month. At the same time, they were unloading one hundred billion dollars a month in Treasury securities to a TL Bank in Hong Kong. That bank then sold the Treasury notes at a discounted rate to other financial institutions and investment managers around the world. This hasn’t been isolated to US debt—they’ve been doing the same with euro bonds and British gilts. After nearly eighteen months of selling off our debt, the Chinese have virtually divested themselves from US Treasury securities.”
Wilson saw he had everyone’s attention now. This wasn’t just an American problem, it was a Western democracy problem. “Mr. President, while the PRC has been divesting themselves of American, British and EU debt, the Chinese have gone on a massive spending spree with that money over the last four years. The PRC has provided a total of one hundred and thirty-two billion dollars in economic aid to Panama, Venezuela, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, the Republic of Suriname, Guyana, and Uruguay. In response, these nations joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, integrating themselves into the Chinese economy.
“In addition to the economic aid, the Chinese provided these same nations with sixty-two billion in military aid to help them modernize their armed forces. In the last three months during the COVID pandemic, Cuba, Venez
uela, and El Salvador have signed a mutual defense agreement with China, positioning soldiers from an adversarial nation less than one hundred miles from our shores for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
A few people cursed softly to themselves as Wilson’s words washed over them and the slides his office had prepared showed the type and number of Chinese military units being deployed to these three nations.
“I have to agree with Blain, Mr. President,” Morrison said as he nodded in agreement. “The Chinese have been moving forward with a master plan that I think we’re only just now starting to see materialize.”
Riley Edison, the Secretary of State, shook her head. “No. I don’t buy this theory of a grand scheme to take down the US and Europe, Mr. President. I think we need more proof before we can make that kind of allegation.”
Riley had been the two-term governor of Minnesota when the President had won the election. Coming from an agricultural state, she’d had experience dealing with China and knew the trade issues facing the heartland of the country inside and out. The President had originally selected her to be his ambassador to China. When his first Secretary of State had suffered a heart attack and opted to step down, he’d selected her to be his replacement. She had done a great job negotiating the new trade deal with the PRC. Now it seemed likely that the Chinese were playing her to buy more time to fulfill their plot.
Wilson moved to regain control of the meeting. “Madam Secretary, Mr. President, if I can explain, there’s a lot more to unpack here. Seven days ago, the CDC received a flu vaccine vial from a diplomatic pouch out of our embassy in Havana. The vaccine had been provided to the Cuban health ministry by the Chinese sometime back in January. The country began a nationwide vaccine campaign in late January that ran into the middle of February. Please note the month—this was at the tail end of the flu season. When the CDC performed a further examination of the vaccine, they discovered it wasn’t for the flu. It was, in fact, a vaccine against COVID.”