False Flag

by Jack Slater

  “Has the colonel checked in?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then we better hope he was successful. Otherwise this fuck-up will be very bad for us. It might still be.”

  Ikeda frowned, then quickly relaxed her facial muscles. The last thing she needed right now was to attract any attention. The best thing she could do was stay out of sight, and out of mind, acquiring as much intelligence as she could while they thought she was asleep. But her honeymoon didn’t last long.

  “Tokko, how far are we from the safe house?”

  “Ten miles, sir.”

  “As soon as we get there, wake the bitch up. It’s time to find out who sent her.”

  The image that caught Trapp’s attention was the sight of dozens of multi-million-dollar motor yachts bobbing on the waves about a mile down the coast. A memory from earlier that day flashed into his mind: a sign announcing that it was Macau Yacht Week.

  It gave him an idea.

  To get to his submarine pick-up, Trapp needed to be about five miles off the coast of Macau. This close to mainland China, the seas were heavily trafficked: in fact, in the distance Trapp saw the dim outline of a container ship steam past every couple of minutes, navigation lights gleaming bow and aft. The navy wouldn’t risk a billion-dollar submarine colliding with a Chinese merchant ship, especially in China’s territorial waters–no matter how vital the mission. It was a case of Mohammed going to the mountain, and not the other way round.

  He just had to figure out how to get there.

  Even for an athlete of Eliza Ikeda’s open water prowess, a five-mile swim in the tiger shark-infested waters off the tip of Macau in the dead of night would have been a dicey prospect. And as fit as he was, Trapp knew he couldn’t hold a candle to the elite CIA operative.

  Taking the exfiltration boat left at the yard was out. Swimming to the exfil point was most definitely out.

  But Trapp was pretty sure he could make the swim to one of the yachts anchored offshore. If he was lucky, and he maneuvered without any navigation lights, he might be able to make it to the pickup point. And since the clock was ticking on Ikeda’s survival, Trapp figured he didn’t have any other choice.

  “The hell with it,” he muttered.

  He started jogging toward the dock hosting Yacht Week. It was hard to miss. As he picked up the pace, a wave of fireworks crackled in the night sky, painting the darkness in shades of green and red and gold. Trapp figured that the super-rich were no more subtle in Asia than they were back home. He didn’t know what it was about money that made people feel the need to advertise it.

  Jason Trapp was a man born in the shadows, and he liked it that way. Still, the thought of stealing some rich asshole’s boat filled him with a certain sense of satisfaction. Though he had no desire to live the high life, it didn’t hurt to taste it once in a while.

  18

  Macau Yacht Week looked like something out of Great Gatsby. The boats closest to the dockside convention center were enormous, at least a hundred and fifty feet in length and Trapp shuddered to think what they would cost.

  A mission deep in his past had sent Trapp to Monaco, the small principality in Southern France, and he’d killed a man on a thirty million dollar yacht half the size of the gleaming, no doubt hand-polished boats lined up on the other side of the fence from where he currently stood.

  Trapp subtly but thoroughly cased the joint, seemingly buried in a Sunseeker yacht brochure he’d swiped from a stand out front, but his eyes really drinking in every last detail.

  Access to the dock was regulated by numerous uniformed guards, and security was being taken very seriously. Trapp supposed that made sense. The kind of high net worth individuals the yacht manufacturers were wooing at this event did not like to mix with ordinary people. He wasn’t precisely ordinary, but on the other hand he was intending to borrow a boat without permission or payment, so he couldn’t exactly blame them.

  Still, Trapp didn’t need to make it onto one of the super yachts. Stealing one of those would be a little too obvious, even for his taste, and even if he made it on board, there was no way he had the skills to pilot a boat that size.

  No, he needed something smaller. Something in the five-million-dollar range would suffice–there was no need to let his ambitions sink too low, after all…

  The waterside path that circled the convention center was thronged with high-end bars, each of which was thrumming with beautiful women, all attired in expensive cocktail dresses and swirling matching sugary drinks. Trapp briefly considered sweet-talking one in into a tour of their yacht, but quickly discounted the idea. There was no telling which of these ladies actually had access to the kind of boat he was looking for, and which were merely aspiring to the comfort of such a life.

  Even if he could somehow make the distinction, his watch warned him he had a little less than six hours before tonight’s exfiltration window would snap shut–whether or not he was ensconced within the black submarine slipping into the warm waters of the South China Sea. Trapp knew he wasn’t an unattractive man, but he didn’t have time to waste striking out in an attempted seduction.

  And finally, there was the inevitable trauma that would occur when he revealed himself to be not only a liar, but a thief. No, there had to be a better way.

  Trapp walked slowly down the coastline path as he searched for it. He didn’t speak much Mandarin, but as it happened, he didn’t need to. The man who finally attracted his attention was speaking English, clearly in an attempt to convince the two startlingly tall European women opposite him to join him in bed.

  “It’ll be fun, I promise,” the man slurred. He gave each girl a leering wink, which left Trapp under no illusions as to his intentions regarding the two women. “I’ll take you out to my boat, we’ll have a few drinks. See where the night takes us…”

  The two girls looked at each other, communicating silently. Damn, they really were something–both perfect tens, and even without their heels, they would’ve stood a head taller than most of the locals. With them, it wasn’t even a contest.

  But Trapp’s gaze was focused on the man, not the two girls–much as he would have liked to linger on their assets a little longer. The man’s hair was jet black, though he must have been in his early sixties, and he wore a cheap suit paired with a twenty thousand dollar Rolex on his left wrist. The combination was incongruous, and Trapp’s eyebrow kinked upward as he pondered it.

  But the explanation quickly became clear. A Communist Party pin, blood red and studded with yellow stars, was nestled on his lapel. By itself, it didn’t mean anything. In a nation of one and a half billion souls, there were almost eighty million party members–and you didn’t get far in either the business or political world here without paying at least lip service to the little red book. But Trapp’s instincts told him there was something else at play here, and he intended to use it.

  “What kind of boat?” they asked in unison.

  “A seventy-six footer.”

  “Um, I’m not sure…”

  The girls were playing hard to get, but Trapp had run across their type before. They were playing a game, one that would end up satisfying a wealthy old man, and leaving the pair of them considerably better off than they were the day before. They weren’t exactly run-of-the-mill hookers, but they weren’t doing it for charity, either.

  “I don’t know.” The first girl smiled, flicking her blond head back coquettishly. “What do you think, Anna–shall we do it?”

  Trapp made his move. He transferred his pistol from the small of his back, stepped forward, in between the two women and the man in the suit. When he spoke, he affected a British accent. It was a paper-thin disguise, but there was no sense telegraphing his employers more than he already had. “Not tonight, ladies. I need to have a chat with your friend.”

  The look of shock on their twin faces as another predator attempted to steal their prey was almost priceless. Though they sounded northern European, perhaps Scandinavian, Trapp detected
a little ‘Valley girl’ in their joint tone of horror. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Yeah,” the Chinese man slurred. “Who the hell –?”

  Using his body to shield what he was doing from the two women, Trapp closed the distance between him and the man with the lapel pin. He painted a look of violence on his face and placed his arm on the man’s shoulder, pressing the barrel of his pistol against the man’s stomach in an unmistakable warning.

  “What are you doing?” the man whispered, retaining enough presence of mind not to scream for help. “You know who I am?”

  “I’m hoping to find out,” Trapp growled. “Let’s get rid of these two ladies. We need to talk.”

  Hiding the weapon beneath his windbreaker but keeping it tight against the man’s torso, Trapp wheeled around. He kept his arm looped across the man’s shoulder to prevent him making a break for it.

  “Better luck next time, ladies.” He grinned. “But I’m sure you won’t need it.”

  The two women slipped away, wearing an identical expression of disgust on their faces.

  Trapp turned back to his newest acquisition. “What’s your name?”

  The drunk Chinese man was quickly sobering up, apoplectic rage replacing his earlier shock. He was clearly a man of importance–at least in his own mind–and reached for the same line he’d previously used, no doubt on numerous occasions.

  “Do you know who I am?” he spluttered. “They’ll hang you for this.”

  Trapp doubted it, but knew that the MSS really did still execute dissidents by hanging. The scar around his neck itched just thinking about it. He needed his new acquaintance to appreciate the full gravity of his situation, and it needed to happen fast.

  He leaned in, maintaining his British accent when he spoke, but layering it with gruffness, and an implicit threat of violence if he was disobeyed. “Let me run you through what I need from you. If you do exactly as I say, I will let you live. If not, then I make no promises. You understand?”

  The man nodded, his expression now laced with the appropriate level of fear. Trapp had no intention of killing him, unless he did something stupid, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “What’s your name?” Trapp asked, falling into an easy step with the man, arm slung across his shoulder as though they were old friends.

  “Liu. Secretary Liu.”

  Trapp grinned. “Nice to make it official,” he said. “Secretary of what?”

  Liu gritted his teeth, and spoke in a low growl. “The Party.”

  Trapp’s eyebrows danced with surprise. “When you say Party..?”

  Liu’s expression vibrated from abject fear to supercilious satisfaction, and then back again. He clearly thought he had gained the upper hand with his declaration, but Trapp merely held his breath, waiting for secretary Liu to confirm that he had in fact just hit the jackpot.

  The man stopped his chest out and preened as he spoke. “Secretary of the Shenzhen Communist Party. Which means you, my friend, are about to enter a whole world of hell.”

  19

  Mike Mitchell strode into sub-basement 3A, his tie loose around his neck and his fists clenching and releasing in an almost manic fashion. He had at least two operatives dead, one confirmed captured, and one whose status was unknown. This was the part of the job that Mitchell hated. Years before, he had been among the Agency’s most deadly assassins, filling much the same role as Jason Trapp did today.

  But those days were long ago in the rearview mirror. Now Mitchell’s days were swallowed up with endless meetings, trips to the oversight committees on the Hill–and occasional interludes of sleepless nights and nail-bitten worry when the shit hit the fan.

  Tonight would be one of those nights.

  During his long and successful career in the field, Mitchell had always slept like a baby. Back then, his life was in far more peril, but it was in his hands. If he screwed up, then it was only him who would pay the ultimate price.

  These days, Mike Mitchell was responsible for the safety and well-being of operatives undertaking some of the Agency’s most dangerous missions.

  “Where are we?”

  Two familiar faces turned toward him, lit by the blue glow of their computer screens. The first was Kyle Partey, the young black analyst who dressed like a college professor, at least twenty years before his time. Mitchell trusted the man implicitly. He had recruited him from the Agency’s Middle East analysis desk, and knew him to be one of the finest minds on the CIA’s payroll.

  The second was Dr. Timothy Greaves. Until six months earlier, he had been the chief research scientist at the National Security Agency. Back then, his hair was dyed blue, but he’d since added a streak of red. Presently, he was seconded to the CIA, and more specifically to the tightly knit team Mitchell had set up in the wake of the attempted coup a few months earlier.

  The team had no official name, and its very existence was only known to a precious few. Mitchell had created it in the image of the Mossad’s “Wrath of God” operation–the mission to exact revenge for the attacks on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

  Kyle barely stopped typing as he spoke. Streams of data scrolled past on his screen, and his eyes flickered incessantly as he interpreted it.

  “That’s unclear, boss,” he said in his faintly upper-class accent. “Right now nothing seems to make sense.”

  “Take it from the top.”

  He nodded, tapping a keyboard shortcut and changing the display on the largest curved monitor in front of him. “Okay. Shortly before the region went dark, Hangman sent me a series of photos.”

  Mitchell leaned forward, his forehead creased. The photos were arranged in a patchwork fashion, with an image of a man dead center, lying on the ground with his shirt stripped open, and a shard of glass emanating from his throat. “So who is he?”

  Kyle shrugged. “That’s the million-dollar question. I’ve run his face through every facial recognition database I can think of, and they are all coming up empty.”

  Mitchell tapped the screen, his finger bouncing off the dark shadow on the man’s left breast. “What’s that–a tattoo?”

  “Way ahead of you, boss,” Kyle replied. Mitchell thought he noticed a glimmer of intrigue in the man’s dark brown eyes, as though he knew something that Mitchell didn’t. His fingers danced across the keyboard, and a high-resolution close-up of the tattoo appeared on the monitor.

  Mitchell frowned. “A star in chains? The hell is that?”

  Kyle shook his head quickly. “No, not chains–barbed wire.”

  “And that’s supposed to mean something to me?”

  Kyle gave his boss one single, definitive shake of the head. “No. I didn’t have a clue either. But I ran the variables through the computer: the star, the barbed wire, the fact that the tattoo looks homemade, as though it was done in a prison. And I got a hit. If I’m right, these guys weren’t Chinese.”

  “So who the hell were they?”

  Kyle grimaced, baring his teeth in an expression that Mitchell presumed was supposed to convey his unease at the paucity of his conclusion. “Honestly, it’s little more than an urban myth.”

  “Kyle…”

  “They might be North Korean. From a special forces group called Unit 61.”

  Secretary Liu’s yacht, Trapp learned, was at anchor about half a mile outside of the mouth of the harbor. The boat wasn’t large enough to hold a full-time crew, which as far as he was concerned was another tick in the jackpot column.

  “There are two ways this can go,” Trapp muttered quietly as they made their way down the pier, their footsteps echoing off the wooden decking, and the light floating structure slightly sinking in response to their combined weight. “Either you play it cool, get me off this damn island and onto your boat, or I’ll put a bullet in the back of your head.”

  Liu nodded sullenly, but didn’t speak. His scuffed black oxford shoes dragged as he walked, and the dark water lapped gently just inches from his feet. The air was thick, mugg
y with salt and heat.

  “And pick those up,” Trapp growled, noticing the man’s posture and gesturing at his feet. He needed this to look natural, like two friends returning to their boat, or a pair of businessman sealing the deal on the water. If anything went wrong, it would only take an errant gunshot, or a call on the radio, and the game was up.

  “You won’t get away with this,” Liu protested. “But I’m a powerful man. If you surrender to me now, I’ll negotiate a light sentence for whatever you have done. I give you my word.”

  “Secretary Liu, I understand exactly how powerful you are. It’s what I’m counting on.” Trapp grinned. “You are going to get us past those two men up there,” he said, gesturing at two armed officers from the Macau Police Department, “and onto your yacht. In a few hours, I’ll be nothing but a distant memory. How does that sound?”

  Trapp gave the Party official one last prod with the barrel of the pistol hidden in his windbreaker before shoving it in his waistband. The threat lingered, however, and Trapp was certain that Liu had received the message loud and clear.

  “Halt!”

  The two policemen were cradling Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine guns, and were dressed slightly differently than the beat cops Trapp had sidestepped earlier–they came equipped with steel-toed boots and military-style helmets. He figured they were from a different unit, and that probably came with additional training.

  Which wasn’t good.

  Liu glanced at Trapp, a shadow of a frown dancing across his face, as though he was making a difficult decision. The shadow cleared, and Trapp hoped he’d made the right one. Though he paused briefly, he resumed his forward motion, striding confidently toward the two policemen.

  Trapp held his breath and followed alongside, fingers grazing his hidden pistol. There was a lot riding on the next few seconds, and his reading of Liu’s character. Corrupt, venal and greedy secretary Liu might be, but to make it to the highest echelons of a branch of the Chinese Communist Party as important as Shenzhen meant that he probably wasn’t a man to be trifled with. Though most Americans had never heard of it, Shenzhen was a city of over twelve million people–fifty percent larger than New York City itself.