Their 100,000+ hackers, linguists and analysts were recruited from elite universities and used academic databases, Government websites and social networks to steal U.S. corporate secrets to influence governments and corporations around the world while staying under the radar.
The 3PLA had unlimited access, much like the NSA, and could listen in on, watch and locate virtually anyone they needed to. In the mid-eighties the 3PLA had preemptively started to secretly ‘chip’ people of interest with first generation geo-location devices, originally designed for the study of animal migration. Prison inmates were often ‘inoculated’ before being released, giving authorities the opportunity to tag them.
An American couple had applied to adopt a young Chinese girl twenty years earlier and the 3PLA had used the ‘vaccination’ program to chip all three of them before the adoption could be made official. The couple had been operating a barbecue manufacturing business in Beijing, but officers at the 3PLA had developed suspicions that they were spying on China, though they were never actually caught doing anything wrong. They were ejected from China in 2003, right around the outbreak of the SARS virus.
Having successfully chipped them, the Government could be sure that if any of them ever returned to China, they would ping the system.
*
Chapter 14
Night Bus to Shanghai
“Shanghai, one way” Xue Lin said, now speaking Chinese to the lady behind the window at the small village’s bus station.
“Leaves in 20 minutes” said the lady, passing the ticket through the window to Xue Lin.
She took a seat inside the bus shelter, now alone. The smells here were distinct. Very Chinese. She thought to herself how miraculous the ‘sense of smell’ was, how it could remember even after so many years. As the warmth gradually returned to her body, an unexpected feeling relief overcame her. She felt lighter somehow.
Here she looked just like everyone else. No more “so where are you from?” questions from well meaning people. She had done most of her growing up in Beijing. It wasn’t until she was thirteen that her parents were suddenly told to go home to America. At the time, their sudden departure seemed really strange to her. She had no time to say goodbye to any of her school friends, and none of them yet had cell phones. She had not managed to stay in touch with them using email. Unbeknownst to Xue Lin, her emails never made it through the Chinese censors.
In America, she had made new friends at both the normal school with the ‘whities’ and at the weekend school for Chinese kids. Saturdays after school she would hang out with the Chinese kids for hours. She had felt quite homesick for a few years after the move and it had not helped that the some of the white kids and black kids were racist toward her and she had more than a few dust-ups in the schoolyard. Her adoptive parents had put her in regular Kung Fu classes in Beijing, nine years of classes in fact, so quite often she found herself in the office of the head mistress explaining the various abrasions and bloody noses of the other, usually much bigger kids. Xue Lin had adopted a ‘kick them in the face, first; ask questions later’ method with the bullies. It only took a year before they realized it was safer to be her friend than her enemy.
*
The young computer tech sat at his terminal inside one of the many high security buildings belonging to the 3PLA. He was part of the ‘3PLA Locator Team’ whose purpose was to provide location information on demand about anyone who had been placed in the chip geo-locator database.
His computer had pinged somebody who had just reentered China. He put his hand up to call over his superior.
“I just had a ping for a reentry. Shanghai. The file says: ‘Born 1991, female, adopted by Americans, possibly CIA. Left China in 2003. Possible espionage. Enemies of China.’”
“Keep a detailed file on her movements between cities, and let me know whenever she moves.”
“Got it” replied the young tech.
Shanghai
Xue Lin had slept peacefully across two seats, enjoying the safety and anonymity of bus travel. There had been nothing to look at during the ten hours of darkness out the window. The bus entered Jiangsu Province at first light. As they reached Shanghai, the sun was already well into the sky and the city was crowded with people on their way to work. She would spend the day wandering Shanghai before meeting her contact after sunset at the Shanghai Peace Hotel, in the Jazz Band Room that she’d heard stories about. She would be picking up her papers: a Resident Identity Card and driver’s license with a Wuhan home address.
Walking the streets of Shanghai, with her face covered by the blue surgical mask to avoid starting any kind of trail on the facial recognition cameras, Xue Lin continued to feel like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She hadn’t been back to China since being removed with her parents by the Chinese Government more than twenty years earlier. It all seemed very surreal with barely a white man to be seen. It felt odd to be this happy while on such a high pressure and dangerous assignment. It felt right.
Xue Lin pre-empted her eight o’clock date at the hotel with some reconnaissance. Dressed as a tourist, she wore one of the long hair extensions that she’d packed. She located the Jazz Room and wandered in. The crowd looked like they had been there for a while already, probably onto their third or fourth cocktail by the looks of them. The old guys in the band played nonchalantly on their instruments as though they had been doing it every night for the last forty years. Possibly some had. They were wearing white tuxedos and seemed oblivious to the crowd of tourists listening to them.
The band stood up to take a break and Xue Lin looked at her watch. It was right on eight o’clock. She was standing at the agreed upon place by the bar looking around the room wondering who her contact was. The audience were mostly white people. The bass player from the band stood next to her as he ordered a drink. He said quietly to her in a Shanghai accent: “I got your papers.”
As his whisky was being poured he palmed her a very small red envelope that contained her ID and driver’s license. He did it so smoothly and quickly that Xue Lin was shocked. “Bass players are usually so slow and clueless” she thought to herself, reminiscing about her dating days in the States.
Xue Lin quietly slipped out of the bar, and left the hotel. The IDs looked good to her. The guy had come highly recommended by the asset, Jimmy. ‘Pretty slick cover, playing in the band’ Xue Lin thought as she laughed out loud, heading out to the street. The unlikely nature of what had just gone down was amusing to her, and she walked off into the Shanghai night, still shaking her head, smiling.
Hitchhiking to Wuhan
Xue Lin bought a thick black marker and dug some cardboard out of a trash bin and wrote: ‘Wuhan Please’ in large Chinese characters. Hitching a ride to Wuhan in a truck was the smartest way to make the ten hour journey. Completely untraceable. The research she’d done while still in the States had turned up pages of tourist hitching experiences from young backpackers. It was not considered a suspicious way to travel for young foreigners, and truck drivers were known for their marathon routes across vast distances in relatively short periods of time.
Xue Lin stood at the toll entrance for highway G50. Her hair was in a ponytail and her clothes were those of an American tourist: a fashionable branded hoodie and designer cargo pants, sunglasses, and now a different hair extension. She waited less than half an hour before a driver paying the toll read her sign and beckoned her over. Xue Lin used just a few words of poorly pronounced tourist Mandarin to communicate that indeed she wished to go to Wuhan. That way she wouldn’t have to converse with the driver.
Once in the truck, the driver made the universal ‘sh’ sign with his forefinger against his lips, and pulled a corner of the curtain back to reveal that there was a narrow bed behind the seats in which another driver was sleeping soundly.
After four hours on the road, the drivers skillfully changed shift without even slowing down. The new driver smiled and nodded at Xue Lin, asking only: “Meiguo ren?” to which sh
e nodded, indicating that she was indeed American as she turned the other way and went back to sleep.
*
The young Chinese computer tech watched the blip that represented the chipped adopted girl. She was on the move. The tech put his hand up to get his superior’s attention.
“What do you have?”
“She is moving rapidly on toll highway G50” replied the tech.
“Is she on a bus?”
“I’ll check sir.” The tech worked through the public transport closed circuit camera system until he found the Shanghai bus depot. He found the departure area cameras. There were eighteen cameras. Opening another window on his computer he pulled up the timetables. He methodically clicked through the different bus lines that would take the G50 highway.
“Shall I come back later?” His superior asked sarcastically.
“Ah, yes sir. This will take a while” said the tech embarrassedly, watching his superior stalk off.
*
Dr. Wu was late for work and the smog was the worst he could remember. His silver Mercedes was very ostentatious for Wuhan and he enjoyed the looks he got from poor people. The car was already five years old but without a single scratch. The Central Military Commission had given it to him to grease the wheels when offering him the dubious job in which he was still working five years later. At the time it seemed like a good deal: high salary, luxury car, choice of his own lab assistants, state of the art laboratories, a new house with security posted outside. But he had been given a dark directive.
Dr. Wu was surprised to learn that two of his lab assistants had resigned just that morning. No reason was given, and nobody seemed to have any idea why. In any case, he would have to fill the two positions before the end of the weekend as there was work to be done. Wu was not concerned about any possible harassment allegations from the two girls who had quit. He had all the power, and they had none.
“Could you post two lab assistant jobs this morning please?” he asked one of the administrative girls. I want to do interviews on Friday so we have two new girls here working on Monday.”
Chapter 15
The Wooden Post
Xue Lin had slept all the way through the second driver’s shift and she awoke as the sun began to rise. They would soon be pulling into Wuhan. She’d been out of contact for forty-eight hours. She would need to find her contact in Wuhan almost immediately and get her hands on the gear that had been organized for her so she could contact Sam and get an update on the job prospects. She was on a very tight schedule.
“Zai Jian!” she said getting the tones wrong on purpose, as she shook hands with both drivers and climbed down out of the truck cabin and started walking in the direction one of them was pointing.
It was a relief to move her limbs again after having been couped up it the truck for so long. She was pleased with how things were going. She felt safe, anonymous and undetected. She had managed to get herself to Wuhan without incident. Now she needed to find a GPS position near the river to initiate contact.
She typed in the position that she’d memorized during her last week at Langley: 30°34’17.3”N 114°17’20.9”E, and hailed a cab. “Hualou Fairprice!” she said.
It was a supermarket close to where she needed to be.
During her ride in the semi-trailer she’d spent a couple of hours running scenarios in her head. Today was her official arrival day and she was to be met by Jimmy, a contact who should have tools for her and should have organized her an apartment. She had been taught in training never to let her guard down in these situations. Assets can never be trusted. They can flip back and forth, they can be playing both sides, or they may just try to kill you the moment the opportunity arises. This particular asset was one of Roet’s. He was ex-PLA, and on the CIA payroll.
Xue Lin paid the cab driver in local currency and walked in the direction that her phone was indicating. On reaching the exact spot, she pulled out a blank piece of paper from a folder in her dry bag and dug a thumb tac out of the wooden post that stood in front of her. She reached up and pinned the paper to the post where there were a few other thumb tacks already embedded. Then she walked a hundred meters along the river where she could still see the post where she had pinned her page.
Nine minutes on her phone’s stopwatch had passed when she saw a figure appear on a motor cycle, walk to the post and pull down the blank page. She walked towards him warily.
“I love this river” she said as she approached him.
“Would you go fishing in it?” he replied
“Only if I needed fish” she sang back to him, smiling.
It was a ridiculous way to confirm identity. This guy had clearly watched too many spy films. Somehow though, Xue Lin liked it as it was so silly. The paper on the post was interesting, however. That was a new one.
“What’s up with the blank paper on the post?” she asked.
“I have binoculars on a tripod over there in my apartment. Easy to see when a contact arrives. Good field of vision.”
“What’s your name?” she asked, as a further security measure.
“Call me Jimmy.”
Xue Lin noticed that his Mandarin had a strong Beijing accent.
“OK Jimmy, what do you have for me?”
“Not here. Let’s go to your new place!” Jimmy pointed to a small motorbike parked on the corner.
“Let’s go then!” said Xue Lin, somewhat excited to be going on another leg of her adventure.
The cheap, useless helmet he handed her was large on her head and as the bike lurched forward onto the road, it tipped forward covering her eyes. Jimmy steered the bike through the streets across town, pulling into the Shuiguo Lake Residential district and turning up a side street in front of a shabby looking apartment building.
“Helmet.” Jimmy held out his hand and Xue Lin tossed the paper thin helmet to him. He shoved both the helmets inside the seat compartment and gestured for her to follow him into the building.
“This key is for the front of the building” he said holding it up.
“You are on the third floor. You can use the stairs or the elevator. Follow me.”
They walked up two flights as Jimmy said: “You are paid-up for six months rent, no problem, no questions. Anybody asks, your daddy paid.”
The stink of fish sauce hung in the stairwell. Loud televisions blared, and cheesy pop music added to the assault on Xue Lin’s senses.
“Apartment 310. Got it? Not too big but good for a lab assistant” He said smiling.
“Oh yeah? You got me a job?” she said, surprised.
“Interview” he replied “but you are pretty. He’ll take you for sure.”
“Why thank you Jimmy, you are very kind” she replied almost genuinely, while thinking to herself what a slippery character this Jimmy seems to be.
“Here’s your stuff. Special order by your boss.” He pulled back the bed cover revealing a spread of equipment.
“One Ruger LC9S pistol and 5 magazines. Cleaned and oiled. One laptop. Don’t use it to communicate with anybody except work friends. Never break cover on this computer. Not secure. They are always reading and listening in China. Use this radio. They can’t listen. I show you how to disassemble.”
Jimmy proceeded to pull it apart, slowly, piece by piece, looking at her after each step to see if she had it. Each piece fitted into a clock, a lamp, a power outlet or some other appliance somewhere in the apartment. It was very clever.
“Instructions for contacting your boss” Jimmy pointed at a notepad on the bed. “Memorize and then destroy.”
“Cash, People’s currency” Jimmy threw a sizable roll of notes on the bed.
Xue Lin counted it. “You’re short” she said looking accusingly at Jimmy.
“You know, tax…” Jimmy showed very little shame. She let it go. Xue Lin knew exactly what Jimmy had been assigned to provide her with, and noted that Jimmy had a tendency to take care of himself at every step of the way.
“Reading gl
asses, your prescription, but Chinese geek-style. Make you look like science girl. Your job briefing and a copy of your file for the interview, Friday 10am. Wear something low cut. Dr. Wu is a boob man” Jimmy said, not smiling.
Xue Lin picked it up and leafed through it. ‘Impressive’ she thought.
“Micro GPS locator, quite small. Twist to activate and you drop it in their pocket or bag. Follow them on App on the phone” he said pointing at the phone on the bed.“Phone, not secure for talk or text. Always listening. Don’t forget. Better to turn it off if you need to break character.”
“Handbags.” Jimmy picked up three fake designer handbags from the floor. “All Chinese girls love designer handbag. You will look funny without one if you go out at night with your new friends. “Garrote wire”. He picked up the deadly wire with metal handles and mimed the strangling of an imaginary victim. Xue Lin shook her head disapprovingly at his little macabre pantomime, though she was happy he had provided one as it was a good close-range weapon, long favored by the CIA.
“Data recovery” Jimmy pointed to the familiar tool and it’s wires, used to download data from phones and computers. “Better hide this. If they find this, we won’t find you. Lock picks, just in case you need to get in somewhere. Multi frequency bug detector. This was very expensive. Sweep your apartment every day when you get home, especially before using radio. Chinese Communist Party is not too shy to bug everybody. Sometimes they like to watch too.”
Jimmy looked at her concerned: “You know you have to hide this on the street somewhere right? They find you with this, you go to jail, do not pass Go.”
The Wuhan Mission Page 5
