Lethal Circuit (21 page)

“So my dad, how close was he to exposing them?”

“Really close if you were to ask him,” Ted said. “And that’s the other side of it. That’s why the investigation into your dad’s death ended so abruptly. Understand I haven’t been active for years, but I have it on good authority that the Agency thought he was close too. They did everything in their power to maintain your father’s cover by quelling any civilian investigation into his disappearance. The long and short of it is that your father had made some real progress and management didn’t want to spook the Dragons with a local investigation. They wanted to give them the freedom to pop their heads out of the sand so they could come in and lop them off.”

Michael thought it over. “This Green Dragon Group. The CIA with all its resources must have found more on them than what you’ve just told me.”

“Well there is one other thing, but they didn’t find it.”

“Who did?”

“You.” Ted pointed out the Japanese characters inscribed around the circumference of the platinum disk. “These Kanji are in the old style, but their meaning is clear.”

“What do they say?”

“They say,” Ted said quietly, “Here lies the dragon.”

34

W
HEN
THE
BACK
wall of Alvarez’s office slid open like the door to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Mobi knew he was back at the JPL he loved. Alvarez’s anteroom was small, only about five feet deep and fifteen feet long, but it contained everything that her official office lacked: a secure server, pictures of her kids, and a well-used laptop which Mobi immediately cracked open. It was now obvious that the plastic alien out in the main office was a spare remote for the alcove, a key under the doormat in case Alvarez were to get locked out. He also realized that the alcove was probably built the way it was because even on a blueprint, nobody was going to miss that much space in such a large complex. No doubt the Director of Operations himself, a Caltech civilian to the end, had secretly authorized its construction because he didn’t trust the DOD and their pet project below his facility. The tiny private operations center Mobi now sat within would have been an antidote to all that, a thorn in the side of the militarists who wanted to turn JPL into an extension of the Defense Department. Here, Alvarez would be able to operate independently, secreted away from the watchful eye of the DOD. And here, if Alvarez had her way, Mobi would be able to do his thing as well.

Alvarez’s laptop demanded a password and the mystery of the scrawled digits on the keycard fell into place. Guessing that Alvarez had kept it simple, Mobi typed in the first five digits and he was in. The last thirteen digits beginning with the 011 were no doubt Quiann’s phone number. Mobi launched Alvarez’s secure soft phone. He knew the data packets were trojaned to resemble standard internet traffic. Not untraceable to be sure, but given that he was about to share state secrets with a known traitor for the betterment of all mankind, it was better than nothing. Now, after untold hours of waiting around, Mobi was so excited to finally be doing something constructive that at first he didn’t notice the door to Alvarez’s outer office swing open.

“What are you doing here?”

Mobi literally jumped out of his seat. It was the blonde Air Force guy who was asking the question; the one who had slapped the handcuffs on him in the restroom. Mobi stood and stepped outside the alcove to meet his guest in the main office. He gestured nervously to the green alien he held in hand. “Alvarez is a bit of a UFO nut.”

“I said, why are you here??”

“Just, computing.”

Mobi watched the cogs turn in the Air Force guy’s head.
 

“I’d like you to come with me.”
 

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

Tautology. If there was anything Mobi hated, it was tautology. Because he said so. The argument was circular. This ball-breaking bully was treating Mobi like a child. And in that moment Mobi did what he’d wanted to do to every ball-breaking bully he’d encountered since the first grade — he hauled back with the green alien and hurled it at him. Which would have been fine if the alien had been a sack of bricks. But given that it was inflated plastic, it simply bounced off the blonde man’s square jaw. And only then did Mobi realize the mistake he had made. He’d made him mad. Worse than that, along with the alien, he’d thrown out the remote control to the retractable wall. Not quite the smooth escape he’d been looking for.

“You chunky prick.”

The Air Force guy strode toward him. Now Mobi knew he was in trouble. He stepped back into the alcove and tried to think his way through the situation. He was in an alcove with a computer and a chair. Not much else. Just him, the Air Force guy, and a retractable wall. The retractable wall was of course the key. If it opened, it had to close. And Alvarez had to have a better way to do so than poking a green alien in the foot. Mobi searched the walls of the alcove for a panel or a button as his new friend approached. He found nothing. Was the wall voice activated?

“Wall. Close.”

“Dream on, asshole.”

“Close wall!”

The wall didn’t listen and Mobi was fast running out of ideas. The blonde man had skirted around Alvarez’s desk and was only steps from the alcove. Think what Alvarez would do. She probably used this space only occasionally, when she didn’t want people to see what she was doing. Maybe when she was working in private. Maybe when she wanted to guard the contents of her computer. Mobi copped a glance at Alvarez’s laptop. Its screen was open. He thought about it as his assailant drew a weapon from a hidden holster. It was worth a try.

“Hands in the air,” the blonde man said.

Mobi risked it. He idly reached one of his outstretched palms to his side in a slow motion wave and slapped Alvarez’s laptop shut. He heard a relay kicking over. It was followed by a pneumatic whoosh.

“No you don’t, fat ass,” the blonde man screamed, diving toward him.

But it was too late. The wall had already closed. There was a click as it locked into place and Mobi found himself alone once again, only the glow of the server’s LEDs lighting up the dark space.

35

H
ERE
LIES
THE
dragon. Michael mulled over the words. What they were looking for, what his father had been looking for, had remained hidden since the last years of World War II, despite repeated efforts by both the Chinese and a slew of foreign governments to locate it. Now, if what Michael had found buried deep within the old man’s skull was what it seemed, they were about to find it, hidden alongside a river that hundreds, if not thousands of people traveled daily. It seemed impossible, and yet, in some strange way, it also seemed right.

“There.”

Michael followed Kate’s gaze across the bow of the boat. Perhaps a hundred yards ahead, nestled into a sharp bend of the river sat the double peaked karst rising like the devil’s pitchfork out of the black waters of the Li.

Michael motored forward a few more yards before turning the tiller hard and cutting the engine. They drifted silently to shore, just the hint of the afterglow of a blood orange sunset illuminating the loamy river bank. Thirty feet up the rough river beach stood the limestone walls of the double peaked karst. Michael hopped off the bow of the boat, pulling the long bowline up the bank to a crooked tree where he tied it off in a clove hitch. Kate followed Michael off the bow, Ted handing off a trio of climbing packs, each complete with a collapsible shovel bungeed to its back panel. Already, what ambient light was left in the sky had given way to a deep navy blue, the evening’s first stars twinkling above.

Michael pulled out his headlamp and turned his attention to the base of the looming karst. The thought of scaling a mountain though, especially a lush mountain like this one brought back Peru. The kidnappers had abandoned their operation at the last moment and left him to die in that mineshaft. The physical toll as he perched there with burning legs and an aching back, the walls of the shaft pressing in all around him was one thing, and it was horrible. But what was worse was the mental torture. The doubt. What if his father, despite his best intentions, was just too late? It was the doubt that proved to be Michael’s worst demon.

Somehow though, Michael had been able to summon a deep faith in his own ability to survive and he had hung on. When his desperately relieved father finally poked his head down the shaft, extending his arms downward, Michael wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t hallucinating. It was only the roar of the helicopter when he was dragged out of the shaft that had finally snapped him back to reality. Michael was choppered down the mountain and immediately given medical attention. Dehydration had taken its toll on him, but once he learned just how hard his father had worked to find him, Michael felt ashamed that he had ever doubted him. But despite his love for his dad, he also knew that he never wanted to have to rely on somebody else for his survival. To that end, Michael refused to give up doing what he loved. He camped, he climbed, in fact, he threw himself into it with a vengeance, just as he did the martial arts and every other aspect of his life. Michael made it his mission to do anything and everything to never be the victim again.

Two years after the ordeal, he had attempted a technical assault on a little known Rocky Mountain peak with some friends from college. This time the enemy wasn’t doubt, but bad weather. A storm had prevented them from reaching the summit, but he had learned something from the experience, and no matter how much he tried to suppress it, two things about his current situation gnawed at him: one, you didn’t try to scale several hundred unknown vertical feet in the middle of the night, and two, if you were foolish enough to try, you didn’t do it with people who weren’t climbers.

Michael was willing to throw the first point out the window because he saw little choice. This green karst was the key to what had happened to his father. The second point resolved itself with even less fanfare.

“Unbelievable,” Ted said.

There would be no need to climb the mountain. At least not in a technical sense. In a marvel of Chinese ingenuity, a network of bamboo ladders had been fastened to the rock, all the way up the face of the karst.

Michael remained incredulous. “Let’s rope together just the same,” he said. “It may be a ladder, but it’s a long way to the top.”

•
 
•
 
•

L
I
T
UNG
TOYED
with the palm-sized detonator in his wrinkled hand. Despite the gravity of the situation ahead of him,
 
he reasoned that he was nearer to happiness than despair. The American had left from the docks on a stolen riverboat not long before. Now, Li thought, if the risks of the next few hours could be adequately contained, he would be well on the way to achieving his goal. To that end Li quietly replaced the detonator in his pocket. He would remain guardedly optimistic, but cautious, always cautious. There was much yet to be done.

•
 
•
 
•

T
HE
BAMBOO
LADDER
was cool to the touch in the night air. Michael estimated that he was already more than three quarters of the way up the karst, and though he didn’t glance below, he could hear both Kate and Ted on the rungs beneath him. He climbed two more rungs and made his way along a ledge of rock before taking hold of the next section of ladder. Whoever had installed this system had been thoughtful, but the more Michael thought about it, the more the ladders quietly crushed the hope he had felt not ten minutes before. A mountain that people would have seen from a passing boat was one thing, but a mountain so well traveled that it necessitated this kind of infrastructure was something else entirely. Nazi airplanes didn’t stay hidden for decades in well-traveled areas. The odds were just plain against it. And this was an airplane that had been the object of years of searching. To find it here, now, a convenient ladder leading to its final resting place would be beyond absurd.

And yet the platinum plate, the most compelling piece of evidence Michael had yet seen, had pointed here. Michael knew he had no choice but to press on. Reaching the top of the ladder, he stepped onto a rock ledge a couple of feet in width. This time, instead of proceeding along the ledge to what looked like the fourteenth and final ladder, he waited for Kate to show her head. “You ever play that game chutes and ladders?” Michael said.

“You mean the one where you roll the dice and you climb a ladder on the board, but if you hit a snake you go sliding back down?”

“That’s the one.”

“We call it snakes and ladders, but yeah, I played it when I was a kid. Why?”

“I don’t know. Fourteen ladders in a row,” Michael said, staring down at Ted below. “I can’t help but think we’re going to hit a snake.”

36

T
HOUGH
THE
DOOR
of the alcove rattled in time with his aggressor’s fist, Mobi did his best to remain unperturbed. After twenty minutes of effort he had finally managed to get Quiann to pick up the phone and he wasn’t about to let the big bully outside ruin his moment.

“Hi, my name is Mobi Stearn. I’m a telecommunications engineer here at JPL in California.”

“Who is this that continues to call?” the heavily accented voice demanded.

“Dr. Mobi Stearn,” Mobi said, somewhat self-consciously. “Am I speaking with Dr. Jie Quiann?”

“Yes.”

“I have an urgent matter I’d like to discuss with you, sir.”

“Yes.” Quiann paused. “I see you are calling from Deputy Director Alvarez’s IP address.”

“Yeah. I can explain that.”

“I must speak directly to Deputy Director Alvarez.”

Mobi saw that making friends might be harder than he had anticipated. “Well that’s the thing, sir. She’s held up and I’m kind of your go-to guy here.”