“Fair enough,” Mitchell said. He translated.
“The J-20 was a disappointment, useful mostly for trying to humiliate your visiting military officers, and we would never have enough to match your Raptors. And the Dongfeng missile was always suspect. Senior party leaders were losing faith in all of it, so they removed it from the shashoujian program,” Pioneer answered.
“No successes, lots of failures,” Jonathan said. “Something set them off. We’re missing something.”
“I agree, but I don’t know what it would be. In fact, around that time, the MSS even wanted to shut the program down.”
“Why?” Jonathan asked. That hadn’t been in the reporting.
“Because the MSS feared that CIA had penetrated the program. It was true, as I had done that, but not like they thought.”
“What do you mean?” Mitchell said.
“I was sure that the CIA did not have another penetration with better access than mine inside the shashoujian. I know that intelligence services like to confirm information from multiple sources, but my case officers were never asking me about the things the MSS was afraid you knew. I was the senior MSS archivist. I assumed that even if you had a more senior penetration, my case officers would still have asked me those questions. They never did. I tried to raise them sometimes, but the case officers never seemed interested. They liked me to respond to their questions. They did not like me to invent my own taskings. They said it was a risk.”
“He’s got your number cold,” Jonathan told Mitchell.
“Yeah, well, it happens when the case officers aren’t technical specialists in the subject they have to ask about,” Mitchell said. “They stick to the questions that you analysts send them from headquarters. If you don’t send the right questions, they never get asked.”
“Chalk one up for the system,” Kyra said.
“What triggered their fears that we had penetrated their program?” Jonathan asked.
Pioneer sat back and thought for a moment. “It happened after you bombed our embassy in Serbia. I forget the exact date.”
Jonathan cocked his head. “Serbia…,” he said quietly, but Kyra overheard. “Did the MSS smuggle anything through that embassy related to the Assassin’s Mace?”
“I know that the Guojia Anquan Bu Tenth Bureau purchased something of value from a senior Serb army officer in Belgrade and sent it to Beijing through the diplomatic pouch a few days before the bombing. The Tenth Bureau is responsible for stealing foreign technologies, so I assumed the Serbs had stolen some piece of equipment from NATO. When your Air Force blew up the embassy wing, the MSS was convinced that President Clinton had ordered the strike to keep the delivery out of their hands. That is why they refused to believe that the bombing was an accident. They still believe that.” Mitchell translated. Jonathan leaned forward and put his head in his hands.
“You don’t know what was in the package?” Mitchell asked Pioneer.
“I don’t. I tried to find out, but the MSS kept the records compartmented. I could never access them, so I had nothing to report. I was not even sure that the technology had anything to do with the shashoujian. The timing of the sale and the MSS worries about a penetration could have just been coincidence. I do know that after it came to Beijing, the MSS gave it to the PLA and from there it went to Chengdu. But they often buy stolen technology abroad. It is common.”
“I’ve been an idiot!” Jonathan hissed.
“What? What is it?” Kyra asked.
“It’s been sitting there the entire time and I was too stupid to see it,” Jonathan said. “We should have seen it when we did the timeline.” He stood up and looked at Mitchell. “We’re done. I’ve got what I need.” Mitchell nodded and spoke to Pioneer in Mandarin, telling him the conversation was finished.
“What did we miss?” Kyra asked.
Jonathan took a deep breath. “You remember that the timeline showed no progress in the Assassin’s Mace project until 1999?”
“Yeah,” Kyra said. “We’ve been looking for an event that kick-started it.”
“We’ve been looking for an event in China,” Jonathan said. “That was stupid and narrow-minded. There was a kick-start event, but it didn’t happen in China. It happened in Serbia.”
“What happened in Serbia?”
He shook his head. “Stupid,” he said, quiet but still intense. “We can break this thing open. He gave us the Assassin’s Mace.” His voice was calm. “He’s had pieces that he didn’t know belonged to the puzzle. So did we, for that matter. We could’ve figured it out without him if we’d been smart enough. I was an idiot not to see it,” Jonathan said. It was an honest admission that stemmed more from exhaustion than humility. The sleep deprivation was finally degrading his ability to think, and the caffeine pills were now doing him more harm than good. He hoped Kyra was doing better, but she had been under more stress and alternating between coffee and alcohol.
Jonathan checked the clock and did the conversion of time zones in his mind. It was 0830 at Langley. He turned to Mitchell. “I need a secure cell phone and a laptop.”
Sachs reached into his pocket and produced a mobile handset. A backpack from the plane’s cockpit produced an iPad. “You can’t keep those. I had to sign for them.”
Jonathan shot the junior officer a withering look as he pulled the phone from his hand. “How long before we leave?” he asked Mitchell.
“By the schedule, thirty minutes. But we own this plane. You need us to wait?”
“If you would,” he said. He handed the tablet computer to his partner. “I’m calling home. I need you to look someone up for me.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Pyotr Ufimtsev. P-Y-O-T-R. U-F-I-M-T-S-E-V. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.” Kyra shrugged, pressed a button on the computer, and began typing. “We just need a little more,” Jonathan said, as much to himself as anyone listening. “And we need to talk to the Navy.”
“About what?” Mitchell said, exasperated.
“Have you ever heard of Noble Anvil?” Jonathan said.
Kyra looked up. He was as excited as she had ever seen him during their short time together. She sifted through her thoughts as she pressed the return button to start the Internet search on the name Jonathan had given her. She had a good memory for acronyms and code words. Developing memory skills was a standard part of case officer training, and life in government service demanded it anyway. “The US part of NATO’s Allied Force operation in Yugoslavia back in ninety-nine,” she said.
Jonathan nodded. He was more grateful that he wouldn’t have to explain the reference than impressed with Kyra’s knowledge of military history. “The Air Force bombed the Chinese embassy by accident. The Chinese believed there’s no way we could have screwed up our targeting that badly, so somebody must have ordered it. And they think we ordered it because they had a piece of classified US technology in the building — something sensitive enough that the Chinese thought we might be willing to bomb their embassy to keep them from shipping it to Beijing.”
“Wait… the F-117 Nighthawk?” She started swiping her finger across the computer’s screen, looking through the search results.
Mitchell said nothing for a moment, searching his thoughts. “The one the Serbs shot down.”
Jonathan nodded. “The only stealth plane we’ve ever lost to hostile fire. Six weeks later to the day it was shot down by the Serbs, we dropped a bomb on the Chinese embassy sixty miles away. But the PLA wasn’t part of the shootdown, so we never had a reason to connect it with the Assassin’s Mace program even when the Chinese thought we had.”