Jax followed her off the steps, then stopped when his phone rang. Punky was deep in thought but still heard his half of the conversation.
“What? When?”
She turned to him and grew concerned when she saw the look on his face.
“What are we doing about it?”
Jax looked at his watch, then furrowed his brow.
“We have her here, but we think there’s something going on.”
Even though Jax had played devil’s advocate and forced Punky to consider alternate explanations for the Ministry’s interest in Tan Lily, his comment to whoever was on the other end of the phone clearly showed he was worried. Like it or not, they had stumbled into the middle of something bigger than benign espionage activities on the West Coast.
Jax looked up and made eye contact with her. “The sooner, the better. Keep me posted.”
He ended the call and joined Punky at the edge of the lawn.
“What was that about?”
“That was my partner, Connor Sullivan,” Jax said. “We found her.”
“Her?”
“Our missing operations officer,” he said. “A Navy P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft was re-tasked from monitoring Chinese naval activity in the East China Sea after a fleet of fishing vessels received instructions to transit south. It appears they stumbled upon one of the trawlers transporting our officer from Hainan Island to a smaller island off the coast.”
Punky shook her head. “That’s a long way from Shanghai. Are we sure it’s her?”
He nodded. “The P-8A also intercepted transmissions that mentioned moving an American to Fenjiezhou Island.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose as if to stave off a headache brought on by trying to solve the puzzle. Even if the Navy had discovered the missing CIA officer’s location, she didn’t see how that fit with what Tan Lily had just told them. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Jax clenched his jaw. “This is why I came here — to find our missing operations officer.”
“Hear me out…” She trailed off as she looked into his determined eyes and tried stitching together the random and seemingly unrelated pieces of information they had collected. “I’ve been investigating the Ministry of State Security here in California for years. I’ve come face-to-face with their operatives and know what they are willing to do to accomplish their objectives.”
“Punky…”
She held up a hand. “I understand we need to get your officer back. I’m not advocating that we don’t. What I’m saying is that somehow this is part of their plan.”
Jax rolled his eyes. “Rescuing an intelligence officer they kidnapped is part of their plan? Come on.”
“You don’t understand. While you and I play checkers, they are busy playing chess. They have thought two, three, four moves ahead, and the best we can hope for is a draw. What I’m saying is that we need to be even more cautious, especially if what Tan Lily told us is true.”
Jax opened his mouth to reply, then quickly closed it.
She saw the look on his face and knew he was holding something back. “What?”
“We’re launching a rescue operation to bring her home. Connor is on his way to Clark Air Base in the Philippines to debrief her as soon as she is rescued, and the Navy is sending the USS Ronald Reagan south to support.”
She felt her heart sink. This was exactly what she had feared. “We’re playing right into their hands and practically giving them the perfect target.”
“This is what the Navy does — go into harm’s way.”
“But…”
Jax placed a hand on her shoulder. “It’s done, Punky. We’re going to get our officer back. My job was to find out if the doctor had any information that could help us do that.”
Maybe it was the way he had said it, but it almost sounded to her like he was willing to toss Tan Lily and her daughter aside now that they had found their missing operations officer.
“And now?”
He narrowed his eyes. “And now I am going to keep her safe until you find out who is after her and why.”
Her mind flashed to the dark gray Audi sport wagon she had seen out front of Torrey Pines Elementary School. She didn’t have any evidence to support her suspicion, but she believed the driver of that car was the person she was looking for.
And now she knew he wanted the doctor to activate the weapon’s switch.
Punky and Jax returned to the safe house to plan their next moves. She knew a Chinese operative was pursuing the doctor, and with the USS Ronald Reagan moving into the South China Sea, she couldn’t help but fear that an attack was already underway. She sat in the chair across from Tan Lily.
“Why use an engineered biological weapon?” Punky asked.
The doctor looked relaxed as she sat on the sofa and answered the question without emotion. “To take out a targeted ship at a specific time without firing a single shot.”
“But why?”
“To remove the only thing standing in the way of reunification.”
“You mean an invasion of Taiwan,” Jax said.
Tan Lily nodded. “It was believed that an engineered biological weapon gave them the greatest chance of success to accomplish that task. However, the fear was that whatever they infected the crew of the targeted ship with would also infect their own forces.”
“So, they wanted you to engineer a switch,” Punky said, tying it all together.
Tan Lily nodded. “It’s called a binary weapon. It could be through an engineered switch at the DNA or RNA level, or it could be through paired infections that can later combine for a desired effect.”
“But I thought you said this was child’s play. Why would they need you?”
She chewed on the inside of her lip, hesitating to answer the question. “Maybe…” She shook her head.
“What?” Punky asked, urging her to finish her thought.
Tan Lily closed her eyes and took a deep breath before answering. “My husband and I discussed the possibility of creating what we called a tripartite weapon. To our superiors who had instructed us to create the synthetic bioweapon, it would look just like an engineered pathogen with a switch constructed into it — just like they wanted.”
“Tripartite… you mean three parts,” Jax said.
She nodded. “It was our fail-safe. If we couldn’t sabotage the program and needed to move forward with synthesizing the pathogen, we would add a second switch to render it harmless. The thought was that if they ever managed to employ the weapon and activate the first switch, we could neutralize it by leaking the formula for something readily accessible or easily synthesized.”
“Like what?”
Tan Lily shook her head. “It was just an idea, and I fled with our daughter before we could begin testing it. I don’t even know if it was something Shen Yu investigated further.”
But Punky had latched onto the theory. “So, it’s possible that Shen Yu developed a synthetic biological weapon with an on switch and an off switch?”
“It’s possible,” the doctor admitted.
“Could you figure out what that switch was?”
“If I had a blood sample of someone infected with the pathogen that had already been activated,” she said. “But even then, there are over one hundred million potential compounds, and it would take a long time to find the right one.”