A Time for War (4 page)

His cell phone rang from his jacket pocket. His ringtone was “The Soldier's Song,” the Irish national anthem. It reminded him that he wasn't the only one picked on by the British. He checked the caller ID and the screen said it was Johnny Yu. Jack had a reporter's instinct and it wasn't like Johnny to phone and talk about the price of green tea. He took the call and walked toward a hallway where his voice wouldn't bother the other museum guests.

“Johnny, how have you been?”

“I've been well.” Johnny's English was perfect. When Johnny and his wife moved here from Shanghai they took language classes at the City College of San Francisco. They were among those immigrants who believed in embracing the language and ways of their new country. They were part of a culture that believed in real, practical knowledge—not just a document that declared you had been educated.

“What can I do for you?” Jack asked.

“May I come and see you?”

“I was about to—”

“Someone threatened my daughter,” he said.

There was a crack in his steady voice. This was a man who had snuck up on drug dealers with an open cell phone line so he could send the conversation to Jack's tape recorder. It wasn't easy to shake him.

“Is Maggie all right?” Jack asked.

“She stared one of them down; he ran away and left.”

Jack had gone to Maggie's black belt test when she was thirteen. He had been doing a report on highly disciplined youths of San Francisco, including members of Maggie's martial arts school. After the test he had interviewed Maggie and her father for the article. A year later they had called him asking for help.

“Was it the Long Zai?” Jack asked Johnny now. The Long Zai was one of the most organized and ruthless gangs in Chinatown, and they were the reason Johnny had needed help twelve years ago.

“I don't think so,” Johnny said, “but the threat was not random. The men who came to the grocery wanted to see me. Maggie thinks she knows why. I'd like to tell you face-to-face.”

Jack's reporter instinct was still humming. “Did you file a report with the police?”

“She's doing that now.”

“Did she recognize any of them?”

“No,” Johnny said. “And she didn't get a good look at the car. The police told me they will try to identify the man from the store surveillance camera.”

“I'll tell you what,” Jack said. “How about I swing by around two o'clock?”

“I would really appreciate that,” Johnny said.

“See you then,” Jack said. “And tell Maggie ‘well done.'”

Johnny said he would do that. Jack ended the call.

It seemed that he had picked up the torch just in time.

*   *   *

The Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in San Francisco is a set of featureless, three-story white buildings located at 1450 Laguna Street. A pair of fierce, squat, stone lions guard the stately six-panel chocolate-brown doors. These thick-maned guardians, known as
Shishi,
have traditionally stood in front of royal and governmental buildings for over two millennia. They always appear in pairs, signifying the propagation of the Chinese civilization, and are thought to have mystic properties that ensure survival.

Sixty-one-year-old Jing Jintao was nothing like the
Shishi
. He was a short, prim man with close-cropped, graying hair, a relaxed expression with a natural smile, and pale, penetrating eyes. The expression put people at ease; the eyes were invisible but missed nothing. He was the perfect diplomat: observant, perceptive, and expert at gentle flattery and small talk that revealed nothing.

To guests and even to his staff, Jintao seemed to be a man in repose. But unlike the
Shishi
whose bared but ineffective teeth greeted him every day, Jintao was constantly in motion, both mentally and by quietly and efficiently directing the movements of others. His personal thoughts were not informed by the past. He was a man of action, not philosophy. He knew only one direction and he pursued it with a single-mindedness that would have been the envy of any Khan.

Born in 1952 in Wuhan, the capital of the Hubei Province, he attended the School of International Studies at Beijing University and worked his way up through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For years he had steadily progressed through increasingly more challenging posts—all of them in regions like Hong Kong and the Middle East where sensitive intelligence was collected, reviewed, and sent to the Ministry of State Security in Beijing.

Jintao was responsible for coordinating data from the many countries in which he had served to help spearhead a pair of cyber attacks on world computer systems. On March 28, 2009, he was part of GhostNet, a massive assault on government, corporate, and personal computers in 103 nations. The targets ranged from the U.S. Department of Defense to the Dalai Lama. He recruited talent in Europe, Asia, and the United States to launch a second cyber attack in December of that year. Operation Aurora targeted two dozen major corporations, including Google, raiding sensitive files and crippling operations. Investigating the operations, the U.S. National Security Agency discovered—alarmingly—that Beijing was taking a page from the jihadist playbook: talking to the loyal ethnic population in other countries and encouraging them, for pay, to help fight what Beijing called “imperialistic designs against the homeland with the goal of assimilating its population and culture.”

Expatriates are reluctant to attack their new home,
Jintao reflected,
but a few are willing to defend the old one.
The art of turning a displaced national was to locate those few, the outspoken in lunch spots and bars, in barbershops and in parks. It did not matter what they were saying, only that they were speaking their mind. The next step was to get close to them, speak in their native language, build trust, nurture a sense of injustice about their adopted country, make them believe that eavesdropping or applying for a job in a sensitive facility or allowing agents to live with them were vital and valid responses to some misdeed.

Agents,
Jintao thought as he looked at the manila folder on the desk in front of him. A secretary had brought it to him with his morning tea. Beijing had hundreds of operatives in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Many were trained to infiltrate the transplant communities and disseminate information without the knowledge of the FBI or CIA plainclothes operatives who spied on virtually every embassy and consulate, both electronically and with eyes on the front door and carports. Messages were passed with cash after Chinese checkers matches in the park or in swapped iPods that were actually filled with photographs, scanned data, and other intelligence. No transmissions were done over the Internet or by cell phone—except for disinformation designed to make the Chinese seem plausibly naïve, tying up the electronic surveillance teams in nearby office buildings and mail trucks. None of the actual spy work was ever discussed or planned in rooms with windows, since the Americans had developed software to read the vibration of panes and transform them into speech.

That was the government's way of doing things.
“Cautiously aggressive,”
was how Jintao would describe it.

But Jing Jintao had another way. He bypassed that bloated, inertial system entirely to do what he felt was essential.

His young male secretary, Shing Wei, brought him the intelligence dossier that the daily courier had brought from Beijing in the diplomatic pouch. Jintao had known from American news reports that bringing down the U.S. Navy SEAL helicopter in Afghanistan was a success. What he learned from the field report written by Sammo Yang was that the EMP unit had worked exceptionally well.

EMP—“electromagnetic pulse”—it sounded like a simple medical procedure, such as “CAT scan” or “sonogram.” Originally discovered as one of the effects of nuclear explosions, virtually every country with a weapons development program had been working to create non-nuclear EMPs since the 1940s. The basic principle was to generate a magnetic field and an electric current simultaneously, then shape the resulting electromagnetic field into a pulse and direct its emission at a target. The pulse, upon encountering any electrical system within its range, would produce a surge in the system's voltage large enough to shut it down for weeks, if not permanently.

An EMP that disrupted an electrical system upon which human lives depended—such as a helicopter—certainly did have medical impact. Sammo Yang had also mentioned that the EMP unit he had built resembled a medical device. He would be arriving in the United States later that day with the unit, as part of the rotating Economic and Commercial contingent. These were the accountants and investors who helped to saddle the United States with added loans and increased debt. It was fitting that Yang accompany them.

Jintao went through the rest of the information in the dossier, mostly current names and addresses for operatives throughout the world. It was important for everyone to know where resources were at all times.

When Jintao was finished reading the update from Beijing, he reflected upon his own operation, one that had nothing to do with the timorous Chinese leaders and their limited, even diffident EMP program. This morning had been a setback: the loss of a choice site and the sacrifice of a promising operative. Jintao had learned of the disaster at Yu Market. Upon hearing how the cell leader had failed to complete his mission, Jintao had condemned him without hesitation. The deliveryman had carried the execution order to the second-in-command. That accomplished two things: it removed a leader who had showed promise in training but impetuosity in the field, and it warned the next leader that similar actions would earn him the same fate.

But a setback was only a defeat if he allowed it to be. That was not Jintao's way. He had spent decades watching the insular world and internecine clashes of the ruling State Council, the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party, and the People's Liberation Army. Beijing did not understand global politics in general or the character of the United States in particular. They did not grasp the need to act strategically and proactively, rather than simply react sluggishly to world events or lash out in small, surgical, punitive actions. His plan was one—the only one—that would guarantee the supremacy of Beijing before the year was out.

The cell was strong, resilient, and well trained by Jintao's colleagues in Shanghai. They would recover swiftly and move ahead.

Jintao informed his secretary that he was now ready to begin the day's responsibilities of his office: coordinating local athletic and cultural activities, meeting with fellow envoys about interests mutual to their respective nations, and talking to reporters about matters pertaining to the Chinese community in San Francisco and Chinese policy in the Pacific Rim. The routine and mostly neutral and largely ineffective business of state.

No kind smiles and polite bows would change what he was doing in secret.

This stone lion was awake and nothing would stop it.

*   *   *

“The table's wobbly,” Abe Cohen complained good-naturedly.

“That's because you moved the cardboard,” Bruno Spumante replied, pointing to the toe of the man's Nike. Four menus tucked under his arm, he bent to shove the cardboard back.

“That's real classy,” Abe said across Bruno's back. Vegan-thin with a long-gray ponytail, Abe winked at Jack and Doc Matson.

“So says the man in the Rolling Stones sweatshirt,” said Doc.

Abe Cohen was an unrepentant leftist hippie who owned a poster shop that catered to San Francisco's aging Flower Power population. Doc Matson, “older'n God,” six foot two with granite eyes and a cowboy hat over his white hair, was one of Jack's oldest and dearest friends. They shared a love of wine and a distaste for doctrinaire leftists, but Doc and Abe disagreed with a vengeance on just about everything. Jack had met them for brunch at Spumante's, Bruno's restaurant in North Beach.

“Hey, this sweatshirt is vintage. From Altamont,” Abe said.

“The prosecution rests,” Bruno replied. He stood. His bald head glistening with perspiration under the warming sun and his lucky black vest showing its age—he had worn it every day since he opened his doors seventeen years before—fifty-year-old Bruno Spumante passed laminated menus to the three guests. They were seated at one of a dozen tables outside the restaurant. Because it was a weekday, brunch was not a busy time. Bruno didn't make money being open this early; he did it so his regulars could have coffee or melon. And also, Jack knew, so he would have an audience for his Mussoliniesque monologues.

Bruno smiled and bent to give Eddie a brisk rub on the head when he was finished. Jack knew that was probably the last smile Bruno would crack all day. The hardworking son of immigrants, Bruno was a fierce supporter of what he called American Truth, the nation's original compass settings, and he was chronically glum over the way the United States had become what he called “left behind”—and he wasn't referring to end of days but to socialism and a body part. Bruno's spontaneous, combative monologues had made him something of a tourist attraction in the Italian District.

“You hippies, you were moth-eaten forty-three years ago, when that shirt was new,” Bruno said as a waiter brought water. “They were called ‘conscientious objectors' in my father's day and ‘cowards' in my grandfather's day.”

“Your grasp of social movements is matched only by your understanding of how to properly fix a table,” Abe remarked.

“This is an earthquake zone,
che cazzo,
” Bruno snapped. “What you fix today will be broken tomorrow.”

“What did he just call Abe?” Jack asked Doc. Doc knew how to curse in forty languages.

“A dick,” Doc grinned.

Jack laughed. “By the way, Abe, I stumbled across an article about hippies,” he added. “Specifically counterintelligence.”