“It’s okay, Master Chief. For the next hour, we’re just five soldiers in a room.” Zee opened his mouth to speak, but Cathermeier beat him to it. “No, Mr. Gurtz, you may not call me Chuck.”
There was laughter all around.
“Let’s get to it.” Cathermeier shut off the lights and turned on the slide projector. A black-and-white satellite image of a commercial harbor appeared on the screen. “We’ll start from the top,” Cathermeier began. “Penetration …”
He spoke for twenty minutes, clicking through the slides as he covered every aspect of the area: terrain, weather, military, and civilian presence … Everything save the location or why they were going.
Smitty broke in: “General, what’s the job? Are we supposed to just render this mystery location safe for world democracy, or is there something specific you want us to do?”
Cathermeier laughed. “You’ll get the specifics once you’re en route, but in short, your mission is straightforward: Infiltrate a heavily guarded coastline via submarine lock-out, penetrate inland, lay up, reconnoiter the harbor, and finally, provide strike support as directed.”
Provide strike support as directed, Jurens thought.
Translation: Something was gonna get bombed, and it would be their job to make it happen.
Faced with steep odds against finding Genoa, Oaken had to make some assumptions.
The first was that Tanner’s theory held water, which seemed the case. The timing and efficiency with which the Guoanbu had rolled up the Ledger network was telling. They’d known details that surveillance alone couldn’t have provided.
What about Genoa himself? According to Tanner, the man had been a colleague of Soong’s, which meant he worked in either the military or intelligence communities — or both. Therefore he was not an agent, but rather a professional spook. That certainly narrowed the field of candidates, but even so, Oaken knew it would be like looking for a piece of lint in a snowstorm.
With no where else to start, he went back to the beginning.
Eight hours later he knew the details of the ledger from start to finish, top to bottom. He’d read every intelligence report and every analysis he could get his hands on. He was looking for a nick in the onion’s skin that would allow him to start peeling layers. It wasn’t there. Ledger should have worked, but it didn’t. No one knew why.
He stood up, stretched, then walked into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. He was dumping water into the pot when an angle bubbled up from his subconscious. “Wang Trahn,” he murmured.
In 1997, wan Trahn was a thirty-nine-year-old clerk in the archives of the Ministry of State Security. Unmarried, lonely, and enticed by the sexy images flooding his country from the West, Trahn began to imagine America as the paradise so many immigrants believe it to be. The Coca-Cola was refreshingly sexy; the hamburgers were made “your way” by smiling beach bunnies; the automobiles were plentiful and luxurious. If you wanted it, you could have it and/or be it. You could work on Wall Street, or be a cigar chomping police detective, or even an actor in Hollywood.
Having heard rumors of how hard it was to get to America, and how so many of his countrymen arrived only to find themselves enslaved by the same people who transported them, Trahn started looking for a better way. It didn’t take him long to realize his job was the key.
Every day he handled documents for which the Americans would pay handsomely. Not only would they get him out of China, but they would make him rich in the process.
Trahn spent the next year gathering thousands of documents, reducing them on the photocopier, then smuggling them out of the archive building. If it looked even remotely important, he took it. The crawl space in his basement soon overflowed with files, reports, and photos.
Once certain he’d collected enough, Trahn bought a back pack, stuffed it to the brim with his plunder, took a taxi to the U.S. embassy, then begged his way into the courtyard. He was met by the CIA’s deputy station chief, who looked at Trahn’s identification, then inside the backpack, and then promptly took him inside.
It was just past dawn when Tanner, Cahil, and Dutcher arrived at the office. They found Oaken asleep on his couch. “I’ll go make coffee,” Cahil said. “You see if you can rouse him.”
Ten minutes later they were sitting in the conference room. Red-eyed and hair askew, Oaken was sipping a cup and arranging notes. Despite his obvious exhaustion, the glint of excitement in his eyes was unmistakable.
He’s in his element, Briggs thought. Adventure, Oaken style. “How long have you been here?”
Oaken glanced at his watch. “Thirteen — no, fourteen hours.”
“Nothing spells fun like an all-night research session,” Cahil said. “That’s my motto.”
“You have a motto?” asked Tanner.
“Several. Depending on the situation.”
“So,” Dutcher said, “Briggs told me about your project. I assume you found something?”
“I did,” Oaken replied. “First, though, the story.” Oaken took them through the Wan Trahn saga, ending with his evacuation to the United States and subsequent debriefing with the CIA. “Trahn was what they call a ‘Hoover’: he sucked up every bit of information in sight then dumped it on us. When Langley finished counting, he’d delivered four thousand pages of documents.”
“Four thousand?’ said Cahil.
“Yep. Since he worked in the archives, though, none of it was current. It gave us a lot of general info on how the MSS and PSB run their in-country stuff, but since most of it was still coded, we didn’t get any nuts-and-bolts details. Plus, there was a lot of random stuff — bits that fit other puzzles, but not enough to build a picture — unless you know what some of the puzzle pieces look like, that is.”
“Which you do?” Dutcher asked.
“Yep. I accessed the database where Langley keeps Trahn’s dump, then ran a search using some of the dates and keywords from Ledger. They way I figured it, if Ledger hadn’t been burned by someone inside the network, you wouldn’t expect to see any of that info in the Guoanbu archives until after the network was rolled up. The only way they could have gotten the information was from the interrogation of agents, right?”
Tanner nodded. He had an idea where this was going, and he could feel his heart pumping a little harder. “Right.”
“Well, surprise: I turned up over four hundred references that match Ledger criteria.”
Cahil said; “So in plain English, the MSS was talking about Ledger before they rolled it up.”
“Long before. The first reference was just ten days after you got in-country, Briggs.”
My God, Tanner thought. Less than two weeks in, and they’d been onto him. He’d been certain he’d covered all the bases, but in truth the Guoanbu had been ahead of him every step of the way.
Dutcher said. “You know how lucky you are? By all rights, you shouldn’t have gotten out.”
Tanner managed a half-smile. “Glad I didn’t know that then. What about Genoa, Oaks?”
“That’s the kicker. You said everyone was arrested, right? No one got away?”
“No.”
“In all of the Guoanbu’s references to Ledger, the name Genoa doesn’t show up once. You met with him dozens of times, either in person or by brush pass, and he’s not mentioned once.”
“They didn’t have to; they already knew who he was.”
Oaken nodded. “You were right. Genoa was the double.”