“What do you mean?”
“Well, like this CIA guy they killed. Tom didn’t tell you what he was looking for. It was part of an op that I was working. Have you ever heard of the CCDI?”
“No.”
“It’s the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. A Chinese organization that is supposed to root out corruption in their government. A few months ago, it got a new boss. A guy by the name of Jinshan. Cheng Jinshan. Heard of him?”
“Uh, no.”
She laughed. “Sorry, of course you haven’t. Sometimes I forget that everyone doesn’t spend all day studying obscure Chinese businessmen and politicians. Well, this guy Jinshan is well connected. He’s a very successful entrepreneur, but also was rumored to be tapped into the Chinese cyberwarfare units with some of his Internet companies. We knew he was working closely with the government agency that heads up their Internet censorship program.”
David said, “How’s he involved in all of this?”
“Turns out, he’s more than tapped in to the government’s cyberwarfare. He practically runs China’s cyberwarfare program. This guy has been interwoven into their operations from the beginning. Anyway, Jinshan is now put in charge of the CCDI, a position that is almost always given to a politician. But this time the Chinese president himself picks Jinshan, a businessman.”
“This is for cyberwarfare?”
“No. Stay with me. Jinshan has his hands in everything. He owns a lot of companies. At least one of them does the majority of the real technically challenging work for China’s offensive hacking programs. When you hear about cyberattacks on the news that originate in China? It’s probably run by one of this guy’s teams. But his newest job is in an organization that has nothing to do with cyber. That is the CCDI. The CCDI is supposed to get rid of crooked politicians. And trust me, China, like everywhere else, has plenty of them.”
David said, “Supposed to. But that’s not what Jinshan is doing?”
“We think that the Chinese president has been using Jinshan and the CCDI to whittle away at the government’s leadership and shape it the way he wants. It’s Tyrant 101: clean house of all who could oppose you.”
“So what did you guys do?”
“Well, naturally we at the NSA started paying much closer attention to him. I was looking into Jinshan’s secured files and computers—”
“Is that legal?”
She looked annoyed. “Are you a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Good. Well, neither am I, so let’s not worry about legality, shall we? Anyway, it turns out he really is a much bigger fish than we thought. Like I said, he had his hands in everything. He rubs elbows with their highest-ranking military brass and has played golf with several members of their politburo. Some people think he might even be responsible for getting the current Chinese president in office. So we started an operation to monitor him more closely. The CIA agent that was killed was our man on the ground. But I had no idea what he had uncovered until yesterday, when Tom read me in.”
David said, “So what does Jinshan have to do with a Chinese attack on the US?”
“I don’t know exactly. I just know that our ground asset had started getting close to people in the CCDI. He began to realize that the whole point of that organization, which is supposed to be about stopping corruption, was now to fill key government leadership roles with people who were handpicked by Jinshan. I told you that before Jinshan got tapped for the CCDI leadership role, we didn’t have too much on him. Well, that isn’t true for the people he was picking to fill different political leadership roles. They are stacking the deck with politicians that are or have been closely aligned to the military and intelligence services. It’s like they’re militarizing all government posts over there. The CIA agent was supposed to get into some secure hard drive that would give us more info on their strategy and endgame. That is where he must have gotten the info Tom shared earlier. Someone must have been onto him though…”
“How is this not making world news?”
“Think about what else Jinshan controls — the information. The Chinese media is owned by the government. What he doesn’t want made public doesn’t get made public. And honestly, nothing worthy of the big global news agencies has happened yet. But if you connect the dots, there are major shifts in leadership taking place.”
“Who else at the NSA knows about what Tom told us?”
“About the attack plans? Not many that I know of. My boss was working with Tom and some others in the CIA. But at the NSA, it was just my boss and me. We compartmentalize information like crazy. Thank goodness we do. If there really are sleepers in the NSA, we wouldn’t want this to get out. We wouldn’t want them to know that we know. With any luck, we still might be able to get out ahead of this thing.”
Brooke and David talked for another hour. She was a local Maryland girl, had gone to UMBC, and excelled in mathematics and computer science. She had interned at the NSA while in college and worked there for the past fifteen years.
Eventually, David politely hinted that he needed a nap. He got the impression that she would talk the entire flight if he let her. But they ended their conversation and David found himself alone looking out the oval window into the vast evening sky.
David kept thinking about his family. He was worried about the short term and how his wife would react to his being missing. And he was worried about the long term — about how their lives might change if America really was thrust into a war of this scale. David’s family would be affected more than most.
When your father was an admiral, it was expected that each child would serve, go to sea, and give up the comforts of civilian life. The other two siblings were certainly fulfilling this obligation. His sister, Victoria, was a rising-star helicopter pilot living in Jacksonville, Florida. Their brother, Chase, had been a SEAL. Now he did overseas security work for the State Department… at least, that’s what David had thought. What had Tom meant by saying he works for us? David was the only one who hadn’t turned military service into a career.
Aside from the occasional holiday, David hadn’t seen much of his father or siblings over the past decade. Being in the military after 9/11 meant a lifestyle of long and frequent deployments. As the commander of the Navy’s newest carrier strike group, this was likely Admiral Manning’s last time at sea.
David realized that the last time he had seen the three of them was at his mother’s funeral. She’d died a little over a year ago now. It was a cruel irony that a woman who had loved others so deeply would die of heart failure at the young age of sixty-one. David had thought about her every day since then, and it had taken over a month for those thoughts to stop drawing tears.
Now his father and the three siblings were scattered around the world, each one serving their country in his or her own way. Was a coming global war really about to envelop David’s family? A few hours ago, that thought would have seemed preposterous. But now…
It was all just too hard to believe. What was the saying? The simplest explanation was usually correct. The problem in this situation was that there didn’t appear to be any simple explanations.
David had a choice here. He could go or stay. Should he trust everything that Tom had told him? If he really felt this wasn’t safe or legitimate, he could try to escape when they landed.
No. David would get on the next plane. In that moment, he committed. Cautiously, but firmly. For now, he chose to believe that Tom was being truthful. After all, no one in the CIA ever told a lie. Talking to Brooke had helped. After the first five minutes of speaking to her, David had instantly liked and trusted her. And she was smart. If he had learned anything from his days at the Naval Academy, it was to follow smart people. It almost never failed. Almost.