“There’s nothing here about the message’s content.”
Coates slid over another folder. The message was short, written in small block letters:
GENERAL HAN SOONG ALIVE LAOGI.
REQUESTS DEFECTION.
CONDITION: SAME LAST CONTROLLER.
BIAN TO SERVE AS CONDUIT.
The laogi … Dutcher suppressed a shiver.
Laogi was the Chinese word for the government prison system — or “reeducation centers”—but had come to describe any one of the hundreds of gulaglike camps spread throughout China. Once you went into a laogi, you either died there or you came out forever changed, a reconditioned zombie. Dutcher had once met a Brit who’d served two years in a laogi. By all accounts, the man had received decent treatment in comparison to his fellow Chinese inmates, but still he’d been a shelclass="underline" unable to sleep more than an hour at a time, plagued with migraine headaches and permanently slurred speech, incapable of holding down a job or a relationship … They’d killed him, but left him alive.
Oaken said, “If Soong is really alive, will he be the same man we dealt with twelve years ago?”
Mason nodded. “That’s the rub.”
“I don’t like any of it,” Coates said. “The demand for Tanner, the stipulation that Bian is our only conduit … We have to consider this might be a ruse.”
“To what end?” Albrecht countered. “To get Tanner back? I doubt it. Sure, he almost stole the PLA’s best general, but all this for revenge? I don’t see it.”
“Then the other option: a plant. They’ve had twelve years to recondition Soong. We get him back, he starts planting disinformation …”
“They’d have to know we’d put him under the microscope first.”
“Twelve years, Sylvia,” Coates repeated. “Hell, put me in a laogi that long and they could convince me my mother’s a goddamned beach ball.”
Dutcher agreed. Conviction and honesty were two sides of the same coin. The first created the appearance of the second. Believe a lie strongly enough and it becomes your truth. Still, in the end it wouldn’t matter; they had no choice but to go back in for Soong. Until his defection attempt, he’d been China’s premier military strategist for three decades; he was a potential gold mine.
As if reading Dutcher’s mind, Mason said, “We speculate all we want, but the fact is, we can’t ignore this. If there’s any chance at all of getting Soong, we have to take it. Dutch?”
“I’ll talk to Briggs.” And I know what he’ll say, Dutcher thought. In Briggs’s mind, he’d failed Soong and his family. If there was even a remote chance to get them out, Tanner would take it.
Coates said, “Let’s say Tanner’s up for this … That doesn’t solve our biggest problem.”
“What’s that?” asked Sylvia Albrecht.
Dutcher answered. “We have to assume Soong gave the Guoanbu everything. Twelve years ago or twelve days ago, it doesn’t matter: The Guoanbu has a long memory. Tanner is still a face in China. He may not even make it past the border.”
With the groaning of gears, the massive steel doors shut behind Guoanbu Chief Kyung Xiang.
There were several seconds of complete darkness before the generators kicked on and the lights flickered to life. Stretching into the distance along the walls, fluorescent lights cast pale shadows across the stone floor. From wall to wall the corridor was two hundred yards wide, the vaulted ceilings extending 30 feet above their heads.
“Amazing,” murmured Xiang’s deputy, Eng.
“Indeed,” replied the base commander. “This tunnel extends two kilometers to the north. There are eight elevators, four on each side. Below us lay three sublevels, each three hundred meters wide. Crew quarters and support areas are on the lowermost level.”
“How many men?”
“Six hundred.”
Amazing indeed, thought Xiang. Ten years under construction, this base was the largest of its kind in the world. It was an unprecedented feat. Of course, compared to the Great Wall or the Three River Gorges Dam, the base’s construction had been a straightforward engineering problem. What made this special was the fact that the outside world knew nothing about it.
All their satellites, all their spies, and still they couldn’t see what was right in front of them.
Thousands of workers, all carefully screened and monitored, all transported in and out of the project area without ever knowing where they were … And only a fraction of them — most of them specially trained PLA soldiers — had known what they were building.
What a surprise we will give them.
Before long, the world’s intelligence agencies would be asking the same question: How did they do it? The answer was so simple it probably wouldn’t occur to them: Patience and focus. Conditioned by thousands of years of history, the Chinese people did not think in the short term. The Great Wall took thousands of years to build; the Three River Gorges Dam over a decade. Americans complain if a mega-mall or high-rise apartment building takes more than six months to build. To the Chinese people, six months was but a flicker. True greatness is measured in generations, sometimes centuries.
And what of personal greatness? Xiang thought. That too can come and go in a flicker. After the Soong debacle Xiang had had to scrabble to merely survive. The Guoanbu did not suffer failure gladly. After those initial years, amazed to find himself alive, Xiang had begun the long climb up the MSS ladder: enemies to be eliminated, competition to be discredited, victories to be invented. Xiang often wondered if the defection attempt had been a blessing in disguise. It had made him a harder man, and that’s what China needed: Hard men who could make hard choices.
Soong had cost him much. Of course, the good general was now paying the price: China’s greatest general, now a rat in a cage, knowing every day he would never see the outside world again. But there were other debts outstanding, weren’t there? The man who’d nearly stolen away Soong was alive and free. The insult was almost too much to bear. Thinking of it now, Xiang could feel that old familiar gnawing in his belly …
He stopped himself. Focus. The past was done. The future … Well, a large part of the future — both China’s and his own — depended on this base and the role it would play in the coming months.
“… we should be fully operational in four days,” the base commander was saying. “The final tests will be completed tomorrow.”
Xiang gazed down the length of the tunnel. “And the men?” he asked. “They are ready?”
“We conduct full drills three times a day. They’re ready.”
Eng’s cell phone, whose frequency had been linked to the base’s internal communication system, trilled. Eng answered, listened for a moment, then hung up. He walked over to Xiang and whispered, “Message from Qing. It’s done.”
“What about the family?”
“Them, too.”
“Complications?”
“None,” Eng replied. “It went flawlessly.”
5
Latham collected Randall and then called Commerce’s Office of Investigations to let them know he was on his way. Though it had no authority beyond itself, the COI was touchy about its turf; Latham didn’t expect a warm greeting.
They were met in the lobby by the COI’s director. “Morning, gentlemen,” he said with a humorless smile. “If you’ll follow me, the director is expecting you.”
He led them to the elevators and up five floors to a corner office decorated with potted palms and Ansel Adams prints. The director and another man were waiting for them; both were standing.