Eye for an Eye (29 page)

Minh stared for several minutes at Borchardt, who was unconscious, bleeding badly on the ground. Minh tried to catch his breath. He reached his hand to his neck, then looked at it. The fingers were covered in wet blood.

Minh limped to the cabin door, clutching the briefcase.

*   *   *

The engines on the Gulfstream were fired up, and a smooth electric din permeated the cabin as the pilots prepared to take off.

Dewey stared at the entrance door to the Boeing, watching the light, waiting for signs of life. He gripped the detonator. The first minute turned into a second, then a third. Then a shadow appeared in the Boeing door, at the top of the stairs.

But where Dewey expected to see Borchardt, Bo Minh suddenly appeared. His head darted wildly about. He stepped into the light atop the stairs, and Dewey could see blood covering one of his hands and his neck. He was limping. He started descending the stairs.

“Motherfucker,” said Dewey.

Dewey held the remote detonator. He put his thumb to the red button. He was about to press it, then paused. He put it down on the seat.

He bolted to the cabin door and jumped from the top step to the tarmac ten feet below. He sprinted toward Borchardt’s plane. As he ran, Dewey pulled a Glock from his shoulder holster. He closed in on Bo Minh, who was limping beneath the shadows of the Boeing.

Minh saw Dewey sprinting toward him. He dropped the briefcase as Dewey closed in. Minh did not even have time to move as Dewey fired a round from point-blank range into his chest.

Dewey caught Minh as he fell, throwing him over his shoulder, fireman style. He sprinted the last few yards to the Boeing, then climbed up, two steps at a time. At the top stair, he tossed Minh’s body to the floor. He saw Borchardt. Dewey grabbed him and lifted him up onto his shoulder. He ran back to the cabin door, then descended the airstairs, still clutching the handgun. He ran the last hundred yards to the Gulfstream, then climbed aboard. He tossed Borchardt onto one of the leather sofas, then turned and hit the door lever. The stairs began to rise.

“Get this thing in the air,” yelled Dewey into the cockpit. “And I mean right fuckin’ now.”

The Gulfstream’s engines flared and grew louder. The plane bounced into motion, then moved toward the end of the runway.

“Hold on,” barked one of the Israeli pilots. “We’re goin’ hot.”

The engines roared. The jet accelerated down the runway, to the right of the Boeing.

Dewey went back to the sofa and picked up the detonator. As the front wheels lifted off the tarmac, he pressed the small red button.

There was a pause of no more than half a second, then a tremendous thunderclap slammed the sky as the Boeing exploded.

Dewey watched through the porthole window. White, red, orange, and black flames, along with billows of thick smoke, exploded up into the sky in a spectacular radius around the plane. Dewey had to turn his eyes away from the explosion.

More loud thunder echoed across the sky as heat and flames from the explosion spread havoc within the plane’s explosive- and ammunition-laden cargo area.

The Gulfstream was punched sideways, shaking and tilting as it lifted off into the sky. Dewey almost fell to the floor, but he held on to the seat. He forced himself to look again. The tarmac was a smoldering inferno of steel, inside of which was the now very charred remains of Fao Bhang’s beloved half brother, Bo Minh.

Dewey looked above the burning jet. The lights of Beijing were visible in the distance.

“You’re next, motherfucker,” Dewey whispered.

58

BEIJING CAPITAL INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
BEIJING

The black sedan reached the steel gates at the edge of the entrance to the private terminal. Dozens of flashing red and blue lights atop police cruisers made the scene look festive—until one moved past the gates and the line of soldiers and police officers standing guard. On the tarmac, the plane was still burning. It had been more than an hour since the blast. The object was was virtually unrecognizable, a destroyed carapace of charred steel, melted parts, atop a small crater torn into the tarmac.

The line of soldiers and officers were held back at least 150 yards by the intense heat still emanating from the wreckage.

Closer to the Boeing was a convoy of green and yellow fire trucks. Teams of firefighters in protective clothing sprayed water at the smoldering wreckage.

Bhang’s sedan passed through the gates, then past soldiers and officers. It came to a stop between two of the fire trucks. The driver leapt from the front seat and opened the back door.

It was 9:00
P.M.
in China’s capital city.

Bhang stepped from the sedan. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips. Despite the heat, which at this distance still hovered at approximately one hundred degrees, Bhang wore a black suit. Not realizing the irony of the act, he took a lighter from his pocket and lit the cigarette.

Bhang’s driver climbed back inside the air-conditioned limousine.

Bhang stood alone smoking the cigarette, listening to the loud crackling of the plane burning, watching the torrents of water strike the flames, creating steam that made clouds climb into the sky along with the smoke.

The chief investigator for the Beijing Fire Authority approached. Bhang saw him coming, from the corner of his eye, and held up his hand toward him without looking, telling him in no uncertain terms to stay away.

He stared at the burning jet, trying to imagine where Bo Minh had been and what had happened. He already knew who did it.

Bhang realized, as he took a long drag on his cigarette, that he’d let his personal feelings affect his professional judgment. But he never could have foreseen this. In all his years of covert activities, of killing, assassinations, being the target of attempts on his life, this was the first time anyone had succeeded in hurting him.

He stood in the intense heat. Sweat dripped down his forehead. He didn’t want his driver or anyone to see the tears that now flowed down his cheeks at the thought of his poor brother, his helpless brother, always the weakest one on the playground, always the one being picked on. The only person Bhang had ever truly loved. Now he was gone.

The one thing Bhang was there to do and was capable of doing—protecting Bo—he’d failed at. There was no other way to look at it. At that moment, Bhang knew that the dark knot in his stomach, the bitter woe and paralyzing guilt, was a feeling worse than dying.

He also knew what he had to do, the only thing he had to do, the only thing that mattered anymore.

Bhang flicked his cigarette butt down on the ground. He opened the door of the sedan and climbed into the cool air.

“Headquarters, Minister?”

“Yes. Hurry.”

*   *   *

Ming-húa and a swarm of other senior-level ministry officers were already assembled in Bhang’s large corner office at the ministry when he entered. He said nothing to the six men standing around the conference table as he walked to his desk. He placed his briefcase on the desk, picked up a silver lighter, and lit another cigarette.

“Minister Bhang,” said Ming-húa, bowing. “We are all deeply, deeply sorry for what happened to your brother.”

Bhang did not look up. Instead, he removed his suit coat and hung it on the back of the chair. He opened the top drawer of his desk. Reaching in, he removed a small, stainless-steel handgun, a Walther PPK/S 380CP. Next to it was a long suppressor. Methodically, Bhang screwed the suppressor into the muzzle. When he was done, he raised the weapon in his right hand and aimed it at Ming-húa. He fired one shot. The bullet struck Ming-húa between the eyes, dropping him to the ground, as the other five men stared in horror.

“Nobody leaves this building until Andreas is dead,” said Bhang. “His elimination is now the top priority of the ministry. Drop what you are doing. Delegate any projects you are currently working on.”

None of the five men still standing at the table said anything, but all nodded yes.

“We have learned something in the last few minutes, Minister,” said Dheng. “We found several Hong Kong–based accounts we know to be Borchardt’s at the Bank of China. This afternoon, Mr. Borchardt wired seventy million dollars to the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation of Savannah, Georgia, presumably for an aircraft.”

“It could have been someone working for Borchardt,” said Bhang, “paying an old bill.”

“Yes, but it was wired into a Gulfstream account at the Bank of Hong Kong,” said Dheng. “The account is designed so that when Gulfstream sells something in China, it can keep the profits in China and not have to repatriate the money and thus pay American taxes on the transaction.”

“In other words,” said Bhang, “he bought a jet in China?”

“Today,” added Dheng. “An hour and a half ago.”

Bhang nodded. He lit another cigarette.

“Excellent work.”

“My team is now attempting to locate the plane,” said Dheng. “Gulfstream embeds standard tracking technology into all of its planes. But in order to do so, we must penetrate Gulfstream, and that’s not easy. The company is owned by General Dynamics. We need to access their internal servers to be able to access the GPS.”

Bhang looked at a tall bearded man, Xiao.

“I want the roster of every ministry operative, regardless of rank and regardless of current mission,” ordered Bhang. “I also want personal information on Andreas. Dig deeper. We know he was born in Castine, Maine. Does he have family?”

“Did we not already kill his fiancée?” asked another man at the table, who immediately regretted asking it.

Bhang glanced at him, nostrils flared.

“It’s a fair question,” said Bhang, hatred and fury inflecting in his normally calm voice. “What you all want to know is, when will it end? It ends when Andreas is dead. Until then, we take as many pieces off the chessboard as we can.”

59

MI6 HEADQUARTERS
VAUXHALL CROSS
LONDON

Chalmers stuck his head in the door of the conference room, interrupting Calibrisi, who was on a phone call. Katie and Tacoma were seated at the conference table, looking at their laptops.

“We have something,” said Chalmers.

The group took an elevator to the second floor of MI6 headquarters. When the doors opened, they entered a cavernous, brightly lit room filled with dozens of men and women at workstations. This was MI6’s operations room, Smythson’s nerve center for the management of MI6 paramilitary teams.

“Close your eyes, guys,” said Chalmers as they walked through.

Technically, Calibrisi, Katie, and Tacoma shouldn’t have been allowed on the second floor of Vauxhall Cross. But while there existed plenty of information that the two agencies kept separate, including activities inside each respective country, the fact is that MI6 and the CIA were more like siblings than adversaries. The occasional courtesy, such as allowing Langley’s well-liked director to pass through, was looked at by everyone on the floor with a mixture of amusement and pride.

In the middle of the floor stood a small frosted-glass conference room. In each corner, a large plasma screen was hanging. In the center of the room was a steel conference table. Smythson stood at the table, looking across it at two men who were seated behind computer screens.

Chalmers, Calibrisi, Katie, and Tacoma entered the room.

Smythson’s brown hair was brushed back from her face, tousled after so many hours of stress and work. She looked up at Chalmers, a blank expression on her face.

“Punch it up on two,” said Smythson.

One of the plasmas lit up, and the group watched as video started to play on the screen.

“We’ve been monitoring SIGINT coming out of PRC,” said Smythson. “Video, audio, data. This came off a British Airways flight four hours ago. The jet was on approach to Beijing International Airport.”

The screen was black. After several moments, the orange and yellow lights of Beijing twinkled across the screen as the plane descended.

“Watch for it,” said Smythson.

Flashing green and yellow lights pulsated in a long line, which indicated the runway that the jet was headed for. To the right of the runway, an orange mushroom cloud of flames was visible. As the lights on the ground grew larger, the plume of bright orange spiraled spectacularly into the sky, the flames lashing orange and white into the black of the night.

“It’s an explosion,” said Smythson. “We’ll get a closer shot, here.”

The jet moved lower. As it closed in on the runway, the size of the inferno grew larger. An analyst paused it. The right side of the screen was now taken up by a still frame of the explosion. Within the flame stacks was the skeleton of a plane, now aflame.

“So there was a plane that caught fire at Beijing International,” said Calibrisi.

Smythson smiled at Calibrisi.

“It’s Borchardt’s plane,” said Smythson.

Calibrisi’s eyes grew wide.

“Once we saw the burning plane,” said an analyst, “I called MIS to see if we could look at all SIGINT for Beijing International starting six hours ago, the approximate earliest point in time I thought they could fly in from London to Beijing. I got a hit on a flight plan, an inbound private flight, Boeing 757, which landed three hours before the video was snapped. The plane crossmatched against a British customs filing that one of Borchardt’s companies made almost a decade ago, an ownership certificate, necessary if your plane is British domiciled.”

Calibrisi nodded. “Excellent work.”

“What does it mean?” asked Katie. “Could they have attacked the plane? Perhaps on landing?”

“We’re not there yet,” said Smythson. “There are a number of different possible explanations.”

“There aren’t that many,” said Katie, walking to the screen, pointing at the skeleton of the jet. “It landed, so it wasn’t shot down, right? It’s in Beijing, which could mean Dewey flew right into the waiting arms of Fao Bhang.”

“Yes,” said Chalmers. “Or there’s simply a different explanation. In any event, we need some real-time intelligence on Dewey. Hector, this guy is your guy. Do you have any way of reaching him?”

Calibrisi shrugged his shoulders.