Razing Beijing: A Thriller (25 page)

Emily looked at him blankly.

“You said you’d had a family emergency—”

“I’d rather not talk about that.” She averted her eyes to
the floor of the car.

“Why did you make up the NTSB story?”

Emily’s cheeks flushed red. “Because somebody in my unit
was involved in this! At least I could deprive them of—how do you say? Feeling
‘home free and off-the-hook.’ It was the only thing I could think of that they
could not cite to retaliate against my family. And I was
furious
at what
they did to my cat!”

Stuart nodded. “Why would Thompson want to talk to me?” he
wondered aloud. “If he was preparing to spill his guts, why to me instead of
the police?”

“Thompson knew he could trust you.”

Stuart looked at her. She blinked her eyes and avoided his
gaze.

“So, you destroyed the ECU, and the evidence along with it.
I mean, you had no choice.”

“No!” Emily shifted in the passenger seat to face him with
her back against the door. “I could not bring myself to destroy it, not after
what they did. I came up with a way just to make them think so. I snuck into
the lab late at night and substituted a defective board for the memory module.”

“You’ve still got the memory module?”

“I hid it in a very safe place. But I don’t see what we can
do without endangering my parents. What do you think?”

“I don’t see any alternative but to get this information to
the proper authorities.”

Emily’s eyes flared with defiance, like an animal cornered.
“Don’t you see?
Anybody
could be involved in this! How can I know that my
parents won’t be harmed as soon as I approach the police? I had come to think
these people would not dare harm my father, but now I don’t know.”

Stuart re-examined the face in the photographs. Emily was
right; they could not risk calling these people’s bluff. If only half of what
she had shared with him turned out to be true, the saboteurs had already
demonstrated the capacity to kill.

Emily wiped the tears from her face. “I am afraid it may
already be too late.”

“What?”

Emily spoke very softly: “I received word from some of my
friends in China. They say my parents have disappeared. Nobody seems to know
where they are.”

A young couple had parked their car on the far side of the
green and were throwing a Frisbee to one another.

“Okay,” Stuart said. “If not the police, then we’ll
just have to think something up on our own.”

AT ABOUT THE TIME
that
Stuart and Chang were leaving Ault Park, Canadair flight 1405 punched through
the cloud layer and retracted its landing gear on its way to Minneapolis.

Paul Devinn sat back in the comfort of his first class seat
and stared at the cumulous ocean boiling beyond his window. His chance sighting
of Stuart with Emily Chang at the airport raised several disturbing questions. Had
Devinn followed his instinct, he would not have boarded his flight. He then
could have assessed the nature of their rendezvous, perhaps struck up a conversation.
He even might have decided to tail them.

Where to, her place? He’d have known long ago if Stuart was
screwing Emily Chang. What other business would a young woman possibly have
with an executive two levels above her, a man who had essentially been fired? If
Chang’s objective were a job, she’d have simply called Stuart or flown to
Virginia. For his part, Stuart might have returned to Cleveland for any number
of reasons. It was possible the two had simply happened upon each other while
passing through the airport.

Another possibility asserted itself by way of the subtle
tightness in his chest: despite the anonymous threat, Chang was spilling her
story to Stuart. Whatever it was that Thompson might have shared with Stuart
before being silenced had just become all the more relevant.

Devinn breathed a heavy sigh. What sparked his paranoia
would warrant, in only a matter of hours, little more than passing curiosity. He
fully reclined his seatback. No, he decided, he had done the right thing by
avoiding Stuart. Better to consider this with the clarity of distance and time.
He would certainly have plenty of each.

Monday, May 25

“THEIR AMBASSADOR
recently
delivered this to the White House.” The Director of Central Intelligence held
up the folded copy of a letter between his thumb and forefinger. “Care to guess
what it says?”

McBurney folded his arms. That it had taken six weeks for
Zhongnanhai to issue an official denouncement itself provided more insight than
whatever blather the letter contained. “I can guess what it says.”

Lester Burns unfolded the letter and began reading aloud. “President
Denis, We find no alternative but to regard your sanction of an attempt to
kidnap Chinese citizens as a direct attack on bilateral relations. How would
the American public view such an act? Do we not strive, together in good faith,
toward economic and cultural interdependence from which our peoples mutually
benefit?

“Mr. President, there is terrain for which one does not
contend. We would like to suggest that such miscalculations are sometimes the
result of well-intentioned yet improper counsel. Perhaps the incident to which
we refer is one such example? We shall deem the incident moot on this basis and
demand no apology.

“It’s signed ‘In cordial respect, Ambassador Lao.’ ” Burns
looked up from the letter and grinned.

“Yeah, well, Lao’s a clever bastard.” The veiled prompt for
division within the enemy camp—where there was failure, fan the flames of
blame—was actually pathetic. “I trust the President sees through that. Especially
given that Beijing actually unleashed fighter jets on Hong Kong to force down
commercial airliners over this guy.”

“I think he knows the score. That’s not to say he’s not
disappointed. Herman, on the other hand, was apoplectic.”

McBurney had now lost his two strongest leads for proving
that China had launched stolen US technology into orbit. Complications
surrounding the Iranian double agent’s murder inside the Rivergate apartment
complex had created whole new categories of questions than existed when Ahmadi
was alive. The botched defection was particularly bad in that the Agency had
failed to extract even the most basic corroborating evidence from the physicist
Zhao. As National Security Advisor, Herman must have called for his
resignation.

“The President still plans to deny it was ever anything but
a humanitarian mission,” said Burns. “He’s going to have State take the
initiative in asserting that charade. Do we know what they did with the physicist?”

“Qincheng, probably.”

“With his wife terminally ill?”

“We’re guessing that by now the woman is dead.”

Director Burns set the letter down on his desk. “You think
your snakehead blew mission security?”

“We’ve been going around on that. We did experience a
last-minute lapse at the other end. It’s conceivable Public Security might have
pinpointed their falsified documents. If so, tracking their movements into Hong
Kong would’ve been relatively straightforward. I perceived a lack of surprise
on the part of the security types who nabbed Zhao and his wife at the airport.”

“What sort of lapse are you talking about?”

McBurney reminded Director Burns of their plan to receive
advance warning in Hong Kong from their deep Beijing agent in the event
something like what actually happened might be going down. “But we didn’t know
surveillance had been intensified until we nearly stumbled into it.”

“You were to hear from ‘SIREN’?”

“That’s right, SIREN appears to be one broken link in the
chain.”

Burns’s expression turned to one of dread. “Turned?”

McBurney would normally find curious Burns’s interest in a
specific agent, but then again the communist government employee SIREN
represented something of a rare asset. “If SIREN was turned, why break off
contact? Her case officer doesn’t seem to think so.”

McBurney was confident Burns understood that China was a
hard target in the best of times. Nowadays, the raw intelligence was
inconsistent and riddled with white noise. “We’ll figure out what happened. I’ve
got three analysts working it. I also plan to bring it up this afternoon with
His Royal Highness, the Ambassador.” Their Beijing station chief was such a
pain in the ass. He glanced at his watch with dread.

“That reminds me, Sam. Appropriations are underway on
the Hill. I don’t have to remind you that the oversight bunch will be asked to
weigh in. Don’t leave me standing too long with my finger in the dike. Don’t
let this phantom satellite of yours become our own vanishing act.”

“THERE’S EVIDENCE
stateside
of Chinese collaboration with Iranian espionage,” McBurney informed his Beijing
Station Chief.

Jim Rotger’s bored expression indicated his opinion of
McBurney’s position, which they had already touched on before his return trip
to Washington. With the possible exception of its occurrence on American soil,
the news wasn’t exactly earth shattering. “What would make China embrace the
risk of conducting espionage with Iran?”

As good a Sinologist as McBurney considered himself, he was
no match for Rotger’s time-tested accuracy in reading the vagaries of Chinese
government. So renowned was the man in his official role as deputy ambassador,
an unusual accreditation for a CIA field officer, that he had retained his
Beijing post for two consecutive administrations. Perhaps for these reasons,
Rotger came across to some of his Agency colleagues as an arrogant and
cantankerous intellectual. “We don’t know, of course, but I do have a theory,”
McBurney said as he leaned back in his office chair. “First, I’d like to hear
yours.”

“I really haven’t had enough time to develop any.”

“You don’t need as much time as the average Joe.” McBurney
smiled. They were off to a good start, as usual.

“Well, your premise suggests that Iran is presently engaged
in a multi-pronged assault on the United States.” Rotger toyed with his wedding
band while eyeing McBurney. “No one debates OPEC’s ongoing oil embargo that
Iran, and I guess Venezuela, seem to be championing. And you believe that
Tehran was behind this terrorist strike on the Holocaust Museum?”

“Most likely.”

“I seriously doubt Beijing would risk becoming ensnared with
them in the probable fallout. And collaboration in espionage, you say? China’s
spycraft can jump somersaults over Iran’s. They simply don’t need them. It
doesn’t make a lot of sense. So.” Rotger smiled. “What’s your theory?”

“Beijing’s already in bed with Iran through OPEC,” McBurney
observed. “I know you’ve seen the overheads that show construction of all these
new tanker depots.” Shanghai Oil Refinery had contracted with BP to expand
Pudong’s oil terminal capacity. Similar work was being done at the ports of
Quanzhou, site of their largest oil terminal expansion project, and further
south, at Guangzhou. “The upshot is most of Iranian and Saudi product now flows
into Chinese ports.”

“That’s a hard accusation to prove without solid numbers.”

McBurney shrugged. Last month the PLA navy sank another
Vietnamese gunboat in the Spratlys over oil rights. PetroChina recently outbid
three rivals and now controlled almost thirty percent of Indonesian oil assets.
The oil company executives that the CIA talked to seemed to be stumped as to
why China’s supply, on its present trajectory, would grow by a whopping 30% in
the next eighteen months. Some analysts speculated that Beijing expected a
major Middle East supply disruption. But the evidence suggested that China was
awash
in Middle East oil. “I really didn’t invite you here to have another discussion
about oil. This Ahmadi character took our most promising leads to the grave. We
have to figure out how to recover, and I think that means we have to find who
his handler was. Attacking the problem from both ends means I’ll need your help
over there.”

“State Security does not traditionally bring non-ethnic
Chinese into their circle,” Rotger reminded his boss.

“All the more reason for them to feel they could proceed
without our suspecting it.”

Rotger studied his face, blinking his eyes.

For the next twenty minutes, their discussion touched upon
possible explanations involving Beijing’s response to America’s on-again,
off-again missile defense shield, Iran’s possible stake in that outcome,
cross-strait-relations between Beijing and Taipei, and the uncertainty cast
upon all of it, on the eve of tectonic change brought about by ‘Succession’
within the Communist Party leadership.

McBurney said, “There’s another piece of this puzzle, what
the Chinese are concocting inside their secret weapons lab. Our would-be defecting
physicist led us to believe it was significant.”

“Weapons lab...?”

McBurney tore open the sealed envelope delivered earlier by
Langley Security. He removed the 8-1/2x11 inch photographs that he’d had his
office dredge out of the archives and placed the series on the table beneath
Rotger’s nose. The first was a grainy black-and-white photograph, covertly
acquired from across the street of an old stone structure several stories tall,
distinct from the adjacent modern buildings in several respects: PLA soldiers
patrolled the sidewalk in front of it, and all of its windows were barred, as
if it were a prison. In fact, the building was believed to have been a prison at
various times throughout its existence. The picture, McBurney knew, was taken
three years ago.

“Do you recognize this place?”

“Sure. That’s the Old Defense Building on Iron Lion Lane that
you cabled me about. I’ve tried to get you a more recent photograph. Problem is
it’s hard to stand within two blocks of the place. Whenever someone stops their
car, or tries to appear as though they’re fumbling with a sandwich bag or a
roadmap, a guard appears out of nowhere and orders them immediately out of the
area. You can see how other buildings obstruct it. You’re suggesting
that’s
a secret weapons lab? In the middle of Beijing?”