Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller

by Bradley West

  As the phone rang in Guangzhou, Kaili stepped out in search of a private room where she could call Beijing.

  The speaker answered in Mandarin. Nolan knew every NSA listening device in Asia was or would soon be screening for Bob Nolan, so he opened with, “I need to speak with my wife Shao Yin and daughter Mei Ling.”

  Joanie and Mei Ling spoke at once, “We’re here!”

  “Are you both all right?”

  Joanie took over. “Mei Ling looks like she’s lost a few pounds since we saw her at Christmas. And she needs a haircut and skin care products.”

  “Mom, that’s not what Dad means. We’re fine,” Mei Ling said. “Except we’re under arrest and in a detention center.”

  “I’m glad you’re OK. Look, I don’t have much time. I need to make a trip right now and do a couple of things. If it all goes well, those holding you will take you the airport, return your passports and let you go. There are people listening in on this call, so don’t use our names.”

  “Is the maniac still after you?” Mei Ling asked.

  “Yes, I’m sorry to report, but don’t worry. I think he’s quite ill, and maybe dying. He certainly isn’t in a position to hurt either of you, even once you’re released. I have other problems, and I’m afraid my employers are now trying to arrest me. If they succeed, I’ll go to jail and your hosts won’t release you.”

  “We understand, Bob,” Joanie said. Mei Ling and Nolan winced. He hung up to limit the damage.

  He didn’t bother wiping the room of prints. The Internal Security Department likely had it miked, and if not, he’d bet his now forfeited pension on CCTV coverage. As the images wouldn’t be stored on-site, there was no point to dismantling the surveillance gear. Plus there was Linda Leong. She’d helped him in many ways, big and small, over the years. You never knew when you might need a favor, starting with the discreet storage of a backpack holding some biking accessories.

  * * * * *

  Kaili thanked Madam Leong for the use of room #3 for her call. The mama-san gave her an eyeballing, making Kaili uncomfortable. Had that procuress watched her offer herself to Nolan, or maybe those two had been lovers and Leong was jealous? Pushing those thoughts out of her mind, Kaili dialed her boss of less than a day.

  “It’s Po See Win in Singapore,” she said in Mandarin, using a pseudonym signaling extreme urgency. “Can you speak?” The call ended. She opened an app and entered the day’s password to activate anti-eavesdropping measures. A few seconds later her phone buzzed on the now secure line. The Americans didn’t own all the best technologies these days, certainly not in telephony. China’s homegrown telecom equipment companies were excellent partners to MSS in developing counter-surveillance techniques.

  “I have a high-value migrant. He’s Robert Nolan, CIA cryptanalyst. He will give us Watermen’s NSA files in Sri Lanka on Friday. After that, I think we can persuade him to come across.”

  “That was fast work, I’m impressed. How did you manage it?” Her new superior was one of the few survivors of the purge that followed Liu Zhenchang’s firing. How long the new MSS head Ding would leave him place was anyone’s guess, but in the meantime anything she did to make the Southeast Asia Foreign Affairs Bureau look good would be helping both of their causes.

  “I exploited his weakness.” Kaili didn’t owe him anything more detailed and would be vague in her field report. But what exactly had she done to elicit such an outpouring of information? She had an epiphany: Nolan was at least as lonely as he was desperate.

  “It seems our man is now on the run from his own agency. He’s chartered a private jet that flies in the next one to two hours. With your permission, I will join him on the flight.”

  “Do so. Preferably, travel with a bodyguard. If that’s impossible, develop a plausible cover that he kidnapped you. If it goes wrong, claim diplomatic immunity. If you make it to Sri Lanka alright, MSS has a large organization in Colombo. You should be fine, as long as he doesn’t get violent or the CIA doesn’t use force to capture him.”

  She said, “I won’t be able to get a bodyguard on that plane, but I don’t think he’s the violent sort. There are two collateral issues.” Her brain whirled away on other matters while her work façade handled the briefing. “The NSA spy Mark Watermen will be in Sri Lanka. Nolan made a deal with Russia’s security services to trade the NSA files for Watermen’s freedom.”

  “Watermen? Eliminating him ties up a major loose end. Find out when and where they’re meeting Friday. We’ll have a team there. If you can, either verify the files are destroyed or take them into your possession. This would close an important chapter most satisfactorily. It might even be the fast track to seeing you back in Beijing very soon.”

  Working for the new big boss Ding Taiping wouldn’t be anything like being mentored by Comrade Liu; that wily old man still had his fingers on many pulses. Liu was hard to cage; smarter men than Yi Xiubao had found that out. Maybe she should lie low for the time being, until the Beijing musical chairs sorted themselves out. New appointees like Ding didn’t last unless they learned fast.

  “Thank you, Comrade. I’ll try to touch base with our colleagues once I reach Sri Lanka. But realistically, I may not be able to do so.”

  “Not to worry. Our people will spot you soon enough. You’ll have cover.”

  “There’s another issue. Nolan says he knows what happened to MH370,” she said. “That’s why he’s forced to flee: his own people are suppressing his investigation.”

  “MH370? That’s fascinating! After this call, I’ll contact Ding Taiping himself. I’m certain he’ll be very excited. When will you make your approach to Nolan?”

  “Once I have the files or they are destroyed, I will inform him that we cannot release his family unless he personally comes to China to collect them. That should do it.”

  “A most excellent idea. This will also give us a chance to administer a polygraph and obtain a full briefing on the Stuxnet project.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “The priority has to remain eliminating Watermen and the files. MH370 and Nolan are of lesser importance. If you have to, terminate Watermen yourself.”

  “Terminate?”

  “Terminate with extreme prejudice.”

  * * * * *

  He’d been waiting for the knock but jumped nonetheless. The weak afternoon sun warmed the apartment only a few degrees above this morning’s freezing levels. His hair was greasy and he could use a cooked meal, but without power all he could contemplate was building a fire in the bathtub. Now it was moot, with the FSB finally here to jail him for real. He opened the front door to see only Chumakov’s driver, Ivan or Boris or some other bog-standard Russian name. He was a gentle giant with gnarled fingers and bright scars on his neck and lower jaw speaking to a bad day in Afghanistan c.1982.

  Ivan-or-Boris spoke minimal English, but it was better than Watermen’s Russian, which he had refused to learn on principle. “Here are tickets and passports. Sign. Tomorrow, 5 a.m. airport pickup.”

  Watermen reached out for the proffered packet, taking the pen and looking at an itemized list in Cyrillic characters with an X in the lower right-hand corner awaiting his scrawl. He could have been signing for anything, but if the man said it was passports and plane tickets, that was good enough for him.

  Watermen returned the pen and signed receipt. Ivan-or-Boris solemnly folded the paper and inserted it into the inside breast pocket of his camelhair overcoat and left. Watermen was alone again, but one step closer to freedom. He opened the zippered pouch and arrayed the contents on the side table next to the window, where he could see well enough to read. It was a first class one-way ticket from Moscow to Sri Lanka through Abu Dhabi on Etihad Airlines. Hot damn! His now notorious Mark Watermen US passport was there. Behind it was a weathered Russia passport identifying him as Oleg Gordievsky, the infamous Soviet double agent for MI6 in the mid-eighties. Of all the phony names, Chumakov had gifted that one just to mess with him a little bit more.
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  One thousand Sri Lanka rupees, about US eight dollars’ worth of currency, carried a sticky note in Chumakov’s handwriting that said overseas living allowance. Behind it, a solitary UAE ten-dirham note worth about US$2.50 was labeled relocation funds. Then there was a final sticky note on the photo page of the Gordievsky passport that read pack personal effects and one laptop only. Like hell I’m taking one of those bugged laptops with me to Sri Lanka, he thought. At the bottom was written, P.S. You should start wearing your glasses again.

  Of course, the Gordievsky passport pictured him wearing glasses. Sri Lanka immigration officers could well ask him to put on his spectacles before allowing him into the country. He couldn’t see worth a damn without glasses anyway.

  So he was getting out at long last. That must mean everything was good at Godpa’s end.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  RIDE SHARING

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT, MARCH 12, SINGAPORE

  Flynn spoke with an audible tremor in his voice. “I just got a call. We sweated Nolan’s helper—threatened her with deportation, confiscation of her life savings and imprisonment in Philippines—and she told us our man went over the back wall with his bike almost thirty minutes ago.”

  “Jesus wept! A bicycle. Get all the surveillance footage of every cyclist for five or ten miles in all directions.”

  “That’s nearly the whole island, Dick. Singapore’s less than twenty-five by twelve miles.”

  “Yes, and there are over five million people living here, but not more than ten are white males with big gray mustaches who ride a bike. Get cracking and work with ISD, SID and NSA. We want every voice and internet communication on or off the island filtered for Bob Nolan and variants thereof.”

  Shoenstein spoke. “I’ve confirmed with State that Nolan’s real and cover passports are now on global watch lists. Nothing so far.”

  Flynn piped up, “The Singaporeans are doing their part, putting double shifts on at Changi Airport, the Malaysia causeways, the train station, bus terminals, and even the ferries to Indonesia and Malaysia. His photograph is all over the local wires.”

  Millie was feeling better. She sat up to observe the Keystone Cops operation. She supposed they’d let her stay on in Constantine’s office because of her assertion that Nolan was a traitor, but her true feelings were conflicted. She hated Nolan, but he wasn’t a Benedict Arnold. She needed something better than Nolan has Watermen’s NSA files to keep her out of jail. Maybe even keep her job.

  Bullpen gossip had it that Constantine’s wife had run off with the handyman six months ago. Hmm.

  * * * * *

  Rikki Lam wasn’t used to picking up stray men at the Orchard Towers taxi stand, so she jumped when a stranger opened the rear passenger door and dumped an overstuffed backpack on the back seat. Before she could reply—or, for that matter, accelerate away—the front door opened and in plopped someone she didn’t know. He closed the door behind him.

  “Hi, Rikki. It’s me, Bob.”

  “Bob? I didn’t even recognize you.”

  “Best to start driving. There are three cabs waiting for this spot.”

  Flustered, she put her canary-yellow classic BMW in gear and pulled out. Spotting a break in the oncoming traffic, she executed a nifty illegal U-turn with the throaty engine roaring. Nolan winced as he buckled his seatbelt. “Let’s try not to break any more traffic laws. I’m on the lam, remember.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry about that. It’s just that traffic on Orchard Road sucks, so I try to avoid it. Where do you want to go?”

  “Seletar Airport. Up near Punggol. I have a plane to catch.”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Take your time. I chartered it and am the only passenger.”

  “I’ll get us close. Let me know the detailed directions to the airport once we get near.”

  “Will do. And thanks for the ride. You could end up in jail for this. I won’t tell them, but if they find out, tell them I made you do it at knifepoint.”

  “Knifepoint? Bob Nolan, I don’t think you’ve ever pointed a knife at anything other than a steak!”

  “Desperate times make for desperate people.” They both chuckled.

  “Actually, I’m glad we had this chance to talk. I haven’t spoken to Shao Yin in the last few days. Is she all right?”

  Nolan squirmed in his seat, but turned to look Rikki in the eye as he lied. “She’s off visiting one of your aunties on the duck farm in Guangzhou. Probably doesn’t even have cell coverage, much less internet.”

  “That was sudden. She didn’t even call me before she went.”

  “Yes, that was my doing. I told her to get out of town quickly because there were people coming after me.”

  “So that explains the WhatsApp just now. You’re running?”

  “For my life.”

  * * * * *

  One of the China embassy’s nondescript cars was parked outside Jason’s Gourmet Grocers behind Orchard Towers. Kaili slid into the back and greeted the driver with sharp instructions to first go to her apartment and then to Seletar Airport.

  Getting kicked out of your home on zero notice helped quicken subsequent packing experiences. She did a half hour’s worth in ten minutes and was back into the Nissan in record time.

  As the driver worked the car through traffic toward the freeway, she paused to reflect. Teenage beauty queen from Dalian, the frozen north. Without the grades for a place at a top university, she settled for Soochow, where, true to legend, the local girls were every bit her match in looks, but not in guile or moral flexibility. Majoring in international relations, Kaili was primed for action. What she found instead was a three-year stint at China Exim Bank in Shanghai. There, the talent scouts saw her potential as a curvaceous, ambitious young woman with a head for numbers, and a healthy appreciation of what motivated men.

  After training, she’d been fortunate enough to come under the patronage of Comrade Liu. She was almost thirty, and he was nearing fifty-five. Zhenchang had never made a pass at her in the ensuing fourteen years, putting him in the minority. As his star rose, so had her own. Kaili had been slow to work out that sleeping around was not the way to build a professional career. By the time the MSS whisked her out of Exim Bank, she was two affairs away from becoming the branch bimbo.

  Her estranged husband Foo Woon Cheng had money and a lifestyle an overworked civil servant only aspired to. Foo had been almost a decade her senior and was a divorcé with one daughter and a handful of selective abortions subsequently. He’d made it plain that Kaili’s sole role was to bear him a son and an heir. That she nearly did, but overwork or awful luck claimed their unborn baby boy in the third trimester, leaving Kaili barren. Woon Cheng’s affection morphed into scorn. He let her know in countless ways, large and small, that she’d failed him. He cheated on her. His family shunned her. She was useless. On the rare occasions she’d consented to sleep with him, he’d treated her like either a whore or a mannequin.

  She’d finally turned the tables through Zhenchang and his contacts in the domestic intelligence apparatus. They’d amassed enough evidence of Cheng’s circumvention of exchange controls and bribery to have him jailed, or worse. Returning late one night drunk and demanding sex, he sobered up in a hurry when she served up the offshore bank statements, fake invoices, deposit slips and a sprinkling of photographs. She’d kicked him out of their luxury apartment and informed him never to come back. If ever he dared speak of her, much less to her, his days as a free man were over.

  Imagine Foo’s hubris, married over a decade to a woman he thought was a junior economist in the Ministry of Trade and Industry, instead of a rising star in the MSS’s Counter Intelligence Bureau.

  “Wait! Stop here!” she said.

  The driver slammed on the brakes. They’d just passed a familiar sight.

  * * * * *

  Nolan exited Rikki’s car almost a mile away from the front gate of Seletar, a decommissioned military airport now used by flying c
lubs and private pilots. He told her to U-turn and take the long way home. She should expect to be questioned in the next day. With road cameras all over Singapore, her alibi should include driving at knifepoint.

  Not ten minutes later, a white Nissan Maxima passed and screeched to a halt. The rear window came down.

  “Hello, Bob. Get in.”

  Damn, that woman had a seductive voice. He put his stuffed backpack down at the side of the road. The airport lights shone up ahead.

  He leaned in the window. “Is this an embassy car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there will be an incident if you drive in; the vehicle will be photographed and later ID’d as belonging to China.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Get out here. Let me call for a pickup. Send your driver back.”

  Using her drill instructor’s voice, in short order, Kaili had the driver out of the car and her luggage arrayed.

  “Let me get on the phone to the charter company. Post-9/11, the US flew dozens of terror suspects through Seletar as part of the extraordinary rendition program. The Singaporeans gave the CIA a private gate to preserve deniability in case any of this ever hit the papers. We’ll go through—no questions asked—once they send an airport car.”

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?”

  “The same thing.”

  “Surprised to see me?”

  “Yes. I told a crazy story and I wouldn’t have blamed you for thinking it was a lie or a trap. Nevertheless, if you had called before we were airborne, I’d have sent the car back. I’m very happy to see you.”

  “Me, too,” she said, wondering if she should notify Meng.

  * * * * *

  Tony Johnson hoisted his duffel bag over his shoulder for what he hoped would be the last time today. The plane was now fueled up and had flight plans filed for Kuna-Kuna, Cunta-Nora, damn, somewhere in the Outback. He would cool it there at the Kuna Cunta-Kinte Country Club for a day, and have dinner with someone he’d heard a lot about. Friday they were flying out for an off-the-books interrogation. The sort he liked, the kind without Geneva Convention guidelines and no Abu Ghraib photo albums, either. More like the Salt Pit in Kabul back in 2002–2004 when he started out: no-holds-barred focus on fast results and damn the niceties.