He lay down on the bed and thought over his situation. There was no reason for him to leave the hotel for operational concerns; the men he’d run from at the Peninsula were on his side now, or as close to being on his side as they ever would be. But still, he didn’t know who had seen him leave with the government goons, and the thought that there were eyes on him around here made him uncomfortable.
But he fought the urge to get up and go; as much as he loathed staying right where the bad guys knew he could be found, he recognized that leaving would just make Dai suspicious.
With his accommodations settled, he turned his thoughts to his larger operation. After a few moments’ worry and the resultant pain in the pit of his stomach that indicated he understood the stakes of this assignment, he told himself to calm down. Other than the situation with the two attackers the evening before, everything was proceeding exactly according to plan.
The CIA had sent Court on this operation in the first place because they knew he could get close to Fitzroy, and Fitzroy would get him in with the Chinese. Brewer’s orders to Gentry were to make contact with Fitzroy, act as if he were just an old employee looking for work, and get himself assigned to the Fan contract.
Court had done just as he’d been directed, and Dai had taken the bait. The colonel had given up little information about who, in fact, Jiang was, but Court knew why Dai wasn’t in a chatty mood about the target. Simply put, the colonel was down here to fix an embarrassing mistake, and he wasn’t going to reveal to a Westerner that such a mistake was even possible.
The Agency’s brief to Court told him that forty-eight-year-old Colonel Dai Longhai was the new director of counterintelligence of the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army, General Staff Department (3rd Department). This meant he was army but served as the security chief of a very elite and secretive branch of soldiers tasked with creating advanced persistent threats into the classified intelligence systems of its adversaries. Unit 61398 was the Chinese name for the group, but the CIA referred to them by the code name they’d assigned to the unit — Byzantine Candor.
Unit 61398 was one of the chief cyber warfare arms of the PLA, and they had broken into many Western government secure networks, including those run by the Pentagon and the entire Department of Defense. As far as anyone knew, they had yet to get into JWICS, the U.S. intelligence community’s most secure network, but it was not for lack of trying, and many in America’s counter-cyberintelligence realm thought it was just a matter of time, because the men and women of Unit 61398 were exceptionally well financed, supremely well motivated, and, frankly, the best in the world at what they did.
And within the elite men and women working at Unit 61398, the CIA knew of an even more select, more exclusive group, and this was the outfit Fan Jiang belonged to. Though Fan and his colleagues in this handpicked detail worked and lived near the rest of the unit, they were sequestered from them, because their job was something of the opposite of that of their colleagues. Fan was on a task force simply called Red Cell. They were charged with using the hacking techniques crafted by 61398 and then turning them around, retrofitting them for the purpose of attacking China’s own secure intelligence networks to hunt for flaws in their counter-cyberwar systems.
Red Cell knew the West was doing just what Unit 61398 was doing, so they applied 61398’s latest technology against their own classified systems. Day and night they sought to breach the most secure networks in their nation, to steal secrets from their own Ministry of State Security, their Ministry of Defense, even the Chinese Communist Party leadership.
The government of the People’s Republic of China was not exactly the world’s most trusting organization, so it vetted Red Cell members carefully, lest one or more of their number actually succeed in breaking into the systems and see something he or she should not see.
This made the members of Red Cell the most watched over, the most scrutinized of all of the members of Unit 61398, who were themselves among the most highly vetted in the nation. Every single member of the team had undergone rigorous background and party loyalty checks just to get into the unit. They had been dosed with truth drugs and given lie detector tests; their families, friends, and neighbors were routinely subjected to intense and occasionally hostile interviews.
The Red Cell had been a successful unit in the four years of its existence. It had found weaknesses in the Chinese intelligence community’s electronic communication practices by using the work of Unit 61398 to poke holes in what were thought to be secure networks. And they had done it all without one single security issue from any Red Cell members.
Until that night less than two weeks earlier — the night Fan Jiang ran from a hotel in Shenzhen and began his journey into the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.
The evening of the incident, Lieutenant Dai Longhai had been second-in-command of 2nd Bureau’s counterintelligence department, which meant he was the number two man over security for Unit 61398, but he’d been called into work in the middle of the night and informed that, beginning that moment, he was now a colonel, and he was now in charge, and his one priority was finding a runner from Red Cell.
Dai was given unprecedented powers to call up forces from the military and intelligence services, to put the border guards on high alert, and then, when there were confirmed CCTV images of Fan Jiang in Hong Kong, Dai had been given authorization to go over the border himself with a small army of killers and spies, and even to call in Western contract killers to help him out, since Dai thought white faces might make it into certain areas where Fan might try to run — places where his Chinese military and intelligence officers could be easily identified.
Fitzroy was contacted to bring in the gweilos, but to date, Fitzroy had failed.
Court learned all of this in his CIA brief, although he was not told how the CIA obtained this information. This was an SAP operation — a Sensitive Access Program. Sources and methods had to be protected, after all. But the CIA freely admitted they did not have a clue why Fan Jiang decided to run in the first place.
Court understood how these sorts of things worked for security chiefs; if Colonel Dai Longhai returned to the mainland with Fan’s head on a pike, his career would not benefit from this. He’d win nothing if he succeeded, but he would certainly lose everything if he failed.
The CIA did not want Fan Jiang dead, of course. They wanted him alive, which certainly complicated things for Court, but he understood how important it would be for him to succeed in his mission. Fan Jiang knew the Chinese secure networks inside and out, and Court couldn’t imagine anyone on Earth the U.S. government would want to get their hooks into more. The Agency would offer Fan Jiang the moon and the stars to work with them, and if Fan turned the Agency down, then the dangling carrot would be replaced with a swinging stick.
American national security was at stake — Fan Jiang would not be given much of a choice in the matter.
Court wasn’t sure if he was on a rescue mission or a kidnapping mission. It all depended on how Fan Jiang looked at his situation.
The only problem Court could see with the Agency’s plan was that if brought to a successful conclusion, it would leave Sir Donald Fitzroy in a house filled with over two dozen Chinese military and intelligence operators who would all be extremely angry with him.
Dai would kill Fitzroy for Court’s duplicity; of that Court had no doubt.
The CIA operation took this into account, at least on paper. Their plan was for Court to locate Fan Jiang, then for Special Activities Division Ground Branch paramilitary operatives to swoop in and snatch the Chinese soldier in such a way that made it look as if the Gray Man had executed his contract.