Ryan turned his head away from the monitor, looked back over his left shoulder, and saw Target Five’s foot sticking up.
Jack looked on the top of the center monitor and saw the small camera built into the display’s bezel.
This image had been taken sometime in the last sixty seconds, while Ryan downloaded data off the hard drive.
He was being watched this very second.
Before Jack could say anything else, Chavez’s voice blasted his right ear. “Fucking split now, Jack! That’s a goddamned order!”
“I’m gone,” he said, his voice a whisper. His eyes locked onto the lens of the tiny webcam, and his thoughts on whoever was behind it, looking at him right now.
He started to reach for the USB drive in the computer, but it occurred to him this machine would retain all the pictures of his team on it, which could easily be seen by whoever came to investigate Target Five’s death.
In a flurry of movement Jack dropped to the floor, unplugged the computer, and frantically ripped cables and cords out of the back of the machine. He hefted the entire thirty-pound device and carried it with him out the door of the flat, down the stairs, and out into the street. He ran through the rain, which was prudent as well as good tradecraft. It seemed a fitting thing for a man with a computer clutched in his arms to do in the rain. His car was a block away; he dumped the machine in the backseat and then drove out of Taksim toward the airport.
As he drove he called Chavez back.
“Go for Ding.”
“It’s Ryan. I’m clear, but… shit. None of us are clear. All five of us have been under surveillance tonight.”
“By who?”
“No idea, but somebody is watching us. They sent images of the entire team to Target Five. I took the hard drive with the pictures on it. I’ll be at the airport in twenty minutes, and we can—”
“Negative. If somebody is playing us you don’t know that that box of wires in your car is not bugged or fitted with a beacon. Don’t bring that shit anywhere near our exfil.”
Jack realized Ding was right. He thought it over for a second.
“I’ve got a screwdriver on my utility knife. I’m going to pull over in a public place and remove the drive from the tower. I’ll inspect it and leave the rest right there. Dump the car, too, in case anyone planted something while I was in Five’s flat. I’ll find another way to the airport.”
“Haul ass, kid.”
“Yeah. Ryan out.”
Jack drove through the rain, passing intersections with mounted traffic cameras high above, and he had the sick feeling that his every move was being watched by an unblinking eye.
FOUR
Wei Zhen Lin was an economist by trade, he had never served in his nation’s military, and consequently he had never even touched a firearm. This fact weighed heavily on him as he looked over the large black pistol on his desk blotter as if it was some rare artifact.
He wondered if he would be able to fire the weapon accurately, though he suspected he would not need much skill to shoot himself in the head.
He’d been given a thirty-second primer on the gun’s operation by Fung, his principal close protection agent, the same man who’d loaned him the weapon. Fung had chambered a round and flipped off the safety for his protectee’s benefit, and then, in a grave yet still somewhat patronizing tone, the ex — police officer had explained to Wei how to hold the weapon, and how to press the trigger.
Wei had asked his bodyguard where, exactly, he should point the gun for maximum effect, and the response Wei received was not as precise as the former economist would have liked.
Fung explained with a shrug that placing the muzzle against most any part of the skull around the brain should do the trick as long as medical attention was delayed, and then Fung promised that he would see to it that medical attention was, in fact, delayed.
And then, with a curt nod, the bodyguard had left Wei Zhen Lin alone in his office, sitting behind his desk with the pistol in front of him.
Wei snorted. “A fine bodyguard Fung turned out to be.”
He hefted the pistol in his hands. It was heavier than he expected, but the weight was balanced. Its grip was surprisingly thick, it felt fatter in his hand than he’d imagined a gun would be, but that was not to say he’d spent much time at all thinking about firearms.
And then, after looking the weapon over closely for a moment, reading the serial number and the manufacturing stamp just out of curiosity, Wei Zhen Lin, the president of the People’s Republic of China and the general secretary of the Communist Party of China, placed the muzzle of the weapon against his right temple and pressed his fingertip against the trigger.
Wei was an unlikely man to lead his country, and that was, to a large degree, why he decided to kill himself.
At the time of Wei Zhen Lin’s birth in 1958, Wei’s father, then already sixty years old, was one of thirteen members of the Seventh Politburo of the Communist Party of China. The older Wei had been a journalist by trade, a writer and newspaper editor, but in the 1930s he left his job and joined the Propaganda Department of the CPC. He was with Mao Zedong during the Long March, an eight-thousand-mile circling retreat that solidified Mao as a national hero and the leader of Communist China, and which also secured a comfortable future for many of the men around him.
Men like Wei’s father, through the happenstance of history that put them alongside Mao during the revolution, were considered heroes themselves, and they filled leadership positions in Beijing for the next fifty years.
Zhen Lin was born into this privilege, raised in Beijing, and then sent to an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. At the Collège Alpin International Beau Soleil near Lake Geneva he developed friendships with other children of the party, sons of party officials and marshals and generals, and by the time he returned to Beijing University to study economics, it was all but preordained that he and many of his Chinese friends from boarding school would go into government service in one form or another.
Wei was a member of a group that became known as the Princelings. They were the rising stars in politics, the military, or in business in China who were the sons or daughters of former top party officials, most of them high-ranking Maoists who fought in the revolution. In a society that denied the existence of an upper class, the Princelings were unquestionably the elites, and they alone were in possession of the money, power, and political connections that gave them the authority to rule the next generation.
After he graduated from college Wei became a municipal official in Chongqing, rising to the role of assistant deputy mayor. He left public service a few years later to go to Nanjing University Business School for his master’s in economics and a doctorate in administration, and then he spent the latter half of the 1980s and all of the 1990s in the international finance sector in Shanghai, one of China’s new Special Economic Zones. The SEZs were areas established by the Communist central government where many national laws were suspended to allow more free-market practices in order to encourage foreign investment. This experiment with pockets of quasi-capitalism had been an unmitigated success, and Wei’s education in economics, and to a greater extent his business and party connections, put him at the center of China’s financial growth and positioned him for even greater things to come.
He was elected mayor of Shanghai, China’s largest city, at the turn of the millennium. Here he pressed for further investment from abroad and further expansion of free-market principles.
Wei was handsome and charismatic, and popular with Western business interests, and his star rose at home and around the world as the face of the New China. But he was also a proponent of strict social order. He supported only economic freedom; the residents of his city saw no liberalization whatsoever in their personal freedoms.