Wall of Night

by Grant Blackwood

  “Thanks, Bear.”

  “No problem. You okay?”

  “A little shaky.”

  “You’ve got a right to be. Talk to you later.”

  Latham called Dutcher and filled him in. “Cahil’s going to check the address.”

  “Okay,” Dutcher said. “Two things: Which cell phone are you using?”

  “One of yours.”

  “Good. Once you and Paul have your stories straight, use your home phone to call the police. What’re you going to tell them?”

  “I was out late, came home, and was attacked by unknown assailants. I killed one of them and my partner killed the other. I’ll have to tell Harry a little more than that, but he’ll back me.”

  Within the hour, the house was buzzing with activity as crime-scene specialists, a homicide detective from the Montgomery County sheriff’s office, and the medical examiner went about their work. Owens sat with Latham as the inspector interviewed him. “So you and your partner were doing … what?” asked the inspector. “Having a beer, right?”

  “Right.”

  “At Finnegan’s in Chevy Chase?”

  “Right.”

  “You get a call from your neighbor about a leak and hurry home. Your partner follows to see if he can help, you pull into the garage and … ”

  For the third time, Latham took him through the confrontation.

  “You have no idea who these people are?”

  “No.”

  As the lie came off his lips, Latham felt a twinge of guilt, but he suppressed it: This was his case; these people had invaded his house, tried to kill him—and would have killed his family had they been here. This case belonged to him.

  The inspector asked a few more questions, then left to supervise the CS team.

  Once alone, Owens asked, “Is this them, Charlie?”

  Latham nodded. “I’m pretty sure. We were calling them Grandpa and Grandpa Zi. Harry, they were hunting for me—maybe Bonnie and the kids, too.”

  “You must have struck a nerve. Is your story going to hold up?”

  “Bonnie and Paul are clear and Finnegan’s is always busy. My worry is the press. If the Guoanbu gets wind of this, they’ll shut down whatever they’ve got cooking.”

  “I’ll talk to the sheriff and the ME. I’ll tell them we think it might have something to do with a former case of yours and we need time to dig into it. They’ll probably identify them only as ‘unidentified intruders.’”

  “Good.”

  “Let’s say you’re right and these two killed the Bakers … have you figured out why?”

  “How much do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me if you’re getting close. I can keep running interference, but not for much longer.”

  “We’re getting close, Harry. Real close.”

  It was nearly dawn when everyone finished their work and left. The ME was the last to go, wheeling the sheet-covered body of Grandpa Zi out the front door. Randall arrived a few minutes later.

  As Latham got into the car, he asked Randall, “How is she?”

  “Alive, but just barely. Her brain’s mush, Charlie.”

  Latham could hear the anguish in Paul’s voice. This was only the second time he’d fired his weapon outside the range; the last time had been the previous year during a raid of a terrorist safe house. The difference was, this had been a woman—an old woman, at that.

  He squeezed Randall’s shoulder. “She would have killed me, Paul. Bonnie and the kids, too, if they’d been here—just like the Bakers.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But, God, she’s just—”

  “Listen: Old lady or not, she was a killer, plain and simple.”

  Randall swallowed hard and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, where to?”

  “Holystone.”

  Dutcher and the others were waiting in the conference room. The first tinges of sunlight were filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Oaken sat before a computer perched at the edge of the table. Everyone stood clustered behind him.

  Dutcher looked up as Latham walked in. “How’d it go?”

  “I think we’re okay. They’ll want to talk to me again, but Harry’s going to cover me.” He nodded at the computer. “From the Zis’ house?”

  Cahil nodded. “Walt’s trying to break their security program.”

  A thought flashed into Latham’s head. “Walt, stop.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me about the program.” Oaken did so. “Sounds like the same setup Baker’s computer had,” Charlie said.

  “You broke it?”

  “One of our tech people did. Lemme make some calls.”

  Latham called Whulford at home, who got dressed, drove to the Hoover Building, and looked up James Washington’s phone number. It was five-fifteen when Latham made the call.

  A groggy voice answered. “Yeah, hello.”

  “James, this is Charlie Latham. I don’t know if you remember me—”

  “Yes, sir, of course. What can I do for you?”

  “Sorry about the time, but I need your expertise. The hitch is, you can’t tell anybody about it.”

  “Is this about your daughter? Something to do with that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we never talked. What’s up?”

  “I’ve run into another version of the security program you broke for me. Can you help?”

  “No problem.”

  “Here, I’ll give you to the guy you’ll be talking through it.”

  Thirty minutes later, it was done. The contents of the Zis’ hard drive was transferred to Oaken’s hard drive. Oaken pulled up the new directory on the screen. “Not much here …” he said, scanning the file names. “Hold on … what’s this?”

  “What?” Dutcher asked.

  “This folder’s got about twenty gigabytes of ASF files in it.”

  “Which means?”

  “ASF is a video format.” Oaken clicked open the folder. “This could be something. Dates, times, locations … Looks like they go back six or seven years. When were the Bakers killed?”

  Latham told him.

  “Jesus, that’s the label on this file.”

  Dutcher leaned closer. “Let’s see it.”

  The on-screen counter told them the video was forty minutes long, but after only five minutes, they’d seen enough. “Shut it off, Walt,” Dutcher whispered. “My God.”

  “Why would they tape it?” Cahil murmured. “What possible use could it be?”

  “We’ll never know,” Latham said. “He’s dead, and if she survives, she’ll likely be a vegetable.”

  Dutcher said, “What else, Walt?”

  “There’s a couple dozen files. None look more than a few minutes long. You guys go grab some breakfast; I’ll sort through them.”

  Twenty minutes later Oaken called them back into his office. “I started from most recent and worked my way backward. They taped a lot of meetings with Baker. They always used the same setup: Grandma Zi did the face-to-face stuff, Grandpa Zi taping. But take a look at this one … ” Oaken double-clicked on a file. The screen filled with snow, then turned into a shot of a parking ramp at night.

  “That looks like a metrorail platform,” Latham said.

  “My guess, too,” Oaken replied. “Shot from ground level, out a car window. Take a look at the person meeting Grandma Zi.”

  The camera zoomed in on the platform until they could make out two figures standing at the railing. The dull yellow light from the streetlamps illuminated their faces. After a few moments, the camera zoomed in.

  “There’s no sound?” Cahil asked.

  “No. They probably deleted it. More deniability that way.”

  “Okay, that’s Grandma Zi. I can’t make out the other person.”

  “Wait … here it comes … ”

  The other face, this one belonging to a man in his early sixties, swam into focus.

 
“Name that face, anyone?” Oaken asked.

  “I can,” said Dutcher. “Howard Bousikaris, chief of staff to President Phillip Martin.”

  Before anyone could react, Oaken’s phone rang. He answered it, then handed it to Dutcher, who listened, then hung up and turned to Tanner. “Mason. He wants to see us. Walt, you’d better come, too. How long will it take to transfer all the Zis’ files to a laptop?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Do it.”

  Tanner asked, “What’s going on, Leland?”

  “They just deciphered Soong’s message.”

  39

  Langley

  CIA Headquarters was quiet, only a few early risers in the hallways. Sitting with Mason at the conference table were George Coates and Sylvia Albrecht. As Tanner took a seat, he realized all three were staring at him. Whatever it is, he thought, it’s bad.

  “Something tells me I’m off your Christmas card list,” he said.

  Mason smiled, but there was none of it in his eyes. “We need you to go through your conversation with Soong again, from start to finish.”

  Tanner did so, retelling it exactly as he had the previous times.

  “No way you misunderstood?” Mason said. “Added anything, left anything out?”

  “No.”

  “Soong’s exact words were, ‘Ming-Yau Ang and Night Wall.’ You have to be sure.”

  “If I weren’t sure, I would have said so. What’s going on?”

  Mason hesitated, then nodded at Sylvia Albrecht, who began.

  “Nineteen years ago, Ming-Yau Ang was an operations analyst in China’s Ministry of Defense,” Albrecht began. “He was accused of spying for the Soviets, then summarily tried and executed. They never found out how long he’d been working for Russia, or what he’d passed. They swept it under the rug and it eventually faded.

  “The truth is,” Albrecht continued. “Ang was working for both the Russians and us.”

  “A double,” Dutcher said.

  “Yes. And with doubles you can never be sure of who’s working who. We took his product, but we were always skeptical. We were feeding Ang material to pass to the Russians as Chinese product.”

  “And for safety’s sake you had to assume the Russians were returning the favor,” Tanner said.

  “Or the Chinese,” Oaken added.

  “Right on both counts. Since all the product Ang dealt with was long-term strategic stuff, there was no way we couldn’t be sure he was tampering with the product before it reached its destination.”

  Tanner understood the quandary. If Ang’s job had dealt with tactical plans—an upcoming PLA divisional exercise, for example—the CIA could have fed him a “tweaked” plan and waited to see if the Russians reacted appropriately.

  Albrecht said, “Ang was a good asset, but because we couldn’t entirely trust any of his product, he was never stellar. I doubt there were any tears shed when he went down.”

  Mason took over the story. “Here’s where it gets interesting. ‘Night Wall’ is the name of a PLA operation Ang worked on, but it was tightly compartmentalized, so he could only give us bits and pieces. The overall plan was restricted to ministerial level. What he did give us seemed genuine enough, but as Sylvia said, there was no way we could take it on face value.”

  “What did he claim Night Wall was?” Dutcher asked.

  “Night Wall—the literal translation is ‘Wall of Night’—was a war game for the theoretical invasion of eastern Siberia.”

  Uh-oh, Tanner thought. “What kind of invasion?”

  “No idea. You have to understand: Back in the eighties, these kinds of plans were common. We did it, the Russians did it—everybody. It was just part of playing the game.”

  “Letting the other guy know you could do it if you had to,” Oaken said.

  “Exactly. You drew up a plan, war-gamed it, then shelved it. Ang’s handlers probably thought Night Wall as just another notional scenario—important, but not earth shattering.”

  “But not anymore,” Dutcher said.

  “Not anymore,” Mason agreed. “I’ll give you one guess who Ang claims authored Night Wall.”

  Tanner didn’t have to guess. “General Han Soong.”

  “The one and only. Two things: Soong designed it, and he probably knows Ang fed it to us. So, unless we’re wrong—and I pray to God we are—Soong’s message is pretty clear: Night Wall is real and the Chinese have taken it off the shelf.”

  “The question is, Why? Why now?”

  “I think we might be able to answer that,” Dutcher said. “Dick, you may want to excuse George and Sylvia for this.”

  Coates said, “Now, hold on—”

  Mason raised a hand, silencing him. “Why, Leland?”

  “What I have to say … It might be better for them if they don’t hear it. If you choose to tell them afterward, that’s your business.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad,” Dutcher replied.

  The DCI turned to his deputies. “George, Sylvia, give us a few minutes. Stay close.”

  Once they were gone, Dutcher said to Oaken, “Walt, give Dick the condensed version.”

  Oaken spent the next twenty minutes taking Mason through the convoluted path they’d been following: the Baker murders and Latham’s suspicion of the Guoanbu’s involvement; Cahil’s hunt for Skeldon and subsequent discovery of Sampson and Kycek; Oaken finding a link between Skeldon’s Siberia survey and the process called TASSOL that Baker had been working on; and finally, Latham’s identification of the Zis as the Guoanbu agents who’d murdered Baker. “Then, of course,” Oaken concluded, “there’s what we found in the Zis’ home.”

  “What?”

  Oaken opened his laptop, powered it up, then slid it across to Mason. “Hit Enter to start it; Spacebar to pause.”

  Mason tapped the keyboard and leaned back to watch. When the laptop beeped, indicating the video was finished, Mason glanced up at Dutcher.

  “The woman’s name is Siok Hui Zi, one of the agents linked to Baker. The man with her … well, you know who he is.”

  Mason nodded. “Yeah, I know him. That slimy son-of-a-bitch …”

  “The questions we have to answer are, what is Bousikaris doing for the Zis, and what is their leverage on him?” Dutcher said.

  “Or on Martin,” Mason added. “If somebody was squeezing Martin, Bousikaris wouldn’t hesitate to jump into the fray. I may have a guess about what Bousikaris was doing for them.”

  “Jerking the rug out from under Latham’s investigation,” Oaken predicted.

  “Besides that.”

  “What?” Dutcher said.

  Mason waved his hand. “Later. How’s Charlie?”

  “He’s fine; his family’s fine,” Dutcher replied. “We’re still waiting for word on Grandma Zi, but it doesn’t look good.”

  “Too bad Randall’s such a good shot.”

  “Charlie would argue that.”

  “I guess he would. Walt, how solid is the connection between Baker and Skeldon?”

  “The payoffs are fully documented and traceable. If this went into court—”

  “It won’t.”

  “Hypothetically, then. If it went to court, it would play out like this: Sampson and Kycek were hired by Skeldon, who was hired by Baker, who was in turn spying for the Chinese government. For whatever reason, the Guoanbu decides Baker needs to be eliminated, and the Zis are given the job. They kill Baker and his family, hoping it’ll be written off to random violence.”

  “When was Bousikaris’s first meeting with them?”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  Dutcher said, “That mean something to you, Dick?”

  “Maybe. Keep going. What do we know about this shale oil process.”

  “TASSOL. I’m still working on it, but we can logically assume it’s revolutionary. If not, why would the Chinese go to all this trouble?”

  “Makes sense
. Okay, following your logic, whoever owns and controls this process can count on trillions of dollars in oil revenue and political clout that would rival that of the Mideast.”

  Tanner said, “Wars have started for less. A lot less.”

  “That they have,” Mason replied. “So, the Chinese know Siberia’s shale oil reserves are untapped—trillions of barrels of oil locked in the ground beneath the tundra with no way to get it out.”

  “Until now,” Oaken said.

  “Until now. What we don’t know is when and how the Chinese are going to move.”

  “Judging by Soong’s urgency,” Tanner said, “I’d sooner rather than later. As for the how, only he knows the answer to that.”

  “Which means he probably knows how to stop it.” Mason sighed, then looked at Tanner. “You still think you can get him out?”

  “Yes.”

  “How soon can you pack your bags?”

  40

  Bay Ridge, Maryland

  Walking up the cobblestone path up to his parents’ house, Tanner realized this had become something of a ritual for him. Invariably, whether returning from a mission or preparing to go on one, he found himself drawn home—to that part of his life that had nothing to do with “spies and bad guys.” If the worst ever came to pass, he didn’t want his last contact with them to be a phone call or a “sorry we missed each other” voice mail.

  Before retiring from his post at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, his father, Henry Tanner, had taught history for Olive Branch Outreach, moving his family to a new country—a new adventure—as the whim struck them: Kenya in the spring; Switzerland in the fall; Australia the next summer; Beirut when it was still known as the “Paris of the Mideast,” before being ravaged by decades of civil war.

  Where such upheaval would have left some children confused and standoffish, under Henry and Irene’s loving guidance Tanner had thrived. By the time they had returned to Maine for Briggs’s entry into high school, he was a well-rounded and even-keeled teenager.