Blue Warrior (9 page)

13

Zhao residence
Bamako, Mali

6 May

T
he Malian boxer was ten centimeters taller and at least ten kilos heavier than Zhao, but it was his face and not Zhao’s that was drenched in sweat and bleeding heavily over the left eye.

Both men were shirtless and ripped. The black man kept his gloved hands up by his face, one hand carefully guarding the eye now swelling shut. He kept driving cautiously toward Zhao, who was springing on the balls of his feet, dancing half circles around the squeaking parquet dance floor, first left, then right, then back again, a smile plastered on his handsome face, his bare hands loose and bouncing in front of his broad chest.

Guo stood at parade rest. The boxing ring was in Zhao’s colonial mansion. Previously it was a ballroom with a giant crystal-and-gold chandelier dangling overhead. Guo disapproved of the entire house and its furnishings—a garish historical anachronism. Everything about the house screamed excess and self-indulgence. Guo preferred the sleek linearity of his modern high-rise apartment in Beijing, or the spartan efficiency of a military barracks, to this European monstrosity.

It was an honor for Zhao to personally request Guo’s services. Zhao was the kind of man the Party groomed for leadership. If Zhao’s star continued to rise, he would inevitably reach the Standing Committee,
perhaps even the presidency. Weng emphasized the importance of this mission to Zhao’s career, which meant, of course, his own. Their fates were now intertwined. The two men were practically mirror images of each other: ambitious, intelligent, powerfully built, and ruthless. They were even the same height. The primary difference was that Zhao fought in boardrooms, Guo on battlefields. Politics versus blood. In Chinese history, the two were often commingled.

“You read the files I sent you, Guo?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Malian threw a lightning left jab into the space where Zhao’s head had been a nanosecond earlier. Threw a second. Missed again. Zhao laughed.

“What did you learn?”

“Mossa Ag Alla is a dangerous opponent, that he is to be killed upon contact, and that I am to conduct operations without revealing my identity or location while in country.”

Zhao danced right, then left. “Correct on all counts. And secrecy is vital. The Mali government would be outraged if they knew you and your team were here.”

The chiseled Malian charged again, throwing a vicious right cross, lowering his left hand just a few centimeters.

Zhao saw the punch coming in the man’s eyes even before he threw it. As the African swung his enormous right fist, Zhao spun on the ball of his right foot and launched a devastating roundhouse kick. His heel crashed into the boxer’s left temple, just behind the swollen left eye. The African boxer grunted as his brain short-circuited. His upper body still twisted on a right axis, following the centripetal weight of the failed right cross, and the strike from Zhao’s heel into his skull accelerated the spin. The big Malian pirouetted on his right leg, then tumbled to the floor like a bag of wet meat slapping wood. He didn’t move.

Zhao sauntered over to a gilded table and pulled a bottle of water from a champagne bucket brimming with ice. He tossed it over his shoulder at Guo, who caught it in one hand. Zhao cracked one open for himself, pointed it at Guo.
“Ganb
ei.”

“Ganbei!”

Mali was hot. Guo was glad for the cold water. He drained it.

But Zhao sipped his water, Guo noticed. The man also wasn’t breathing hard, and didn’t seem to be sweating much, if at all.

“So tell me, Guo,” Zhao said, smiling. He nodded at the unconscious African. “What should we do about him?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“You said that you were to conduct your mission without revealing your identity or location while you were here. And yet you revealed both in front of this man.”

“I assumed he was in your employ, sir. Otherwise, you would not have summoned me in his presence nor inquired about my mission.”

“Not an unreasonable assumption. He does work for me, but he is an African. Where do you think his loyalties are?” Zhao knelt down next to the boxer, felt for his pulse.

Guo flushed with humiliation. It had been a test, and he’d failed. He drew his combat knife. “I’ll take care of him now.”

“No need. I already solved your problem.” Zhao stood, held out his hand for Guo’s knife.

Guo turned the blade in his hand and extended the handle to Zhao. His mission was over before it began.

“I was told you were the best,” Zhao said. He drained the last of the water and let the bottle tumble to the floor.

“I am the best.”

“That’s disappointing.” He lifted the heavy combat knife in his hand. “Nice weight. Well balanced. Is it a good thrower?”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

Zhao glared into Guo’s emotionless eyes. Raised the razor-sharp blade behind his ear to throw it.

Guo didn’t flinch. How one died mattered even more than how one lived.

The blade launched from Zhao’s hand. It thudded heavily between the shoulder blades of a naked young French woman combing her long
red hair. The carbon steel blade buried itself into the plaster wall behind the old oil painting.

“Never really cared for Degas,” Zhao said. “You?”

“I don’t have an opinion, sir.”

“Be sure to keep your blade sharp. And don’t make me clean up your mess again.”

“No, sir.”

Zhao picked up his shirt and pulled it on. “My bartender makes a fantastic Rusty Nail. We’ll drink a few and talk some more about your mission. I especially want to hear more about this Pearce fellow you are supposed to capture, if you have the time.”

“Yes, sir.”

Of course Guo had the time. He had all the time in the world now.

CIOS Corporate Offices
Rockville, Maryland

CIOS wasn’t unique. American defense and intelligence agencies like the NSA contracted with thousands of private, nongovernmental companies to handle their enormous workloads. CIOS was just one of hundreds of contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, the infamous former employer of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

As an authorized NSA contractor, Jasmine Bath had either legal access to NSA resources or the knowledge to gain access to those resources, and the ability to cover her tracks while doing so in either case. She had been subjected to the pervasive scrutiny of security-clearing authorities, not only before she was initially hired by the NSA, but also during and after her government employment, then reexamined again when she applied for her contractor authorization. Those investigations themselves were conducted by a private contractor, National Investigative Services. Bath easily penetrated the NIS mainframe and wrote her own glowing clearances.

She was also well aware that her bank accounts, e-mails, and all other data footprints were subject to constant, randomized checks to ensure her continued loyalty and fidelity. But since the day she entered Berkeley, Jasmine had been prescient enough to sanitize her own records and to create the necessary fictions to maintain the illusion of purity.

As far as she was concerned, it didn’t matter that her job was to violate the privacy of other people in the name of national security. It was no one’s damn business but her own to know whom she slept with, which nineteenth-century German transcendentalists she read on her Kindle, or how often she ordered Kao Pad Poo at the Smiling Panda.

It also didn’t bother her one whit to dig wherever she was told to dig, especially by The Angel. What did it matter to her that she generated lists for him of Dark Web porn downloads, offshore painkiller prescriptions, or secret organ-donor purchases of certain committee chairmen, Treasury Department undersecretaries, and Senate staffers? Politics was a game of sharp elbows and vicious cross-checks. Bath wasn’t playing the game. She wasn’t even keeping score. She was just supplying the sticks and blades for a hefty fee.

That morning she had received a new research request from The Angel. “Lane, David M.” She knew the name. Had watched his pathetic announcement a few days earlier. The congressman seemed earnest and sincere in his speech, but those qualities in politics were about as useful as a floppy drive on a MacBook Air, so she dismissed him out of hand as a loser.

So why the research query from The Angel?

Hers not to reason why, only to cash the checks. She ran her searches, a digital colonoscopy. But Lane came up clean.

As in, nothing. As in, not doctored or laundered or sanitized, or even a fictional legend concocted for some CIA spook needing a cover. Nope. Nothing.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Then you need to create some catastrophic filth. Put it out there in a credible way, the way you do better than anybody else.”

“No problemo.”

“Get started on that right away, but don’t let it out. Yet.”

“You got it.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

Lane, David M. Sincere, earnest . . . lame.

Like Justice Tanner. Tanner killed himself, sure. Jasmine looted the coroner’s hard drive. Saw the crime-scene photos. A bloody mess. Jasmine hated that. But it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t put the gun in his mouth, did she? Or pull the trigger? No. But maybe she supplied the bullets, metaphorically speaking.

Screw the metaphors.

Screw Tanner. And David Lane.

Not her problem.

Her problem was Margaret Myers. The former president was a software engineer in her own right and owned her own software company. The truth was, the two of them had a lot in common. In another reality, or a J. J. Abrams parallel universe, the two of them could’ve been friends.

But Myers wasn’t her friend. Myers had been sniffing around the Tanner suicide for weeks. The initial queries had been clumsy, almost like a drunk walking into a plate-glass door he had trouble seeing. But Myers came back, slowly, cautiously, and from new directions, using bots, mostly, tapping into a wide variety of public databases, then breaking through passworded accounts and, finally, private nets, all unaware of Jasmine’s presence monitoring her searches. Or, at least, so Jasmine hoped. What was clear to Jasmine, however, was that Myers was assembling the right data set. But just to be sure, Jasmine broke into Myers’s toy box and took a look around. Then there was no question.

Myers knew, or at least was on the verge of knowing.

Jasmine informed The Angel. Now Myers was his problem.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“The only way to be metaphysically sure is when the feds come rolling up to your driveway in a fleet of those big black Suburbans.”

“Can’t you steal her database? Drop a virus into the network?”

“If she has any brains—and she does, believe me—she’s got hard copies of everything, or cloud backup, or both. But even if she didn’t, once I broke in there and stole everything, she’d know that we know, so you’d alert her and she might be forced to act or go deeper. I think it makes more sense for me to sit tight and watch what she does. If she alerts the black-Suburban boys I can let you know, but there are a whole lot of intermediary steps she’ll be taking before she gets to that point, and right now I’m completely invisible to her.”

“Sounds like a plan, so long as you’re sure you’re invisible to her.”

“Guaranteed,” Jasmine wrote. “Trust me.”

14

Myers residence
Denver, Colorado

6 May

V
in Tanner was the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice to commit suicide while in office. That’s how he would always be remembered in the history books. Myers chose to remember him only as her friend.

She’d known Tanner for twenty years before she nominated him to the Supreme Court. Knew his wife and kids well. Their two skiing families vacationed together in Vail several times. Justice Tanner sent her a handwritten note when her son had been killed, and enclosed an old Polaroid of their two young boys in soccer jerseys, skinny arms draped over each other’s shoulders, gap-toothed smiles and sweaty foreheads, best friends forever.

But Myers didn’t nominate Tanner because they were friends. He was a brilliant jurist, but more important, a thoughtful and prudent political theorist. Small government, small businesses, and small farms were his Jeffersonian mantra. Her opponents on the Senate Judiciary Committee hung the libertarian label on him at the televised hearing, thinking that the old canards about legalized prostitution and disbanding the FDA would scuttle his chances, but his effortless, irrefutable defense of limited constitutional government silenced his critics. His confirmation sailed through with only two dissenting votes.

Myers was certain at the time that Tanner’s appointment would be
one of the highlights of her presidency. She hoped it would be the beginning of the end of the “tyranny of black robes.” She believed Tanner would cast a number of crucial swing votes that would finally begin to push back the overwhelming encroachments of federal legislation and administrative decrees that now impinged upon nearly every facet of American life. But to her chagrin, he cast the deciding vote in favor of upholding sweeping new regulations promulgated by Senator Fiero’s finance committee, regulations that would only serve to further empower the largest banks and enlarge yet again the role and opacity of the Federal Reserve.

His decision deeply troubled her. The nation had nearly seven thousand banks, but just six of them controlled sixty-seven percent of all banking assets. Those “too big to fail, too big to jail” bankers were largely responsible for the 2008 crash and the long Great Recession still ravaging the nation and much of the globe. The last thing Wall Street and the Big Banks needed was more power and more regulatory protection in the guise of banking reform. If any Supreme Court Justice could have been expected to vote against the Fiero legislation, it was Tanner. Instead, he wrote the majority opinion. As any student of the Court knows, justices have a funny habit of changing after their appointments—and disappointing their champions. Myers and Tanner would be in the footnotes, too, but for a grislier reason.

She reflected on her decision to visit Tanner two weeks prior. Myers may have resigned the presidency but she still felt responsible for his disastrous decision. She had the right to know why he made it. God knows he’d been pilloried in the media, crucified on both the left and the right for his inexplicable vote. She had known that if the media got wind of her visit, it would only make his bad situation worse. But she had needed to see him face-to-face, look him in straight in the eye.

—

S
he arrived at his Georgetown brownstone late in the cool evening, unannounced. That way she could avoid the press, and Tanner couldn’t avoid her. She knocked.

Tanner’s dark, sleepless eyes narrowed when he saw her that night. He reluctantly waved her into his study.

“I’m surprised it took you so long.” He lit a cigarette. “Where’s your Secret Service detail?”

“I discharged them. I’m no longer the president, so why should the public have to pay for them? Only pimps need an entourage like that.”

“The world’s a dangerous place, Margaret. You need to be more careful.”

“Where’s
your
security detail?”

“Gave them the night off.” He led them into his study. Offered her a chair. Floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves were crammed with books.

“How are Michelle and the kids?”

“They’re fine. Visiting her parents.” He took a long drag. “Kind of late for a social visit.”

“I’m just a concerned citizen calling on an old friend. You look awful, by the way.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. What’s done is done. And I don’t owe you anything.”

“I’m not a debt collector. I just wanted to know why.”

“It’s all in the majority opinion.”

“I think it’s all in your face.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He stabbed the cigarette out in a crystal ashtray full of butts.

“You’re one of the most principled men I’ve ever known, and yet you’ve obviously made a decision you regret. You regret it so much it’s tearing you up. The Vin Tanner I know would never make a decision that violated his principles, but something compelled you to do so.”

Tanner’s face blanched. “I’ll have to ask you to leave. Now.”

“Is there anything you want to talk about?”

“No.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

He rose to his feet. “Yes, leave. This minute.” His shoulders slumped. “Please.”

“I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”

She left.

Three hours later, Tanner put a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

—

M
yers blamed herself, of course. The timing of Tanner’s death couldn’t have been coincidental. That meant she played a part in it. The guilt had eaten her alive since that day. But something else was wrong. Her intuition told her she was being followed. She couldn’t prove it. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized she probably was under surveillance. She made herself a target the minute she knocked on Tanner’s door. Stupid.

There was a knock on her door.

“Come in.”

The service technician. He’d left twenty minutes before, after a service call. Her TV signal had been experiencing irregular glitches the last few days. She had called for service and the tech arrived today, to replace one of the circuit boards on the satellite dish.

“Forget something?”

“No, ma’am. Found this about a mile up the road.” He handed her an electronic device about the size of a tablet.

“What is it?”

“Not sure, ma’am. But it’s generating a radar signal. And it was pointed in the direction of your house.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m retired Navy. I just do this job to keep from getting bored. Radar is kind of a hobby of mine. I carry a homemade rig in my truck, picks up all kinds of radar signatures, especially wide-spectrum. About a mile north of here, my rig alarmed. It wasn’t one of the police bandwidths, for sure. So I pulled over. Looked around with my handheld. Found an all-weather box strapped to a tree. Kind of unusual, to say the least. Found that inside. Just thought you should know.”

She flipped the device over. No markings. “What do you think it was doing?”

“Can’t be sure, but I’d guess it’s some kind of surveillance function. You need to run it by your people, just to be sure.”

Her security chief, Roy Fox, was scheduled to stop by after lunch. She’d ask him then.

“Thank you for taking all of the time and effort to bring me this.”

He shrugged. “Glad to do it.” Then he added, “If you don’t mind my saying, ma’am, you were a damn fine president. I hated like hell to see you go.”

Roy Fox arrived on schedule after lunch. He was former FBI, a specialist within the communications exploitation section (CXS) of the bureau’s Counterterrorism Division. Fox easily identified the tablet-sized device in his hands as one of the next-generation PHOTOANGLO radar units.

“This isn’t good.”

“What’s the problem?”

He explained. Myers agreed. This wasn’t good at all.

The presence of a PHOTOANGLO unit meant LOUDAUTO passive room bugs, or their equivalents, were planted in her house. The LOUDAUTO units were nearly impossible to find, either by electronic detection or physical inspection, if they were properly inserted. The miniature microphones turned room audio like human voices into analogue electrical signals that were picked up by the PHOTOANGLO radar unit, rebroadcast to a relay station, then reconverted to audio files for analysis.

Fox went on to explain that similar passive bugs could record keyboard strokes, printer outputs, and even video cable signals.

“God only knows how long they’ve been in place.” His face flushed. “I’ll tender my resignation immediately, of course.”

Myers didn’t know what to think. She had hired Fox to protect her security. He’d obviously failed. But whoever had deployed these devices was world-class. Maybe she was at fault for not taking her security more seriously.

“Well, at least we know now.” She pointed a finger at an invisible room bug. “And so do they.”

“I just hope there isn’t another PHOTOANGLO out there still picking up this conversation.”

“Why don’t you and your team conduct a sweep. Yank out everything you can find.”

Fox pulled out his cell phone, scrolling for numbers. “I’ve got a few favors I can call in. I’ll get a team here right away. I won’t let you down again.”

He bolted out of the room with the phone in his ear.

Myers didn’t know what to do next. She knew that all of this equipment was standard NSA ANT spy craft—the kind of technology they deployed to spy on the European Union, the UN, and sometimes even hostile governments in its DROPMIRE program. Not that any of these devices were stamped
NSA
. But she herself had approved of their deployment when national security was at stake. At least, that’s what she believed at the time.

Now that she was being targeted by the very same technology, she began to doubt the wisdom of her previous decisions. She felt horribly exposed, even violated. She understood that sometimes people were targeted in order to eliminate them as suspects. Didn’t matter. Her privacy had been stolen from her, and no matter the reason, she resented it. Now she understood the rage of people like Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had been similarly bugged by her American “friends.” Was it possible that spying on allies caused more damage than it prevented? Spying, by definition, was illegal. Spying on allies violated trust, and alliances were built on trust.

Myers knew these surveillance units were also available to other federal agencies, and even state and local investigative units, including some of the larger metropolitan police departments. Undoubtedly, other national governments had access to similar technology as well. There was really no way to determine who might be behind these incursions. But she hadn’t committed any crimes. This couldn’t be an official investigation. This was a private affair—undoubtedly, the same people connected to Tanner’s death.

Her visit with Tanner had been unofficial, off the books. She hadn’t
called him in advance or sent an e-mail. She’d known that if he was home he’d let her in, so why give him the chance to wave her off beforehand? Myers thought it wise to not volunteer any information about her visit that night, and neither the district police nor federal authorities had ever contacted her after his death. She didn’t attend his funeral, probably the reason she had never gained closure with his death.

Why had he killed himself? Even if he had made a ruling he’d regretted, it could have been addressed, either by later rulings or in off-the-record interviews. Unless he couldn’t do either. That meant some kind of pressure had been applied to him, didn’t it?

Whoever had pressured him was now coming after her. If that person could break Vin Tanner, they could break her. And now they had the gall to come after her. That made her angry. It also scared her. Whom could she trust?

A horrible thought crossed her mind. What if her own security chief had been part of this? He probably wasn’t—she’d known him for years—but now she had doubts. Was he really unable to find those devices? Or was he hiding them? Once again, the very existence of the technology had poisoned the well. Could she really trust him? Now she wasn’t certain.

She wanted to call Troy. But if her phone was compromised like her computer, she’d only put him in danger, too. She may already have. He was too busy on Early’s rescue mission to help her anyway. What was she thinking?