The Einstein Papers (6 page)

He had lived in Washington, D.C., for almost a year now, posing as an employee of the Chinese Embassy, and he had seen little to change his opinion. He had grown up in a thatch-roofed shack with pigs living in a pen next door, and now he discovered that for most Americans an automobile without air conditioning was an unbearable hardship.

The agent had also found that the average American citizen cared little for the politics of the world. Americans seemed content if they were able to pay their bills, own a home, watch cable television, and screw their spouses on weekends.

The agent believed America’s role as leader of the world would soon be ending.

It seemed fitting the burglary was planned for the most American of days, Super Bowl Sunday. Slipping into the laboratory during the first quarter, he copied what he needed from the computers, then rifled through desks for the next two quarters before slipping out in the middle of the fourth.

He waited in his car on the street outside, listening to the end of the game on his radio. A pair of bumper stickers sat on the seat next to him. As soon as he confirmed that the team called the Broncos had won, he got out and slapped the winners bumper sticker onto the rear of his car.

Once that was done, he drove into traffic, madly honking his horn, as if the Bronco’s winning the game was the greatest event of his life. The horn honked until he was but a block away from the embassy.

It was the perfect touch to end a successful operation.

Li Choi was seeing an apparition.

Closing his eyes, he rubbed them with his fingertips, then opened them again. Strangely enough, he could still see the blond-haired man. It must be my mind playing tricks, Choi thought to himself. Some residual memory from American television perhaps, dredged from the depths of my subconscious and brought about by the torture of the past few weeks. It was a logical assumption and it brought Choi some degree of comfort.

The ghost who had appeared inside his cell looked vaguely like the star of a detective show he had enjoyed when he was in the United States. What was the name of the show? Choi thought to himself. It was about a detective in Florida, the city of Palm Beach. Oh well, no matter, he thought; the show will come to me after the ghost disappears.

Or perhaps I’m actually asleep, Choi thought.

Since being abducted in the parking lot of a Chinese grocery store in San Francisco seventy-one days before, the thoughts that ran through Choi’s mind were a jumbled mass of bizarre images, seemingly unlinked. The shock of his kidnapping, combined with his being transported to the remote laboratory and weapons facility at the foot of the Qilian Mountains on the dividing line between Gansu and Qinghai provinces on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China, and his worry for his family’s safety in the United States, had combined to bring Choi to the edge of madness.

None of this was happening and he knew he would soon awake.

He rubbed his eyes again. The apparition remained.

And then the blond-haired man framed in the door spoke. “Li Choi, I presume?”

Choi stared from the metal cot bolted to the wall of the cell where he had spent the last several months under armed guard. Each evening, after a full day in the laboratory, he was brought to the cell and locked inside for the night. He was so conditioned to the door being closed and locked, his mind could not comprehend the door now being wide open without a guard present.

“Where is the guard?” Li managed to stammer.

“He met with an unfortunate accident. His neck snapped,” the blond man said quietly as he stared at a photograph. “It must have been when I twisted it.”

Choi swallowed, rubbed his eyes, and stared again at the man. The man’s accent was obviously American. He stood tall, a shade over six feet. If Choi had to guess his weight, he would place him at just over two hundred pounds. Judging from his biceps, which thrusted from the sleeves of his shirt, very little of that weight was fat. The glacial blue eyes beneath his thick blond hair stared at Choi with a barely concealed danger. The blond man’s lips were sculptured and his strong chin had a thin scar that ran along the left side like an exclamation mark. He was dressed in khaki pants with a multipocketed shirt that matched. The buttons on the clothes were made from a sharp-edged metal of dull finish. His feet were covered with paratrooper boots. The clothing bore no insignias, and other than a watch, the man wore no jewelry. like a caged tiger, he seemed to be emitting waves of heat and impending motion from the aura surrounding his body.

“Index finger, please,” the man said.

“But I just…” Choi stuttered.

“I’d love to stand here and chat, but I think someone might be along soon to check on the guard. Since he’s dead, and I have no intention of joining you for eternity in this cell,” the man said easily, “let me print you and see if we have a match. If we do, the time has come for you to leave.”

“My family, they said they’d kill my family,” Choi said, sitting upright on the cot, wondering why the unreal aspect of this encounter was barely diminishing.

The man nodded, then pressed Choi’s finger to an ink pad, then a slip of paper. He fed the paper into a black plastic box roughly the size of a sandwich and waited until a light flashed green.

“Who would have thought?” the man said as he pushed a series of buttons on his wristwatch. “It is you.”

Less than a minute later, the numerical code Taft had entered into his wristwatch was beamed through space to an orbiting satellite and then back down to an NSA facility in Maryland.

“Confirmed as a valid transmission,” the intelligence officer said to his partner, who was standing with a telephone in his hand. “Contact General Benson. His man is inside and has verified the target’s identity.”

Without another word the man removed the black nylon pack from his back and began to dig around. From a zippered pocket he extracted a single photo and handed it to Choi. The picture showed Choi’s wife, Chun, and his son, Li Jr. They were standing next to the blond-haired man in front of Disneyland. Mrs. Choi held a copy of a newspaper in her hands.

“What is today’s date?” Choi asked, squinting to read the newspaper’s date.

“September 21st, 1999,” the man answered.

The picture had been taken less than a week before.

“How did you …” Choi began.

“Listen, I’ll explain later. Right now we’ve got to get out of here,” the blond-haired man said as he repacked his equipment, then walked over and helped Choi off the cot to his feet. “What’s your physical condition?’

“I’m weak and one of my eyes is blurry from being beaten,” Choi said. “My kidnappers wanted me to renounce the United States. They said since China paid for my education I became no more than a common thief the minute I filed my immigration papers.”

The man nodded and reached back into his pack. He took out a thermometer and placed it under Choi’s tongue, then set two fingers on Choi’s wrist. He stared at his watch as he took Choi’s pulse, then removed and read the thermometer.

“You’ll live, I expect,” the blond-haired man said.

Choi watched as the man placed the pack on his back; then he followed him into the hallway outside the cell.

The man turned to Choi and whispered, “So did you… did you withdraw your citizen papers?”

“No damn way,” Choi said proudly.

“Good,” the blond-haired man said. “Now, if you’ll just remain quiet and let me do my job, I’ll get you out of here and back to the States.”

Stepping over the body of the guard, whose head was twisted at a grotesque angle, the two men walked to the far end of the hallway and stopped at an outer security door. Beyond the door rose a stairway that led to the ground above and freedom. The blond-haired man removed a suction cup sporting wires from one of the pockets on his shirt and stuck it to the door. Placing a small speaker in his ear he listened for a second.

“All clear,” the man said. “Get ready.”

“One question,” Choi said. “What is your name?”

“John Taft,” the man said, peering through the glass in the door. “My name is John Taft.”

Opening the door, he led Choi outside.

Although the remoteness of the Qinghai Advanced Weapons Facility afforded it a natural defense against infiltration, the Chinese had taken no chances. The grounds were peppered with buried motion detectors, and detailed radar scanned the grounds for anything out of place. Trained guard dogs patrolled the perimeter on regular intervals and the fence was electrified to an intensity that caused it to hum as if a series of hornets’ nests lay just to the other side.

Taft glanced down at his watch.

“This is going to get hairy,” he whispered to Choi.

“What do …” Choi began to say.

Twenty miles to the southwest, along an ancient but still active fault line, the last of a series of carefully measured explosive charges Taft had set in place ignited. An earthen dike along the Qargan River blew, flooding the ugly scar in the land with millions of gallons of water. The plates in the earth bordering the fault line, loosened by the explosions and now lubricated by the water, shifted.

With help from man the forces deep in the earth were unleashed.

At that instant the ground began to shake lightly. The tremors increased their intensity until undulating waves shook the building Taft and Choi stood alongside.

And then, like a series of giant Christmas lights run amok, the electrical transformers at the corners of the facility exploded with blinding blue flashes and the grounds were plunged into darkness and chaos.

Taft was slipping on a pair of goggles as the ground first shook. He stared out on the darkness through a comforting green glow.

“I guess what they say is true,” he said as he reached out to a trembling Choi. “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.”

Tugging at Choi’s shoulder, he motioned for him to follow. One hundred yards north of the building that housed Choi’s cell the pair paused and crouched in a ditch.

“I’m sure they have an emergency generator, so watch for a spotlight any second,” Taft said.

As if Taft had willed it, a beam of light bobbled on the ground, then began to sweep the grounds.

“When the light sweeps east in a few seconds, you’re going to follow me to the fence,” Taft said.

Choi watched the searchlight begin its swing to the east. The spotlight passed over the top of the ditch and continued on its path. Taft grabbed Choi’s arm, yanking him easily to his feet.

“Now,” Taft whispered, pulling the scientist along by his arm.

At the edge of the fence Taft spit on the wires. Finding it dead, he motioned to Choi. “Go under, I’m right behind you.”

Choi squirmed into the depression Taft had dug through the sand under the fence on the way into the compound. He watched from the other side as Taft picked up an electric jammer hung on the fence. Designed to temporarily defeat the motion sensors on his way into the facility, the box had served its crude purpose.

Quickly collecting several tumbleweeds from the ground, he slipped into the hole, covering the entrance behind. Taft climbed out the other side just as the light began to sweep back to where they crouched.

“Quick, follow me,” Taft whispered.

He grabbed Choi by his jacket and pushed him into a washed-out gully several feet away. Taft hit the ground seconds before the light swept across them. He sat upright just as soon as the light passed overhead.

“So far so good. The quake was designed to give us some time to undertake our escape,” Taft noted as an aftershock rippled through the earth. “With their electronics systems barely functioning, it should be some time before they think to check on you.”

Choi watched in stunned silence as Taft quickly withdrew a global positioning system, or GPS, from his pack. He scanned the numbers, checking their exact location. Staring briefly at a plastic-covered map, Taft next glanced at the small compass on his wristwatch, then stuffed the GPS and map back in the pack.

“This way,” he said quietly to Choi.

Choi struggled to keep pace with Taft, who made his way quickly down the gully. After a twenty-minute jog, Taft stopped and checked their location once again. Glancing at the moon, he took a northern fork of the gully. Two hundred yards later, the pair sighted the Shule River. The river was flooded with recent rains and the muddy water surged quickly past. Taft stopped and took his bearings again. After staring around for a second, he walked a few feet to the left then reached beneath a pile of brush at the water’s edge and removed a metal folding shovel.

“Eureka,” Taft said quietly.

Choi watched in amazement as Taft unfolded the shovel and began quickly digging in the sand of the riverbank. After removing two feet of sand overburden, Taft uncovered a four-foot-by-six-foot wooden crate. He dragged the box out of the hole and pried open the top with the shovel. Moving quickly now, he removed a package from the box and tossed it on the ground. Next he pulled a nylon cord lanyard. With a loud hiss a black rubber raft began to inflate. When the raft was partially inflated he pulled a strip running down the center. This released a catalyst into die bottom compartment, and he waited as the chemicals mixed and the floor became rigid.

“So far so good,” Taft said, as he dug farther into the crate and removed a compact four-stroke outboard motor and an auxiliary fuel tank.

Taft looked at Choi, then into the box. “You want a cold beer?”

Seeing the look of shock on Choi’s face, Taft smiled. “Just having fun with you, pal,” he said quietly.

Moving rapidly, Taft dragged the raft into the water. Wading in, he attached the motor to the stern, then placed the extra fuel tank in the rear. Taft climbed back onto the shore and threw the wooden crate in the hole and shoveled sand over the top. After smoothing the sand with the shovel, he brushed over the area with a tree limb to blend it in with the surrounding shoreline. Hoisting the shovel to his shoulder like an ax, he turned to the thoroughly stunned Choi. “How do you feel about boat rides?”