‘I don’t know any names,’ he repeated in a monotone voice.
Ethan leaned back in his seat and folded his arms.
‘It’s your superior officers you’re afraid of, right?’ he suggested. ‘If you go home now, having told us everything, you think that you’ll be sent into some prison somewhere for betraying state secrets.’
Sung’s oriental features were hard to read, somehow less expressive than those of other races, but Ethan saw the technician’s eyes wobble in their sockets as he thought of whatever hellish prison awaited him back home for his perceived failure.
‘It’s not going to be much better here,’ Ethan said as he leaned forward on the desk. ‘You’re in the country carrying out illegal surveillance on US assets on behalf of China. You’ll be tried, sentenced and imprisoned in a high — security facility where you’ll be on permanent lockdown twenty three hours per day. On the hour that you do get out there will be killers, drug dealers, Hell’s Angels and every other maniac you can think of who’ll just love to get to know you real well, and being a foreigner who tried to kill members of our military, just how much sympathy do you think you’ll get from the guards?’ Ethan let a smile crawl across his features. ‘There’ll be nothing left of you come this time next year.’
Sung swallowed but remained silent.
‘Or, we can cut a deal,’ Ethan suggested. ‘You go free.’
Sung looked up in surprise at that. So did the police officers and DIA agents.
‘I don’t know that we can offer him that after…’ began one of them.
‘Hear me out,’ Ethan said as he raised a hand to forestall the objection and then turned back to Sung. ‘You’re a computer operator, right? Are you the superior officer?’
Sung thought for a moment and then shook his head.
‘So you were just doing your duty,’ Ethan said.
Sung nodded and Ethan went on.
‘If this attack you’ve planned goes ahead, our countries could find themselves at war, Sung. China could find itself under attack, which will then draw other nations such as Russia into the conflict. Before we know it we could all be fighting each other in World War Three. Is that something you want to be responsible for Sung? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Your failure will be not helping us and seeing millions of innocent people die both here and in your own country because you didn’t have the guts to stand up and help us stop this attack before…’
‘We’re not attacking your country!’ Sung shouted.
Ethan looked at him for a moment.
‘You’re here,’ he replied, ‘you’ve implanted people, you were watching them on your screens Sung, I saw the video feeds before the crash.’
Sung glared at Ethan, hatred radiating from his dark eyes.
‘You Americans, always so sure of yourself and yet so simple in your thinking. We’re not attacking your country, we’re trying to stop an attack.’
Ethan frowned and leaned back in his seat.
‘Sure you are, Sung. You came all this way to protect our interests.’
‘Abrahem Nassir,’ Sung growled.
The mention of that name got Ethan’s attention and he leaned forward again. ‘What do you know about Nassir?’
‘He stole our country’s technology and we’re trying to get it back before he does anything else to provoke conflict between our nations.’
Ethan stared at Sung for a long moment. ‘You mean the technology that your country stole from ours, way back in 1997? The technology that you took from four National Security Agency employees and then killed them for it over many years?’
Sung averted his gaze, his anger deflated. ‘I was not involved in that operation. We are trying to make amends.’
‘How were you planning to do that, Sung? Who are you controlling?’
Sung smiled, his eyes still cold and black.
‘Your agents,’ he said, ‘maybe people in this room. Maybe people you know.’
Even as Ethan was about to ask who the technician was referring to, the door to the room opened and an officer urgently beckoned Ethan to join him.
‘You need to see this.’
Ethan got up and followed the officer to a second room down the corridor, where the computers and screens from the captured van had been set up again.
‘I don’t know what the hell we’ve got here,’ a police IT expert said as he sat before the screens, ‘but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’
‘I thought that the hard drive had been stolen,’ Ethan said. ‘I saw it taken.’
‘It has,’ the IT man said, ‘but the other drives were recording much of the data the Chinese must have collected since they arrived here. You’re looking at footage a few hours old.’
Ethan looked at the screens before him. Both showed images of the view through a windshield of a car driving through what looked like Washington DC, and Ethan peered at the images for a moment as he tried to figure out whose eyes he was observing the scene through.
He turned to a man sitting manacled to a chair in the same room, the older Chinese agent they had captured in the van.
‘Get him over here.’
The police hauled the man to his feet and dragged him across as Ethan pointed at the screens.
‘Who are these people?’
The man remained silent, his lips thin and straight and his gaze directed somewhere over Ethan’s shoulder. Ethan stepped forward, reached down and grabbed the man’s testicles in one hand as he twisted them and yanked them brutally upward.
The man jerked as though electric currents were seething through his body as he went up on his toes and Ethan growled into his face.
‘Ten seconds and I’ll twist them clean off! Your name and the names of those people on the screens!’
‘Jiang Sin!’ the man squealed. ‘I can’t tell you their names!’
Ethan twisted harder for a moment and then he released Jiang Sin. The Chinese man sagged, coughing and tears streaming from his eyes as he spoke.
‘We’re trying to stop Abrahem Nassir,’ he said weakly.
Ethan peered at Jiang. ‘Prove it!’
‘Nassir is trying to assassinate the Presidents of both our countries!’
‘Both of them?’
‘Yes!’ Jiang insisted. ‘His plan is to start a war between China and America, and that’s something that we do not want!’
Ethan stared at the screens for a moment longer. ‘But you were watching through the eyes of two people.’
‘Yes,’ Jiang said, ‘the second signal was not ours! That person is being controlled by Abrahem Nassir! We intercepted it and were trying to track them down using the person we implanted!’
Ethan stared at the two screens, and then he saw the person in the car look across a quiet street at a row of buildings, one of which Ethan recognized instantly. Vantage Aviation Hire. He heard Jarvis’s words echo through his mind.
During the attack, several witnesses reported noticing that the general was suffering a nosebleed. The small size and design of the devices caused minimal discomfort for the wearer, but he has told us that they also caused nosebleeds from time to time.
Ethan whirled to the police officers.
‘I’ve got to move, now! Keep these men in custody, no matter what!’
XL
Ethan dashed out of the police station, his cell phone in his hand as he hurried toward his vehicle.
‘Jarvis’
‘Hannah Ford was implanted,’ Ethan said as he reached the pool car. ‘The Chinese must have got to her when she was in Hong Kong.’
‘But she was checked, scanned!’ Jarvis protested. ‘She was clean when they passed through the airport!’
‘Well, somehow the Chinese got something into her and they’re not telling us what!’