He could see one of his vans move into position at the nearest intersection. The driver made eye contact and nodded. The female agent he had been sitting with walked up behind him.
“How do you want to play it?”
“I’ll see if I can pay off the woman working the front desk. If I give you the thumbs-up, get the vans right outside and use the curtains.”
She nodded.
Tetsuo walked into the massage shop and approached the older woman sitting at the front desk. She barely glanced at him, her eyes fixed on her phone as she asked him to choose from a menu of services. Her Japanese was heavily accented — Korean.
“You the owner?”
She looked up at him suspiciously. “No. My husband is the owner.”
He took out his wallet, thumbing through a wad of cash. “You know that woman that just came in? Is she a regular?”
“Yes,” the Korean woman answered, taking a few bills.
“I need to speak with her.”
“She is busy.”
Tetsuo placed his hands on the counter. “I don’t want to cause trouble. But I don’t think that she’ll come with me unless I make her. I need you to go in that room back there and close the door for the next five minutes. Can you do that for me? I promise you that I won’t hurt her, and I won’t get you in any trouble. But I don’t want anyone to see it when my friend and I take her out. Okay?” He slid over a thick wad of cash.
She looked down at it, counting, and looked back up towards him, a curious smile appearing on her face. “Who are you?”
“What room are they in?”
“Room four. Upstairs.”
“Is there a lock?”
“No locks. We’ve had problems with locks. Who are you?”
“Five minutes.” Tetsuo held up his hand, thumb and fingers extended.
The woman shrugged. “Knock on the door if anyone comes. And don’t get me in trouble with the police.”
“I won’t. Is that camera on?” He pointed up at the black orb hanging down from the ceiling.
She nodded.
“Let me see you turn it off. You can turn it back on when you come out.”
She picked up her phone and tapped a few times, then showed him the screen as she selected OFF on the security camera’s application. Then the woman disappeared into the back room.
Tetsuo waited until the door was shut and turned to give a thumbs-up to his agent standing outside. She turned and gave a nod to the van, which in turn made a call to the second van. Both pulled up close to the curb, only feet from the door.
Then the back doors of one of the vans opened and Tetsuo’s team members set up curtains that shielded the short path from the parlor entrance to the vans.
“Room four, upstairs. No locks.”
The three men who moved ahead of him were members of the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Most of these men were former special forces guys. They had made a career of apprehending and killing terrorists. This operation was a little different, and they had been warned. If their information was correct, she was one of an elite group of Chinese intelligence operatives, and she could be quite lethal.
The team crept towards the door marked with a 4. Two held silenced pistols. Tetsuo and the other man gripped Tasers.
It happened in a flash.
The door opened, and the three professionals sprinted into the small room. The woman was in her bra and panties, straddling the American service member, who lay on his stomach, while rubbing oil onto his back. She jerked her head around as the door opened, hopping off the man and trying to respond, but they were too quick. Tetsuo’s men grabbed her, separated her from the American man, who was yelling, and then zapped both of them on the side. Then one of the CIA operatives removed a pair of syringes from a case attached to his waist. Both the American service member and the Chinese spy were injected with a solution that would keep them unconscious for the next few hours.
The men quickly dressed the limp bodies and carried them into the back of the lead van, where they were tied down on stretchers and carefully monitored. The American would be dropped off with his military ID and otherwise empty wallet just outside of the base. Tetsuo wanted it to look like a robbery. The service member wouldn’t remember much, but his buddies would know that he’d left the bar with a prostitute. They would assume that she had been part of the heist.
It would make sense that she would never show up around that area again.
The hooker was one of Jinshan’s operatives, they had learned, but she wasn’t anything like the highly trained Lena Chou. This one was straight honey trap, used to lure in men who might know something about American and Japanese military movements or technology.
After they’d interrogated her for a few hours, promising her the reward of a safe life in America, without the threat of retribution from her Chinese handlers, she finally talked.
And she had a lot to say.
The hooker had a prodigious customer list. It included low-ranking clientele, like the enlisted men in the bar, who had access to flight schedules and deployment status, but also higher-ups, including a colonel in the US Air Force who had bragged about the F-22s that were coming to his base. She had even worked her magic on a Japanese executive who was giving her access to AEGIS radar technology being sold to the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Some of the classified information these men provided was knowingly exchanged for sex. Others were clueless as to the importance of the details they let slip — at least, according to her.
Under normal circumstances, each one of these clients would be investigated, questioned, and charged. But these were not normal times, and that wasn’t what Tetsuo was interested in today. The woman was working for Jinshan’s agents, and Tetsuo wanted to know any special instructions that Jinshan’s office had given her in the last few weeks that might be related to the shipping containers being managed out of the Tokyo office.
“They told you to meet someone coming from China?”
“Yes, they wanted me to keep him company.”
“Is that normal?”
“Not at all.”
“Why do you suspect they are doing that?”
“They said that his confidence is low. This man is upset about the things he is doing. Stressed out. They thought that I might be able to help with that. And they wanted me to keep an eye on him.”
The woman was sitting on the couch, drinking from a bottle of water. She observed her three interrogators with careful suspicion but seemed indifferent to the work she was involved in. As if it was totally normal.
Tetsuo said, “What were you supposed to do?”
“If the Indian-American man said anything that made me think he was disloyal, I was to notify my handler immediately. They told me that they were worried about him having second thoughts. They want to keep using him. Apparently, he’s a boy genius or something. But if he’s not able to keep working for them, they want to take care of the problem soon.”
Tetsuo’s face remained impassive at the mention of the man being Indian American.
“Does he have a name?”
“His name is Natesh Chaudry.”
Tetsuo wrote down the name on his notepad.
The woman said, “He doesn’t know me… yet. I’m supposed to make it appear natural.”
“Tell us when and where you’re supposed to meet him.”
16
David’s youngest daughter was staring at him from her baby seat, the tower of plastic that rolled up next to the kitchen table, ensuring that her head was slightly above theirs when she ate. Maybe that was where she had gotten the idea that she ruled over them.