Wall of Night

by Grant Blackwood

  With a nod from their escort, Leland Dutcher and his deputy at Holystone, Walter Oaken, stepped off the elevator into Dick Mason’s outer office. As Dutcher had expected, Mason’s secretary, Ginny, was waiting. Ginny had been Dutcher’s assistant when he’d served as DDI years before.

  “Leland!” She gave him a hug. “I heard you were coming. ”

  “Ginny, I doubt there’s much you don’t hear. Here’s hoping you’re never kidnapped.”

  “Oh, lord, who would want me? I’m a glorified typist.”

  “Sure you are. You remember Walt.”

  “Of course. Nice to see you again, Mr. Oaken.”

  “You, too, Ginny.”

  Tall and gangly and stoop-shouldered, Oaken was not only Holystone’s second-in-command, but also its “chief scrounger and cobbler,” as Dutcher was fond of saying. Whether it was information, equipment, or documentation, if somebody needed it, Oaken either had it or knew where to find it. A former division head at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research, Oaken had been Dutcher’s first recruitment for Holystone.

  Dutcher nodded toward Mason’s door. “Who’s waiting for us in there?”

  Ginny said, “Mr. Mason, Mr. Coates, and Ms. Albrecht.”

  “Ah, the big three.”

  George Coates and Sylvia Albrecht were Mason’s Deputy Directors of Operations, and Intelligence, respectively. When Mason first came aboard as DCI, he’d done some house-cleaning, which included the hiring and firing of two sets of DDs until he’d found a pair that could set aside the intra-departmental infighting that had become endemic at Langley. Coates and Albrecht were a rare breed, content to let hard work and merit, rather than political acumen, decide their careers. It helped that Mason set a good example; the DCI had little stomach for politics and worked tirelessly to keep it out of Langley. Gruff and grizzled but always fair, Mason was the epitome of a CIA cold warrior: A good man to have on your side, a terrible man to have against you.

  Mason’s door swung open. “Dutch, Walt. Thought I heard your voices. Not trying to steal Ginny away, are you?”

  “It’s crossed my mind.”

  “Forget it. She’s a company woman to the bone.”

  Ginny waved a dismissive hand. “Go, both of you. I’ve got work to do.”

  Dutcher and Oaken took their seats in a pair of chairs around the coffee table. Sunlight streamed through the window, casting shadows on the burgundy carpet. After greetings were exchanged and coffee poured, Mason came to the point. “Leland, how much do you remember about Ledger?”

  “The defection of Chinese PLA General Han Soong. I was DDI then. We put together the assessment and background, but after it went to Operations, I lost track of it. Rumor was it was handed to ISAG for execution. I later learned Briggs was involved, but that was before Holystone.”

  ISAG, or Intelligence Support Activity Group, was a multiservice hybrid experiment that had gathered together SpecWar experts from the navy, army, air force, marines, and FBI, and put them through a course designed by the CIA. The goal was to create operators armed with superior military and intelligence training, a combination that had thus far been shunned by the military and the intelligence communities.

  The training lasted two years and covered an astonishing range of skills: languages, agent handling, weapons, improvised demolitions, evasion and escape, communications, deep cover, surveillance and countersurveillance … If there was even a remote chance of it coming up in the field, it was taught.

  “As I understand it, the defection fell through,” Dutcher continued. “Soong was arrested the day he was going into the pipeline. What I’d always wondered was why IS AG got the job.”

  “Soong requested a controller with military background; Tanner fit the profile. As it turned out, it was a good call. The Guoanbu and PSB were waiting at the meeting site. You and Briggs never talked about Ledger?”

  “No. I don’t think it’s his favorite topic.”

  “Understandable,” said Mason. “He was Soong’s controller for three months. They got close.”

  And Briggs has been playing the what-if game ever since, Dutcher thought.

  Dutcher knew and loved Tanner like a son. The same reasons that made Tanner good at what he did were the same reasons that got him in trouble. He was tenacious—occasionally to a fault—and in this business, the ability to detach yourself was often a necessity of survival. Tanner’s “detachment instinct” was flawed—not dangerously so, but just enough to cause him heartache from time to time. Of course, Dutcher thought, there was no formula. In the end, pragmatism was perhaps the best measure. If it works, leave it alone.

  And Tanner worked. He not only got the job done, but he could also sit alone in a room with himself afterward without going crazy. The best ones could. The ones who couldn’t, or the ones that didn’t let themselves, weren’t long for the business—or this world, for that matter.

  Dutcher said, “Why the history lesson, Dick?”

  “Three days ago our station chief in Beijing was contacted by someone in China’s Ministry of Agriculture—a mid-level bureaucrat named Bian. The pitch was subtle, ambiguous.”

  “Or so Brown thought,” Coates added and slid the report across the table.

  Dutcher picked it up and read it, then said, “Interesting trick with the pen. Very old school.”

  “Probably picked it up from a LeCarre novel,” said Sylvia Albrecht. “Cliché or not, it works.”

  “There’s nothing here about the message’s content.”

  Coates slid over another folder. The message was short, written in small block letters:

  GENERAL HAN SOONG ALIVE LAOGI.

  REQUESTS DEFECTION.

  CONDITION: SAME LAST CONTROLLER.

  BIAN TO SERVE AS CONDUIT.

  The laogi … Dutcher suppressed a shiver.

  Laogi was the Chinese word for the government prison system—or “reeducation centers”—but had come to describe any one of the hundreds of gulaglike camps spread throughout China. Once you went into a laogi, you either died there or you came out forever changed, a reconditioned zombie. Dutcher had once met a Brit who’d served two years in a laogi. By all accounts, the man had received decent treatment in comparison to his fellow Chinese inmates, but still he’d been a shell: unable to sleep more than an hour at a time, plagued with migraine headaches and permanently slurred speech, incapable of holding down a job or a relationship … They’d killed him, but left him alive.

  Oaken said, “If Soong is really alive, will he be the same man we dealt with twelve years ago?”

  Mason nodded. “That’s the rub.”

  “I don’t like any of it,” Coates said. “The demand for Tanner, the stipulation that Bian is our only conduit … We have to consider this might be a ruse.”

  “To what end?” Albrecht countered. “To get Tanner back? I doubt it. Sure, he almost stole the PLA’s best general, but all this for revenge? I don’t see it.”

  “Then the other option: a plant. They’ve had twelve years to recondition Soong. We get him back, he starts planting disinformation …”

  “They’d have to know we’d put him under the microscope first.”

  “Twelve years, Sylvia,” Coates repeated. “Hell, put me in a laogi that long and they could convince me my mother’s a goddamned beach ball.”

  Dutcher agreed. Conviction and honesty were two sides of the same coin. The first created the appearance of the second. Believe a lie strongly enough and it becomes your truth. Still, in the end it wouldn’t matter; they had no choice but to go back in for Soong. Until his defection attempt, he’d been China’s premier military strategist for three decades; he was a potential gold mine.

  As if reading Dutcher’s mind, Mason said, “We speculate all we want, but the fact is, we can’t ignore this. If there’s any chance at all of getting Soong, we have to take it. Dutch?”

  “I’ll talk to Briggs.” And I know what he’ll say,
Dutcher thought. In Briggs’s mind, he’d failed Soong and his family. If there was even a remote chance to get them out, Tanner would take it.

  Coates said, “Let’s say Tanner’s up for this … That doesn’t solve our biggest problem.”

  “What’s that?” asked Sylvia Albrecht.

  Dutcher answered. “We have to assume Soong gave the Guoanbu everything. Twelve years ago or twelve days ago, it doesn’t matter: The Guoanbu has a long memory. Tanner is still a face in China. He may not even make it past the border.”

  Northern China

  With the groaning of gears, the massive steel doors shut behind Guoanbu Chief Kyung Xiang.

  There were several seconds of complete darkness before the generators kicked on and the lights flickered to life. Stretching into the distance along the walls, fluorescent lights cast pale shadows across the stone floor. From wall to wall the corridor was two hundred yards wide, the vaulted ceilings extending 30 feet above their heads.

  “Amazing,” murmured Xiang’s deputy, Eng.

  “Indeed,” replied the base commander. “This tunnel extends two kilometers to the north. There are eight elevators, four on each side. Below us lay three sublevels, each three hundred meters wide. Crew quarters and support areas are on the lowermost level.”

  “How many men?”

  “Six hundred.”

  Amazing indeed, thought Xiang. Ten years under construction, this base was the largest of its kind in the world. It was an unprecedented feat. Of course, compared to the Great Wall or the Three River Gorges Dam, the base’s construction had been a straightforward engineering problem. What made this special was the fact that the outside world knew nothing about it.

  All their satellites, all their spies, and still they couldn’t see what was right in front of them.

  Thousands of workers, all carefully screened and monitored, all transported in and out of the project area without ever knowing where they were … And only a fraction of them—most of them specially trained PLA soldiers—had known what they were building.

  What a surprise we will give them.

  Before long, the world’s intelligence agencies would be asking the same question: How did they do it? The answer was so simple it probably wouldn’t occur to them: Patience and focus. Conditioned by thousands of years of history, the Chinese people did not think in the short term. The Great Wall took thousands of years to build; the Three River Gorges Dam over a decade. Americans complain if a mega-mall or high-rise apartment building takes more than six months to build. To the Chinese people, six months was but a flicker. True greatness is measured in generations, sometimes centuries.

  And what of personal greatness? Xiang thought. That too can come and go in a flicker. After the Soong debacle Xiang had had to scrabble to merely survive. The Guoanbu did not suffer failure gladly. After those initial years, amazed to find himself alive, Xiang had begun the long climb up the MSS ladder: enemies to be eliminated, competition to be discredited, victories to be invented. Xiang often wondered if the defection attempt had been a blessing in disguise. It had made him a harder man, and that’s what China needed: Hard men who could make hard choices.

  Soong had cost him much. Of course, the good general was now paying the price: China’s greatest general, now a rat in a cage, knowing every day he would never see the outside world again. But there were other debts outstanding, weren’t there? The man who’d nearly stolen away Soong was alive and free. The insult was almost too much to bear. Thinking of it now, Xiang could feel that old familiar gnawing in his belly …

  He stopped himself. Focus. The past was done. The future … Well, a large part of the future—both China’s and his own—depended on this base and the role it would play in the coming months.

  “… we should be fully operational in four days,” the base commander was saying. “The final tests will be completed tomorrow.”

  Xiang gazed down the length of the tunnel. “And the men?” he asked. “They are ready?”

  “We conduct full drills three times a day. They’re ready.”

  Eng’s cell phone, whose frequency had been linked to the base’s internal communication system, trilled. Eng answered, listened for a moment, then hung up. He walked over to Xiang and whispered, “Message from Qing. It’s done.”

  “What about the family?”

  “Them, too.”

  “Complications?”

  “None,” Eng replied. “It went flawlessly.”

  5

  Washington, D.C.

  Latham collected Randall and then called Commerce’s Office of Investigations to let them know he was on his way. Though it had no authority beyond itself, the COI was touchy about its turf; Latham didn’t expect a warm greeting.

  They were met in the lobby by the COI’s director. “Morning, gentlemen,” he said with a humorless smile. “If you’ll follow me, the director is expecting you.”

  He led them to the elevators and up five floors to a corner office decorated with potted palms and Ansel Adams prints. The director and another man were waiting for them; both were standing.

  Nervous boys, Latham thought. It was understandable.

  The director strode over, hand outstretched. “Agent Latham, Frank Jenkins. This is—excuse me, was—Larry Baker’s supervisor, Bud Knowlton.”

  Latham introduced Randall and everyone sat down.

  “We were devastated to hear about Larry,” Jenkins began. “He’s going to be missed.”

  Straight from the Bureaucrat’s Book of Platitudes, Latham thought. He absently wondered if Jenkins even knew Baker. Doubtful, he decided.

  “You’ll have our full cooperation,” Jenkins concluded.

  “Thank you,” Latham said. “Before we get started, I want to make sure everyone understands the ground rules. We’re investigating the deaths of a federal employee, his wife, and their two young children. It doesn’t get any worse than that.”

  “Yes, of course—”

  “If we get any leaks—even a trickle—out of your office, or if your PR people talk to the press, we’re going to start handing out obstruction-of-justice charges.”

  Jenkins stiffened in his chair. “Agent Latham, there’s no need to get—”

  “I assume you’ve already called the Public Affairs director?”

  “Well, of course. She needs to—”

  “All she needs to know is this: No leaks, no talking to the press. She can use the standard ‘can’t jeopardize an ongoing investigation,’ but beyond that, not one word.”

  “Obviously you don’t understand our position. If the press suspects we’re—”

  “Dump it on us. Tell them you’re cooperating fully, but the FBI has requested that you make no statements until the investigation is concluded.”

  Jenkins thought about that. “I suppose we could do that. Okay. How else can we help?”

  “Tell us everything you know about Larry Baker and what he was working on.”

  An hour later Latham and Randall walked out of commerce and got into their car.

  “Well?” asked Randall.

  “Either Baker had the most boring job in the world, or they’ve already circled the wagons.”

  According to Jenkins and Knowlton, the most controversial issue Baker had had on his plate was hearing-aid technology that a U.S. company was trying to sell to Ireland, an item which, according to Commerce’s Office of the Inspector General could be considered an “Advanced Electronic Device.” Until it was cleared, Knowlton explained, the hearing aid would remain on the NCTL, or National Critical Technologies List.

  “Our tax dollars at work,” Randall said.

  “Yep,” said Latham. “My guess is they’re reviewing his files right now. Once they’re satisfied there are no grenades laying around, they’ll call us, apologize, then turn over the files.”

  “And if they find something? Into the shredder?”

  “I doubt it. Better to lose it than find i
t later if they have to; they have no way of knowing Baker was making copies.”

  “We could subpoena them, the records—everything.”

  “We’ll see. Let’s check with the lab, see if they got anything from Baker’s computer. After that, how do you feel about a trip to Dannemora?”

  “As in the prison? What for?”

  The fatherly part of Latham didn’t want to bring Randall into this, but if he and Owens were right about where this case was going, Paul deserved to know. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  The lab had nothing for them, so they caught the shuttle to New York, then another north to Albany, where they rented a car and took 87 north toward Dannemora. Once Latham had the cruise control set, they both leaned back and enjoyed the scenery.

  “So,” Paul said. “The story.”

  “You remember the Callenato murders in New York about six years ago?”

  “A city councilman and his family, right? There was almost another one, too, but a beat cop broke it up before it happened. Caught the guy, as I remember—some nutcase named …”

  “Hong Cho.”

  “Right.”

  A naturalized citizen from Hong Kong, Cho had been hired by the Callenato crime family as a freelance enforcer. The councilman Cho had murdered had been under investigation by a joint FBI-NYPD Organized Crime Task Force for funneling work to Callenato-owned construction firms. The Callenatos, not only suspecting the councilman of cooperating with the police, but of helping himself to a larger percentage than they’d agreed upon, decided it was time to be rid of the man.

  Late one August night, Cho broke into the councilman’s home, tied up his wife and three children, then shot each of them execution style. Initially it had been ruled a robbery/homicide, but the ME later determined several hours had elapsed between the time the family was tied up to the time they were killed.

  “Both the cops and our people were baffled,” Latham continued. “What had Cho been doing for those two hours? The house hadn’t been tossed and there were no signs of torture. The mother and father’s wrists were rubbed raw, though, almost to the bone.”