Razing Beijing: A Thriller (65 page)

Emily’s far-away look hardened. “Because if we took control
of it, we might be able to...well, right a few wrongs.”

Sunday, July 5

8:25 P.M. Tokyo, Japan

BEYOND THE PROW
of
the cruiser
USS
Cowpens
and the
Vincennes
moored beside
her, points of light punctuated other massive silhouettes against a twilight
sky as the latest American warships glided toward Tokyo Bay. The navy destroyer
John S McCain
and frigate
Vandegrift
were on their way to the
Gulf; they would not be the last.
Cowpens
herself was putting back to
sea in several days and most of the crew were ashore on leave.

Lieutenant Anthony Scianni stood on the fantail watching
the departing warships when
crraaccck!
—he felt the concussion through the
soles of his shoes. Everything around him was bathed in a searing flash of
electric blue light. In one brilliant instant the corrugation of waves lapping
Vincennes’s
hull and every visible object became a frozen image.

Scianni shouted for the watch petty officer, who ran to
join him while beneath their feet the
ping-ping-ping
of a shock wave
traversed the ship. Seconds later somebody sounded the general alarm. Shouting
erupted from all over
Cowpens
and boots hammered the ladders.

Seeing no obvious damage around them, the younger sailor shouted
a sickening question above the alert, “Was that an aerial nuclear blast?”

Scianni replied, “That would’ve lit the whole sky.” The
ship was pitching slightly, fore and aft. “Whatever it was, it struck the ship.”

Athwartship, a Marine sergeant gripping a rifle hurled
himself against the rigging and frantically scanned the water. Finding nothing,
he saw the other two men forward and ran to meet them. “What happened?” shouted
the sergeant.

Before they could answer, there came the metallic shout of
a bullhorn. “
Ahoy, Cowpens!
” The navy strictly enforced rules that
gunboats patrol any harbor where warships were moored. One of these approached
the port bow of
Cowpens
. “
Ahoy, Cowpens!
” Two sailors aboard the
gunboat were pointing at something, their sidearms drawn.

“Negative hostile!”
A fusillade of words poured
between the gunboat’s bullhorn and another aboard the warship. “Repeat, we do
not see any hostile in the vicinity.
Better inspect that radar array.
”

Outside the bridge, Scianni stepped past the sailor on the deck-mounted
machine gun. He leaned out over the railing to look down at the front of the
Aegis radar where the gunboat was training its light. The angle prevented
seeing much; his nose caught a strong blast of ozone. Two sailors appeared
below on deck and turned their heads upward—they froze, their mouths
disbelieving ovals.

Scianni joined the Marine sergeant in a dash from the
bridge and down two flights of stairs to the main deck. They reached the
five-inch gun turret, where now a half dozen Marines joined the sailors in
craning their necks amid speechless confusion. Scianni turned and blinked his
eyes clear.

The gunboat spotlight danced shakily over the forward
quadrant of the Aegis array to reveal a gaping hole. Deep inside, where the
radar had been, a broken wire sparked intermittently. Scianni realized that someone,
or something, had just carved away a ton of the ship.

EMILY CHANG LOOKED UP
from her work and rubbed her arms, the persistent chill being more difficult to
tune out than the electrical hum and ozone-rich air. CLI’s supercomputer regularly
drew some twelve megawatts of electrical power, enough to power a
municipality—more than enough to fry server multiprocessors not kept adequately
cool. She zipped her sweater up to her chin. Her work could be accomplished
from the warm comfort of home via remote connection, but Thackeray’s satellite
terminal was completely off-network and the only other portal through which to
access the building’s rooftop communications dishes.

Seated nearby, indifferent to his environment, Milton Thackeray
folded his arms and stared blankly into his monitor. Beside his keyboard were
copies of Stuart’s Internet e-mails that had precipitated their dubious plan. Thackeray
swiveled his head and gazed at Emily with tired eyes. He jutted his chin toward
her desktop. “How’s the map?”

Emily glanced at the municipal map of Beijing spread open
on the table. Thackeray had used a felt-tip pen to designate the longitude and
latitude of the more prominent landmarks. Locating the two Beijing University
buildings cited by the CIA analyst had been relatively easy; drawing on her
memory of government buildings was proving more difficult. “I trust Stu to help
fill in some of the blanks,” she said. Right now, she was a lot more concerned
about their programming assumptions.
If
the theft had truly occurred, Emily
reminded herself, those responsible for stealing the company’s software
probably would have then proceeded to make alterations, perhaps significant
ones. If so, hacking her way in was going to be that much more difficult.

She glanced at the digits in the lower corner of her
screen. “You should have said something about the time. You must be starving!”

Thackeray pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “You
really seem to be into this.”

I believe in Stu,
she thought, averting her eyes. “I
don’t think such people can be entrusted with so threatening a device.”

One-by-one Thackeray began pulling the fingers of his hand
and popping his knuckles. “You seem a little more certain than I am as to who’s
behind this.”

“Thack, we’ve already gone over the e-mails. I thought the
logic of the exercise here was fairly self-evident.” Without Thack’s help, the
exercise was also thoroughly pointless.

“What’s evident is that we’re going to get ourselves tossed
into jail. Hacking into a satellite isn’t exactly legal, you know.”

Probably due to nervous tension, Emily found his fear of
going to prison inexplicably comical; she conjured an image of Thack in
shackles dragging an iron ball around on a chain.

“You think this is funny?”

Emily erased her smile. “No. Before becoming a full citizen
here, I lived in constant fear of being deported back to my country and locked
away in the
laogai
. That’s sort of like a prison labor camp.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“Because after university I refused to return and work for
a state-owned company. I suppose they had reason to be angry. They paid to send
me to school here. Nowadays...I guess I no longer fear prison so much.”
Simply
being deported would be the death of me.

“Maybe you should.”

“I don’t mean to belittle your concern, but are you really
having serious second thoughts about what we’re doing?”

Thackeray only stared at his computer screen.

“Where I come from, people who have done absolutely nothing
wrong—nothing to offend their neighbor, to break any law or hurt anyone—are
thrown into prison.”

“Really?”

“That is to say, they have not broken any laws that
Americans might recognize. How can there be law if the law is fickle, the
constitution merely some malleable farce? You can rot in jail simply for
offending a party official.”

“I’m not sure I see what that’s got to do with us.”

Her anger suddenly flaring, Emily turned and looked at him.
“Sometimes Americans can just be so
ignorant
. Even though the one-Party
rulers of
my
country have the blood of sixty million Chinese on their
hands, why should they care what their policies yield? Those controlling the
media are puppets, cronies of the ruling elite, spineless cowards who owe their
positions to promising only stories favorable to Party and government. Not that
it matters, since the gutless bastards refuse to stand for election. They are
born knowing what’s best for the masses, they enact their laws, and because there
are no weapons with which to protect oneself, their corrupt police are able to
barge into homes and hurl innocent people into jail. If there’s even a remote
possibility that Stu’s theory is right, we cannot allow these men to control a
device of such potential evil. What has it got to do with us, you ask? It’s got
everything
to do with us.”

Thackeray had his eyebrows arched and was studying her.

“Sorry.” Emily let out a deep breath. She smiled
sheepishly, feeling embarrassed for having gotten so carried away. “Of course,
it’s certainly not your fault that my father is in prison.”

“Oh. I don’t know that it’s any of my business.”

“My father is in prison for the heinous offense of trying
to take my mother to the United States for medical treatment.”

“I’m sorry, Emily, I didn’t mean...” Thackeray tugged his
beard. “How is your mother?”

Emily returned Thackeray’s gaze for a moment before looking
away.

“There I go, opening my trap.”

“It isn’t your fault. My family’s story is not unique.” Emily
tried to smile. “Maybe now you can see why I seem so ‘into this.’ I wish people
didn’t take their precious freedoms for granted. Why do Americans not
appreciate what they have?”

“I’ve heard that said, but I guess I never really thought
about it.”

They sat silently for several minutes. It became obvious to
Emily she could no longer concentrate, and besides, her hands were
freezing
.
It was approaching midnight, anyway. They had another full day’s work tomorrow
at their regular jobs before picking up where they left off tonight.

“I say we pack it in.” Thack began typing commands to save
various files and to shut down his terminal.

As she began the same routine, Emily’s thoughts wandered
through a more recently troubling consideration. What
had
been her father’s
role in Deng Zhen’s organization? If the CIA knew, they certainly were not
telling her. They had refused to acknowledge more than only humanitarian
interest in aiding his defection. The more she thought about it, the more she
realized there should be similarities in the application of CLI’s software to
the particle physics of her father’s work.

“There’s something else I should tell you, Thack. It’s
going to sound, well, strangely coincidental.”

“Strange? I can handle strange. Coincidence scares the shit
out of me.”

“This might scare you then. My father is a physicist,
actually a highly respected one. It’s possible that he was involved in
developing this satellite.”

Thackeray stopped what he was doing and looked at her.

“He never actually told my mother and me specifically what
his responsibilities were, other than to admit working on classified military
secrets. But if he
was
involved, it can only increase the odds that what
we’re dealing with here is definitely not some sort of benign Chinese
commercial venture. Ironic, isn’t it, that his own daughter might be struggling
to undo it?”

“I’d say the odds of such a coincidence are pretty remote.”

Not as remote as you think,
she silently lamented,
her expression becoming dark. “It infuriates me that as good and decent a
person as I know my father to be, they are able to bend such men to their
bidding.”

“And then throw him in jail,” observed Thackeray. He
remained quietly thoughtful for several moments. “Didn’t Stu say he was leaving
you those Baltimore stadium samples?”

Monday, July 6

DEPUTY INSPECTOR JOSEPH
CICCONE
of the New York Police Department looked at the snarl of
vehicles stretching as far as he could see. He quietly swore. Out over the
Hudson River and a mile or so away, an NYPD helicopter hovered just about level
with the pinnacles atop the suspension structure of the George Washington
Bridge. Murphy’s Law number twenty-four, Ciccone mused, was that if an
automobile was on the verge of a breakdown, it was bound to occur during rush
hour. With luck it would not be anything worse.

Traffic along the southbound lane of the Major Deegan
Expressway ground to a halt.

Ciccone depressed the button on his radio for the pre-set
frequency and hailed the chopper pilot.

The pilot confirmed his suspicion. “Roger, we got a
breakdown or a fender-bender on the GW southbound lower tier. Traffic is stalled
all the way up 95, 9A, in fact all the GW feeders. Royal mess. Out.”

Ciccone determined that the transit authority who monitored
bridge vehicular traffic had already dispatched a tow-truck. Upon learning that
his was the patrol car nearest the scene, Ciccone flipped on his pursuit
strobes and began motoring slowly along the highway shoulder.

After twenty minutes and several blasts of his siren, his
patrol car crawled onto the lower tier and the bridge’s breakdown lane. He beat
the tow truck to the scene and found a Buick sedan, trunk-lid open and two men
kneeling to replace the driver’s side rear tire—a single disabled vehicle,
after all. One of the men stood and waved his arms at the approaching police
car.

Ciccone stopped twenty yards behind the disabled vehicle. He
immediately regretted his conditioned response to seeing men of apparently
Middle Eastern extraction—a consequence, certainly, of all the publicity
surrounding the Islamic
jihadists
terrorizing the country. Off the top
of his head the officer could recall the Arabic names of two of the
department’s most decorated cops. His own brother-in-law was from Syria, and
their children played on the same high school soccer team. Like many Americans,
he could draw on personal experience to know that radical Islam was an entirely
different animal.