“Good. I’ve got a very excited and nearly hyperventilating Wil Borger in front of me, insisting I get you on the phone. What’s up?”
“It’s about General Wei, sir. I think I know what’s he’s done with the case.”
Langford pointed Borger to a chair on the other side of his desk and placed the call on speakerphone. “Go ahead.”
“Wil and I have been trying to put the pieces together since I left. But things weren’t fitting. Wei’s actions before his suicide, the deaths of his wife and daughter, even his cell records were all pointing to something we kept missing. Something big.”
“So what is it?”
Clay took a deep breath and glanced back over his shoulder at Tang, who was waiting by the road in the dark, next to the car. “Admiral, the only way I can get things to make sense is if we change one of the variables. Something we’re assuming is true but may not be.”
“Spit it out, Clay.”
“Sir,” Clay said. “I don’t think General Wei’s daughter is dead.”
Langford looked at the phone on his desk with surprise. “What?”
“I don’t think she’s dead. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Langford peered thoughtfully at Borger.
“There is very little on his daughter’s death,” Clay continued. “Too little. I think he orchestrated it and had the records scrubbed.”
“But if his daughter is still alive, then why kill himself?” Borger asked.
“To protect her. If she were suffering from a heart disease, which I do believe she was, he would have had to fake her death to keep people from making a connection after he was gone. If his whole family was believed to be dead, then the investigation stops.”
Langford frowned, thinking. “So, what about the case?”
“I’m betting only a few people knew about it. And that he moved his daughter to someplace safe, then carefully left a trail of clues that led away from her. The one thing he couldn’t easily control was the cellular towers tracking his location. So he turned off his phone when he traveled to see her.”
“So he hid the case with her?”
“He may have done more than that,” Clay replied over the speaker. “If his daughter was dying, Wei may very well have been holding the one thing that could help her. The DNA from the plants in Guyana. And if they did find a way to transfer it to humans, he may have used the last of it on her. If he did, killing himself was the only way to prevent an investigation from finding her. A last and seemingly delusional act by the grief-stricken husband and father. But I don’t think he was delusional at all.”
“So he let everyone assume he was crazy and smear his name.”
“Exactly.” Clay switched the phone to his other ear. “Purposefully destroy his family honor to save the only family he had left.”
Borger nodded. “It makes sense, except that family honor is more important to the Chinese than anything. Could he sacrifice his family’s entire name for his daughter?”
The room fell silent when Clay didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Whether Borger knew it or not, it wasn’t a question for Clay… it was a question for Langford. Clay was one of the few people who knew what Langford had gone through with his own daughter.
Admiral Langford had grown quiet but finally nodded. “Yes, he could.” With a grave face, he turned and looked out the window. “I would have.”
Silence returned to the call. Clay waited almost a full minute before speaking again. “Wil, we need to find where Wei hid his daughter.”
“Right.”
“Probably someplace remote, but still with enough medical equipment to treat her.”
33
Seventeen-year-old Li Na Wei’s eyelids fluttered open weakly. The darkened room around her was blurry with just a few streams of light edging in from a nearby window. The old and tattered shade gradually came into focus along with the peeled paint around the wooden window sill.
She rolled her head more to the left and traced the wall back to a small shelf with dead flowers and a few other items she didn’t recognize.
From the top of her left hand, a clear IV tube ran up and over her pale arm to an old-looking machine. She looked at her hand and then raised it, gingerly wriggling her fingers.
On the other side, past her right hand, she spotted the faded chair and smiled, images of her father sitting next to her coming to mind. She often felt the warmth of his hand in hers even before waking up. But not today. He was probably back in Beijing.
Li Na took a breath and looked curiously down at the blanket on top of her. Her curiosity grew with her second breath and she took a third one, deeper this time. Something was different — she could breathe again. Still with some difficulty but better than before. And less pain.
She didn’t recognize the room. How long had she been asleep? Days? Weeks? It felt like a long time.
It couldn’t have been that long, she decided. Her muscles would have been even weaker.
She reached up with her right hand and tapped a small silver bell with her fingertip. A low “ding” sounded.
A minute later, a doctor leaned in. Upon seeing his patient awake, he smiled and entered.
“Hello, Li Na. How do you feel?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Dr. Lee.”
She blinked, then remembered his question. “I feel better.”
“Good.” He stood at the foot of her bed, touching her toes through the blanket. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and removed his hands. “Can you move your toes?”
She complied. Satisfied, Lee moved to her right side and inserted the tips of his stethoscope into his ears. “Can I listen to your heart for a moment?”
“Okay.”
He placed the round diaphragm lightly against her chest and listened. The beats were stronger and more regular.
“Squeeze for me,” he said, placing his right hand in hers.
She squeezed.
“Excellent. Are you in any pain, Li Na?”
“A little. Not much.”
“Good.”
The doctor gently raised her arm and slipped it through a blood pressure cuff. He then held the diaphragm of the stethoscope against her vein and pumped several times, staring at his wristwatch.
He was stunned. A few weeks ago she’d been days away from death. Then her condition began to improve. Her body seemed to be strengthening. And now, she was awake.
He’d seen miracles before, but not like this. Li Na’s heart was beating twice as strong as it was before, and faster. Her temperature was back under thirty-seven degrees Celsius, bringing a huge sigh of relief from Lee and his nurse. And it all happened after her father’s final visit.
Barring a relapse, Lee was growing increasingly confident the young girl would survive. Which meant fulfilling the promise he made to her father. And soon. Because the one thing General Wei had repeatedly pressed was that if his daughter did survive, there would soon be people searching for her.
34
M0ngol’s dark eyes sifted methodically through the computer logs of one of China Mobile’s system servers. The giant file was one of several that contained the company’s geolocation metadata for most of its customers in the greater Beijing area.
However, what M0ngol was searching for was not Wei’s phone number. He already had that. The geo data tracked signals from the SIM cards of each cell phone and more importantly logged the signal strength of each signal as it was polled. Comparing the strength against multiple towers allowed him to discern in which direction a unit was moving, such as General Wei’s just before it had been turned off.
What he’d found in the older logs showed him more of the same: a northbound direction prior to the tower losing the signal, then reestablishment of that signal days later, traveling south.