Saigon Red

by Gregory C. Randall

  “He’s dead,” Alex said.

  “Really, that’s too bad. He had a bright future, but never trust someone who isn’t loyal. I will release the boy as soon as the data is verified. However, if anything or anyone interferes, I will explode the vehicle.” They heard an audible squawk; Lin put his hand to his ear and listened. “Thank you, I understand.” He turned to the detective. “Father, tell the helicopter pilot to return to his station. He’s too close. If he ventures any closer, I’ll shoot him out of the sky.”

  Phan raised the radio and said something that was lost in the winds and whirring. “He’s backing off.”

  “Excellent,” Lin said. “Now, I know about you, Mr. Campbell, and your organization. Someday you should hire me. I can help you better understand all the screwups you’ve accomplished these past six months. And you, Mr. CIA agent Javier Castillo of Waco, Texas; Washington, DC; and Milan—my, such a world traveler. And yet you don’t have a clue as to who my employer is. So typically American.” He looked at Alex. “But you, I do know what you are to me, but little about who you are. Reports relayed to me say a disgraced Cleveland cop, yet here you stand in the middle of an international trade negotiation that will change the course of militaries and transportation for a century. Someday, I would like to see this Cleveland.”

  “Cleveland is where your grandfather lives,” Alex said. “I’ll bet that little voice in your head didn’t know that.” She paused when Lin smiled. “You do know—how the hell? Did you know that I’m also your father’s sister?”

  Lin laughed. “You, my aunt? Yes, I listened to your conversation with that man.” He pointed to Javier. “It was all a fabrication, lies to entrap me. And I knew you would follow me. So, I think you are the fool. This is a joke, something to distract me.”

  “Lin, there is more to all this than your self-indulgent and childish problems with your father. Can’t you see that you’re just a tool being used by that crazy woman in China?”

  “Possibly, but a well-paid tool.” He turned to his father. “Tell Mr. Lucchese to bring out the data and the helmet, now.”

  “And if we don’t?” Chris said.

  Lin said something into his headset, and the drone slowly rose a meter and rotated 360 degrees.

  “As you can see,” Lin said, “the machine will do what it does. It’s aware of everything that’s happening. If anything happens to me, it will explode, taking the boy with it. So, Father—and I’m losing my patience—have Mr. Lucchese bring me what I want.”

  Phan signaled to the lobby. Nevio pushed the door open and walked to the group. He carried a nylon bag. He kept looking at his son sitting on the machine. Paolo jerked and pulled against his restraints. The drone returned to the deck and remained stationary, its blades still spinning.

  “Good to see you again, Nevio,” Lin said. “Nice kid. The thumb drive, please.”

  Nevio handed him the small device. Lin removed a box from his belt, like the one Karns had used the previous night. Lin inserted the thumb drive. “Until the data is confirmed, none of you move.” Lin looked at Nevio. “He seems like a great kid; we had some good conversations. He has a future in technology. Nevio, he’s a far better man than you ever were.” After a seemingly endless minute, the device buzzed, and Lin’s earpiece squawked. “Excellent, the data transfer is confirmed. Now the helmet.”

  Nevio handed the bag to Lin. He removed the helmet and studied it.

  “I can’t let you go with my son,” Nevio said. “He’s my boy. Why are you doing this? Leave him here, then go.”

  “Sorry, I can’t. I need insurance.”

  “I said leave my son here.”

  “The traitor has a backbone. Excellent.” Lin began to back away.

  Nevio lunged and tried to tackle him. Lin smashed him across his head with the helmet, knocking him to the concrete platform. “And gutsy, as well. Anyone else care to take a swing?” Lin continued stepping backward toward the machine. Halfway, he secured the bag with the helmet to a clip on his belt. He put on his own helmet and looked across the platform to the drone and the boy; there was an audible squawk from inside Lin’s helmet. “Understood.” He turned to the five people on the deck. “Change in plans. Listen carefully. There is a device built into the drone. I have no control over it; it’s completely out of my hands. It will explode in two minutes. So, for now, goodbye. Father, I will see you in hell.”

  Lin spun around. Alex pulled her pistol and, with both hands, aimed it at Lin.

  “No!” screamed Phan, and knocked her arm away. “Don’t kill my son.”

  Lin ran to the handrail, took one look back at his father, slammed closed the visor, and vaulted over.

  “Your knife, Jave!” Alex shouted.

  Javier tossed her his pocketknife. Phan watched as she ran to the drone and severed the tape binding Paolo’s hands and ankles, freeing the boy. Chris then came in from behind, just avoiding the blades, and pulled Paolo from the cycle and handed him to Phan. The detective looked at the dashboard. A series of numbers was counting backward. There were only fifteen seconds left.

  “Everyone inside!” Phan yelled. Chris took the boy and threw him over his shoulder and ran toward the doors. One of the officers pushed them open—Chris was the first in. The others followed and pulled the doors tight. Ilaria was all over her son, pulling the remaining tape from his hands, removing his helmet, and making sure he was all right. Almost everyone looked back at the amazing piece of technology. It continued to whir and vibrate, almost like a live animal. Then it rose off the deck about three feet, hovered and adjusted to the gusts of wind, and exploded. Pieces of the drone spun out over the city, and chunks of plastic and steel flew at the doors and the building. Everyone in the lobby dropped to the floor just as parts slammed against the unbreakable glass windows. There was no fire, at least not like the kind you’d expect from a gasoline-powered machine, just the burning battery pack skidding across the pad.

  “I can’t believe he jumped,” Javier said. “He could have easily escaped.”

  “I’m sure he did,” Chris said. “That backpack was like those worn by BASE jumpers. I’ve seen them jump—he’s gone. He could be anywhere in the city.”

  Phan ignored the comments. He just stood at the glass and looked out over the city. His son was gone, again.

  CHAPTER 48

  Three hours later, Alex sat in one of the wicker chairs on the small outside terrace of Campbell’s hotel room. Javier and Chris sat in the other two. Chris was smoking one of his maduros. She nursed a vodka on the rocks, the others, bourbon.

  An hour earlier, when Alex had left the apartment, all the Luccheses had gone to bed. Ilaria had stayed with her son. Paolo, outside of a few bruises, was shaken but well. Gianna had been elated to see her brother again. Paolo had told her he would tell her everything the next day. He’d been exhausted and quickly fell asleep, his head in his mother’s lap, her hand holding his. Alex knew Ilaria was strong; she would have to be to deal with all the repercussions that would be coming. Detective Phan would want to pin Karns’s death on someone, regardless of the attitude of his superiors. Alex knew he was wired a lot like her; she hated unfinished business.

  She thought that the Luccheses would be under a microscope. Javier would probably see to that. She looked at Javier; he seemed oddly pleased.

  “Do you know who this Chairwoman is?” Alex asked Chris and Javier. “She’s the catalyst for everything. Was the information important enough to kill people over?”

  Chris took a sip of his drink, then looked at Javier, who nodded.

  “Alex,” Chris began, “America wants a balance of peace and security throughout the world, but more than that, they want to control that security and balance. It’s a burden we’ve assumed since World War II. My company and a few others help carry that burden. It’s like a chess game: pieces move forward and back, and each move is an attempt at blocking or advancing an agenda. But often a move can be a feint, a ruse. This group in China—we’ve learned it’s
called Dark Star Security—steals as much technology as they can, and spins off these thefts to the highest bidder. It is a quasigovernmental organization based in Beijing that has its fingers in almost every country worth stealing from. They’ve kidnapped scientists, engineers, and creative thinkers, who we assume now work for this organization or are squeezed for their expertise, then liquidated. We believe the head of this syndicate—the Chairwoman as she is known—is also a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Chinese government, which of course denies that she exists. One of our informants said that she’s the third chairman to hold this position in the last thirty years. Our informant died from polonium poisoning soon after he got us this information. Obviously, Lin Van Phan, the Ghost—your nephew—is one of her agents. They’re well trained and as ruthless as she is. Why she chose him, I don’t know.”

  “And this technology, was it worth all this?” Alex asked. “Was it worth the deaths, and the trauma to a family?” She was still trying to figure Chris out.

  “This technology is good,” Javier said. “Very good, so good that even the engineers at Como Motors believe it will work. It will; however, not nearly at the capacity they think it does.”

  She looked at him. “You went fishing.”

  Both men smiled. “Yes,” Javier said. “I’ve been cleared to tell you this. It was bait, bait with an expiration date. This is something that Nevio Lucchese didn’t know. In fact, we knew from informants in the Mafia that Ilaria’s father was involved. That was what I wanted to tell you in Milan, but couldn’t. Desperate people will do desperate things.”

  “You sons of bitches,” Alex said. “You were using them.”

  “All we did was use their fear and greed. The software is a Trojan horse. In fact, when they plug this last piece of data into the others, it will perform as expected. Then, in a few weeks, it will secretly transmit its own location through the nearest available router. After that it will slowly begin to disassemble itself. Our hope is to use this piece of data to find Dark Star’s servers and through them, their base.”

  “This was a trick?” Alex asked, stunned.

  “Yes and no,” Javier said. “We needed Nevio, and Ilaria’s father, to believe that what they had was the real thing; in fact, ninety-eight percent of it is real and functional. We needed Dark Star to believe that this was critical information, military software and hardware that could be a game changer. We contracted, through NATO, Como Motors to develop and advance these technologies based on some of their own designs for artificial intelligence as well as a few ideas of ours. The story we let slip implied that the technology would do more than it could actually accomplish. We were surprised to discover, after leaking this fake story, that Dark Star had advanced well beyond many of our own technologies. Their prototypes were built on our platforms, like the stolen plans for the drone. It looks like Con Ma received the plans from an engineer under Nevio’s control, who handed them off to Con Ma. For some reason, Con Ma then killed the man. Your brother is still trying to find the engineer’s killer.”

  “I can’t believe this, a Trojan horse?” Alex said.

  “Yes. The drone was the first part, the software the second. This was a way for us to draw them out as well. Every drone part from the explosion that could be found is on its way to our lab in Silicon Valley. We’ll put it back together. The Pentagon and Langley want more information. We now have identified this Ghost, thanks to you. What we didn’t count on were the anomalies that stuck their noses under the tent of this operation.”

  “Thank you; now my family is a camel with its nose under the tent.”

  “Your connections to Phan and Lin were way outside anything we could have anticipated. And to make matters even more bizarre is your ex-husband,” Javier said. “Again, anomalies.”

  “You put the Lucchese family up as targets, including the children,” Alex said. “You are heartless bastards.”

  “We did nothing; we only provided the props,” Chris said. “They were the ones who were passing on the information. It was Karns who helped make it happen. Nevio and Ilaria, as naive as they are, knew what they were getting into. And her father seems to be the promoter. His Mafia connections led to the Chinese and Dark Star. This is one more piece of information about this Chinese syndicate, and their connections throughout the criminal world. All I could do was help protect their children, that was your job. Here I failed.”

  “The children are fine now,” Alex said. “And Detective Phan, once his coroner autopsies Karns’s body, will know it was one of the guns in the apartment. The pressure will fall on all of us, and most especially the Luccheses.”

  Javier looked at Chris. Then he looked at Alex. “That will not be a problem.”

  “What do you mean not a . . .” Alex stopped as a scene ran through her head. “The coroner’s people, the ones that Phan didn’t recognize.” She paused again. “Goddamn you, you sons of bitches.”

  “His body will not be found,” Javier said.

  “And the dead men . . . their deaths will haunt me forever,” Chris added. “They weren’t supposed to be at the warehouse. They had just come in from Japan; Jake and I sent them here. I guess Karns tried to keep them out of the facility, but they reacted too quickly to the alarm. Damn that man. Then Lin fought his way out, and my people died.”

  “My God, this is all senseless,” she said.

  “This is a war. A cyber war of ideas and technologies, but it’s also more than that.”

  “More than what? Like Phan said, a murderous game played on his ‘playground’? Who picks the battlefields?”

  “I don’t,” Chris said. “They can be anywhere. Afghanistan, the Sudan, Central Africa, Vietnam. That was why you were assigned to the family. To protect them.”

  “It seems I needed to protect them from you guys too,” Alex said. “Yes, you are all cold-hearted bastards.”

  “Wait just a minute,” Chris said. “It was your ex-husband that threw the grenade in the room. No one could have seen that coming, no one. Did you? Until a few months ago, you hoped he was dead.”

  “Obviously, hope and reality are two very different things,” Alex said. “I have no idea why he was here. Someday, when I get the chance, I’ll ask him. I’m beginning to see why Professor Moriarty drove Sherlock Holmes crazy—simply because he could.” She turned to Javier. “Who built the virus for the software?”

  “We did. Dark Star must believe in what they got,” Javier said. “Very visible emergency changes will be made to various systems and programs to make it appear to Dark Star that we’re trying to counteract the effects of this theft—add reality to the fiction. In time, they may come to see the weakness of the tech, and they’ll either write it off as Western incompetence or understand they were snookered. Either way, we come closer to identifying their players.”

  “I can’t believe this—people died.”

  “Ilaria was protecting her daughter; none of that was foreseen,” Chris said. “She did what I was about two seconds from doing myself.”

  “When this goes public,” Alex said, “it will be a disaster for the Luccheses and their family. The repercussions will roll though his company. Is that what you want?”

  “None of that will happen,” Javier said. “All of this will be kept quiet. No one will ever know. It can’t and won’t get out. Dark Star must believe that what they have is real. It’s just that simple. If the Chinese think that there’s a chance that the data is bad, they’ll dump it. So, nothing will happen to the Luccheses. Actually, they’re returning home next week, a surprise promotion for Nevio. They’ll stay in Milan. Don’t worry about what Ilaria said about her family; the raise is substantial. The kids will be fine. How the Luccheses deal with this good fortune is up to them.”

  “You all are bastards,” Alex said.

  “The world is not like Cleveland,” Javier answered. “The games are bigger and more dangerous. We know that some members of Dark Star’s infrastructure are highly placed military personnel from North
Korea, Iran, and even eastern Russia. However, most of them are Chinese. All quite businesslike.”

  “And people die.”

  “Yes, and sadly people die,” Chris said. “In this case, they were friends and associates. I will not let that go unavenged. I don’t care that this Con Ma, Lin Van Phan, is your nephew. There will be a day of reckoning—that I can assure you.”

  “Do you know what happened to Ralph?” Alex asked, looking at Javier.

  “No,” Javier said. “Your ex is an incredibly resourceful man. We don’t know how he got into Vietnam, and we don’t know if he got out. Our informants in the Cambodian and Vietnamese drug cartels hint at a possible connection to a local gang here run by Tommy Quan. He was one of our local service providers; they provided the limos and the Honda minivan to TSD. He and his cousin were murdered the other night. We have found that they were connected to this same drug cartel. It slipped under our vetting. Our guess is that your ex used them when he was in business—it cost them their lives. Right now, we assume he got out. He likes to play games, and you seem to be his focus. Why? First guess: he still cares for you. Anyway, he’s just a text message away. Send him a note; ask him. With his ego, he’ll probably tell you.”

  “If I find him, I will resolve this one way or the other. So, Christopher Campbell, now you and I have a problem. Do I buy into this whole international quasi-military chest puffing and cock strutting going on? Stay with you and Teton, or walk away?” She looked at her boss; he smiled, a Cheshire cat type of smile. “Then again, you could just fire me and make it simpler. Maybe I can get unemployment.”

  “Outside of the strange revelations about your family,” Chris said, “you’ve handled yourself exceptionally well. That was a nice touch with Ralph, the fake money, the in-your-face attitude—I liked it.” Chris blew a smoke ring in the air. “To be blunt, I need you.”

  “Well, I don’t know whether I need you. I need some time to think about all of this,” Alex said. “To go from babysitter, to pawn and shill, to savior of the world is a little too much to consider in an hour. I have a half brother and his wife to get to know. I want to meet my new nieces and nephews, and most of all help my father and my family understand all of this. I’ll let you know. And you, cowboy: we need to talk, and not here.”