The base was full of American soldiers, all looking relaxed. Xue Lin found a seat in the warm morning sunshine and waited for Sam to get back from his errands. She felt that the interviews had gone well, and was confident that both Dr. Wu and Jimmy would be a good fit in America if they made it through the induction process. She felt sorry for Dr. Wu, who would likely have quite a miserable life ahead of him. She felt that Sam’s softer account of Roet’s botched rescue attempt was a wise way to avoid Wu locking up on them in anger. She wondered how things would go with Wu when Roet arrived from Langley.
Sam’s phone rang and he wrote down the details of the private jet that had been requisitioned for him and Xue Lin. They had an hour to get organized before wheels up. He figured it was time to sit down with her and give her the bad news.
Sam found Xue Lin still sitting eyes closed in the sun. He thought it best to give it to her straight. Mentally, she was equipped to deal with stressful information, but this was closer to home than any scenario she had been faced with in her career.
“It’s good to be warm again. They don’t have sunshine in Wuhan. They do have a nice blanket of smog going though.”
“Xue Lin, we’ve had a development. It’s not good.”
She sat up and Sam gave her the news, finishing with the video. She took it like a pro, saying only: “I’m going with you.”
“I thought you’d say that.” Sam replied. “Wheels up in forty-five minutes. Bring your backpack with the vials, and your weapons. We’ll be able to land non-commercial but bring your Chinese passport anyway. If you get taken down, at least the Chinese will get blamed. Let’s go to the armoury. We may be going in heavy. To be determined. By the way, did you keep that submachine gun you stole from the lab?”
Xue Lin smiled just for a split second as she walked briskly with Sam to the armoury. Sam exited the armoury fifteen minutes later with a long, black canvas bag, heavy looking, and a long gun slung over his shoulder.
He told Xue Lin to check if the armoury had any suppressors that fit the pistols in her backpack.
“They’re all Chinese. I doubt they’ll fit anything here.”
“Just ask. When you are done here, go grab the Barret that I saw you put in your locker, and those pistols and that Chinese machine gun. Meet me outside the mess hall in fifteen minutes. We’re getting a ride to the plane in twenty.”
“Roger that.”
‘Poor kid!’ Sam thought to himself, respecting the professionalism she was showing.
Roet’s plane had been in the air for several hours. He was angry that both his assets had left China. They were of much greater use to him back in China where they could be bribed and coerced into doing his bidding and keeping him informed. Maybe not so much Dr. Wu anymore since he had shot the girl in the neck, but definitely Jimmy. It was time to take all that money out of Jimmy’s US bank account and take it offshore and put it with the rest of his money. It seemed that the CIA executives up on the seventh floor were looking to retire him after the killing of Wu’s daughter and a series of other mistakes. He’d also had a call from an annoyingly obsessive CIA accountant concerning his massive over-spending the budget allowance for Jimmy and his other foreign assets and confidential informants. Roet had established US bank accounts under each of his informants’ names, setting himself up as a co-signatory. He could empty all of the accounts whenever it suited him, filtering all of the funds to a numbered account in Switzerland.
It could soon be the right moment to pack up shop. He was getting tired of the game and he was well aware that he was drinking too much these days and it was affecting the way he was seen at work.
In any case, he needed to get into a room with Dr. Wu soon and find out the whole story about his virus. Things had been left up in the air since the daughter’s death. He needed to find out if Wu had completed the work on altering the virus to be non-dangerous to white people.
Chapter 43
In the Air
The Gulfstream jet streaked into the sky towards Europe with Sam, Xue Lin and a big bag of guns aboard. Xue Lin had a poke through the bag to see what kind of toys Sam had collected. Nothing much out of the ordinary except for the pair of hand grenades which she picked up and weighed in her hands. Xue Lin needed to sleep much more than Sam did, and she lay down in the bed up near the front of the luxurious plane and went straight to sleep as soon as she put her head on the pillow.
Sam’s phone had been buzzing with the receipt of files from the analysts at Langley. He read through the analysts’ reports on the video of the couple. They’d isolated and cleaned up background noise but still didn’t have a clue where they were being held. Other analysts were going through immigration footage from the last couple of days of flights from San Diego and LAX to Milan but it was going to take a while longer.
Sam figured that he might make that phone call to the Chinese kidnappers a little early and try to ‘poke the bear’ and see if they made a mistake. Sam was getting frustrated. He needed to know where they were holding the couple if he was to stand a chance of getting the drop on them.
Xue Lin awoke after more than three hours of deep sleep. Groggily she went to the back of the plane and made herself a cup of coffee as Sam continued to read reports from the analysts.
Xue Lin had dreamt about the locator that Jimmy had dug out of her shoulder. It had clearly caused her some anxiety. “What an invasion of privacy!” she’d thought to herself.
“Sam! I have an idea how we might find out where they are hiding my parents. The Chinese Government would most likely have put locator chips in them when they vaccinated the three of us during my adoption process back in ’95.”
“What?” asked Sam, quite incredulously.
“Yeah, Jimmy dug my chip out when we were on the run. I couldn’t believe it either. Apparently they chip anyone they feel like. I guess my parents were ‘persons of interest’, so they did all of us and told them that it was a vaccination.”
“Jesus Christ!” said Sam, his sense of justice rearing its head.
“Anyway… it occurred to me that perhaps Jimmy, being a Communist Government man might be able to help one of our CIA geeks hack into their database and find my parents on a map.”
“Bit of a long shot Snowflake, but you might be right. Let’s get on it.”
Sam and Xue Lin called Korea and arranged to have Jimmy put on the phone to discuss the idea. Jimmy wasn’t confident that he could get into the system, but they connected him to one of the CIA hackers at Langley and they all started working on it. Jimmy’s basic Government knowledge of the use of the chipping system helped the computer geek work out where to start looking for the database.
The Barbecue couple were being guarded heavily by the six Chinese agents who were spread out in strategic positions, each member knowing that this was a high priority mission and that mistakes might mean the firing squad when they got home.
The two prisoners looked like typical suburban Americans. Being in their mid-fifties they shouldn’t be much of a flight risk, but there was probably an American team in the planning stages of some kind of attack or a rescue. For the Chinese it was best if the situation did not escalate beyond a simple ‘swap.’ Two American CIA operatives for the three stolen vials, but they were prepared for a heavier scenario.
Sam looked out the window at the passing clouds below, feeling impatient and helpless as he waited for the geeks to find the GPS database. He opened the bag and checked and loaded all the weapons and double checked magazines. Then looking for something else to keep him occupied he remembered that he had to look over the footage of the interview with Dr. Wu so he could report back.