“My dear Marie-Laure: This is a sort of farewell, I think. I am not a traitor, whatever the U.S. government may claim. I despise people like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen. They betrayed their country. Worse than that, they were vulgar. They sold secrets for money. They were an inversion of the Cold War; their secrets were putrescent. I am not an agent of a foreign power. I have never taken a penny from anyone. I serve the cause of one world and the free and open exchange of information. I hope you will be proud of me, always. Denise.”
37.
AMSTERDAM
Harris Chang checked into the Amsterdam Hilton the next morning. It was a cool, clear December day that softened the old city’s color in the low winter light. The purple waters of the canal behind the hotel were dappled by sparkling traces of the sun. Chang checked into his room and then descended to the lobby to wait for Denise Ford. She hadn’t been on his flight, but there were other ways to reach Amsterdam overnight. He asked the front desk to call the room of Audrey Fingerhut. The clerk said there was a reservation in that name but that she hadn’t checked in yet. Chang left a message to inform Miss Fingerhut when she arrived that Mr. Tong was in the hotel restaurant.
Chang found a table overlooking the canal and had a late breakfast. Small boats were berthed just beyond the grass of the hotel garden; they bobbed gently at their moorings, disturbed occasionally by the wake of a barge that moved along the Noorder Amstel. Chang looked at his watch every few minutes, and he ventured into the lobby several times. He thought about going upstairs to bed, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. The waiter brought a copy of the International New York Times. Chang ordered more coffee and scanned the newspaper. The lead story was about the widening political purge in China.
Chang was still seated at his table when, just after noon, Denise Ford entered the restaurant. She wore a blonde wig under a gray hat and a big pair of sunglasses. Heads turned. Even on the run, she maintained the tailoring and demeanor of a well-turned woman. The waiter tried to seat her at a table near the water, but she shook her head and walked toward Chang.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she said. She removed her sunglasses. Despite the long trip, she looked remarkably fresh. Her skin had a faint blush.
“Hi Audrey,” responded Chang. “How was your flight?”
“Long, but pleasant enough. I came via Copenhagen. The man in the next seat tried to talk to me, but I pretended I didn’t speak English.”
“How’s your Chinese? Mine isn’t very good, but I’m ready to learn. I just hope your friend will be here. We need to work out the details. They’re going to realize soon that we’re missing back home. We can’t make any mistakes.”
“Shhh!” She put her finger to her lips. A man at the next table was paying his bill. She wanted him gone before they talked anymore.
“Did you know that Amsterdam has more canals and bridges than Venice?” she asked blandly. “Yes. And do you know what the local people call this city? They call it ‘Mokum.’ The taxi driver explained it on the way in from the airport. Mokum. What an ugly name for such a pretty place.”
The man at the nearby table had signed his check and left. Ford patted Chang’s hand.
“I’m glad we both made it,” she said. “I thought you’d be here, but I wasn’t certain. Impressions are sometimes wrong. You look a bit tired. Are you okay?”
“I’m concerned, to be honest. I am about to walk over a line that I can’t cross back. I want to be sure that your friend Mr. Li will be on the other side to greet me.”
“Oh yes! He’ll be here. He said he would be, and he’s not a man who breaks his promises. Ever.”
“Where are we going to meet? Do you know?”
She put her finger to her lips again.
“That’s my secret. Personal protection. I trust you, of course. But a girl learns never to tell a man everything. I’ll explain tomorrow morning on the way to the meeting. That’s safer, I think.”
Chang tried not to show anxiety. But this was the first piece of the plan that was going wrong.
“I don’t know,” he said warily. “I hate to go blind. Part of my Army training. Always do the recon.”
“I understand, but it’s just not possible. Relax. Curiosity killed the cat.”
“I’m in your hands, Audrey, literally.”
“No. Figuratively you’re in my hands. Not literally, although I’m willing to consider a proposal.”
She looked at her watch and then yawned.
“Gracious. I’m tired all of a sudden. I think it’s time for a snooze. Soon we’ll be on Beijing time. Can you believe it? Very exciting, really. A new world dawns.”
She rose from her chair. “I’ll call you if I wake up for dinner, but I think I’ll stay in bed. Did you know that this hotel is where John and Yoko had their ‘love-in’ for peace, in bed? Historic.”
She waved good-bye.
“What about tomorrow?” pressed Chang, still hungry for information he could pass to Vandel.
“Knock on my door at 8:00. Room 512. We’ll go from there. Sleep tight.”
Ford strolled off, dropping a five-euro note in the waiter’s hand on her way out.
John Vandel traveled through the night in his Gulfstream jet. The flight attendant made up the bed in the aft cabin. Vandel offered it to Kate Sturm, but she said she had some paperwork to finish. He slept nearly the whole way.
When they landed at Schiphol, a car was waiting just outside the general-aviation terminal with a chase car behind. The military attaché’s office had dispatched the vehicles, as Vandel had requested, along with a team of four U.S. Army warrant officers who worked out of the Amsterdam consulate on counter-terrorism support missions. The Director had ordered Vandel to stay away from CIA channels. He didn’t want any paperwork that he would have to brief the intelligence committees about.
Vandel and Sturm stayed in a small hotel by the Amstel, just south of the old city and its concentric bands of canals. The lobby was dense with pimply tourists from Britain who had come for the legal dope and the sex shops. Many of them sported tattoos and piercings. They looked at Vandel and Sturm in their dark suits as if they were creatures from outer space.
Vandel waited until 6:00 p.m. that afternoon to call Seattle. It took an exercise of will, pacing in his small room above an Amsterdam alleyway. He didn’t want to disturb yet again the contractor to whom he had assigned the decryption problem, but he was running out of time. By the next morning it would be too late. The Special Operations Forces officers were already asking where they should deploy. Vandel told them to be patient about the details, but that wasn’t a military virtue.
When Vandel finally placed his call to Jason Schmidt, it was 9:00 a.m. Seattle time. Schmidt had been in his lab all night, working on the computations. His voice was shaky from exhaustion, disappointment, elation: Vandel couldn’t tell. Maybe all three.
“So where are we?” asked Vandel. “Have you decrypted any of it? I need to know. If it didn’t work, just tell me.”
“Well, I can’t say yes or no, exactly. I don’t know.” He sounded exhausted, otherworldly.
“That’s a quantum answer, for Christ’s sake! Give me a zero or a one.”
Schmidt sniffled, then he choked back a sob. “I’m so close,” he said. He was convulsed for a moment.
“Bear up, man. Did you get anything I can use? Anything at all?”
“Not yet. Please. I’m trying to make bits of niobium play a symphony. This is almost a quantum computer, but the encryption string is just too long. I can factor a five-digit number, maybe a ten-digit number. But this is too much.” He sniffled again.
“Get some sleep, Mr. Schmidt. It’s not your fault. You tried. We’ll cope.”
“I still believe, you see.” Schmidt’s voice was soft, apologetic, but still affirming the wonder of what he had built. “My machine can do so many quantum things. We can find optimal solutions. We can recognize patterns. There are so many ways we can help. We just can’t do this.”
<
br /> Vandel summoned Sturm to his little room overlooking the alley. He looked exhausted, suddenly. Too much stress, too many bets, too little to show. His scarred face was sallow and his eyes were sunken.
“We’re fucked,” he muttered. “Our quantum guy can’t break the Chinese code. Without that, we can’t ID the meeting place. They hold the high cards. We’re sending Harris in blind. He’s screwed.”
Vandel shook his head. He looked like a defeated man.
“Maybe we should abort,” his voice cracked slightly as he said the words.
“What are you talking about?” Sturm took his limp arm and shook it.
“We could bail. Maybe that’s the right call. We know where Chang and Ford are. We could go to the Hilton and grab them, put them on our plane, and fly them home. Sort it out when we get back. That’s the safest thing to do.”
“Stop it, John,” said Sturm sharply. “This isn’t like you. This is a puzzle. You have to solve it. You’re too exposed now to retreat. Suck it up.”
Vandel straightened. Nobody talked to him like that. He raised his hand, as if he might slap her, and then let it fall to his side. As he glared at Sturm, his pewter eyes began to glow again as his brain processed the problem. She was right. The buzzer was ticking down. He had to take the shot.
“Think, dammit.” He put his hands to his head and closed his eyes. Sturm waited while he rubbed his temple and the synapses fired.
“Okay,” he continued, his eyes still closed. “If someone chooses a city for a rush meeting, the chances are that he’s been there before. Right? And so has the other person. It’s a place that’s special, where they both know the meeting point, and there’s no chance of getting lost. That’s what you would do, isn’t it? You’d go back to someplace you know.”
“That sounds right,” said Sturm with a trace of a smile. “That’s how I would set it up.”
“Of course, you would! That’s the only way. You’d go someplace in that city where you’ve both been before.” He looked at her and then roared again: “That’s it! That’s what our targets would do.”
“What?” asked Sturm. “I don’t get it.” But he was already in motion.
Vandel walked back to his desk and grabbed the communications device he had used before to call Jason Schmidt. He punched in the Seattle number again.
“I’m so sorry,” began Schmidt, his voice shaky, when he answered. He was still floating in a pool of regret.
“Forget about that,” said Vandel. “Pull yourself together. I have a new question for you, and this one could be a lifesaver.”
“Okay, sir.” Schmidt roused himself. “I’ll try.”
“So, listen, you told me a few minutes ago that your machine can do pattern recognition. I assume that means facial patterns. So how fast? It would take a couple of days for the NSA’s best computers to match faces from a big database. That’s way too long. Can you do it faster with your machine? I mean, like, are you sure that you could do it faster?”
Schmidt laughed. He was relieved. This was a problem he had already solved.
“My goodness, yes! Much, much faster. Pattern recognition is just optimization. It’s in our sweet spot. The last test we ran with some of your people we solved a pattern-recognition optimization problem one hundred million times faster than a single-core classical computer did. Is that fast enough?”
“Sweet Jesus,” said Vandel. “Brother Schmidt, I think you just found your Killer Application.”
“Really?” The computer scientist, who had been in tears only a few minutes before, was still wary of flunking another test.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” said Vandel slowly. “Some people from the intelligence community are going to call you in a few minutes. They will help you connect to a very large database of facial pictures taken by surveillance cameras in a city in Europe over the last five years. When I say large, I mean billions of faces. Then they’re going to send you two particular faces we’re searching for. Understood? Then you get your quantum machine thing to identify, fast, where those two faces have been seen together in this city. Can you do that? Fast?”
“I think so. We’ve done it before. We have the basic tuning set for recognizing facial patterns. What’s the city?”
“Amsterdam.”
“Oh, I love that city. So pretty,” said Schmidt, enthusing now. Vandel cut him off.
“We need to move. This is super urgent. People will be in touch with you to set up the data links right away.”
“Yes, sir. I’m here. I’m ready. My techs can get started as soon as you get the data to us.”
“That a boy,” said Vandel. He rang off.
Vandel called the director of national intelligence himself to make the pitch. It didn’t take long: They had served together in Iraq. The DNI instructed NSA to break its normal rules and gather a comprehensive Amsterdam facial-recognition database immediately, some data shared openly by the Dutch government and other data obtained by different, covert means. The NSA was told, further, to share this ocean of data immediately with the little Seattle company and its “beta” quantum computer.
Vandel turned back to Kate Sturm when he had finished the phone call to the DNI’s office at Liberty Crossing. The wave of exhilaration and action had passed through his body, but now he was shaking his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We have, what, twelve hours? Maybe Schmidt will be a hero and maybe not. But we need some kind of backup. Do we have enough people to follow Ford and Chang when they head out to the meet?”
“Not on the ground. We don’t have enough people, even if we borrow more SOF. We could try overhead monitoring. We wouldn’t know where Ford and Chang were going until they got there. But that would be better than nothing.”
“Okay, then that’s our alternative tomorrow morning. We’ll use the SOF team we’ve got, steal some more from DOD, and get some birds overhead. We’ll track them to the location, wherever it is.”
“And then what?” asked Sturm, looking into the bloodshot eyes of her boss.
“When the meeting goes down, we grab the Chinese minister and tell him it’s over. We own him. He’ll come with us. He’s a dead man if he doesn’t.”
“If he’s smart, he’ll say yes,” answered Sturm. “He’s in a jam. With the right pitch, maybe he’ll come over. What if he says no?”
“He’ll say yes. Definitely. His world is falling apart back home. We can save him.”
“One question: How are we going to move our Support team around town following these guys without it looking like a Blackwater reunion?”
Vandel pondered the problem for a moment. His answer, inevitably, was deception.
“Get some Dutch police uniforms for our SOF guys. As many as you can. And some vehicles that look like Amsterdam cop cars. Can you do that overnight?”
“Probably. But is this a good idea, John? The flap potential is huge. The Dutch won’t be amused. They like us, but they take their sovereignty seriously.”
“They’ll never know, if we do it right. Chop-chop. We have a lot to do in the next twelve hours.”
Vandel walked her to the door, gave her a pat on the back, and put an arm around her broad shoulder. The other arm he held aloft in a fist.
38.
AMSTERDAM
The sun rose the next morning a bright Dutch orange. The canals came to life with a rolling ripple of sunlight that illuminated the ribbons of water in the old city, one after another. John Vandel and Kate Sturm had been up all night in preparation. Vandel popped pills through the night to stay awake. Sturm caught him gobbling another tablet just before dawn and wagged her finger, but Vandel gave her a thumbs-up.
“Better living through chemistry.”
The SOF detail in Amsterdam had months ago established a safe house near the old city, just below Willemspark. Vandel had turned that into a temporary command post overnight. His friends at the Defense Intelligence Agency had cobbled together a secure downlink for satellite reco
nnaissance, and thanks to more emergency tasking from Liberty Crossing, continuous low-orbit reconnaissance had been arranged starting at dawn. A dozen Dutch police uniforms had been found, along with three vehicles and, Vandel was assured, a Dutch speaker.
Harris Chang woke early. He had lain awake rehearsing his “defection” speech for the meeting with the Chinese intelligence minister. He retrieved from his room safe the manila envelope, with Vandel’s special “gift” for Minister Li. That was his only weapon. He felt entirely alone, a sensation that on this morning was oddly reassuring. He might not be able to trust anyone else, but he trusted himself.
Denise Ford, true to her word, had slept through dinner and then taken a long walk along the canals at midnight. She strolled past the windows of the red-light district, observing the women in their garter belts and black-widow bustiers. Several of the women beckoned for her to come inside, but she kept walking. A drunk stopped her on the sidewalk, taking her for a hooker. She pushed him away so forcefully that he fell over.
Chang knocked on Ford’s door at 8:00 a.m. She was wearing her blonde wig and a trench coat. She had packed her roller bag. She was smiling serenely, very like a person who was about to escape from one life to another.
“Zaoshang hao,” she said brightly.
“And good morning to you, too,” answered Chang. He wore a blazer and gray slacks, with a blue-striped shirt and red silk tie, perhaps dressed for a job interview.
“You’re not packed!” she said.
“My suitcase is back in the room. I’ll get it in a minute. I need to know where we’re going. It makes me nervous not to know. We could get ambushed.”
Ford shook her head, pushing some stray blonde hair from her wig off her forehead.
“I’ll tell you en route,” she said. “Safer that way. Now go get your bag. And I hope you brought some warmer clothes. They say Beijing is freezing in the winter. Meet me downstairs in the lobby in five minutes. I’ll order a taxi.”
The Quantum Spy Page 31
