“There was a problem with the cell phone they gave me. I got no signal.”
Reaching into his side pocket, Bailey produced the cell phone Jake had been given. “This one?”
The two of them, Jake and Su, had left their bags with a sergeant who worked for Bailey. “You gonna do my laundry also?”
“We had to check them to make sure there were no weapons before we could bring them into our secure area. You understand.”
Jake did. He would have done the same thing.
“However,” Bailey continued. “We also found a .22 caliber handgun and a silencer, along with a clip full of rounds hidden in Su’s backpack.”
“Shit! I put that there. Part in her bag and part in mine.”
“What about the silencer? Where’d you get that?”
“We were attacked in Dandong, China. At a hotel. Almost killed.”
Bailey turned the phone around in his hands. “The phone,” he said. “It’s been tampered with… rendered inoperable.”
Jake thought about running through the cold forest in China, and then ran back from the time it had been handed to him in China as part of the package from Steve Anderson, the think tank man. Who, other than Jake, had had access to the phone? There was only one person. And she worked for a Chinese cell phone company. Damn it.
Just as Jake was thinking of her, Su came out from a treatment room, her left hand and wrist sporting a new, lightweight green cast. She rubbed the cast as she approached the two of them.
“Thank you,” she said, bowing to Jake and then Bailey, her eyes sparkling as if ready to cry. “Don’t know how to pay you.”
“Compliments of Uncle Sam,” Bailey said. “Listen, we should get going.”
“Where?” Jake said, confused.
“Our guys transferred the images you took to a computer. You need to tell me what in the hell we’re looking at.”
With that, Lieutenant Colonel Bailey escorted the two of them outside and drove them in a Humvee to a squadron secure facility. From the outside the building looked like it could have been administrative offices, but Jake was escorted through a number of cipher-locked doors and into a bunker-like chamber in the center of the building, with enlisted Air Force personnel manning computers and others listening through headphones. They had left Su in a waiting area in the front entrance. Jake knew that only those who needed access to this area were allowed inside. Rank had nothing to do with it. In fact, the wing commander probably had access, but the base commander, who was more concerned with running the physical dimensions of Osan Air Base, might not have access.
Bailey stopped at a station with a staff sergeant sitting in front of a twenty-one inch LCD monitor. On the screen, Jake immediately recognized the photo he had taken.
“What the hell is this, Jake?”
Jake pointed to the center of the monitor. “As you can see, it’s dark. But here. That’s about the size of a three-story house. At first I thought it was a large telescope. Then this here opened. Can you flip to another photo?”
The sergeant clicked that one away and brought up another image in Photoshop.
“That’s it,” Jake said, pointing again. “I think you know what that is.”
“Sergeant Jones,” Bailey said. “Let’s increase the size and focus on this area.”
If there was any doubt before, that was erased once the image became more clear.
“You want me to clean up the color and contrast?” the sergeant asked.
“No,” Jake said. “We’ll let the folks in Langley take care of that.”
“Zip it, encrypt it, and send a copy to Agency HQ.”
“Send a copy to Shemya, Alaska also,” Jake said. “Colonel Tim Powers. His eyes only. He’s the project leader and resident expert.”
The staff sergeant looked at Jake and then to his commander.
“Do what the man says, Jones.”
“Yes, Sir.” The sergeant went to work.
Bailey patted Jake on the shoulder and pulled him aside. “Nice work, Jake. From what I understand, Washington has been trying to confirm knowledge of China’s laser program for some time.”
Jake laughed. “At least since the last administration let the Chinese walk off with the plans.”
“Fuckin’ goat rope.”
The colonel escorted Jake out of the secure area. When they got to an inner corridor, Bailey stopped and turned to Jake.
“That Chinese woman. She’s hot.”
“Yes, she is,” Jake said.
“You more than just working together?”
Holding back a smile, Jake said, “I can’t believe you asked me that. Let’s go get a beer.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Bailey led the two of them into the front waiting area. He was the first to notice something wrong. First, the sergeant he had assigned to watch Su was laying on the floor in the center of the room. Knocked out.
And Su was gone.
41
When the new Central Intelligence Agency was formed out of the former CIA, FBI, and other government alphabet soup, they had sought a neutral ground to establish a new headquarters for the Agency. The location had to have enough room for new buildings, yet be close enough to the U.S. capitol. The powers that were at the time had selected Andrews Air Force Base near Camp Springs, Maryland. That would have been a good decision, and would have gone down in U.S. history as one of the most brilliant plans ever. The Air Force base was already a secure location, with the president’s fleet of aircraft based there. The airstrip also would have allowed the Agency to develop even further its own covert air force. But that plan was scrapped in favor of keeping it in the same old place in Langley, Virginia.
The external operations photo analysis division was housed in a deep, secure bunker used for that purpose since the Cold War. It was not only sheltered against a nuclear attack, but was filtered against chemical and biological agents.
The Director of Operations, or DO, whose name was only known by the upper echelons of the Agency, certain members of the office of the president, and members of the senate intelligence committee, leaned back in his swivel chair in a sound-proof office overlooking the photo analysts below. The DO was only six months on the job, having replaced the first man to hold that post, Kurt Jenkins, who had defined the new roll before moving on to the private sector as a consultant with the conservative think tank, The Western Institute.
A strong and intimidating figure, the DO still was not looking forward to this next meeting later that day. He held the photos from China, newly downloaded, decrypted, and enhanced digitally for his eyes only. It was obvious to him, even though he had not come up the ranks as a photo analyst, that the images were of a new land-based laser system nearly identical in dimensions and construction to their own system, although an older version that had been a prototype of the one they were establishing in the Alaskan wilderness. The secure call from Colonel Tim Powers on Shemya just minutes ago had confirmed his own suspicions.
Now he had no choice but to act.
An hour later, in a park a few miles south of Clinton, Maryland, the DO got out of the back seat of his Mercedes, dressed in running attire, told his driver he would be fifteen minutes, and wandered from the parking lot toward the trail where he frequently ran.
Glancing over at his driver, he stretched for a moment before heading out at a slow pace down the dirt trail. Clouds swirled above, threatening rain, and making the mid-day run seem more like a dusk outing.
In a quarter mile, he rounded a curve and started to slow his pace as he saw the two figures ahead. Then his slight jog became a walk until he approached the two men.