Clay’s eyes were still on his computer screen. If the Forel had been “recommissioned,” U.S. intelligence would have found out, particularly if it was still in Russia, which suggested that it wasn’t officially recommissioned. Especially according to the article Clay had just found.
The article was two years old and posted by a relatively small Norwegian publication from a town just outside of Stavanger. It appeared a small group of antiwar protesters had gathered outside a quiet shipyard. They had demanded that the government stop aiding “the global war machine” by building warships for its allies, which typically meant Russia. The group had caught wind of the construction of a warship being built in their small town. Yet once some of the group members found their way into the locked building, what they found was not a warship at all, but a submarine.
The picture in the article was centered on the protesters and only captured a piece of the vessel behind them. And from what Clay could make out, the dimensions appeared to be very close to those of the Forel. The article failed to mention, and Clay already knew that Norway didn’t build submarines. At least not officially. In fact, the country’s own small fleet of just six submarines was assembled in Germany. Finally, what the article did include was that the shipyard was privately owned and operated by a Russian conglomerate.
But the last piece still didn’t fit since the Forel was destroyed along with the Chinese warship near Rio de Janeiro. Two boats on the same path and found in the same location. The Forel was not an adversary as they’d originally thought, but an ally to the Chinese. Slowly the pieces were lining up, but still kept bringing Clay back to the same question. Why were the Chinese Corvette and the Forel destroyed?
He glanced at his phone in front of him as the tiny screen lit up, followed by the familiar ring of an incoming call. He reached forward and answered it.
“Hey, Wil.”
“Hi, Clay. I wake you up?”
“No. I was just sitting here wondering why we don’t talk more.”
Borger laughed on the other end. “Good, because we may be in for another long night. First though, I think we need to get the Admiral on.”
Langford logged in from his own computer and his face promptly appeared in a video window. His short gray hair was still neat, indicating he hadn’t slept yet either. On the contrary, his eyes seemed to blaze intently in the glow of his computer screen.
“What do you have?” he asked immediately.
Borger began typing on his keyboard. “Sir, I think we have some answers, but unfortunately more questions too.”
“Then let’s start with the answers.”
“Yes, sir.” An image filled the rest of their screens as Borger shared a picture from his own computer. It was a waist-high shot of a senior Chinese officer in uniform. He looked to be in his early sixties with a tight haircut similar to the Admiral’s. In the picture, the man looked relaxed with dark eyes focused on the camera.
“This is General Wei. Head of China’s PLA, or the People’s Liberation Army, and the man I believe our Lieutenant Li delivered the DNA samples to after he left South America.”
Both Langford and Clay leaned forward, studying the picture.
“How do we know?”
Borger displayed a second window on the screen, filled with numeric codes. “I found the logs from Li’s cell phone carrier and traced them back to the day he arrived. The triangulation from the cell towers isn’t as exact as GPS, but he was in the building of China’s Central Military Commission. That I’m sure of. I then searched and compared the coordinates until I found people whose phone locations were close to Li’s. The most likely person out of that group was General Wei.”
“Admiral, it appears General Wei was the one in charge of the Guyana find. I’ve found emails from him and others showing that he was giving the orders. And get this, the initial discovery was made almost nine months ago. It took them another six months to get there.”
“Plenty of time to gut a warship.”
“Right. And from what I can tell, they pulled it off with surprisingly few people knowing about it.”
“Okay, so what happened to our briefcase?”
Borger frowned on screen. “That’s a good question, sir. I just finished plotting the General’s phone coordinates on a map. It’s a little messy.” A map appeared on the screen with thousands of blue dots all around or near the government center of Beijing. “I can clean this up a little, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it.”
“Why is that?” asked Clay.
“Because the coordinates of his phone are much more interesting after Lieutenant Li delivered the case.” Another map suddenly replaced the first. One with fewer dots. “You can see here that most of the dots, or coordinates, are almost on top of each other until this.” He circled some of the outlying dots with his mouse. “What this shows is that Wei left the building less than thirty minutes later on that day. And judging from the distance and speed of the coordinates after his departure, he was probably in a car.”
Borger’s mouse highlighted a string of dots moving in one direction. “This was his path until the tower lost signal.”
“What does that mean… he drove out of range?”
“I don’t think so, sir. I think he turned off his phone.”
16
Langford raised an eyebrow. “He turned it off?”
“Yes, sir. There were a few towers he was still close enough to connect to. And even if he didn’t have a strong enough voice signal, he should have been well inside the range of the control channel used for text messages. Text messages can be received farther away, which still would have allowed the towers to triangulate.”
“So he receives the case from Li, immediately gets in his car and heads north, then turns off his phone.” Langford’s face was somber. “Then what?”
“That’s where things go from strange to bizarre.” Borger hesitated before continuing. “He disappeared from the grid for almost fourteen hours before his phone came back on, at roughly the same place as it went off.”
“So he turned it back on?”
“Yes, sir.”
Langford crossed his arms, thinking. “Do we have any indication whether he still had the case with him?”
“There’s no way to know,” Borger replied. “But my bet is that he didn’t.”
Langford nodded. “I wouldn’t exactly call that bizarre. My guess is our good General hid it somewhere, or with someone.”
“Uh, that’s not actually the bizarre part. It’s that General Wei’s reappearance on the grid was short-lived, literally. He never returned home. Instead, he drove himself back to Beijing, found a parking lot, and killed himself in his car.”
“What?!” Both Langford and Clay were stunned. “Are you kidding?”
“No, sir,” Borger shook his head.
“Jesus,” Langford groaned. “This just keeps getting worse and worse.” He looked at his screen with exasperation. “Any of this making sense to you, Clay?”
“I’m afraid not, Admiral. But I agree with Wil. If this General Wei went to so much trouble to get that case and then disappeared just before ending his life, I think we can be pretty certain it wasn’t with him when he came back.”
This wasn’t making sense to any of them.
“Why on Earth would a man with that kind of power, who now has something virtually every person on the planet wants, simply kill himself?”
“To keep it quiet,” Clay mused. He looked back to Wei’s picture on the screen and it suddenly fell into place. “That’s it. That’s the answer.”