by Ben Coes
“We have something,” said Chalmers.
The group took an elevator to the second floor of MI6 headquarters. When the doors opened, they entered a cavernous, brightly lit room filled with dozens of men and women at workstations. This was MI6’s operations room, Smythson’s nerve center for the management of MI6 paramilitary teams.
“Close your eyes, guys,” said Chalmers as they walked through.
Technically, Calibrisi, Katie, and Tacoma shouldn’t have been allowed on the second floor of Vauxhall Cross. But while there existed plenty of information that the two agencies kept separate, including activities inside each respective country, the fact is that MI6 and the CIA were more like siblings than adversaries. The occasional courtesy, such as allowing Langley’s well-liked director to pass through, was looked at by everyone on the floor with a mixture of amusement and pride.
In the middle of the floor stood a small frosted-glass conference room. In each corner, a large plasma screen was hanging. In the center of the room was a steel conference table. Smythson stood at the table, looking across it at two men who were seated behind computer screens.
Chalmers, Calibrisi, Katie, and Tacoma entered the room.
Smythson’s brown hair was brushed back from her face, tousled after so many hours of stress and work. She looked up at Chalmers, a blank expression on her face.
“Punch it up on two,” said Smythson.
One of the plasmas lit up, and the group watched as video started to play on the screen.
“We’ve been monitoring SIGINT coming out of PRC,” said Smythson. “Video, audio, data. This came off a British Airways flight four hours ago. The jet was on approach to Beijing International Airport.”
The screen was black. After several moments, the orange and yellow lights of Beijing twinkled across the screen as the plane descended.
“Watch for it,” said Smythson.
Flashing green and yellow lights pulsated in a long line, which indicated the runway that the jet was headed for. To the right of the runway, an orange mushroom cloud of flames was visible. As the lights on the ground grew larger, the plume of bright orange spiraled spectacularly into the sky, the flames lashing orange and white into the black of the night.
“It’s an explosion,” said Smythson. “We’ll get a closer shot, here.”
The jet moved lower. As it closed in on the runway, the size of the inferno grew larger. An analyst paused it. The right side of the screen was now taken up by a still frame of the explosion. Within the flame stacks was the skeleton of a plane, now aflame.
“So there was a plane that caught fire at Beijing International,” said Calibrisi.
Smythson smiled at Calibrisi.
“It’s Borchardt’s plane,” said Smythson.
Calibrisi’s eyes grew wide.
“Once we saw the burning plane,” said an analyst, “I called MIS to see if we could look at all SIGINT for Beijing International starting six hours ago, the approximate earliest point in time I thought they could fly in from London to Beijing. I got a hit on a flight plan, an inbound private flight, Boeing 757, which landed three hours before the video was snapped. The plane crossmatched against a British customs filing that one of Borchardt’s companies made almost a decade ago, an ownership certificate, necessary if your plane is British domiciled.”
Calibrisi nodded. “Excellent work.”
“What does it mean?” asked Katie. “Could they have attacked the plane? Perhaps on landing?”
“We’re not there yet,” said Smythson. “There are a number of different possible explanations.”
“There aren’t that many,” said Katie, walking to the screen, pointing at the skeleton of the jet. “It landed, so it wasn’t shot down, right? It’s in Beijing, which could mean Dewey flew right into the waiting arms of Fao Bhang.”
“Yes,” said Chalmers. “Or there’s simply a different explanation. In any event, we need some real-time intelligence on Dewey. Hector, this guy is your guy. Do you have any way of reaching him?”
Calibrisi shrugged his shoulders.
“What can I say?” asked Calibrisi. “The guy’s AWOL.”
“We need to find Dewey,” said Smythson.
Calibrisi nodded, then pulled his phone out.
“Get me Bruckheimer over at NSA,” he said into the phone, to an operator at CIA control. “Tell him it’s important.”
60
IN THE AIR
Dewey leaned into the cockpit.
“No radio,” said Dewey, “unless you feel like having China shoot us out of the sky.”
Dewey went back to the seat and opened his leather bag. He removed a half-empty pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He sat down in the seat and kicked his feet up on the seat in front of him.
“Why did you save me?” asked Borchardt. They were his first words since taking off from Beijing several hours before.
Dewey held the bottle in his hand, reading the label on the side of the bottle. He took another sip but said nothing.
Borchardt sat up, a pained grimace crossing his face. He felt for his ear. It had turned into a large red scab. The gash had clotted up. Dewey had left it alone, even though it needed a bandage. Eventually, the blood had stopped trickling.
Borchardt touched the raw, fresh scab, then grimaced again. He glanced around the interior of the plane.
“This must be the new plane,” he said, admiring it. “They’re too expensive, of course, but Gulfstream makes the best planes. Look at it.”
Dewey stared at the seat in front of him, his mind a thousand miles away.
Killing Bhang’s brother had done little to make the pain go away. His mind kept replaying the sight of Jessica, her eyes looking helplessly up at him from the ground.
“Nothing,” Dewey whispered to himself. “You did nothing wrong.”
“Dewey,” said Borchardt. “Why did you save me?”
Dewey glanced at Borchardt, a look of contempt and sadness on his face.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Because I gave you my word,” said Dewey, looking away, shutting his eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the sight of Borchardt, of the plane—trying to shut out the world.
Borchardt sat back.
“Well, thank you,” said Borchardt. “Whatever you did it for.”
Dewey opened his eyes. He stared impassively at Borchardt. Borchardt was a mess. On one side, his shirt was covered in blood. He had a raw, fresh contusion on his forehead. His ear looked as if a bear had clawed part of it off.
Dewey had inflicted the counterblow he wanted to. He’d struck hard at Bhang, in a way that had undoubtedly hurt him. But Bhang wasn’t expecting it. He would be anticipating Dewey’s next move.
Dewey knew Bhang would bring the weight of the ministry to bear now. He would scour the earth looking for him, much as Aswan Fortuna had done. Yet, unlike Fortuna, Bhang had an army of committed, disciplined warriors, not just a cell of half-crazed jihadists.
And the first place they’d be looking is somewhere in the vicinity of the disheveled, blood-crusted, ashen-pale little German billionaire with the odd haircut seated across from him.
Dewey glanced at his watch. They’d left Beijing nine hours before. They would be over Europe soon.
Dewey knew that now was the time to move beyond improvisation. Bhang would come looking for him, and when he did, he had to be ready. He would have, at most, one chance at Bhang.
Dewey knew he couldn’t do it alone. He needed Hector.
But would Hector ever forgive him?
Dewey shut his eyes, feeling shame, as his mind replayed the look in Hector’s eyes as Dewey held him by the neck, against the concrete wall.
“So what now?” asked Borchardt.
“What do you mean?”
“What are you going to do now?” asked Borchardt.
Dewey took a sip.
“You killed his brother,” continued Borchardt, “but he’s still alive. What’s next? I could hel
p you.”
“Gee, thanks, Rolf,” whispered Dewey, contemptuously. “Let’s do it together. Me and you. The Lone Ranger and Tonto.”
Borchardt nodded.
“I guess I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t trust me either. Then again, who else do you have?”
Dewey leaned over and looked out the window. They were passing over water. Suddenly, Dewey pictured his brother, Hobey, standing on the town dock in Castine, shirtless, eating a popsicle, staring up at the Maine Maritime Academy ship, mesmerized by its size, towering over the dock and the two boys. Something about the memory made him feel anxious, even upset. He stood up and walked to the cockpit.
“Where are we?”
“We’ll be over Italy soon,” said the copilot.
“Let me see a map.”
The copilot handed Dewey a navigational chart, which he studied for several minutes. He’d been to most of the larger cities on the map. He wanted someplace familiar, where he could hide out for a few days and figure out his next steps. A place where he could reach out to Hector and apologize.
“Drop me in Lisbon,” said Dewey. “Then you guys can go back to London and get some sleep.”
Dewey went back to the seat across from Borchardt.
“Dewey,” said Borchardt, “I would like to know where we stand. I know my apologies mean nothing to you, but I am sorry.”
“You certainly deserve to die,” said Dewey, “but I’m better off with you alive. Properly managed, you have a certain utility. There aren’t many people who could’ve done what you just did. Besides, Fao Bhang will probably get you after he figures out what happened to his brother.”
A look of anxiety hit Borchardt.
“You better hope I kill him,” said Dewey. “Because if I die, my guess is, you’ll be next. Then again, maybe a sincere apology from you would suffice for Bhang. Throw in a box of chocolates. He seems like the sentimental type.”
Dewey pulled his handgun from his shoulder holster.
“No,” said Borchardt, holding his hands up, pleading.
“I’m not going to kill you,” said Dewey.
He clutched the barrel of the weapon, then swung the butt at a precise spot on the side of Borchardt’s head. Borchardt tumbled to the floor, unconscious.
“But I am going to knock you out for a while.”
61
BEIJING
Dheng’s desk was a large X made of glass and stainless steel. It sat in the middle of a gargantuan floor of stone-faced computer geeks, hundreds in all, seated in row after monotonous row of computer terminals, each of them staring into computer screens.
Dheng sat at the intersection of the X. Dheng was a computer engineer by training, with two Ph.D.s in computer science, including one from Caltech. Within the ministry, Dheng was considered, at least to those who knew him, the most intelligent person in China.
Sixteen flat-screen plasma TVs lined the axis of the large X, two on each axis, facing outward, enabling Dheng to monitor activities; he had access to the activities of every hacker inside the ministry and could drop in on any individual screen at any time in order to ask the hacker a question, make a recommendation, or take over the screen.
It was Dheng who had written the cryptographic algorithm that enabled the ministry to hack into the Pentagon four years before. Although access inside had lasted only eleven minutes, Dheng stole a variety of informative documents.
Dheng was a short man with unusual curly black hair and glasses. He moved along each axis, looking quickly at each screen for no more than a minute before stepping to the next screen. Occasionally, he would stop and type something quickly into a keyboard, usually a suggestion or actual code, before moving on.
All sixteen screens mirrored the screens of Dheng’s most notorious and capable hackers, scattered about the large floor. All sixteen hackers were working on the same thing: trying to break into Gulfstream’s computer network.
As Dheng long ago learned, the U.S. private sector had much more robust antihacking protection than the U.S. government had. Everyone knew where the talent went after getting their degrees from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, or Caltech.
Dheng’s small brigade of hackers had been at it now for more than five hours.
Dheng was suddenly interrupted by a loud commotion half a room away, almost out of eyesight. A group of employees was yelling. Dheng looked up.
A young, overweight man came running from the commotion, down the aisle between rows and rows of workers. By the time he reached Dheng, his face was beet red and sweat darkened the armpits of his blue plaid shirt.
“One sixty four,” he wheezed, “sir. I have gotten inside, sir.”
Dheng smiled. He stood upright and started clapping.
“Fine work. What is your name?”
“Hu.”
A brief round of applause filled the room.
Then Dheng moved to a screen and started furiously typing.
He took over Hu’s computer screen. As the young, obese hacker had said, he was indeed inside Gulfstream.
Analyzing the access route, Dheng saw that Hu had used a cat-and-mouse strategy, luring a high-level General Dynamics employee in their computer security area to chase after Hu in what was a persistent but illusory attempt at getting in through an employee e-mail server. While fleeing, Hu had painted a simple brushstroke of nearly invisible metadata into the General Dynamics employee’s own seemingly successful lockdown code. Once the employee booked it into a separate data cache, the metadata had communicated back to Hu through the employee’s own CPU. It was a clever strategy that depended on persistence and upon the mistake of an unwitting person on the receiving end.
“Excellent work, Mr. Hu,” said Dheng, who started typing. “Are you married?”
“No, sir.”
A crowd started to gather behind Dheng. His fingers moved across the keyboard.
“Parents?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, they will be very proud,” said Dheng as he typed. “Tonight you may tell them you received a raise and a promotion.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Within forty-five seconds, Dheng was inside Gulfstream’s servers. Three minutes after that, he’d penetrated the massive GPS feed, which collected second-by-second location information about every Gulfstream jet ever made, whether it was parked or flying. Exactly eighteen seconds later, he knew where Borchardt’s new plane, the plane with Dewey Andreas aboard, was located.
Dheng pressed the earbud in his right ear, turning on the wireless phone.
“Get me Minister Bhang,” he said.
* * *
Fao Bhang marched into the conference room down the hallway from his office. Inside the room were the seven men who had, until a few hours before, reported to Ming-húa. These were the top agents within the clandestine paramilitary bureau.
Bhang had ordered them to convene ten minutes before, after Dheng had let Bhang know that the American who’d murdered his brother and who was responsible for the death of Mikal Dillman, was headed into southern Europe.
Dheng entered the conference room, a cigarette in his mouth, walking quickly and reading a laptop as he moved toward the table.
“The plane is descending,” said Dheng, staring at his laptop as he spoke. “He’s going to land in one of the following airports: Madrid, Sevilla, Porto, Lisbon, Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech. We will know more as he gets closer.”
“I want every ministry agent in those cities positioned at the airports,” said Bhang, calmly. He lit a cigarette. “Get them all on live COMM.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All contractors in Spain, Portugal, Morocco—same thing,” said Bhang. “Get an alert out. We need to stop him right now, at the airport. He’s running. We need to find him before he gets far, and we need to take him down.”
Bhang looked at Dheng.
“As soon as you know,” Bhang said to him.
“As soon as I have his end location, Minister, you and everyone here will
know,” said Dheng. “It shouldn’t be that long. In fact, based on the plane’s altitude, we can now rule out Madrid.”
“Tell them all, to the man or woman who kills Andreas, the Order of the Lotus,” said Bhang, “awarded by me personally.”
Every man at the conference table paused. A few exchanged glances. They each understood the significance of what Bhang had just said. The Order of the Lotus was the ministry’s highest honor, a medal that had not been awarded to anyone in more than five years.
“Good luck, gentlemen. I know we will be successful.”
62
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE (SID)
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Near a private exit off the Baltimore–Washington Parkway that read NSA EMPLOYEES ONLY stood a black glass rectangular office building, one of two newer buildings in a cluster of four—the Big Four, as they were referred to—headquarters of the world’s foremost cryptologists, eavesdroppers, and hackers: the National Security Agency.
On the third floor of the building, in a windowless conference room, Jim Bruckheimer, director of SID, was seated with two of his most trusted SID analysts, Serena Pacheco and Jesus June.
SID had primary responsibility within the United States for the acquisition of all foreign signals intelligence; SID was the behemoth that went out and eavesdropped, stole, code-broke, and did all manner of legal and illegal information gathering, in every region and country of the world, on behalf of the U.S. government, then processed signals with NSA’s massive computers for use by the president and other military and intelligence officials.
Bruckheimer, Pacheco, and June were seated around a triangular phone console. On the line with them was General Piper Redgrave, NSA’s chief, along with Hector Calibrisi.
Calibrisi had just finished briefing the group on the explosion in Beijing.
“Is there a finding on this?” asked Redgrave.
“Yes,” said Calibrisi. “President Dellenbaugh signed it two days ago.”
“Care to share some of the details?” asked Redgrave.
