Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  “I . . . I did not know—”

  “I don’t give a shit what you didn’t know. I want to know what you do know. I’m not going to threaten to torture you. You and I both know there is no reason for me to threaten you. I will either break you apart, limb by limb, or not break you apart limb by limb, regardless of how helpful you are to me now. I owe you a lot of misery.”

  “Please, John. I can help you.”

  “Yeah? Then help me.”

  “I can tell you everything I know.”

  “Start talking.”

  “Chinese intelligence is involved.”

  “No shit! I’ve got dead and hog-tied Chinese soldiers all over the building. What is your involvement?”

  “I . . . I thought it was industrial espionage. They blackmailed me, sprung me from prison, but made me an accomplice. The jobs started easy, but they got harder and harder. They tricked me, they threatened me, threatened to kill me. I could not get away.”

  “Who do you report to?”

  “He calls himself Center.”

  “Is he waiting to hear from you?”

  “Yes. Crane—that is one of the men still alive out there on the floor—was letting me come in to get some data, and I was to upload it, send it to Center. I had no idea anyone was going to be hurt or—”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Kovalenko looked to the floor for a moment. Then he nodded. “Da, da, you are right. Yes, of course I knew what was going on. The first people they killed, the other day in Georgetown? No, I did not know they would do that. And then again, when they killed the cabdriver and tried to kill the woman today. I did not know that was the plan. But by now? I am no fool. I thought I would come into this building and find a stack of dead bodies.” He shrugged. “I just want to go home, John. I want no part of this.”

  Clark looked him over. “Cry me a fucking river.”

  He got up and left the room.

  —

  Back in the hallway, Clark found Gavin Biery talking to Gerry Hendley. When Biery saw the older man, he rushed up to him.

  “That guy in there. Does he work for Center?”

  “Yeah. Says he does, anyway.”

  Gavin said, “We can use him. He will have a program on his computer that he uses to communicate with Center. It’s called Cryptogram. I’ve created a virus that can go through Cryptogram and photograph the person on the other end.”

  Clark said, “But we have to get him to agree to help us, right?”

  Biery said, “Yes. You’ve got to convince him to log in to Cryptogram and get Center to accept an upload.”

  Clark thought it over for a moment. “Okay, come with me.”

  Biery and Clark returned to the conference room.

  Kovalenko had been sitting alone, his hands tied behind his back, his body positioned so that the two dead Chinese assassins were on the floor near his feet. This was by design. Clark wanted Valentin to sit there with dead men, to think about his own predicament.

  Biery and Clark sat down at the table.

  Before he could speak, Kovalenko said, “I had no choice. They forced me to work for them.”

  “You did have a choice.”

  “Sure, I could have shot myself in the head.”

  “You sound like a guy who wouldn’t mind living through this.”

  “Of course I do. But don’t fuck with me, Clark. You, of all people, want to see me dead.”

  “I’d get a few chuckles out of that, yeah. But what’s more important is defeating Center before this conflict gets any bigger. There are millions of lives at stake. It’s not just about you and me and a grudge.”

  “What do you want?”

  Clark looked at Gavin Biery. “Can we use him?”

  Gavin was still in a mild state of shock. But he nodded and looked at Kovalenko. “Do you have Cryptogram on your computer?”

  Kovalenko just nodded in reply.

  Clark said, “I am sure you have some security check you use to establish that it is actually you communicating with Center.”

  “I do. But it’s actually more complicated than that.”

  “How so?”

  “I am pretty sure that while we are talking on Cryptogram, he’s also watching me through my camera.”

  Clark’s eyebrows rose, and he turned to Biery. “Is that possible?”

  Gavin said, “Mr. Clark, you have no idea what we’ve been dealing with since you left. If this guy told me Center had microchipped his brain I wouldn’t bat an eyelash.”

  Clark turned back to Kovalenko. “We want to take you to your place and get you to connect with Center. Will you do that for us?”

  “Why should I help you? You are going to kill me anyway.”

  John Clark did not disagree. Instead he just said, “Think back to a time before you were spying for a living. I don’t mean for Center. I mean . . . before the SVR. There must have been some reason you went into this line of work. Yeah, I know your dear old dad was a KGB spook, but what did that get him? Even as a kid you must have seen him, the long hours, the low pay, the shithole postings, and you must have said to yourself, No way in hell I’m going into the family business.”

  Kovalenko replied, “It was different in the eighties. He was treated with respect. The seventies even more so.”

  Clark shrugged. “But you got into this in the nineties, long after the shine wore off the hammer and sickle.”

  Kovalenko nodded.

  “Did you, just maybe, think that someday you just might do some good?”

  “Of course. I was not one of the corrupt ones.”

  “Well, Valentin, you give us about one hour of help right now and you very likely might just stop a regional war from going global. Not too many spooks can say that.”

  “Center is smarter than you,” Kovalenko said flatly.

  Clark smiled. “We’re not going to challenge him to a game of chess.”

  Kovalenko looked at the dead men on the floor again. He said, “I feel nothing about these men. They would have killed me when this was over. I know that like I know my own name.”

  “Help us destroy him.”

  Valentin said, “If you do not kill him—I don’t mean his virus, his network, his operation—I mean him. If you do not put a bullet in Center’s head, he will be back.”

  Gavin Biery said, “You can be that bullet. I want to upload something into his system that will give us his exact location.”

  Kovalenko smiled slightly. “Let’s give it a shot.”

  —

  As Clark and Biery prepared to rush with Kovalenko to his apartment in D.C., Gerry Hendley came out of Gavin’s office. “John, I have Chavez on the phone from Beijing; he wants to talk to you.”

  Clark took the satellite phone from Hendley. “Hey, Ding.”

  “You okay, John?”

  “I’m fine. It’s a nightmare, though. You heard about Granger?”

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  “Yeah. Did he talk to you about Chairman Su’s motorcade Thursday morning?”

  “Yeah. He said Mary Pat Foley got the intel directly from the PRC government. Sounds like somebody’s not happy with what’s going on in the South China Sea.”

  Clark said, “What do you think about your chances to pull it off?”

  Chavez hesitated, then said, “It’s possible. I think we need to try, anyway, since there are no more American agency operatives in China in position.”

  “So you guys are going to go ahead?”

  Chavez said, “There’s one problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We do this op, then we leave. Good for us. But you and I have both been around dictatorships long enough to know that some poor group of SOBs, some dissident
group or other group of the citizenry, is going to take the fall for our actions. Not just these kids we’re working with. We kill Su and then the PLA will find a fall guy, and the fall guy is going to fall hard.”

  “They’ll execute everyone with means and motive. There are hundreds of groups of dissenters around China. The PLA will make an example of them all so the country never rises up again.”

  “Damn right they will. That doesn’t sit well with me,” Chavez said.

  Clark stood in the hallway, holding the phone to his ear with his right hand, thinking about the problem. “You need to leave some evidence that proves it wasn’t a group of local dissenters who did it.”

  Ding answered back immediately: “Thought of that, but any evidence will just tie the U.S. to the hit, and we can’t let that happen. It’s fine and dandy that the world will wonder if the Ryan Doctrine was in play, but if we left evidence the Chicoms could use to prove to the world that the U.S. was—”

  Clark interrupted: “What if you left evidence proving someone else did it? Someone who we wouldn’t mind taking the fall for this.”

  “What kind of evidence are you talking about?”

  John looked down at the two Chinese assassins. “What about a couple of dead Chinese special-forces guys left at the scene of the hit like they were part of the hit team.”

  After a pause, Chavez said, “Nice, ’mano. That would kill two birds with one stone. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could get any volunteers for that job, would you?”

  “No volunteers. A couple of conscripts, though.”

  Ding said, “Just as good.”

  Clark said, “I’ll be there in thirty hours with these two surviving Divine Sword assholes. We’ll waste them at the scene.”

  “You? You’re coming to Beijing? How?”

  “I still have a few friends in low places.”

  “Russians? You have some Russian buddies that can get you in?”

  “You know me too well, Domingo.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  An hour later, Clark, Biery, Kraft, and Kovalenko arrived at the Russian spy’s Dupont Circle apartment. It was almost four a.m., nearly an hour after Kovalenko had been ordered to report in by Center. Kovalenko was nervous about the exchange to come, but more than that, he was nervous about what would happen to him afterward, at the hands of John Clark.

  Before they entered the building John leaned in to Kovalenko’s ear. He spoke softly. “Valentin. Here is what you need to understand. You have one chance to get this right.”

  “I do this and I walk?”

  “You do this and you go into our custody. I let you go when it is all over.”

  Kovalenko did not react negatively to this. On the contrary, he said, “Good. I don’t want to fuck over Center and be left alone.”

  They entered the apartment; it was dark, but Valentin did not turn on any lights. The laptop was closed, and John, Melanie, and Gavin stood to the side of the desk, so that when the camera came on they would be out of the field of view.

  Kovalenko stepped into the kitchen, and Clark rushed in after him, thinking he was trying to get a knife. But instead he reached into his freezer, pulled out a frosty bottle of vodka, and took several long swigs. He turned and headed out to his computer, his bottle in his hand.

  He passed Clark with an apologetic shrug.

  Biery had given the Russian a flash drive loaded with the malware he built from FastByte22’s file uploader and his RAT. Valentin slipped it into the USB port of the laptop, and then opened the machine.

  In seconds he was logging in to Cryptogram, initiating a conversation with Center.

  Kovalenko typed “SC Lavender.” This was his authentication code. He sat there in the dark at his desk, tired and worn-looking, hoping like hell he could pull this off so that neither Center nor Clark killed him when this was all over.

  He felt like he was walking a tightrope, with a long fall into the abyss on either side of him.

  A green line of text on the black background: “What happened?”

  “There were men at Hendley Associates that Crane did not detect. After we entered and took the data from the server, they attacked. They are all dead. Crane and his men.”

  The pause was shorter than Kovalenko had expected.

  “How did you survive?”

  “Crane ordered me out of the building while they fought. I hid in the trees.”

  “Your instructions were to provide assistance if needed.”

  “If I had carried out my instructions, you would have lost all your assets. If your assassins could not kill the Americans there, I surely could not do it, either.”

  “How do you know they are dead?”

  “Their bodies were removed. I saw them.”

  Now the pause was long. Minutes long. Kovalenko imagined someone was getting directions from someone else on how to proceed. He typed a series of question marks, to which he received no immediate response.

  A new Cryptogram window opened, and Valentin saw the phone icon, just like earlier in the day.

  He put on the headset and clicked the icon. “Da?”

  “This is Center.” It was definitely the same man as earlier in the day. “Were you injured?”

  “Not badly. No.”

  “Were you followed?”

  Kovalenko knew Center was listening to his voice, trying to detect signs of deception. He was also certainly watching him right then via the camera. “No. Of course not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I am a professional. Who can follow me at four in the morning?”

  There was a long pause. Finally the man said, “Send upload.” And he hung up.

  Kovalenko uploaded Gavin Biery’s file from the flash drive.

  A minute later Center typed, “Received.”

  Valentin’s hands were shaking now. He typed, “Instructions?”

  Softly, and barely moving his lips, he whispered to Biery, “Is that it?”

  Biery responded, “Yes. It should work almost immediately.”

  “You are certain?”

  Biery was not certain. But he was confident. “Yeah.”

  A line of Cryptogram text appeared. “What is this?”

  Kovalenko did not respond.

  “This is an application? This is not what was requested.”

  Kovalenko looked at the camera.

  Slowly he lifted his hand in front of his face in a fist and extended his middle finger.

  Clark, Kraft, and Biery all stood to the side, mouths agape.

  It took only seconds for a new line of text to appear on Cryptogram.

  “You are dead.”

  The connection terminated instantly.

  “He’s off,” Kovalenko said.

  Biery smiled. “Wait for it.”

  Clark, Kovalenko, and Kraft all looked at him.

  “Wait for what?” asked Valentin.

  “Wait for it,” he repeated very slowly.

  Melanie said, “He logged off. He can’t send any—”

  A file popped up in the Cryptogram window. Kovalenko, still sitting in front of the machine, looked up to Gavin Biery. “Should I . . .”

  “Please do.”

  Kovalenko clicked on the file, and a single picture expanded on the monitor. All four people in the dark apartment leaned forward to get a better look at it.

  A young woman, with Asian features, eyeglasses, and short black hair, sat in front of the camera, her fingers resting on a computer keyboard. Over her left shoulder, an older Asian man in a white shirt and loose necktie leaned close, peering to a point just below the camera.

  Valentin was confused. “Who is . . .”

  Gavin Biery touched the girl with his fingertip. “I d
on’t know who that is, but that guy, ladies and gentlemen, is the MFIC.”

  Melanie and Valentin just looked at him.

  Biery said, “Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan, code name Center.”

  John Clark smiled and said, “The Motherfucker in Charge.”

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Adam Yao had documents to get him into mainland China, so he could come and go on the train or through the automobile border crossing.

  Jack Junior, on the other hand, was not nearly so fortunate. Adam had a way across the border for him, but it necessitated some risk and discomfort.

  Adam went first, driving through the crossing at Lok Ma Chau at five p.m. local time. He wanted to be in place on the other side for when Ryan made it over so Jack wasn’t wandering mainland China as a gweilo with no papers, a scenario that would not have ended well for the son of the president.

  Ryan took a cab to San Tin and then walked a few blocks to a hardware store parking lot, where he met the men who would take him across.

  They were “friends” of Adam’s, meaning he had run across them working in his “white side” job with SinoShield. They were smugglers, which made Ryan nervous when he was told they would be his access to China, but when he met them, he relaxed.

  The smugglers were three small young men who seemed a hell of a lot more harmless than Ryan had spent the last sixteen hours imagining them to be.

  Adam told him to not offer the men any money because he had taken care of them already, and although Jack had no idea what that meant, he trusted Adam enough to comply.

  He sized them up as they stood there in the rapidly waning light. They clearly had no firearms on them. Jack had been trained to spot hidden pistols, and these guys weren’t packing—not on their hips, under their arms, or on their ankles. He could not say for sure they did not have knives secreted somewhere on their person, but even if all three of these little guys came at him at once, Jack figured, he could bang their heads together and head for the border on his own.

  That would not be the preferred outcome, however.

  None of the men spoke a word of English, and this made things confusing for Jack as they stood next to their motorbikes and gestured toward his legs and feet. He thought they were admiring his Cole Haan loafers, but he could not be sure. The matter passed soon enough with a few chuckles from the men.