Ethan waited and Hazim breathed a last, terminal sigh.
‘They were Chinese,’ he said.
Ethan’s fists clenched a little tighter.
‘How many of the devices did you insert into American service personnel?’ he asked.
Hazim shrugged.
‘Hundreds,’ he said, ‘thousands.’
Ethan whirled to Lopez. ‘Get in touch with Jarvis, let’s get this out in the open as fast as we can.’
Ethan turned back to Hazim. ‘Tell me about Abrahem Nassir. Everything you know; where he’s been, who’s funding him and what his plans are.’
Hazim sighed, his head hanging low.
‘I don’t know. All I can be sure of is that he is being funded by a wealthy benefactor, and that he is intending to travel to the United States. I overheard his people saying that they had allies, in Africa.’
‘Where in Africa?’ Ethan demanded.
‘Somalia.’
XX
The American Embassy in Hong Kong was perched at an awkward angle on a steep hillside surrounded by massive skyscrapers that overlooked the island’s north shore and Kowloon Bay beyond. It looked to Hannah as though it had been built as an afterthought, a subtle snub to the distant yet global power of the United States.
The FBI vehicle that had picked them up from Hong Kong International Airport on the island of Chek Lap Kok, a few kilometres east of Hong Kong, pulled into the Consulate Building and a set of steel gates opened to allow it through into the parking lot under the watchful eye of a security guard. Hannah got out, slightly dizzy with fatigue as she walked into the Consulate Building with Vaughn alongside her, and they were greeted immediately by an attache who guided them through the building.
‘You really think that these guys will have anything of use after all of these years?’ he asked Hannah as they walked.
‘The Chinese are voracious record keepers,’ Hannah replied, ‘and the offices here have paper logs going back decades. If we can link even a single operative to the abductions, we’ll have a lead. I guess it all boils down to the state of the remains.’
Director LeMay had provided them with a brief before they had boarded their flight from the United States. Although it had contained little in the way of details, Hannah now knew that a body had been found washed up on the shores of Kowloon a day before. That body belonged to a former National Security Agency officer who had been stationed in Hong Kong some two decades before and been missing ever since. Hannah did not know what the NSA’s operative was doing in Hong Kong at the time, but given that the territory had been handed back to Communist China by the United Kingdom in 1997, it seemed possible that the NSA and other government agencies had been clearing house of any sensitive documents and programs before the Chinese could access them.
The Consulate Building did not have its own mortuary — instead the local hospital where the autopsy had taken place under the Bureau’s control had shipped images of the remains to the Consulate for viewing purposes. Hannah and Vaughn were led to a small conference room on the second floor and sat down, the windows overlooking the road below and giving them a glimpse of the bay to the north between the high rise buildings glinting in the sunlight. The FBI had numerous offices worldwide situated in consulate buildings and US Embassies, termed legal attaches and used as staging posts for federal interests around the globe.
Within a few minutes, Special Agent Brad Hinkley strode into the room. A Texan attached to the Hong Kong office, he brandished his own swaggering style of greeting, all firm handshakes and hugs before he sat down opposite them.
‘So, what brings you folks all the way out here? Director LeMay said it was urgent and to do with the body we recovered yesterday.’
‘1997,’ Hannah replied. ‘Four computer experts from the National Security Agency were abducted from Kowloon Bay while on a boat trip to the islands, presumed held by the Chinese ever since. The event occurred just before Hong Kong was repatriated to the Chinese by the British, allowing Communist elements to move more freely through the city.’
Hinkley nodded. ‘The office at the time put everything it had into finding them, but they vanished without a trace. Of course China denied any involvement and put their disappearance down to drownings. The Consulate had been careful not to say how or where the operatives actually vanished from, so the fact that the Chinese were able to pinpoint the disappearances as being on the waters of Kowloon Bay said everything. I read the files and it was figured that in 1997, on the verge of receiving back their ownership of the island, China wouldn’t do anything rash with their new prize. Big mistake.’
‘Do you know anything about what these guys were working on?’ Vaughn asked.
‘Beats me,’ Hinkley said, ‘it’s all so classified that I can’t get close to it and neither could anybody here at the Consulate in 1997, but we do know that when they vanished they had something on their possession.’
‘How so?’ Vaughn asked.
‘Because half the damned US Special Operations Service descended on both this office and the NSA’s Hawaii base where the NSA guys were originally stationed. It’s a listening post that monitors China, Taiwan and some of Russia. They were looking for something after the abductions all right, but they never found it and left empty handed as far as I know.’
‘And now this body shows up,’ Hannah said. ‘What’s the story?’
Hinkley opened a file and spread it before them. Hannah looked down and saw images of a young man in his twenties, and the gruesomely decayed remnants of the corpse fished out of Kowloon Bay.
‘Stephen Ricard, age twenty seven years,’ Hinkley announced. ‘He was an analyst for the National Security Agency stationed at Hawaii and posted to Hong Kong to maintain an NSA watch station out of an apartment on the south shore along with three other agents. All were on the record as being employed by a local British IT company, and all attended work there while also performing their analysis of China’s growing computer and cell phone network. He vanished along with his three colleagues in 1997.’
‘Are you sure these remains are his?’ Vaughn asked.
‘The body was badly decomposed,’ Hinkley admitted, ‘and the teeth had been removed to hinder identification of the remains, something else that the Chinese would have reason to do and that wouldn’t occur in a straight forward drowning. However the autopsy confirmed that according to the Medical Examiner, despite appearances, Stephen had died or been placed in the water only a couple of months prior to his discovery due to the presence of marine growth inside his body tissue, specifically various kinds of algae and such like. Although his teeth had been yanked, four minor fractures in his tibia, fingers and ribs from a childhood accident remained visible under X — Ray and confirm the remains belong to Stephen. He also had a small tattoo of a Goldeneye logo, some sort of computer game based on the Bond movie, on his left shoulder which is also just visible in the images.’
Hannah nodded as she saw a dark smudge beneath the yellow and purple flesh, smeared with what appeared to be a mixture of foliage and raw sewage that had clung to the body from the bay’s frigid waters. The chances of the tattoo and the fractures both belonging to some other unfortunate soul floating in the bay were highly remote.
‘Cause of death?’ Vaughn asked.
‘Purportedly drowning,’ Hinkley said, ‘but several more things rule that out. Firstly, there was evidence of damage to the interior of the trachea, consistent with a tube being forced down Stephen’s throat to flood his lungs with seawater. Along with the limited level of decay, that supports a staged drowning. Secondly, it was the damage to the victim’s brain that the Medical Examiner believes killed him.’