FIFTY-ONE
Valentin Kovalenko was walking back to his apartment from the liquor store when he realized that multiple sirens were blaring to the southwest. It occurred to him that they had not just begun; maybe they had been sounding even before he stepped into the tiny soul food café to pick up some carry-out lunch prior to stopping at the liquor store for a fresh bottle of Ketel One.
Almost immediately he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He did his best to shake it off as he continued down 17th Street, but well before he turned onto Swann Street he heard helicopters in the air.
“Nyet,” he said to himself. “Nyet.”
He kept a leisurely pace up Swann Street to his basement apartment, but once inside the door he shot across the living room to the television, dropped his bottle and the take-out food on the sofa, and turned the TV on to a local station.
A soap opera was playing. He switched the channel to another local station and saw a commercial.
He sat down on the couch, his eyes riveted to the screen, waiting for the noon news, which was coming up in five minutes.
While he waited he listened to the distant sirens’ wail, and he poured two fingers of lukewarm Ketel One into a glass he’d left on the coffee table the night before.
He chugged it down and poured another.
He almost made himself believe his fears had been unfounded. Until the news began, and they opened with a live helicopter shot over Georgetown. Valentin saw the smoke pouring out of the home on the wooded lot on Prosper Street.
The news anchor knew little, except there were fatalities, and neighbors reported the sound of gunshots from inside the house and a mysterious van.
Kovalenko’s first inclination was to drink, and he did so, straight from the bottle this time. His second inclination was to run. To just get up and go, to make tracks in the opposite direction of the sirens.
But he fought this urge, stood, and went to his laptop. His hands were shaking as he typed into Cryptogram: “What have you done?”
He was surprised by how fast the green letters appeared on the black window in front of him: “Explain your question.”
Explain my question? Kovalenko’s hands hovered over the keys. Finally he typed, “3333.”
The delay was only a few seconds, then, “You and your work have not been compromised.”
The thirty-six-year-old Russian looked to the ceiling in his room and shouted, “Fuck!” He typed, “Who did you kill?”
“That is not connected to you. Stay focused on your daily instructions.”
Kovalenko typed furiously: “Fuck you! You had me go over there!!!! I could have been seen. I could have been filmed. Who was in the house? Why? Why?” He grabbed the Ketel One bottle and hugged it close to his body as he waited for an answer.
Now there was a long pause for the response. Valentin pictured Center waiting to send a message just to give the angry man on the other end of the connection time to calm down.
Finally, “I am monitoring police and other official traffic. There has been no mention of you. I assure you there were no CCTV recordings of you or your rented vehicle anywhere around Prosper Street. You do not have anything to worry about, and I do not have time to placate every one of my agents.”
Kovalenko wrote, “I live less than two miles away. I will have to relocate.”
“Negative. Stay where you are. I need you near Dupont Circle.”
Kovalenko wanted to ask why, but he knew he needn’t bother.
Instead he drank for a minute, felt the effects of the vodka calming him somewhat, and then asked, “The people at 3333? Who were they?”
No response came.
Valentin typed: “It will be on the news soon enough. Why not just tell me?”
“One was a problem.”
That told Valentin nothing. He started to type a line of question marks, when a new line of green type flashed on the screen.
“The other five were employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Kovalenko just stared at the screen blankly, his mouth slightly open.
He whispered, “Ni huya sebe”—Oh, fuck — and held the vodka bottle tight against his heart.
Jack Ryan learned directly from CIA’s Intelink-TS network that the biggest news story of the month in D.C., the murder of six men that morning in Georgetown, would have been an even bigger news story if the truth got out.
Traffic between CIA and NSA revealed 3333 Prosper Street to be a CIA safe house, and communications confirmed that five of the dead were CIA employees and the sixth was the main suspect in the UAV attack.
FastByte22, the guy Jack Ryan and his colleagues helped identify and capture.
Needless to say, Ryan had the entire Campus operational and managerial staff convene in the conference room so he could disseminate the news.
Chavez could not believe the audacity of the crime. “So the Chinese really have the balls to send a wet team into Georgetown to kill CIA officers?”
“I don’t know that it was actually the Chinese who did it,” Director of Analysis Rick Bell said as he walked into the conference room. “We just intercepted a CIA message to U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade. In one of FastByte’s interrogations, apparently one where he was severely sleep-deprived, he mentioned the name Tong Kwok Kwan as the true identity of Center. Maybe Center did it as punishment for giving up his real name.”
“What do we know about this Tong guy?” Granger asked.
Ryan said, “That’s Dr. K. K. Tong. Adam Yao said he was the father of China’s cyberwarfare community.”
Granger couldn’t believe it. “What the hell was he doing in HK working with FastByte and the hackers? He should be in Beijing or in a military installation somewhere.”
Ryan shook his head. “He had a falling-out with them. He’s a wanted man in China.”
Chavez said, “Maybe they kissed and made up and he’s working with the Chinese again. The PLA. I can’t believe for a second that some ad hoc computer hacking organization is doing all this just for their own murky objectives. This act today sounds like it has state sponsorship, just like the UAV hack.”
Gerry said, “Whoever they are, they had to kill Zha to silence him.”
Jack said, “But they did not silence him. Gavin has Zha’s computer, and you can bet we’ll hear a lot from Zha when Gavin reveals what’s inside.”
As elite Marine fighter pilots, Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton and Captain Brandon “Trash” White had experienced much more in their lives than average thirty-one- and twenty-eight-year-olds, but neither man could say he had ever experienced anything like what they had been up to for the past twenty-four hours.
Just over one day earlier, both men were awakened in the middle of the night by Naval intelligence officers, and then led, bleary-eyed, into the squadron room with the rest of their squadron as well as another squadron of Marines on the Reagan. The twenty-four pilots stood at attention when a lieutenant commander entered from the Office of Naval Intelligence. He asked them to sit back down, then told them they would all be flying to Japan at first light, air-refueling along the way. The squadron would land at Marine Air Corps Station Iwakuni, and there they would receive further instructions.
To a man the Marines were both angry and disappointed. The action had been out here in the middle of the East China Sea and the strait, not all the way over in Japan. But the Reagan was pulling back, out of range of the strait, which Trash saw as a retreat. And now they had been ordered to leave the carrier altogether and go even farther from the action.