Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (20 page)

The table fell silent. One of the underlings walked to Yi’s side and handed the Comrade Secretary a folded piece of paper. Distracted, he opened it and read the message. Looking up, he spoke. “I thought Zhao was back from Iran and had spent the weekend at home in Shanghai. Instead it seems that Rear Admiral Zhao was on the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing early Saturday morning. He’s vanished along with 151 other China citizens. Comrades, we are adjourned. We will reconvene when we have additional information.”

For more on Edward Snowden, the Rangoon Airport, the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and much more, click below to download the fact-and-photo-packed
Insider’s Guide to Sea of Lies
.

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE
INSIDER’S GUIDE TO
SEA OF LIES

JUMP TO THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

JUMP TO ABBREVIATIONS AND JARGON

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

QUESTION TIME

MONDAY MID-MORNING, MARCH 10, SINGAPORE

Chief of Station Singapore Richard Constantine was the reason Bob Nolan still had a job. In the dark days following Nolan’s whistle-blowing regarding Prentice Dupree’s faked suicide, he topped the Company’s enemies list. Sitting on the fence, Dick Constantine became a powerful ally by default. Constantine was pedantic, protective of his people and operated at arm’s length from the head office. The station chief’s passive-aggressive pantomime with Langley might have been out of high principle, or maybe the less lofty motive of avoiding setting a precedent whereby Tidewater bureaucrats could fire his people.

Constantine was the one who had come up with the idea for a Company-controlled, ostensibly freestanding software company that became Independent Programming Pte. Ltd. As the managing director and putative IPPL majority shareholder, Nolan passed his days outsourcing hacker scripts and giving the CIA slender deniability should any fecal matter find its way into whirling blades. Nolan and Constantine had kept their mutual distance even after Constantine’s rescue mission succeeded, exchanging no more than perfunctory nods when passing in the Agency's offices deep below the Singapore embassy office complex.

Nolan was nearly passed out with fatigue when Constantine swept in, nose up and chin out. Dick Constantine was an unimposing forty-one-year-old who looked a decade worse, as he was fat and sported thinning hair worn extra-long in the back, oiled ringlets spilling over his collar. His striped shirt, suspenders and garish tie were pure Michael Douglas in
Wall Street
. Nolan figured the hair was a certain sign of either an incipient midlife crisis or a recent divorce. It was the latter: Constantine’s pert wife had absconded with their gardener some months before, and the lovers were rumored to be fornicating in two-star squalor on a nearby Indonesia resort island.

Joining Constantine were Jerry Flynn, Nolan’s occasional drinking buddy and head of Singapore Agency security, and Lisa Finegold, who held a vague senior regional remit to monitor South Asia political and military developments. Working through two cups of black coffee, Nolan answered Lisa’s questions based on her notes from the tape of the Sunday morning ambassador’s briefing, and filled in Constantine and Flynn up to the airport detention and escape.

“You seem to attract trouble,” Constantine noted. “What’s the bigger picture that I’m missing? I’m not certain a sixty-seven-year-old ex-Ranger drug trafficker and the Russian mob are wholly responsible for this chaos.”

Constantine was too smart to lie to on multiple levels. Nolan ignored Hecker’s advice to leave Teller out of it. “You’re missing several things. Robin Teller was the cofounder of Double Llama Trading, a CIA-sponsored arms dealer that blew up in early 1985. I met Rob in Bangkok when I was brand new with the Agency. Teller disappeared in June 1985 and officially was never seen again, presumably living under a Company-supplied new identity. This guy’s ties to the CIA go back forty-five years. He was personally recruited by Bill Colby to run F-6, the illegitimate child-of-Phoenix Program from 1973 through the fall of Saigon. Teller had a very strong incentive to remain anonymous. He’d lived in Burma since 2007, working as the head of security for Opium King Khun Sa’s family. Now he’s come out in the open and is practically standing in the middle of the street saying, ‘Hey, fellas! Over here!’”

“Or it could be that he’s a drug smuggler and kills the people who interfere in his business. Ever hear of Occam’s razor? Posit the simplest theory that fits the facts,” Constantine said.

“There’s another part. MH370 landed on that airstrip south of Einme in the Irrawaddy Delta about 3 a.m. Saturday, March 8. Cargo and maybe people came off that plane before it took off again and vanished. Teller was the local handling agent. He’s right now moving the HVTs out of the country. The mayhem he’s wreaking is designed to distract. Based on how we’re responding, he’s winning.”

“Can you prove MH370 landed and took off?” Finegold’s tone revealed her skepticism.

“Not at the moment, but maybe within a day or two,” Nolan said.

“What does Matthews think of this grand conspiracy theory?” Constantine asked.

“I haven’t told him. Sam Hecker heads the DEA in South and Southeast Asia. He fronts as the number two bureaucrat in the Rangoon operation to keep a lower profile. Hecker and his team know what they’re doing. They’ve been helping me full time since Saturday night. Hecker’s view is that there’s no way Teller could have lived seven years in Rangoon hiding in plain sight unless someone in the CIA locally was covering for him. And what better candidate than the COS? Hecker wanted to put a lid on this until we can figure out who in Rangoon station is working with Teller.”

Constantine was no fan of Matthews, whom he suspected was angling for his job. He allowed this damning speculation to pass without comment, while Flynn and Finegold stared in silence.

“What does Hecker think about the MH370 angle?” Constantine asked, fingering his cufflink. Finegold looked up, gold ballpoint angled above a yellow legal pad. Until now she’d been scribbling like she was taking down a murderer’s confession.

“He’s halfway convinced, but started out like you in thinking that Teller is moonlighting, shipping drugs out and money or arms in at night for a few weeks before GE hands over Airstrip One to the buyer, presumably the Army. A plane landed on that phantom toll road early Saturday morning. The MH370 cargo manifest lists 5,500 pounds of mangosteens, and at least one crate of mangosteens was in the corrugated metal warehouse next to the runway that burned down. One of Teller’s gunmen was eating a mangosteen Saturday afternoon when I drove up to the runway’s main gate. I know it isn’t definitive, but there will be more evidence in the form of whatever, or perhaps whoever, came off that plane.”

“So how do the Russians fit into the picture?” Finegold said, ever the skeptic.

“I don’t have anything firm. I’m just working from the top down. Any three terrorists with box cutters can hijack a plane. Shooting a plane down takes a little more technology, but there are one hundred fifty countries and factions worldwide with surface-to-air missiles. If what I’m suggesting is true, the execution becomes exponentially more difficult. Someone hijacked MH370, removed objects and maybe people without anyone knowing, and flew the plane away, probably to be crashed with everyone aboard killed. Such a complicated project would have to have state or quasi-state backing.”

Nolan had their attention. “Let’s look at the suspects. First, China is Matthews’s favorite candidate, as it gives the PLA the pretext it wants to occupy northern Shan State.”

“Actually, that was my idea. I shared it with Lloyd Saturday morning.” Finegold’s voice was fingernails on a blackboard.

“Then you know more about it than I do,” Nolan continued. “My understanding is that Shan State is the natural place for the plane to come down if you subscribe to the China Bad Actor theory. As of yesterday morning, Matthews’s teams in from northern Shan or Kachin States hadn’t been heard from. What’s the latest?”

“By midnight everyone had reported in. We found several new drug labs, a freshly bulldozed dirt airfield and three militias running around where there hadn’t been any before, but no credible place to land a 777 outside of existing military airfields. China wouldn’t hijack MH370 and land it at a Burma Air Force base. The only way China could be behind this is if their men flew the plane into southern Yunnan.”

“And why isn’t that plausible?” Constantine asked

Finegold ticked off her fingers. “First, it doesn’t support the principal rationale for China being behind a hijack. If MH370 doesn’t land in Shan or maybe Kachin, the PLA has no reason to invade. Second, it’s the same ‘loose lips sink ships’ phenomenon whenever military conscripts, factory workers or peasants see something they shouldn’t. Someone always talks unless they’re buried together in a mass grave. Third, we’ve reviewed two days of NRO sat photos of every base in Yunnan and they’re clean. Most of China’s strategic missile silos are in Yunnan, so we have birds overhead looking for heat signatures and listening for radio telemetry signals that indicate pending launches. Zero readings at the PLA air bases during the time window MH370 could have been in flight means nothing that fits our specification landed or took off. Thailand’s radar extends almost two hundred miles into Burma and their records are empty.”

“Point taken. It’s not in Shan or Yunnan.” Constantine waved his hand. “Let’s move on.”

Nolan replied, “The US would be the next suspect based on capability, if not motive. You could slice this two ways: authorized or rogue. If the president knew, this makes him a party to mass murder, and if—”

“Hold on! Mass murder? Where does that come in?” Flynn proved he was still awake.

“This plane, or pieces of it, will turn up soon with no survivors. The story will be that it crashed, or there was an aborted hijack attempt, or pilot suicide. If passengers were going to be found alive, they’d have turned up by now.”

Constantine weighed in. “I think Nolan’s right, at least about the last part. That plane’s now forty-eight hours overdue in Beijing. It’s not in the air flying on vapors. If it were on the ground, we’d have two hundred-plus people calling home.”

“So either the US president put his entire legacy at stake by allowing the murder of plus-or-minus 250 people—”

“239,” Finegold corrected.

“239 people and not being found out, or else the US didn’t sanction this. Alternatively, at least not the official US government.”

“Stop speaking in riddles,” Constantine said.

“If we exclude an official US operation, which I agree is unlikely, then with Teller in the middle you can play it one of two ways. Maybe he hired himself out to the Russians, Israelis or possibly the British. They’re the only three countries that have the intelligence and military capabilities to pull this off, especially if the US is kept in the dark. Alternatively, take a bunch of Agency old-timers and work unofficially. Maybe the US could maintain plausible deniability and still be able to support this type of opera—”

“Stop! This is ridiculous. Neither the US government nor its current or former employees hijacked a civilian airliner and killed the passengers,” Constantine fumed.

“I’m with you on this one, Dick,” Nolan said. “So that leaves us with rogue states, or rogue elements within big intel communities in the larger countries. Russia tops my list, followed by Israel. I don’t think the UK would do this without us. If you want to flesh out the shortlist with long shots you can add Iran, North Korea . . . maybe al Qaeda . . . but at this point their motive could only be a hijacking for ransom. Maybe I’m way off base and the plane is refueled and flying toward Tel Aviv. Even so, you’d think that the time to try to use a hijacked jet as a giant missile is within hours of the hijacking, before every control tower in the world goes on alert. That plane—with or without the transponders turned on—isn’t flying within one hundred miles of any major city without being shot down. Maybe it’s parked on an Indian Ocean island in a hangar and there are negotiations underway, but if so, why in the hell don’t we know about them?”

Constantine asked, “So the Russia theory is in the absence of anything better? It’s just too thin to take seriously.”

“Fine. I wasn’t expecting you to. I’m more or less done with the IPPL shell company handover to Walsh. I have only three weeks left until I retire. Can you assign me to the MH370 task force while I play out my string?”

Constantine looked him straight in the eyes. “Melissa Shook is heading Burns’s task force.”

Nolan was taken aback. Sweet mother of God.
Melissa Shook
? She was the last person he could afford to be seen with. An Agency high flyer and now barely thirty-five, she’d been the flame that consumed him body and soul. In 2011, less than a year after the Nolans relocated to Singapore, Melissa and Nolan were the talk of the embassy. When news leaked back to the homestead, Joanie confronted him. Much to the surprise of many, Nolan stayed married and in Singapore while the male-dominated senior management decided to exile blonde, brilliant Melissa to a lesser job in Tokyo. The two of them had taken care not to cross paths since, though it was well known that Melissa detested him.

Until early this morning, Nolan had spent all but a handful of nights in the past two and a half years walking the righteous path, knowing one more misstep would mean divorce. Besides, Joanie was a classy woman who deserved better. Working on a task force with Melissa would be awkward to say the least, even if Joanie didn’t find out. “I’ll take it anyway,” Nolan said.

“Done,” said Constantine.

Flynn shook his head in dismay.

“I’ve one other request,” Nolan added. “I would like a guard for the next several days until Teller’s in custody or this blows over. That hotel room was turned upside down only a couple of hours ago, and this past weekend, four people were executed in Burma.”