A Time for War (8 page)

“Excuse me,” Sammo said. “I was told that upon landing we would—”

The consular aide held a finger to his lips. He took a notepad from inside his gray blazer. That in itself told Sammo all he needed to know. They were being followed, and by a car with wireless surveillance equipment. If he tapped keystrokes on a laptop or numbers in a cell phone, they would be intercepted and read.

New arrivals are watched,
he wrote.
We have standardized clothing at the consulate that helps to confuse—

Sammo took the pen.
I need to see it now. Have the driver pull over with mechanical difficulty. Raise the hood. Be prepared to head toward the original target.

The aide looked at him. Sammo removed his glasses. His eyes, his jaw, were hard-set. There was no confusing what he had written for a request. The young man understood and wrote instructions for the driver.

The driver read the instructions, and acknowledged with a nod. He pulled off the freeway at the Grand Avenue Exit and stopped at the curb in front of a line of trees. He shot a questioning look in the rearview mirror. Sammo nodded that the location was fine. He had already set the case on his lap and was working the combination lock.

The driver exited and raised the hood. The aide watched silently as Sammo removed a device from the foam padding of the case. It looked alien, like a stiff, sectioned sleeve from a ceremonial costume in the
Mulan of Mars
comic books he had read as a child. Sammo removed his windbreaker and fitted the device over his right arm. He had, in fact, made it from a long universal arm brace that was jointed at the elbow. He fitted one foam section over his bicep and another over his forearm, adjusting them until the bend in the device matched the bend of his elbow. He tightened several screws so the foam wouldn't shift. Then he slipped a hand strap between his thumb and index finger and fitted a small cap over his thumb like a thimble. When the entire unit was secure he removed its plastic sheath, revealing a tube on top of his forearm that extended from the crease in his elbow nearly to the knuckles at the base of his fingers. The tube was cushioned on the forearm foam section and connected by wire to the cap on his thumb. On the underside of his forearm and wired to the tube attachment was a fingerprint scanner. Sammo pushed his left index finger against it. The tube hummed.

The scientist handed the case to the aide and put his windbreaker back on. He was still wearing his cap and sunglasses. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, opened the van door, left it open, and lit the Hong Mei. Sammo did not smoke as a rule, but it proved useful as a signal at night or a distraction, as now.

He casually walked to the front of the van. He pretended to be interested in what the driver was doing.

“Where is the vehicle that was following us?” Sammo asked.

“It is an Escalade SUV. He continued past and turned right at the corner. He will circle and come back, then probably stop toward the end of the block. There.” The driver pointed to an open space behind a brown delivery truck. There was a stop sign; Sammo recognized the shape and color from his training. The Americans would have to wait before turning.

“You are ready to get back on that freeway?” Sammo asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You know the original destination?”

“I do, sir.”

“Tell me when you see him coming up the side street,” Sammo said. He faced away from the spot, leaning against the van, looking idly at the trees. Smoke curled from the cigarette. He enjoyed the smell. That, too, reminded him of home.

The driver stood on the street side of the van, looking around the open hood. He moved his hands idly among tubing and caps, his eyes on the end of the block.

“He's coming, sir.”

“Close the hood, get back in the van. We will be going north.”

The driver obeyed.

Sammo drew back his right hand sleeve so the tip of the tube was exposed. There was no sight; he didn't need one. He had practiced the differential like a circus marksman who had to shoot from the hip. The Escalade pulled up to the stop sign. Sammo pressed his index finger to the top of the thimble. There was a sound like compressed air escaping.

The Escalade did not move from the sign. The electromagnetic pulse from Sammo's device had disabled every electronic system in the SUV.

Sammo jumped back to the door, pulled it shut, and the van sped from the curb. He kept the cigarette, after grinding it out in an ashtray; there was no reason to leave even a partial fingerprint or his DNA. The van was back on the 101 headed north in under a minute. Sammo looked out the window, back at the exit. The Escalade was still at the corner. One of the FBI, perhaps CIA, agents had emerged. He was shouting into a cell phone.

“He doesn't seem happy,” the aide remarked.

“He has no reason to be,” Sammo said. “His car is dead. And his cell phone is not working. Would anyone else know our vehicle plate number?”

“The consulate has three vans and one limousine that travel to the airport,” the aide said. “I'm certain the license numbers are all on file.” It had taken him a few moments to gather his thoughts. He still wasn't quite sure what he had witnessed.

“How are they able to track us going forward?”

“The only license reading devices are on the bridges so that is not a concern. It is possible they may try to spot us using helicopters—”

“I don't think so,” Sammo said. “Not when they begin to consider what has just happened.”

The aide knew better than to ask what
did
happen. He was still sitting with the case on his lap.

Sammo removed his windbreaker, shut and unstrapped the device, and nestled it back in its padded container. He did not smile, did not show the satisfaction he felt at having met American overconfidence with something new, something he had helped to create.

Something that would show these people what it was like to interfere with Chinese progress, something that would cause them to lose what his parents had lost—dignity, face, and their very lives.

 

3

Suitland, Maryland

Dover Griffith had reread the
Truth Tellers
transcript a dozen times. Even though it was clear that Jack Hatfield was right about Squarebeam and Hawke, she couldn't figure out how this might have impacted the Chinook in Afghanistan. The military would have been aware of any Squarebeam technology being used there. The Tangi Valley was not exactly a hot spot for development anyway. It wasn't impossible that the technology could have shown up there and
“whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth,”
she remembered, but there was a reason why Sherlock Holmes refused to be an employee of any government agency. Dover couldn't pass a
what if
up the chain of command.

She set the transcript aside and concentrated on sifting through the data coming from the crash site. She was still studying the horrifying, heartbreaking photographs of the wreckage when her computer pinged an alert. It was from the Intelligence Coordination Center of Homeland Security. This division made certain that all data collected the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, INTERPOL, and other intelligence-gathering services was “cross-pollinated”—shared among appropriate departments. Because of her background in Chinese, Griffith received the alert from the FBI. It was a report filed by the San Francisco Field Office less than ten minutes before:

At 1:46
P.M.
, Pacific, an FBI vehicle with a two-man complement was on a routine SFO-to-San Francisco tail of a Chinese consulate van with one unknown passenger and a single carry-on case. The van left the 101, ostensibly with engine trouble. Agents followed, circling the block. Upon renewing visual contact the pursuing vehicle suffered complete electronic failure, including all forms of communication and GPS. The van quickly departed, headed north.

Griffith reread the report and sat back.

“Catastrophic failure,” she murmured. Not just of the car but of the cell phones within the car. That in itself was disturbing and had earned the incident a Level Two tag at the field office:
INVESTIGATE UTMOST URGENCY.
That allowed for the assignment of additional agents and any civilian resources. But the idea that it had happened twice within a thirty-six-hour period, a world away, was more alarming still.

Griffith idly rolled her mouse back and forth, not seeing the cursor or the screen but contemplating the incidents. It made no sense that China would be in Afghanistan to knock down a Chinook. But maybe that was not the way to approach these matters.

She clicked on her internal address book, accessed the drop-down menu, and sent a secure instant message to Dr. Doug Jane in the Advanced Electronics Research Division. She didn't want to set off any alarms until she had more information, so she had to watch what she said:

From DGriffith:
Thoughts on Chinook?

From DJane:
Electromagnetic pulse.

From DGriffith:
External?

From DJane:
No. Chopper abt 2K' high. Means 4K' blast diameter. Geosynch satellite wld've noticed.

From DGriffith:
Got it. Do you know if vehicular GPS units are powered by main battery?

From DJane:
Not. Wldn't help if they were stranded for a few days.

From DGriffith:
Right. Thanks.

So they were going on the assumption that a device of some kind was snuck on board. That would be one reason for the information blackout that occurred after the crash: complete home-base lockdown until the actions of everyone could be accounted for. The search would be expanded now, to include anyone who had access to the Chinook as far back as they'd need to look.

Griffith felt a burning in her gut. She was by nature a calm, easygoing woman; but what the ONI called “Potential Heightened Alert Situations” did not typically land on her desk. She wasn't the one who made connections; she interpreted or reacted to the findings of others. If these two incidents were related—and that was still a substantial
if
—then Dr. Jane was wrong. The hypothetical EMP source
was
external.

Griffith went to the Pacific Gas and Electric website. She saw no notices of outages in the area. She checked the cell phone carriers, routed herself into their online help center, saw no one complaining of any sudden dead zones. There was absolutely no mention of collateral damage beyond the FBI tracking vehicle.

It could be a coincidence,
she thought. The car died. An agent's phone charge ran out. But the GPS ran off its own power source, probably charged by the car battery. That couldn't be a coincidence.

She looked up EMP data in the ONI online library. She found a short overview of portable shock wave generators. They produced a targeted burst of acoustic or electromagnetic energy that shattered kidney stones and other small, local objects, or disrupted the stability of microprocessors. The current state of the art was that they could be linked imprecisely and ineffectively to antennae, dishes, conic arrays, or directional horns to produce non-local results. The bulk of the research in that area was being undertaken by a handful of private firms with the object of civilian applications such as high-speed chases. The big impediment was that existing technology was only effective against plastic or fiberglass. It was useless against any form of metal container, which disbursed and weakened the wave. The military did not have any research-and-development programs in that area, but were underwriting some efforts in the private sector.

Griffith ran a quick check of firms involved in the military-funded research. Nothing controlled by Hawke was on the list, but after all, Hawke had already demonstrated that he didn't work and play well with the military. The list of firms doing research without military funding didn't include any Hawke companies, either.

Still, Griffith couldn't get the impact of the original Squarebeam technology out of her mind. Squarebeam, or something like it, could have crashed the Chinook. The incident could have been an accident. Perhaps the Russians had been testing a wireless system in Afghanistan. But Squarebeam or something similar could also have disabled the FBI tracker vehicle. Again, that could have been accidental. But the two incidents together added up to a coincidence. Griffith had been suspicious of coincidences ever since she started studying journalism.

She wanted to run these events past a pair of knowledgeable, outside eyes. Someone who didn't have the step-by-step mind of an intelligence analyst. The Department of Homeland Security coined a term for individuals who until recently were grouped under the heading of “Conspiracy Theorists.” People who suspected their government of misdeeds were still called that. But people who believed that corporations or other governments were out to get us were backhandedly legitimized as “Assets with Paranoid Vision.”

Jack Hatfield might not exactly qualify as APV. But, except for herself at this moment, Hatfield was the closest Griffith could think of.

She decided to look him up.

Sausalito, California

The two men closed the trunk after securing the package, then left the small shipping company on Humboldt Avenue in Sausalito and entered the Audi parked out front. The five-year-old firm, Eastern Rim Construction, did brick-and-mortar work. They did not advertise and did not seem to do a great deal of business. But they made enough money working with the Chinese community, shoring up pre-earthquake-code buildings, to cover the rent on the five-hundred-square-foot cinder-block building they rented. They also made money lending out copies of blueprints from their library, a nearly complete collection of building documents pertaining to Chinatown. These were used for restoration projects and landmark evaluation hearings.