Jack turned his hands up on the table. “I’m open to suggestions.”
“Good. You’re on suspension, which you can use to your advantage. You’ve got some time. Use it to find out who the hell is pulling her strings.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to make a covert entry on her place, and do it carefully. She’s not a spook, she’s an analyst, but don’t take any chances. Be on the lookout for any countermeasures or telltales. See what you can find, but don’t bug her place. If she is working for the other side, she might be running security sweeps and detect it.”
Jack nodded. “Okay. I’ll slip in tomorrow morning when she goes to work.”
“Good,” said Chavez. “You might want to follow her for the next couple of evenings. See if she’s doing anything out of the ordinary. Meeting anyone.”
Gavin added, “Eating Chinese food.”
It was a joke, but Ding and Jack just responded to it with cold stares.
“Sorry,” he said. “Not the time.”
Chavez continued: “Obviously give your laptop to Gavin to have it checked out. We’ll have a team from Science and Technology on the fifth floor come by your place and sweep for bugs. Ditto your car.”
Gavin said, “I checked his car earlier today — it’s clean.”
Chavez nodded. “Good.”
Ding’s phone chirped on his belt, and he grabbed it. “Yeah? Hey, Sam. Okay. I’m in the neighborhood, actually. I’ll be right there.”
Chavez got up from the table quickly, draining his beer while he stood. “I’m going in to the office. Granger thinks he has a way to get me and Driscoll into China.”
“Good luck,” Ryan said.
Ding looked at the younger man, then put his hand on his shoulder. “Good luck to you, kid. Keep an open mind with Miss Kraft. Don’t let your emotions convict her before you figure out what’s going on. That said, even if she is not wittingly working for Center, she is another piece of the puzzle. You have to exploit that, ’mano. If you do this right, we can find out from her more about Center than we already know.”
“I’ll get it done.”
Chavez nodded to Biery, then turned and disappeared in the mist.
Dr. K. K. Tong stood at desk thirty-four, looking over the shoulder of the controller as she typed into Cryptogram. He knew most managers were intimidated by his presence at their desk while they worked, but this woman was extremely competent, and she did not seem to mind.
He was satisfied with her performance so far.
He had been making his rounds through the Ghost Ship when she called him on his VOIP headset and asked him to come over. Tong supposed he walked some ten kilometers a day between all the nodes in the building, and on top of this he probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty daily videoconferences.
When the woman at desk thirty-four finished what she was working on she turned around to face him, began to stand, but he stopped her. “Remain seated,” he said. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, Center.”
“What is happening at Hendley Associates?”
“We lost tracking and remote access to Jack Ryan’s phone on Saturday. This afternoon our deep persistent access into the company network ceased. It appears as if they detected the intrusion and took the entire network offline.”
“The entire network?”
“Yes. There is no traffic coming from Hendley Associates. Their e-mail server is not accepting messages. It looks as if they simply pulled the plug on everything.”
“Interesting.”
“My field asset, Valentin Kovalenko, is very good. I can have him meet again with his agent, Darren Lipton, and force him to apply pressure to his agent, Melanie Kraft, to find out how the intrusion was detected.”
Tong shook his head. “No. Hendley Associates was a curiosity. We hoped to learn their role in the American intelligence hierarchy. But then they became a problem in Hong Kong. Then came Miami, where they were even more of a nuisance. Our measures against them have been insufficient. I do not have time to devote to unraveling the mystery of Hendley Associates. If they have detected our presence on their network, then they might have more information about us than we know. It is time for larger measures.”
“Yes, Center. As was always the case, we can covertly report them to the American authorities, or direct one of our proxy assets in the American press to investigate them.”
Tong shook his head. “They know about us. Revealing them to the world reveals us to the world. No, we can’t do that.”
“Yes, Center.”
Tong thought for a moment more and then said, “I will call in Crane.”
“Yes, Center. Shall I end our relationship with Lipton?”
“No. He is FBI. He might still be useful. His agent, though… the girlfriend of the President’s son?”
“Melanie Kraft.”
“Yes. She has proved worthless, and she can compromise our asset Lipton. Send her details to Crane. I will have him remove that compromise.”
“Yes, Center.”
SIXTY-ONE
Domingo Chavez and Sam Driscoll sat in Gerry Hendley’s office with Gerry and Sam Granger. For the first time in the two years Chavez had worked for The Campus, Hendley’s laptop was not open on his desk. Instead he’d zipped it up in a leather bag and put the bag in his closet. It seemed a little paranoid to Ding, but there was a lot of that going around these days.
It was after eleven p.m., but no one commented on the late hour. The only topic of discussion was the potential to follow Mary Pat Foley’s request for help inside China.
Granger said, “We’ve found a way to get you into Beijing, and I talked to the Red Hand representative and let him know we might be requesting their help.”
Driscoll asked, “What’s our access?”
“The Propaganda Department of the PRC is conducting a major charm offensive with other nations around the world. Trying to rally support for China and pull support away from the United States. They are inviting foreign media outlets to come to Beijing to learn about China from a Chinese perspective, not what Hollywood says about it.”
Chavez said, “I’ve used media credentials as cover for status on more than one occasion in my career.”
“Yeah, the Propaganda Department is pledging free movement of the press in China throughout this conflict.”
Chavez said, “Yeah? I’ve heard other dictatorships say the same shit.”
Granger conceded the point. “You can figure that every step you take will be with a government minder on your arm and clandestine surveillance will be monitoring your every move.”
Driscoll said, “That sounds like it might interfere with our plans to work with a group of cutthroat criminals to link up with a group of armed rebels.”
Chavez chuckled.
Granger laughed, too, then said, “Red Hand has a plan to get you away from the minders.” He looked down at his notepad. “In Beijing the Ministry of Culture will offer you the opportunity to go on a number of media excursions. One of the excursions will be to the Great Wall. There is a main location where they visit, and a secondary, less traveled location. The name of it is listed here. You are to ask to see that portion of the wall.”
Driscoll asked, “And then what?”
“Somehow they will get you away from the minders, at which point they will take you to the rebels.”
“Tell me what you know about the rebel force.”
“One of their number is a cop, and he’s been alerting them to police crackdowns, government movements, and the like. They have been doing small-scale harassing actions against the government out in the provinces. They set some government vehicles on fire, blew up a couple of rail lines.