by Ben Coes
“China will buy whatever bonds we put into the market.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Uhlrich. “We owe the People’s Bank of China nearly two trillion dollars. Trillion with a T. That’s a lot of money. Soon we’ll be at two five, then three. It’s not sustainable. What happens when we have to choose between whether your grandma gets her heart medication or China gets their interest payment? What happens when we have to choose between some Marine unit getting a better kind of flak jacket or paying off Beijing? And what happens when we do choose your grandma? What do the Chinese do? Scares me to even think about it.”
“We restructure. What can they do? Invade?”
“You’re missing my point,” said Uhlrich. “The Chinese already invaded. They’re here; instead of weapons, they fired money. If they stop buying our bonds, the U.S. economy will collapse.”
“So we start paying it back.”
Uhlrich smiled.
“I’m going back to Kentucky,” he said. “When Rob Allaire asked me to be treasury secretary, I thought it would be an honor, and it has been. But I’m not big enough for this job. We need someone sitting in this room who can figure this all out.”
“You’re a great treasury secretary.”
“No, I’m not. It’s gotten beyond me, Bobby.”
Grace stood up. He leaned forward and picked up Uhlrich’s glass.
“Let’s have another one,” said Grace, “and talk about that fishing trip we’re going on next summer. You’re not leaving, Wood. I have too much dirt on you.”
Uhlrich leaned back, laughing heartily.
“I’m going to be remembered as the treasury secretary who sold America to the Chinese.”
“No you’re not,” said Grace, standing at the sideboard and pouring two more bourbons. “You’re going to be remembered as the guy who fucked up the door playing darts.”
22
MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY
INTELLIGENCE BUREAU
SHANGHAI
In Shanghai, it was dinnertime. But none of the approximately one thousand employees within the ministry’s vast intelligence-gathering unit appeared to be hungry.
The desks were lined up in long rows; fifty rows in all, twenty desks per row, most of the desks occupied. The floor was an almost unfathomable collage of visual media. There were television screens one after another for as far as the eye could see, patient onlookers sitting and watching every media from every outlet imaginable in the entire world; earphones plugged in, listening and watching every news channel, television show, and movie released throughout the world, in every country, in every language, looking for information that had anything of intelligence value to China. This meant all geopolitical or economic issues affecting China as well as its allies and adversaries. They were to transcribe all mentions of China onto electronic tablets, which were then forwarded to human ciphers to examine further.
To the left, the job was to listen: radio shows, podcasts, music; again, any and every audio media introduced into the known world, if possible, in every country, in every language. To the right, the job was to pore over domestic and foreign print media, from every country, in every language: newspapers, magazines, blogs, books.
For a room filled with so many people and so much media, it was amazingly quiet.
Under Fao Bhang, the ministry had spent more than five billion dollars upgrading the technological might of the ministry’s electronic eavesdropping. This money went into trying to replicate America’s National Security Agency. This sophisticated eavesdropping apparatus—computers, satellites, satellite dishes, and software—produced massive amounts of information, which then needed to be analyzed by human beings. This was the room where that work was done.
Near the front of the room, a middle-aged man in a light yellow sweater and glasses stared at his computer screen.
11:50:01 PM
ARG 6/Córdoba
Gunfire reported
Location: Airport Córdoba
The analyst’s job was to monitor activity in Argentina, including dispatches originating at Argentine Federal Police—the country’s top law-enforcement agency—relevant to China. Normally, a generic crime report wouldn’t have drawn his attention. But some piece of software or algorithm within the bowels of the ministry had flagged it. He waited for another update. It came half an hour later.
12:18:36 AM
ARG 6/Córdoba
Multiple deaths reported
Location unknown
He went quickly into a bypass of AFP’s servers, going behind the AFP firewall through a backdoor Chinese hackers had built.
Locale: Estancia el Colibri
Mara Road 5’77”
AFP at scene
Multiple deaths confirmed
The analyst opened a separate program and typed “Estancia el Colibri.” When he hit “enter,” a satellite photograph appeared on the screen. The frame zeroed down in, focusing on the location of the ranch.
12:51:09 AM
Three confirmed homicides
**USSS at scene
He typed “USSS” into the ministry code manual.
United States Secret Service
The analyst sat upright. Suddenly, his computer screen went red and locked.
ACCESS DENIED
999999999999999
The number 9 replicated across his computer screen in flashing red until the screen was nothing but line after line of the numbers. He attempted to type, but it was useless.
He stood up from his cubicle and walked to the front of the room, went through a door, then walked down the hallway to the small, glass-walled office in the corner.
“Something has happened,” he said to a gray-haired man smoking a cigarette.
“Argentina? What could possibly happen in Argentina?”
“A triple murder, sir.”
“So what,” he said waving his cigarette dismissively.
“The U.S. Secret Service is at the scene.”
The man sat up.
“When?”
“Only minutes ago.”
“Well, what the hell are you doing here? Find out more!”
“The system shut me down.”
“What do you mean it shut you down?”
“It said ‘access denied,’ then flashed a number.”
He stood up.
“What was the number?”
“Nine.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and reached for his phone on the desk.
“Get me Minister Bhang,” he said into the receiver.
* * *
Bhang’s phone buzzed while he was out at dinner with his daughter and her young child.
“What is it?”
“Argentina, sir.”
Bhang listened to the information from the intelligence bureau in Shanghai as his grandson bounced on his lap. Perhaps Bhang should have attempted to reach Hu-Shao or Chang at this point. But his mind was already three steps down the line. If the mission had been a success, he would have already been told this by the agents on scene or by Ming-húa. But that’s not what happened. Something was wrong. He hung up, then dialed a different number.
“Si,” came the voice, a Spanish accent, of Pascal, whom Bhang had woken up.
“What’s the tail number of the plane?” asked Bhang.
“What? Who is this?”
“It’s Fao Bhang. What’s the tail number?”
“I’m sorry, Minister Bhang. Hold on.”
With his left hand, Bhang reached to the table and picked up a dried noodle, then pushed it gently into his grandson’s toothless mouth. He smiled at his grandson as he waited, the phone against his ear.
“Do you have a pen, Minister Bhang?”
“I don’t need one,” said Bhang. “Just tell me the number.”
23
PRIVATE RESIDENCE
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
J. P. Dellenbaugh was awakened by the phone next to his bed. He re
ached for the light switch, pulled the chain, then looked around the room. His wife, Amy, opened her eyes but didn’t move.
Contrary to popular lore, there is no red phone in the bedroom of the president of the United States. There are three phones, each black, with a small console of buttons. It is White House Control—the White House switchboard—that connects the president to the world. It is through a tightly controlled protocol that any inbound phone call gets through to the president, at any hour, and it’s a short list of people whose calls get through. In the middle of the night, that list is even smaller, confined to the president’s chief of staff, the director of the CIA, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the national security advisor. Someone else might be able to get through, a foreign leader, for instance, but first they would have to go through one of the chosen few.
Dellenbaugh grabbed for the phone before the second ring.
“Yes,” he said, sitting up against a pillow, which he pressed against the big ornate cherrywood headboard.
“White House Control, sir, please hold for CIA Director Calibrisi.”
The phone made a staccato beeping noise for a few moments. Dellenbaugh glanced at Amy, who had propped herself up on her left elbow and was watching him. Hector Calibrisi came on the line.
“Mr. President, sorry to awaken you,” said Calibrisi.
“It’s okay,” said Dellenbaugh. “What’s going on?”
“I received a call a few minutes ago from our chief of station in Argentina. I’m afraid it’s very bad news, sir. Jessica is dead; she was killed a few hours ago.”
Dellenbaugh reflexively, unconsciously jerked forward, heaving involuntarily, like a cough without noise. With his free hand, his right hand, he reached out and gripped his wife’s hand, squeezing it. He was silent for several moments, blinking, trying to process the news, unable to speak. He looked at his wife with a pained expression of disbelief and sorrow.
Amy Dellenbaugh said nothing, instead took her other hand and wrapped it around his, trying to be supportive.
“Killed?” Dellenbaugh finally whispered.
“She was shot. It’s still early. We have a forensics team getting on a plane in a few minutes to get down there. She was gunned down by what appears to have been a sniper. It was a planned attack. One of the ranch owners was gunned down; so was Morty, sir. Dewey survived.”
“My God,” said Dellenbaugh. “I’m sorry, Hector. I know how close you were.”
Calibrisi was silent. Dellenbaugh heard what sounded like a low sniffle.
“Who would want to kill our national security advisor?”
Dellenbaugh let Calibrisi regain himself. After more than a dozen seconds, Calibrisi cleared his throat.
“I don’t know. It very well may have been Dewey they were after. In fact, it probably was Dewey.”
“Iran?”
“Possibly.”
Calibrisi paused, then continued in halted speech.
“I should have known, Mr. President. I should have known and insisted on a much broader security detail.”
“It’s not your fault,” said Dellenbaugh.
“Yes, it is, sir.”
“Where’s Dewey?” asked Dellenbaugh.
“Córdoba. He chased someone—presumably the attackers—to the airport. They escaped on a private plane. He shot at the plane. Local police didn’t know what was going on, so they locked him up. We’re dealing with it.”
“How did we learn about it?”
“The head of AFP woke me an hour ago. He and our chief of station are on their way from Buenos Aires.”
Dellenbaugh glanced at Amy. She’d figured out what had happened, and tears were running down her cheeks, which she did not attempt to hide.
After a long pause, Dellenbaugh cleared his throat. He sat up, then stood up. He held the phone in his right hand. Dellenbaugh still retained much of the brawn that had made him a much-feared pugilist during his time in the NHL. He unconsciously clenched his left fist, as if he were about to slug somebody in the nose. His biceps lumped out like a baseball.
“We need to find out who the hell did this,” said Dellenbaugh. He stared out the window at a Washington that was dark, except for a few lights here and there, including the ones that demarcated the pinnacle of the Washington Monument. “Whether it was an accident because they were after Dewey or, God forbid, the assassination of America’s national security advisor, someone has to pay. If it was the latter, Hector, this is war.”
Calibrisi was silent.
“Do you agree?”
“Yes, I do, Mr. President. Intentionally or unintentionally, this is an act of war. We need to find out who did it. I need to speak to Dewey.”
“We need to handle how this is announced,” said Dellenbaugh.
“I haven’t even thought about that, sir.”
“You don’t need to. Let me handle that. In the meantime, get Dewey back here. I want to know what happened. Let’s reconvene first thing in the morning, in the Situation Room. Make sure Harry Black and Tim Lindsay are briefed and ready to talk about military options.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dellenbaugh hung up the phone. He looked at his wife.
“I’m sorry,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Dellenbaugh said nothing. He fought to hold back tears. He picked up the phone.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Get me Jessica’s parents. They’re in Princeton.”
24
VIA NUEVE
SANTIAGO, CHILE
In a dilapidated concrete building near Santiago’s soccer stadium, Chang stood atop a stainless-steel platform, barefoot, naked, sweating profusely, and breathing heavily, as heavily as if he’d just run five miles.
The building looked like an abandoned warehouse. But its external decrepitude masked its true purpose. From the outside, the doors were boarded up and no light was visible. From the inside, two stories below ground, a windowless expanse looked like a laboratory at a pharmaceutical manufacturer.
The facility was owned and operated by a company called Utrecht Promotions, which was, in point of fact, a shell corporation set up by China’s Ministry of State Security. It was one of thirty such secret interrogation labs dotting the globe.
The reason Chang was standing, despite the fact that he was exhausted, was because he couldn’t sit down. It was physically impossible. Forty-six stainless-steel probes the thickness of pencils jutted out from walls on both sides of him. These steel probes—long needlelike protuberances—were the approximate sharpness of golf tees, not sharp enough to break skin at first contact, but painful nevertheless, and capable, with some pressure, of puncturing skin and even leather. The probes were connected to a computer that monitored all manner of Chang’s physiological state, all in the name of determining if Chang was telling the truth.
Different countries, even different agencies within the same country, had different methods of getting people to talk. Simple lie detectors, while excellent devices for sniffing out lies from the untrained, were beatable with coaching and practice. Torture—electricity, waterboarding, fingernail removal, and dozens of other methods—was effective but often led to false confessions. Then there were pharmaceuticals, drugs, in many shapes and formats, employed in a variety of methods. But like the proverbial cure for baldness, no drug had yet been invented that could compel someone to tell the truth. Truth serum was a fiction, a product of Hollywood and thriller writers. What had been shown to be effective in a pharmaceutical context was the interplay of opiates, such as heroin, intended to make the victim feel good, and any manner of neurotoxins, which caused pain. The lure of the opiates intermixed with the harsh pain of the neurotoxins had been shown, especially by the CIA and Mossad, to be enormously effective at drawing out confessions.
Bhang took a different approach.
Upon his elevation to minister, Bhang had appointed somebody he could trust and who was technically capable—his brother Bo Minh—to d
esign and build a better mousetrap. What Minh invented was now being experienced firsthand by Chang. The device was called the “dragon.”
The dragon was simple enough: forty-six stainless-steel probes that pressed front and back against the subject, from head to toe. The probes were intelligent, that is, they performed a variety of functions depending upon the individual probe. First of all, at their most basic level, the probes monitored in real time all life functions of the subject—heart rate, brain activity, lung and heart pressure, levels of various chemicals in the bloodstream, oxygen levels, breathing rate.
These readings were then run through a sophisticated algorithm that had been written after studying more than one thousand individuals in a controlled setting, telling both lies and the truth, over a period of two years. Through this two-year data repository of minute-by-minute reactions, Minh and his team of statisticians, physicians, scientists, computer engineers, and design engineers knew exactly what lying looked like across a complex spectrum of physiological attributes. What they learned is that liars have a wide variety of strategies and physiological reactions, depending on time of day, levels of hunger, levels of exhaustion, and a number of other factors. There was no single way to know if someone was lying. However, there was a finite physiological library of reactions during the lying process—eighteen in all—across all people. Minh and his team discovered that in physiological terms, there are eighteen different kinds of liars, no more, no less.
Once they understood how to identify a liar with one of the eighteen different patterns, they then charted the transition from a state of lying to the state of telling the truth, in precise physiological terms. They mapped each of the eighteen types and, in this way, mapped the precise physiological transition to the truth. They learned that some liars will move to the truth with pain. Others will not, but those liars could be motivated in other ways, such as with drugs, sleep deprivation, hunger.