Lethal Circuit (Michael Chase 1)

by Guignard, Lars

  11

  WHEN MICHAEL TURNED eight his father taught him how to lie. His real birthday party wasn’t until the next day, but Michael’s grandmother was coming over that night for a pre-birthday dinner. Michael would have to wear the blue suit she had given him. But Michael didn’t like wearing the suit. It made him look like an old man. So when his mom told him to go put it on, Michael procrastinated. He looked at his comic books. Then he played with his Star Wars stuff. And then he found a book of matches. Michael knew he wasn’t supposed to play with matches, but he lit one just the same. Then he lit another one. And somewhere between the fourth and fifth match, his new Fantastic Four began to burn.

  Michael didn’t even notice it at first because he was too busy pulling the suit off its hanger. But when he did see the fire, flames licking toward the curtains, he knew what he had to do. He threw his suit jacket onto the pile of comics, smothering the flame. Luckily it went out, but by that time there was a lot of smoke in the room. And his suit was ruined.

  After the inevitable relief that he was okay, his parents were upset. His dad told him that he was going to learn a lesson that night. But it wasn’t the lesson about not playing with fire. Instead, his dad told Michael that he was gong to learn how to lie. Telling the truth was always the first choice. But it wasn’t always the best choice. Because some people couldn’t hear the truth. And one of those people was his grandmother. He said it would upset her very much if she found out about the fire and what had happened to the suit. If she asked Michael where it was, Michael’s father asked him to say that it was at the dry cleaners. To not mention the fire. It would only worry her. Michael did as he was told. It was the first time he had lied and from what he could tell, he wasn’t bad at it. He wondered if he would ever have to lie again.

  “YOU’RE A SPY, he’s a spy, I’m a spy too,” Michael said, holding his father’s many passports in hand.

  “Give it a rest, Michael,” Kate said.

  “No really, you were right the first time. I’m a spy. Went to spy school. Learned some spy stuff. We even had a spy dance. We called it the spy prom. I brought Mata Hari, super spy leader and all round hottie.”

  “What I’m saying is serious.”

  Michael met Kate’s eyes. They had softened since the cab ride. Since bringing him here. “And I’m not?”

  “Your dad’s job,” Kate said. “The way he spent so much time away from home. Did you think that was normal?”

  “He traveled for work.”

  “But did you ever really ask your dad what exactly he did?”

  “We didn’t talk about that stuff.”

  “It’s because he didn’t want to lie to you. Not if he didn’t have to.”

  “He was a businessman,” Michael said. “He sold sneakers.”

  “That was his cover. I’m not saying it wasn’t.”

  “So what are you saying then? That the man I knew, that the man who raised me wasn’t who he pretended to be? That he was a spy. That the both of you worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?”

  “No. He was CIA. I’m MI6,” Kate said quietly.

  “This just keeps getting better. Now you’re telling me you were my dad’s Bond girl?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I’m a field operative. Your father and I were teamed up on a joint intelligence project.”

  “The CIA and MI6. Working together? Back at the Academy we had a name for that kind of thing.”

  “Michael!” Kate lowered her voice. “Enough with the bullshit, alright? The CIA and MI6 have collaborated in the past and no doubt will again in the future. It was a loose affiliation. Your father and I traveled in different circles. But we met and updated each other regularly. Shared progress reports.”

  “Doesn’t explain your teeth.”

  “What about them?” Kate said, running her tongue along them for any sign of stray food.

  “They’re too good to be British.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. I’m half British. On my mom’s side. Born in London, raised outside of Chicago. Libertyville. They have dentists there.”

  “Where do the Cubs play?”

  “Wrigley Field.”

  “Where do you go for drinks after the game?”

  “I don’t know. Murphy’s? They card at Cubby Bear. At least they did when I was there.”

  Michael relented. He hadn’t spent much time in Chicago, but he had been to a game or two and as far as he remembered it, she was right. They did card at Cubby Bear. “Okay, suppose I bite. You’re a spy and he’s a spy. But I’m not him. What do you want with me?”

  “Pay attention,” Kate said. “This is where things get interesting.”

  • • •

  SEVERAL THOUSAND MILES away, across the Sea of Japan, a sleek black phone rang. A powerfully built Japanese man studied the caller display. His name was Hayakawa and he knew the call was not a good sign. Calls from China were never good news and as such, they could not be ignored. Hayakawa picked up the receiver.

  “Hayakawa,” he said gruffly.

  The person on the other end of the line took a moment to respond. When he opened his mouth Hayakawa knew it was Chen.

  “We had an unwelcome visitor today.”

  Hayakawa had expected as much. Already what had started as a pet project had gotten out of hand. He stretched out his five-foot-six frame and stared out the floor to ceiling window of the towering glass building. It was raining in Tokyo, the pedestrians lost in a sea of umbrellas on the street below. Bad tidings often accompanied the rain in Hayakawa’s experience, bad tidings and a whole lot of water. Hayakawa fingered a stray strand of his longish black hair, putting it back into place behind his ear.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “A man. A Western man. I think it was him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Can you find him?”

  “I will try.”

  There was a long moment of dead air.

  “Hayakawa-san, please be patient. I will find him.”

  Hayakawa eyed his reflection in the window, straightening the jacket of his impeccably tailored suit. As he had suspected, the news was bad, worse in fact than he would have thought. But that was only part of the problem. The other part, he could hear in Chen’s voice. The man was losing confidence. He was becoming a liability Hayakawa could not afford.

  “Thank you,” Hayakawa said. “We will discuss this more thoroughly at another time.”

  Hayakawa terminated the connection without another word. He then dialed a second number he knew from memory. He let it ring once, then sat the phone back down in the cradle and waited. He only hoped that he had not already waited too long.

  • • •

  MICHAEL WATCHED WITH interest as Kate pulled an iPhone out of her pocket and jacked it into an Ethernet port that hung loosely from one of the floor joists above. Her Glock was safely reholstered and she made no attempt to gather the Browning off the dirt floor. Michael couldn’t tell if she was trying to foster trust in him, or if she knew the gun wasn’t loaded. It didn’t matter. He had come this far. He was going to listen to what she had to say.

  “The head monk let your dad use the space down here. This Ethernet port is hardwired into the T4 that runs the internet café across the street. In this part of the world, it makes this connection as close to anonymous as you can get.” Kate hunched down on the floor and pulled out her pistol. “As you probably figured out, the backpacker thing is a cover.”

  Removing the clip from her Glock, she emptied the bullets into her lap. She reached for the final bullet to fall and held it between her fingers. It was a 9mm hollow point. Standard issue. Or at least it seemed to be until Kate proceeded to unscrew its base revealing a tiny USB plug. Michael watched with interest as she plugged it into a second port on what was obviously a highly modified iPhone. A photo of a daisy came up on the iPhone’s screen.

  “Pretty flower,” Michael said.

&
nbsp; “You have no idea,” Kate said, tapping the screen. After a few seconds, the image of the daisy began to resolve itself into the finer lines of a blueprint. “Your dad and I were here in China looking for a very specific piece of machinery. A piece of machinery dating all the way back to the Second World War.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There’s more to this than just your dad’s whereabouts. If we can find your father, I hope to God he’ll lead us to this.”

  Kate turned the iPhone’s glossy screen to Michael. The image on the screen could be described simply enough. It was an airplane. A bat winged airplane that looked more like a modern stealth bomber than a Messerschmitt, but an airplane nonetheless. It had a wingspan of twenty meters which Michael calculated would be about sixty-five feet. What looked like jet engines were integrated into both the leading edge of the wings and vertically mounted under them, the cockpit forming a low bulb where the two wings met. The blueprint was monochromatic, and there was only the single page, no section, no schematics, but just in case there was any doubt as to who built it, each wing was adorned by a single Nazi swastika.

  “You’ve heard of the Horten 2-29?”

  “German plane, right? Didn’t National Geographic run some kind of documentary on it?”

  “The Horten 2-29 was a Nazi stealth bomber. It never went into production, but the folks over at Northrop Grumman were recently able to build a mock up of it from a surviving prototype.”

  “Okay. Pretty plane, but who cares?”

  “This is the Horten 21. Big brother to the 2-29.”

  “Again. Not following.”

  “Hitler’s people were supposed to have built as many as fourteen working Horten 21s sometime during the last years of World War II. Like the 2-29, the 21 was an experimental stealth jet. Unlike the 2-29, it was designed to be capable of speeds in excess of Mach 1 and perfect vertical takeoff and landing. They wanted to use it to drop the bomb on New York.”

  “The bomb?”

  “Yeah. The atomic bomb.”

  “Brutal.”

  “True, but that’s not what makes it interesting. The Nazis were having a hell of a time with their jet engine design. To get around this problem and still generate the thrust for vertical takeoff, the Horten 21 was equipped with two propulsion systems. Both a conventional auxiliary and a primary system that was entirely unique.”

  “So it was a Nazi hybrid?”

  “Basically.”

  “Let me guess, they ran it off of breakfast cereal. Soy milk and Franken Berry.”

  “Close. Cold fusion.”

  “Cold what?”

  “Fusion. The Nazis were said to have pioneered a working cold fusion reactor to power their plane. Something that to this day hasn’t been done in the lab, let alone in an airplane.”

  “Do you really want me to believe that this thing is from World War II and no advances have been made since then?”

  “Believe it, don’t believe it, I’m just laying it out. The Nazis were somehow able to engineer a cold fusion reactor. They figured out a way to fuse hydrogen atoms at near room temperature releasing an enormous amount of energy. The basics are that a very cool gas was introduced into a very hot reactor and the super heated gas was shot out a nozzle creating lift. How they were able to create a reliable working fusion reactor we have no idea. Nobody anywhere has been able to do anything similar since. And not for lack of trying.”

  “So what are you saying? The Nazis were smarter than everyone else?”

  “Look. The way my people explained it to me is that a part of science, maybe not the biggest part, but a part, is luck. Who knows? Maybe the Germans got lucky. What we do know is that they incorporated the cold fusion reactor into their aircraft. The record shows two full-size, fully functional Horten 21 bombers were shipped from Nazi occupied Konigsberg to their Japanese allies in Tokyo in the spring of 1945. Our guess is that they wanted the Japanese to take the war to the Pacific Coast. Knock out Los Angeles. But at that point the Japanese war effort was already on shaky ground. For whatever reason, probably because Tokyo was about to be bombed back to the Stone Age, the decision was made to hide the Horten 21 somewhere in occupied China. Long story short, your father and I have been working together for the last two years trying to find it. I’m sure the fact that he’s gone missing is connected to our work, Michael. I’m breaking every rule in the book in telling you this because I think we can help each other. You knew your father and I knew what he was looking for. Together we might stand a chance.”

  Michael turned his attention from the screen and just stared into Kate’s wide almond eyes. Finally he said, “It’s crazy.”

  “No, Michael, it’s real.”

  “Trust me. It’s crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now I have to figure out what your long lost airplane has to do with this.”

  Michael reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts and withdrew the Lucite sphere he had taken from the factory. He watched Kate’s eyes widen as she took hold of the clear sphere, staring intently as cosmic snow fell on the globe of the Earth within, tiny green LEDs twinkling in harmony with its rotation. In that brief moment, Michael actually felt a chill run down his spine as he watched the world he thought he knew dissolve into nothing, to be replaced by something as yet unseen.

  12

  THOUGH KATE HAD little idea what the snow globe might represent, they had at least reached a truce which allowed them to pursue the one commonality in their quest so far — Chen. It didn’t take a genius to see that all roads led back to him. A quick internet search cross-referencing him against Chohow Industries revealed the man’s place of residence and that he was in fact president of the aforementioned company. After that, all it took was a phone call to his secretary to learn that he was unavailable because he would be at a business dinner all evening. From there it was a short cab ride to the garish, gated Mediterranean-style condominium complex Michael now found himself outside of.

  The complex, located in Shenzhen’s outlying farmlands, consisted of maybe fifteen five-story buildings, each containing what looked like forty units. Kate’s plan was simple. Since the gate guard had a closed-circuit view of the entire compound, she needed a diversion and Michael was it. He was to show up at the front gate with his backpack and a guide book asking directions to the nearest bus station. If Michael could win her fifteen seconds away from the prying eyes of the guard, Kate could hop the wall on the highway side of the compound and put in a call for assistance from one of the outdoor security telephones that were staggered between the buildings. The guard leaving his post would give Michael an opportunity to sneak in through the front gate. The guard would then see that the call had been an error and Michael and Kate would be free to go about the business of breaking into Chen’s townhouse in peace.

  That was the theory. In practice Michael discovered that either guards at gated communities didn’t go for backpackers or else they were extremely lonely because, upon startling the guard with a tap at the window, he immediately got on the phone. Within moments a second guard had pulled alongside Michael on a motorcycle. Michael now had two guards to contend with. But it didn’t stop there. Two more guards arrived by car, then another on a bicycle. They were coming out of the woodwork and as it turned out, they weren’t angry, just eager to offer him a ride to the bus station. This wouldn’t happen at home, but Michael had to remind himself, he wasn’t at home. He was in China. And apparently the sight of a backpacker out here in the far flung suburbs was still unique enough to cause a spectacle.

  Fortunately, Kate’s call on the internal security phone soon came in and all five of the guards were off to the races, checking on what might be the matter. Michael snuck into the parking lot behind them. He skirted the far wall, meeting Kate on the south side of the complex as planned.

  “What took you so long?”

  “Made some new friends.”

  Kate ignored him. “As far as I can tell Chen’s condo is the
one nearest to the perimeter wall, there,” she said, pointing at a dark building.

  “No lights, no answer on the phone, we good to go?” Michael asked.

  “As good as it’s going to get.”

  “I was kind of hoping for some spook talk. Maybe you could tell me SAT RECON is in, subject identified, target acquired, that kind of thing. Like I told you, us spies expect that kind of thing.”

  “This isn’t a game, Michael.”

  “I wasn’t playing.”

  • • •

  THE TRUTH REGARDING the “sat recon,” which Kate hadn’t shared with Michael, was that she had attempted to contact the MI6 substation in Hong Kong to get precisely this information. Her highly modified iPhone contained the latest in secure satellite technology. It was a marvelous piece of personal communication equipment, equipped with such an array of electronic shielding and countermeasures that interception of its signal was thought to be impossible. Unfortunately, on attempting to dial out, Kate had been greeted with dead air, no dial tone, no static, nothing. She had assumed that sunspot activity was interfering with her transmission, but as is often the case with such things, the real explanation was more sinister.

  The Chinese Bureau of Scientific Affairs had for years been working on a special project code named 411 whose stated purpose was the interception and decryption of enemy satellite communications. To date, decryption was still a complicated affair requiring both the brute force of supercomputers and the time to let them work, but interception had proven to be a workable problem. In addition to accurately intercepting satellite transmissions, the Chinese had discovered something else. If they had a particular region under surveillance, they were able to acquire the location of the transmission, something that the users of encrypted satellite phones, unlike their common cell brethren, believed they were immune to.

  It was in such a way that Chinese Ministry of State Security Captain Zu Huang caught his break. Earlier in the day Captain Huang had been tasked with ferreting out an American spy. He had been given surveillance photos taken by a security camera at Chek Lap Kok airport and a purported agenda, but little else. Huang didn’t need to be told that his homeland was an enormous country and that without actionable intelligence he’d been set up to fail. It was well known that all agents were set up to fail. The system was designed to ensure that only the strong survived.