Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  She added, unnecessarily, “This is totally off the books.”

  Before Jack could speak she defended herself from what she expected him to say. “This is undeclared war, Jack. The Chinese are killing Americans. I am very comfortable supporting locals fighting back against that evil regime over there.” She pointed to Jack’s chest for emphasis. “But it is not my intention to create more cannon fodder. We have done enough of that with our intelligence leaks.”

  “I understand.”

  She handed Ryan a piece of paper she pulled from her purse. “This is the Red Hand contact in New York. His name is not in any computer, he has not met with anyone from the government. You commit the name and the number to memory, and then destroy this.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. And understand this. You, Jack, are not going to China. I want you to talk to Gerry Hendley and, if he thinks this is something your organization can help us with, quietly, then he can send Domingo Chavez or one of the other operators. Having the President’s son captured in Beijing working with rebels there will make all of our problems exponentially worse.”

  “I get it,” Jack said. Not to mention it would give my dad a coronary. “I will talk to Gerry about it as soon as I leave.”

  Mary Pat gave Jack a hug and started to get up.

  Ryan said, “There is one more thing. I don’t know if I am stepping out of my lane on this, but . . .”

  Mary Pat sat back down. “Speak up.”

  “Okay. The Campus was involved with the Zha arrest in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago.”

  Mary Pat looked genuinely surprised. “Involved?”

  “Yes. We were over there, working with Adam Yao, CIA’s NOC who identified him in Hong Kong.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yao did not know us as The Campus. We sold ourselves as a business trying to track Zha down because he hacked our network. His white-side cover is as a business-intelligence investigator.”

  “I have read CIA’s reports about Adam Yao and the Zha incident in Hong Kong. The SEALs said they had CIA support. We suspected Yao had two local assets helping him.”

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say this: I suppose you know hundreds of great officers in the U.S. intelligence community, but Adam seemed very well dialed-in over there. An extremely sharp guy. He knew about the CIA leak, and he was working his ass off, staying low-profile to avoid getting caught up in the leak while still getting the job done at the same time.

  “It’s not my place to say, but I really think he is the type of guy who needs your full support, especially at a time like this.”

  Mary Pat said nothing.

  After an uncomfortable moment, Ryan said, “I apologize. I know you have more irons in the fire right now than you know what to do with. I just thought—”

  “Jack. Adam Yao disappeared two weeks ago, after someone tried to blow him up in his car but instead killed his next-door neighbor.”

  Ryan reeled with this news. “Oh my God.”

  Foley said, “It’s possible he just took himself off-grid for his own PERSEC. Hell, I couldn’t blame him if he was running from us because of the leak. But our people over there at the consulate in HK think the Fourteen-K Triads got him.” She stood up to leave. “Their best guess is that he’s at the bottom of Victoria Harbour.

  “I’m sorry. We failed Adam, too.”

  She went back inside the house, while Jack sat there in the cold, sitting on the patio chair with his head in his hands.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Adam Yao had spent the first two weeks after the shootout in Wan Chai on Lamma Island, part of Hong Kong territory a forty-minute ferry ride from his home. It was quiet and peaceful here, which was just what he needed. He did not know a soul, and the locals thought he was just some tourist here to enjoy the beach and the bars.

  He had made no contact with anyone. Not CIA, not SinoShield clients or colleagues, not relatives in the States or friends in Soho. He’d lived in a tiny monthly vacation rental off the beach, he paid cash, and he took all his meals in the attached restaurant.

  His life had changed drastically in the past couple of weeks. He had not used his credit cards, and he had thrown his cell phone in a dumpster in Kowloon. He’d sold a few personal items for cash on the street, and he spent a few days with no cash, but he was not too worried about money. Adam’s “day job,” his SinoShield cover company, had put him in contact with all sorts of local crooks, smugglers, counterfeiters, and other profiteers, and he had cordial dealings with many of them. Occasionally he had to make friends in low places in order to do his job, and he had called in a few markers with some of these friends. He knew he could find temporary work on a dock or in a counterfeit basement handbag shop or any number of other shitty jobs, that, even though they were shitty jobs, were a hell of a lot better than getting burned to a crisp like his poor friend Robert Kam.

  He waited two weeks; he wanted the people after him to think someone else had gotten him or that he’d gotten away, and he wanted anyone from the CIA to stop looking for him as well. Adam knew it would be a big deal at Langley that a NOC had disappeared, especially under the circumstances following the SEAL mission, but he knew CIA assets in the area were just about nonexistent, and, anyway, Langley had bigger fish to fry these days.

  Once two weeks had passed, Adam returned to Kowloon, now wearing a full beard and mustache. Within twenty-four hours he owned new dark sunglasses, a new mobile phone, and a new suit and accessories. His suit was impeccable; everyone in Hong Kong who so desired wore a great suit, as Hong Kong tailors had a reputation that rivaled Savile Row, and were known for making beautifully bespoke suits for one-fourth the cost of their London counterparts.

  Adam knew he could have left Hong Kong and returned to the States. It would be safe there, certainly from the Triads and almost certainly from the PRC.

  But he was not leaving HK until he found out more about the shadowy hacker group that he’d stumbled onto, leading to the deaths of God knows how many. The Americans had Zha, this was true, but this Center character Gavin Biery had spoken of must surely still be in operation.

  Adam wasn’t going anywhere till he found Center.

  The MFIC.

  With a few deep breaths and some whispered self-affirmations, Adam then walked into the Mong Kok Computer Centre like he owned the place, asked to speak to the leasing manager of the building, and told the woman he was looking to rent a large space to house a new call center for a Singapore-based bank.

  He handed her his business card, and that was all the ID he needed to convince her of his cover for action.

  The leasing manager told him, much to her delight, that two floors had just been vacated two weeks earlier, and he asked to take a look. She led him through the carpeted rooms and hallways, and he inspected them carefully, taking pictures and asking questions.

  He also asked her questions about herself, which was not his original plan, but going out to dinner with the woman and getting information on the company that just left was to Adam Yao much preferable to his original plan, which was dumpster-diving, hoping against hope to find a scrap of paper that might be a clue about the big group Zha had been a part of.

  That evening at dinner the woman spoke freely about Commercial Services Ltd., the large computer company that had just left, mostly about how they were a 14K-owned business and they used an insane amount of electrical power and installed an alarming number of very unattractive antennas on the roof of the building, some of which they did not have the decency to remove when they left in the middle of the night, led away in trucks by armed men who seemed to be security police.

  Adam took in all the information, and it made his head spin.

  “That was very nice of the Fourteen-K to move all their equipment for them.”

  She shook her head. “No. The people wh
o worked in the offices packed up their own things, and then a shipping service came and took it away.”

  “Interesting. I’ll need someone who can work quickly to deliver my computers from Singapore. Would you remember the name of the shipping service?”

  She did, and Adam committed it to memory and then spent the rest of the evening enjoying his time with the leasing agent.

  —

  The next morning he walked through the doors of Service Cargo Freight Forwarders, at the Kwai Tak Industrial Centre in Kwai Chung, in the New Territories north of Hong Kong. It was a small outfit, only one clerk was present, and Adam Yao presented the man with a beautifully professional business card claiming him to be the leasing manager of the Mong Kok Computer Centre building.

  The clerk seemed to believe the cover, though he was hardly impressed. He barely looked up from his television.

  Yao said, “The day after your company picked up the Commercial Services Limited equipment from our building, two pallets of tablet computers that had been delayed in customs arrived for them. The shipment is in our warehouse right now. I checked the packing list and it was listed as a complete shipment, but someone screwed up and didn’t realize these two pallets had not yet been delivered. Someone is going to be very unhappy if those goods don’t sail with the rest of the shipment.”

  The clerk could not possibly have looked less interested. “That’s not my problem.”

  Yao was undaunted. “No, it will be my problem, except for the fact you guys signed off on the incorrect manifest. If they come to me looking for the three hundred sixty units that you signed for, I could just tell them the shipper must have lost them.”

  The clerk eyed Yao with annoyance.

  Adam smiled. “Look, man, I just want to do what’s right.”

  “Leave the pallets here. We’ll get them to the client as soon as they note the discrepancy.”

  “I hope I don’t look that stupid. I’m not giving you one million HK dollars’ worth of product that’s already been legally imported from China. You could just sell it yourselves on the street and then tell the customer I never delivered it.

  “I want to keep our client happy, and you should, too. We made a little screwup, these things happen, and I am just trying to rectify it quietly. If you can do me the personal favor of telling me the port of disembarkation and the name of the person who signed for the goods, I can go directly to them without involving the customer in this at all.”

  Adam most often got what he wanted with the incredible social-engineering skills that most good spies possessed. He presented himself professionally, he was polite, and he carried himself with a calm air of self-assuredness. It was hard for anyone to tell him no. But occasionally Adam achieved success in social engineering more from the fact that he could be annoyingly persistent.

  This was such a time. The shipping clerk determined, after several minutes of “No,” that his own laziness and strict adherence to company policy was not going to be enough to get rid of the bothersome young man in the nice suit.

  The clerk slid over to his computer, making a show of how much trouble it was to do so. He clicked through a few screens, then settled on one, used his pen to look down at the data. “Okay. It sailed on the eighteenth. Right now it is one day out of Tokyo.” The man kept looking at the computer.

  “Where is it heading?”

  “USA next, then Mexico.”

  “The cargo. Where will the fourteen pallets disembark?”

  The man cocked his head to the side. “It’s already off the vessel. It was offloaded on the nineteenth, in Guangzhou.”

  “Guangzhou?”

  “Yeah. That makes no sense. You said this stuff was imported from the mainland, which means all the duties, taxes, tariffs, were paid. And then they turn it around and send it back to China? Who the hell does that?”

  No one does that, Adam knew. But it told him where Center had moved his organization.

  Center was in China. There was no other explanation. And there was no way in hell he could run such a huge operation on the mainland without the Chicoms knowing about it.

  Things fell into place quickly in Yao’s mind while he stood at the shipping desk. Center was working for China. Zha had been working for Center. Zha orchestrated the UAV attacks.

  Was the Center group some sort of false flag operation set up by the Chinese?

  The prospect was chilling, but Yao was having a hard time coming up with alternative explanations.

  Yao only wished he could tell someone at CIA what he had just learned, and what he was about to do. But Adam Yao wanted to stay alive even more than he wanted a pat on the back or a helping hand.

  He’d make his way over the border. He would find Center and his operation. And then he would figure out what to do.

  —

  Valentin Kovalenko was up early this morning. He took the Metro from D.C. across the river to Arlington, did a brief surveillance detection run, and then entered the Ballston Public Parking Garage at seven-fifteen a.m.

  Today’s instructions were clear, though unusual. For the first time since he’d arrived in D.C. he would be running an agent himself. This would be, it had been explained to him by Center, his priority assignment here in the United States, so he should take it seriously and see it through.

  Today was set up as just a brief meet-and-greet, but there was a subtext to it, which Center had conveyed via Cryptogram the evening before. This agent was a government employee and a willing accomplice of Center’s, though he did not know Center’s identity, and he himself was running an unwitting agent.

  Kovalenko’s job was to get the man to turn up the heat on his agent and get some results.

  All this seemed to be child’s play when Center relayed the mission the evening before; at least it certainly did not seem to be anything along the lines of being involved with the killing of five CIA officers.

  But Kovalenko could not really say how sensitive this operation would be, for the simple reason that he was not allowed to know who the ultimate target was. As usual, Center kept things so damn compartmentalized that Valentin knew only that he was to lean on his agent to be harder on his agent, who, in turn, was responsible for compromising the ultimate target.

  “No way to run an effective intelligence operation,” Kovalenko had said aloud the night before.

  Still, the SVR wanted Valentin to go along and get along, so he was here in a chilly parking garage early this morning, waiting to meet with his agent.

  A Toyota minivan pulled into the lot and parked next to Kovalenko, and he heard the snap of the doors being unlocked. He climbed into the passenger seat and found himself sitting next to a large man with a ridiculous flop of gray-blond hair dangling into his eyes.

  The man reached out a hand. “Darren Lipton. FBI. How the hell are you?”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Kovalenko shook the man’s hand, but he did not identify himself. He only said, “Center has asked me to work with you directly. To help you find access to resources you may need in the furtherance of your objective.”

  This wasn’t really true. Valentin knew this man was an FBI agent in the Bureau’s National Security Branch. He would have access to a hell of a lot more resources than Valentin would. No, Kovalenko was here to pressure him for results, but there was no sense in starting out the conversation or the relationship, short-lived though Kovalenko expected it to be, with threats.

  The American just stared at him for a long time without speaking.

  Kovalenko cleared his throat. “That said, we expect results immediately. Your objective is crucial to the—”

  The big man interrupted with a booming shout: “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Kovalenko recoiled in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Really? I mean . . . really?”
>
  “Mr. Lipton, I do not know what—”

  “The goddamned Russians? I’ve been working for the goddamned motherfucking Russians?”

  Kovalenko recovered from his shock. Actually he empathized with his agent. He knew what it felt like to have no idea whose flag it was you risked your life and liberty for.

  “Things are not as they appear, Special Agent Lipton.”

  “Is that right?” Lipton said, and then he slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “I sure as hell hope not, because you appear to be a fucking Russian.”

  Kovalenko just looked down at his fingernails for a moment. He continued. “Be that as it may, I know your agent has planted a bug on the mobile phone of the target. But we are not getting further GPS updates. We assume he has discarded the phone. We will be going forward with physical surveillance if we don’t see immediate results. That will involve you, me, and perhaps others. I don’t have to tell you that this would entail long hours of uncomfortable work.”

  “I can’t do that. I have a job and a family to come home to.”

  “Obviously we won’t do anything to cause suspicion with the FBI. You will not have to conduct surveillance at times you need to be at your office. Your family, on the other hand, is your problem, not ours.”

  Lipton stared at Kovalenko for a long moment. “I could snap your scrawny little fucking neck.”

  Now Kovalenko smiled. He may not have known anything about Lipton’s agent, or Lipton’s agent’s target, but he did know a thing or two about Darren Lipton. Center had sent him everything. “If you try to break my fucking neck, Special Agent Lipton, you will fail. But whether or not you fail or you succeed, your past will come back to haunt you very quickly, because Center will be angry with you, and we both know what Center will do.”

  Lipton turned away, and looked out the windshield of the minivan.