The three days on the conference floor passed without incident, but the last evening in Shenzhen was critical, because Liu and Chen knew that anyone who attempted to go AWOL while traveling would likely do it either the moment they arrived at their destination, or on the last night. The last night was prime time for a man to do a runner, true, but meek little Fan had given them no trouble, nor could either of them envision a scenario that had him acting counter to his orders. He was a tiny, frail, bespectacled, fragile little geek, and when it came down to following commands, he was nothing if not a good soldier.
Liu and Chen celebrated the end of the stress of walking the floors of a busy conference full of potential threats for three days, having to guard a man in the presence of literally thousands of foreign actors, by picking up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a market across the street from the hotel.
Neither of them recognized it at the time, but the Jack Daniel’s was the kid’s idea in the first place. He said he needed to get some cold medicine, so the three men entered the market. Fan and Chen walked over to the health aisles and the younger man picked out what he needed while Chen looked on and Liu stood at the front counter. Fan stopped at a liquor display, looked it up and down, and commented on how inexpensive the booze was here as compared to the prices he’d seen on the room service card by his bed. With a shrug he suggested to Chen that if they wanted to order a drink tonight with their meal they’d save the Ministry of Defense a lot of yuan by just picking up a bottle here.
Liu and Chen were not allowed to drink on the job; Fan knew this, and he also knew they would see this as a perfect opportunity to subvert their orders and enjoy themselves, without anyone in their command being the wiser.
A minute later the men walked out the door of the market with a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Coke. Their plan had morphed from a quick room-service meal and then bed before the early flight the next day back to the locked-down compound in Shanghai, to a long evening of drinking and watching television.
Now it was two thirty in the morning and the bottle of Jack was empty, as was the box of cold medicine. Liu and Chen were incapacitated, true, but Fan was positively frozen himself — worried they’d wake tomorrow and he’d still be right here, staring back at them like a stone statue of a terrified and guilt-ridden little man.
Fan took another long look at the two men in the dark. He had nothing against Liu and Chen; they were not nice to him in any respect but they were government security men — Fan had been around the type since university, and he’d yet to meet one who’d treated a protectee of his low rank with any sort of deference or even kindness. But he knew that they had their job to do and he had his, and if Fan got away he knew they’d probably be placed in front of a firing squad for their failure.
But Fan rationalized this away — this wasn’t his fault. He didn’t want to run.
He had to run.
Finally he forced himself to stand, to collect his things, and to heave his backpack over his shoulder. With this newfound momentum he moved as softly as he could across the room and opened the hallway door. He shut it behind him with even more care, then tiptoed away from the hotel room and up the carpeted hall, heading for the stairs.
On the way there he did one last thing. With his heart pounding so hard he felt certain he could hear it echo off the walls around him, he reached out, put his hand on the fire alarm… and pulled it down.
Alarm bells screamed in the still hall, and Fan ran for his life.
It was on; there was no turning back.
Three hours before the first light of day, Chief Sergeant Class 3 Fan Jiang of the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, 2nd Bureau, General Staff Department (3rd Department), one of the most talented computer hackers on Earth and one of only a few entrusted with the virtual keys to China’s digital kingdom, left through the side entrance of the Sheraton in the middle of a large group of guests that overwhelmed hotel security: a fast-moving mass of humanity reacting to the fire alarm. When Fan was clear of the crowd on the street, he turned to the south and then headed off through the city, in the general direction of mainland China’s border with Hong Kong.
CHAPTER
ONE
The sleek executive jet descended out of the gray clouds just three miles west of runway 07 Left. As it lowered its landing gear, a set of binoculars focused on the plane, watching it streak over the water on its final approach.
“I’ve always wanted to kill a CIA officer. With my own hands. I’ve dreamed of the day, wrapping my fingers around his throat, squeezing the life from him, watching his eyes bug out and then go blank.”
The comment was in Mandarin, and it came not from the man with the binoculars but from his partner, on his left. Both stood on the roof of an airport outbuilding, doing their best to ignore the stifling morning heat. The man with the binoculars also did his best to ignore his colleague, and he kept his focus on the approaching aircraft.
He replied in Mandarin, as well. “Dassault Falcon. Might be a model Seven X. This should be our target.”
“Can you read the tail number?”
“Negative. Still too far.”
“Killing a CIA man won’t be anything like that guy I strangled Monday. I predict a CIA man will have real muscles in his neck. He’ll be a real fighter.”
With a muted sigh, the man with the binoculars said, “Why are you talking like this, Tao?”
“Because if someone gets off that plane, I predict Control will order us to terminate them. What do you think?”
“I think you are almost as crazy as Control.”
The man behind the Pentax binos kept his gaze fixed on the airplane as it touched down, then slowed on the runway. He checked the tail number now that it was close enough to make out through the ten-power lenses.
“It’s a match.”
“Good.”
Both men were relieved to see that the intelligence reports about the arrival of the plane had been accurate. The aircraft from America was right on time, and this meant the duo wouldn’t have to stand around up here on the hot roof all damn day.
While the man with the optics watched carefully, the aircraft taxied to the customs ramp, then over to the tarmac in front of Hong Kong Business Aviation Center, a fixed-base operator popular with high-end corporate jets visiting the city. Both Chinese nationals lowered their bodies to low squats to decrease any faint chance they could be detected from a cabin window. They didn’t expect to be spotted, because they did this sort of thing all the time and were confident in their skills, but the target today was likely to be someone adept in surveillance detection and countersurveillance measures, so they took no chances.
As intelligence officers with China’s Ministry of State Security, Wang Ping Li and Tao Man Koh were, by law anyway, precluded from working here without notifying the authorities in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong of the People’s Republic of China. The mainland had its rules, and HK, officially speaking, followed a different set of rules when it came to security matters. But these men were spies, and spies rarely followed the rules, and these two even less so, because they weren’t just any spies.
Their real mission in Hong Kong, the reason Tao and Wang and two dozen other men like them were here in the first place, meant they wouldn’t be checking in with the local authorities. They were ghosts, smoke.