by James Rosone
Yami looked sad as she picked up the book. She flipped through a few of the pages until she reached the section he had told her about. She spotted the ten twenty-euro notes and smiled.
“It’s OK, José. I’m sure it won’t detract from the meaning of the book. Oh, before I forget. My brother who works at the clinic found that vitamin you asked for. He asked me to give this to you,” Yami said innocently enough.
She pulled out a small vitamin bottle and handed it to him. José smiled and took the bottle and placed it in his satchel.
“You know, there is a quote on page 142 of the book I think you will like. I thought it was rather powerful.” José winked.
Yami tilted her head as she shot him a mischievous look. She flipped through the book again until she came to the page. She saw twenty twenty-euro notes. It took everything in her not to burst out loud in gratitude. She also saw a sentence highlighted in yellow and read it aloud.
“The thunder traveled over the ship, from west to east, with prolonged reverberations, before it moved away with its clouds, leaving the sea, by midafternoon, bathed in a strange auroral light, which turned it as smooth and iridescent as a mountain lake. The bow of the Arrow became a plough, breaking up the tranquility of the surface with the frothy arabesques of its wake.”
She looked up at José with a look in her eye that said if they weren’t in public, she’d make a bold move and kiss him and much more for what he had given her.
“It’s beautiful, José. I can’t thank you enough. When I finish reading the book, my brother will appreciate it as well,” Yami managed to say as she choked down her emotions.
José tried not to blush as he nodded, lifting his coffee cup to his lips, finishing off the contents. “I am glad I am able to help you and your family, Yami. I truly am.”
The two of them talked for a little while longer before José needed to get going. He pulled out enough money to pay for their meals and left a decent tip. “Yami, I hate to cut and run, but I have a busy day ahead of me and I need to make one more stop. Let’s meet again next Tuesday, same place and time. We can talk then.”
She nodded as they said a quick goodbye. José pocketed his phone; the small red light had stopped blinking, letting him know the download was complete.
Just prior to leaving the café, José went to the toilet. After relieving himself, he sent a one-word message to the station chief at the embassy.
“Colón.”
Walking out of the café, José climbed into his vehicle and headed back to Havana and the Sherritt International office he worked out of.
During his drive, his phone chirped, letting him know he had ninety minutes until his next meeting. Not a lot of time for him to make his drop. Once he finally made it into the city, he headed toward a particular park near where he lived. This part of Havana was a wealthy section—a lot of Party and military officials and expatriates lived in this area.
José made it a point to host some parties at his home for many of these people. He was, after all, a Canadian businessman from Venezuela. He fit right in with many of the Cuban people.
José found a parking spot along the side of the road. He grabbed the vial in the special container that Yami had given him, placing it in his pocket. Before he exited the vehicle, he also picked up a book.
José walked down the path for a few minutes before finding a place under a nearby tree. Sitting under the tree, he started reading the book he’d brought with him. Ten minutes into his little break, he slipped the container out of his pocket and placed it at the base of the tree. Not taking his eyes off his book, he fiddled with the base of the tree with his left hand until he found the loose piece next to a root. He pulled it out slightly, revealing a small carved-out crevice. He slid the container inside and then pushed the cover back.
José sat under the tree for twenty more minutes, reading his book. He waved to a few people walking nearby, not a care in the world. He wasn’t worried about the bottle he’d dropped—he knew someone from the embassy would be retrieving that piece of intelligence.
When he got up, he spotted a vendor pushing his cart through the park. José bought something quick to eat and a bottle of water. Then he climbed back into his car and continued to his office, which wasn’t far away.
*******
José worked for a Canadian firm who’d been hired to help the Cuba Oil Union, CUPET, get the new refinery up and running. Eight years ago, CUPET and the Chinese firm CNOOC had signed a joint venture to explore and extract oil in the North Cuban Foreland Basin, which sat in the Straits of Florida, and a second oil field on the western side of the island reaching into the Gulf of Mexico.
Not only were the Chinese helping CUPET establish more than two dozen oil platforms in the Straits, the platforms were equipped with a lot of specialized communication and surveillance equipment. Sherritt International, however, brought to the venture their expertise in the refinery aspect of the business.
The company had sent José to be one of the senior advisors as he had a deep background in optimizing the performance of refineries. Having worked in the oil business for eighteen years, José had a lot of experience working with developing nations as they expanded their petrol industries.
Later that afternoon, after a round of meetings with some folks from CUPET and CNOOC, José reviewed his phone to look at the video file Yami had sent him. He only needed to see a few minutes to know Yami had provided the material he needed. Now José would arrange a meeting with Mr. Ochoa so the two of them could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.
That evening, after meeting up with some friends from CUPET and their Chinese counterparts for dinner, José logged in to an old Hotmail account. Scrolling to his draft folder, he created a new email. He spent twenty minutes writing up a quick contact report from his morning meeting with Yamileth and attached the video she’d provided of Esteban Ochoa and her in bed. He also outlined how he planned to make contact with Esteban and use the kompromat to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement with the port manager. Then he saved the message but did not send it—his intended recipient knew how to find it.
*******
JBCC – Computer Lab
Beijing, China
“Excuse me, Dr. Xi,” a man in a black suit said as he walked up to him.
Xi knew immediately who the man was. He was a deputy in the Ministry of State Security. He was also alone—that was a good sign.
“What can I do for you, Jin?” Xi asked. He stopped what he was working on and gave the man his undivided attention.
“I think we have a problem. I need your help in understanding something, though.”
Xi lifted an eyebrow. “OK, let’s talk. What’s the issue?”
“A month ago, your assistant, Ma Yong—he went by the Western name Daniel. He was killed in the UK—hit by a car, if I’m not mistaken.”
Xi nodded. “He was. It was a complete surprise. I still wonder if things might have turned out differently if I had gone with him on that trip.”
Xi wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but he felt incredibly guilty about not being there with Dan when he’d died. The young man had been almost like a son to him, a protégé if ever there was one. His death had hit Xi hard.
“I want to show you something. Perhaps you can help me figure out what’s going on.”
Jin pulled a photo out of a folder he had with him and handed it to Xi. There were several photos of Dan’s parents at an airport, labeled with a date about two weeks after his fatal car crash. A few pictures in, Xi’s jaw dropped.
“Dan is alive?” he asked in shock.
Jin nodded slowly. “After his ‘accident,’ Jade Dragon managed to pick up some intelligence that contradicted the reports we had received. Utilizing its ability to analyze CCTV footage, we managed to get these images from the Isle of Man. Unfortunately, by the time we dispatched some of our men to investigate, Ma Yong had already vacated the area.”
“Do you know where he is now?” Xi presse
d.
“Jade Dragon picked up on a very unusual shipment to a Super 1 Foods Store in Athol, Idaho. Would you like to hazard a guess as to what item was ordered from their supermarket for the very first time?”
Xi was at a loss. Is this a test? he wondered. “I don’t know,” he replied.
“Tunnock’s tea cakes.”
Holy crap, thought Xi. Dan was always eating those things. He’d gotten a lot of flack for it, but it kept him productive.
“How do you know it was him?” Xi pressed.
“With a much narrower area to investigate, Jade Dragon was once again unleashed on the CCTV footage of the surrounding area. Narrowing for height and gait patterns, we located a likely match. Eventually, JD was able to capture an iris image from one of the cameras with a high enough quality to confirm a match to Ma Yong.”
Jin showed him a new image. This man didn’t look like the Dan he had known at all. “We believe he had facial reconstruction surgery, but the iris image was a complete match—it’s him.”
“So where exactly is he?” Xi asked.
“Ma Yong is currently being held in a safe house on a naval research facility in Idaho,” Jin explained.
“Idaho…that seems like a strange place to have a naval research facility,” Xi commented. The American state was landlocked, after all.
Jin chuckled. “We thought the same thing until we looked into it. Apparently, the lake is a very deep lake and one of the quietest in the country. The American Navy tests acoustic equipment there. It’s actually an incredibly ingenious safe house location. Who would suspect a naval research base in Idaho? In any case, I wanted you to know we had found him, and he is apparently alive. That means we have a host of new problems you and I need to talk about.”
Now Xi knew why the man was here. He wanted to know if Dan posed a security risk. Suddenly, Xi felt his heart racing; beads of sweat formed on his temples. Dan built Jade Dragon. Did he program vulnerabilities into it?
Jin noticed Xi’s change in demeanor. “You know what I’m going to ask, don’t you?”
Xi nodded. “If he did in fact cross over to their side and wasn’t kidnapped—hell, even if he was kidnapped—he could tell them about everything.” He looked down at his hands—they were shaking. He tried to will them to be still.
“Relax, Doctor. We do not suspect you of anything. You have given us the tools we are now employing to find these traitors in our midst. Back to Ma—is it possible he built in some backdoors that you may not be aware of?”
Xi held a hand up and then picked up his phone. “Reschedule my next meeting,” he told his assistant, “and I am not to be disturbed, is that understood?” He hung up.
“Sir, this may take a while,” Xi told Jin. He began frantically typing away on his computer, using every bit of knowledge he knew about Dan to help him search.
Two hours later, he suddenly exclaimed, “Holy crap, I’ve found something.”
“Can you shut it down?” Jin asked.
Xi didn’t answer right away. He was busy reading many lines of code. “No, I can’t,” he said somewhat glumly. “Give me a minute, though,” Xi insisted.
After a couple of minutes of pecking away at his keyboard, Xi explained, “I’m redirecting this backdoor to go to a honeypot. It’s going to take him to a mirror station. He’ll think he’s in Jade Dragon, but he’ll be inside a controlled box of it. We’ll be able to see exactly what he’s doing and what he’s searching.”
“Excellent. Just make sure he isn’t able to disclose Project Ten. It is important that he doesn’t gain access to the operational plans, or it could jeopardize everything.”
*******
Bayview, Idaho
Dan sat at the computer terminal, ready to enter his login credentials to Jade Dragon. He looked at Jessica. “You are confident there is no way they’re going to be able to trace this IP connection or even know we’re inside the system?”
Jessica Parker had brought in a couple of additional tech experts from her department to help them get things set up here. The Agency was pulling out its entire toolbox of trickery for this one. They needed to gain entry into Jade Dragon and download a copy of the war game scenarios they’d been running in hopes of determining what the Chinese were up to.
“We’re going through a handful of different proxy servers being bounced all over the world. It’s going to be pretty hard for them to know we’re in the system, let alone track us,” one of the tech guys countered.
Dan typed away. Seconds later, they were in. He brought up a chat window, then turned the speakers up and the video camera on the computer on. “JD, are you there?” Dan said aloud.
His question was met with silence.
“Are you trying to talk to it?” one of the techs asked, his curiosity piqued.
“Yes. I programmed Jade Dragon, JD, to talk with me. We would have conversations for hours sometimes in the lab. It was one of the ways I was teaching him language skills,” Dan explained to the amazement of the others.
Opening another window, Dan typed a few other commands. He smiled as he shook his head. “They found my backdoor.”
“What? How is that possible?” Jessica asked, surprised.
Dan ignored her question as he continued to type away. He was looking for something. Then he found it. “We have a problem. They know I’m alive,” Dan announced.
“Not possible. We faked your death pretty damn good,” Jessica countered.
“That may be so, but they know I’m alive. Could they have activated Jedi…?” His voice trailed off.
“What’s Jedi?” asked two of the Agency computer techs at the same time.
His fingers dancing furiously across the keyboard, Dan brought up one line of code and prompt after another. Jessica and the techs tried to get him to respond to their questions, only to be met by silence as he kept shushing them while he continued to type away.
“Found it!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Crap, this is bad. It looks like they activated the Jedi program two days after I was hit by that car in Oxford. They found me, no two ways about it. They know I’m here in Bayview. Right here, that’s how they found me.” He pointed to several lines of code that had some text to them.
One of the techs looked at it. “A CCTV at Bayview Mercantile caught an image of his iris and matched it to him,” he announced.
Jessica’s eyes went wide as saucers. “When did it take this image?”
“Ah, it looks like four days ago.”
“Damn it, they could already have a team on their way here to deal with him,” their JSOC bodyguard said quietly. The Army sergeant first class got up and started making a phone call, probably to report what they’d just learned and call for help.
Dan turned to Jessica. “We need to get out of here. We have to relocate to another safe house. If the MSS don’t have a team already here, they will shortly.”
********
“That’s it, we’ve got him,” called out one of the techs over their headset.
“So, he is alive?” the team leader, Han, asked skeptically. He had had his doubts, but his superiors had insisted they had a good source on the inside.
“He’s alive. He just logged in to his account through the backdoor access. It has to be him—no one else would have known about it,” the tech said.
“OK, then let’s do this. Time to load up,” Han called out to his team.
The eight operators loaded up into the two SUVs and got ready to head out. Two other men climbed into another vehicle and left—they were his sniper team. They’d already found a spot to set up in that provided them with a solid overwatch of the area.
As their vehicle headed down the road toward the naval research station, the men readied their weapons. They’d scoped the place out the day before and found it to be lightly guarded. There was a gate to the small facility with a single guard manning it. Aside from that, they saw at most two local sheriff vehicles. If they timed this right, they should be able to get in and elimina
te the target before anyone knew what had happened.
Five minutes into their drive, Han got a call from their sniper team. They were in position and looking at the building where their tech crew had said the target was using a computer. Now it was just a matter of observing it to see if anyone entered or left the building while the assault team moved into place.
As they approached North Main Street on their way to the gate to the facility, their sniper team called. “We’ve got eyes on a small group leaving one of the target buildings. It looks like they’re climbing into a couple of SUVs. I believe they are going to head right for your position,” the spotter said over their coms.
Wow, this might be easier than I thought, Han thought privately, not wanting to jinx them.
“We’re approaching the gate. What do you want us to do?” asked the driver.
“Drive past it. Go down to the next intersection and make a U-turn. We need to let them reach the gate before we launch our ambush,” Han directed.
As they drove past the small facility, Han saw the two vehicles the sniper team had mentioned. Sure enough, a group of people were getting into them to leave. Something had happened—they must have been spooked to be leaving in such a hurry.
“When the lead vehicle pulls up to the gate, I want you to block them in. Once they’re blocked, I want all teams to dismount and open fire on the vehicles. Take ’em out. Stay ready, though, in case they have a security guard or two with them,” Han directed. The four guys in the vehicle behind him were listening in on the coms as well. They knew what to do.
As they approached the turn that led to the naval research facility, the two government vehicles were just about to pull out onto Main Street when Han’s driver gunned their vehicle and blocked them.
When Han’s vehicle came to a stop, the driver of the SUV they’d blocked honked his horn, apparently not realizing what was going on just yet. Then all eight operators spilled out with weapons blazing.
