She wanted Colonel Zhang. She wanted to see him, face to face, to watch him cringe and beg. She would make him tell her what he had done with Shaomin.
Then she would kill him.
Could she do it? A few months ago such an act would have been unthinkable. Though she held the rank of captain in the PLA, she was a scientist, not a soldier. She had never killed anyone. But that was before the hate had built up in her like a raging fever. Now every fiber in her body was urging her to put a bullet in the brain of Col. Zhang Yu.
She hesitated before starting across the open expanse between the Shelter Three and Four. She decided to walk openly, as if she were on official business. If a sentry challenged her, she would bluff, throw some names out that he would recognize, then shoot him at close quarters.
Keeping a hand around the grip of the Beretta in her pocket, she started across the tarmac.
Forty meters to go. No challenge from a sentry.
Twenty meters. Perhaps there was no sentry—
She saw him.
Mai-ling froze, not sure whether he had spotted her yet. She could see the sentry at his post, slouched on the ground beside the side entrance. He was motionless, staring in her direction. Not until she had studied his features for several seconds through the NVG did she understand why the sentry had not challenged her.
He would never challenge anyone. A single, oozing hole glistened in the center of his forehead. Chiu, or one his commandos, had already taken care of the sentry. It meant, probably, that they were inside the shelter now looking for the remaining Black Star.
Go! she ordered herself. Run for the briefing room. Get there before it’s too late.
She darted to the right, toward the warren of spaces and offices built into the back of Shelter Four. The rooms were not accessible from inside the hangar without a special key — or so she remembered — which meant that Chiu would not stumble onto Zhang’s briefing room.
Not before she had concluded her mission.
In the darkened walkway behind the shelter, she had to peer carefully at each recess, each crevice in the wall. There were several metal doors, all alike. Which one? Which was Zhang’s briefing room? Nothing looked familiar in the darkness.
She tried the first door, applying a gentle pressure to the lever handle. It didn’t move. Should she rap on the door, try to bluff again? If she entered the wrong room, encountered someone besides Zhang, she was finished.
If only she could remember which door. She had been there on a couple of occasions, invited by Shaomin for an audience with the high and mighty Zhang. The same Zhang who turned on them and sent Shaomin to his death in the camps.
The recollection of his cruel, smirking face served to jog her memory. It was coming back to her. She remembered that they had arrived at the shelter in Shaomin’s Bei-jung—his army utility vehicle. He had parked directly beside Zhang’s entrance door.
There. Just as before. Ten meters away, in the deep shadow of the high rear wall — a drab-painted Bei-jung with a canvas top, just like the one Shaomin once drove.
The thought reinforced her sense of purpose. The fear and anxiety slipped away from her like an unwelcome burden. She slid the Beretta from her pocket and approached the door, taking small, determined steps.
No light was leaking around the door jamb. She pressed her ear to the door. She could hear a rustling sound, the noise of scuffing feet on the concrete floor.
Someone was inside. How many? It didn’t matter. She would kill whoever was there with Zhang. He would be the last.
She hesitated at the door, gathering her resolve. She took a long, deep breath, then yanked the lever. The door swung inward, and she stepped inside.
A dim red light illuminated the room. She saw a desk, someone sitting behind it, watching her with intense interest. She held the Beretta in both hands, keeping it trained on him.
Even before she discerned his features in the thin light, she recognized the familiar presence. He wore flight gear — a torso harness and G-suit — and leaned with one elbow on the desk, peering at her with that casual, bemused expression.
Just as she remembered.
“Come in,” said Major Han Shaomin. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
CHAPTER 19 — GHOST
Feingold had vanished.
Lutz waited at the terminal gate to observe each load of passengers board the nightly flight. Feingold was not among them. He hadn’t answered his phone at the lab, nor had he shown up as he usually did for a beer in the club lounge.
They’d grabbed him. That had to be it. Lutz could picture the physicist’s terrified denials as he was being grilled by the FBI stooges. It made him laugh. Feingold, with his compulsive blabbiness and taste for the Vegas fleshpots, was the perfect fit for the FBI’s stereotyped spy. The case against him would build until the lack of evidence became so apparent that even the feds figured it out. Then they resume the hunt for the real spy.
At least he had bought time.
Lutz boarded the last of the 737s bound for Las Vegas. His gut was empty tonight, no data capsule residing in his intestine to be deposited in a slot machine tray. It was too dangerous. He had to assume everyone associated with Calypso Blue was under intense scrutiny.
He heard the engines spin up, then felt the lurch as the brakes released and the jet accelerated down the runway. Yielding to his ingrained ritual, he hit the timer button on his chronometer. As the nose of the 737 lifted, he hit the button again.
Twenty-eight seconds. Same as always, give or take a few seconds. One more reason to be glad Feingold was gone. He would be sitting there, making one of his typically banal comments about the length of the take-off roll and how things never changed. For the rest of the flight he would pester Lutz with that insipid crap about how many kilowatts Las Vegas uses or how many tons of sewage are treated annually in Nevada.
Good riddance.
Watching the blackness of Groom Lake drop away beneath him, Lutz thought about the future. The end game was near. The danger level had become unacceptable. The time was near when he would either be snared by the FBI, or the Chinese would throw him to the wolves.
But not quite. There were still secrets that the Chinese needed to keep their own Black Star invulnerable to new detection technology.
Already stored in Lutz’s accounts was a fair sum of money, nearly half a million, deposited by his Chinese employers. But it was still not enough. He needed to milk it longer, collect the final large sum they still owed him.
Then one fine Nevada day they would come looking for Raymond Lutz in his lab at Groom Lake, and they would find him gone. The man who had enabled the People’s Republic of China to acquire twenty years of stealth technology in less than three years would be as invisible as the Black Star.
Gone where?
The matter of where Lutz — or whoever he decided to become — would live the rest of his life had occupied much of his conscious thought this past year. Anywhere in the U.S. was out of the question. The war against terrorists had generated rapid advances in personal identification technology. It had become nearly impossible to change one’s identity.
No, it would have to be a third world country, but one with a culture and climate that suited the needs of a polymath like Raymond Lutz. A place where, if the danger of his being discovered became a concern, he could slip away to the sanctuary of China.
Sri Lanka. It was a richly endowed country, located on the rump of the Indian sub-continent, filled with ancient art and culture but beset by civil war and turmoil. He could settle there, live well but not conspicuously so, and indulge himself in all the comforts and stimuli that he needed.