Lethal Circuit (25 page)

Michael was entirely silent.

“Ted?” Kate said.

“Sorry, Kate. Had to be done.” Ted dropped the rotors into a small nylon stuff sack before addressing his attention back to Huang. “I’ve got it from here.”

“Very good. Be sure to thank Mr. Chase before you shoot him.”

Without a second glance Huang marched off to the hanging belay ropes and harnessed into the compact automatic ascender dangling there. Michael heard an electric hum and the ascender began to move upward, pulling Huang with it like a worm on a hook. Kate couldn’t contain herself. She glared at Ted.

“I knew you were all wrong.”

“After I left the Agency I had some time on my hands.”

“So what’s the MSS paying these days? Better than the CIA I hope.”

“Just zip up and stare straight ahead.”

“Oh come on. You want me to make this easy for you?”
 

Ted nodded to Huang’s men who stepped forward and circled around so that they were facing the kneeling prisoners. Even in the cold cave Michael saw the sweat on Kate’s brow. Then Ted glanced at his watch. Michael’s mind raced. This was it. This was the moment. He glanced at Kate. Then he saw nothing at all but an intense blast of white light. It was followed, what seemed like an eternity later, by incredible percussive force, slapping him to the rock below, din and flame tearing through the cave like an angry act of God.

44

T
HE
SCREECHING
BLADE
of the circular saw provided a pretty good indication that Mobi’s fast times in Alvarez’s indestructible alcove were about to come to a screaming halt. The first ASAT missile appeared to have detonated somewhere near the Chinese satellite, but as Mobi predicted, it had not resulted in the total destruction that Rand had desired. The system was too buggy for that. Instead, the Chinese bird had ceased transmitting. The good news was that transmissions had now resumed. Mobi attributed the lapse to the EMP effect of the warhead, but regardless of the cause, the fact that the effect had been temporary had Mobi stoked. He might be on his way out, but he was still in the game.

Of course, he knew he wouldn’t be in it long. Sparks from the saw were literally dancing off of his keyboard. Add to that the fact that there was obviously a mole within JPL passing secrets to the Chinese and things were definitely not looking up. Mobi took a moment to rest his eyes. It was time to reassess, or at least examine his fundamental assumptions. He had grown uneasy with the fact that Alvarez had put him in contact with Quiann. What was she really doing talking to a known traitor? She had given him no explanation for this. Could she be the one sending the messages to the Chinese? Putting Mobi onto those messages would certainly be an easy way to deflect suspicion from herself. Not to mention that what Alvarez was saying didn’t make sense. Mobi had assumed that what Alvarez had identified as a hidden clear-code would effectively reset the system allowing normal communication between the Chinese satellite and control. But so far he had found nothing even vaguely resembling a clear-code. Was the answer even in the data stream?

Mobi remembered a magazine article he had once read profiling Quiann. The article was written several years ago in conjunction with one of China’s higher profile space launches. Mobi recalled his impression of the Chinese technology being woefully behind the curve, but what stuck in his mind was something the article had said about Quiann. Something about his alleged earlier involvement in a quasi-cult organization. Mobi thought it had been called the Green Dragon Society. He had dismissed the tidbit as being largely irrelevant at the time, but it occurred to him, what if Quiann did have some kind of weird allegiance to a secret society? That kind of thing could be enough to throw logic right out the proverbial window. What if Quiann deliberately sabotaged the satellite? What if he wanted it to crash down? Over his old alma mater no less? What if crashing the satellite provided the perfect cover for destroying the cold fusion reactor it held? Because Quiann and his cronies wanted to keep the technology secret. Secret from the world. No, Mobi thought, he had been staring at the data too long. Quiann was a man of science. Of course, so was the Unabomber.

“Stearn!”

Mobi heard his name called but paid it no heed. The thought was burnt into his head. If Mobi were to proceed on the premise that Quiann didn’t want him to re-establish communication with the satellite, then he might have sent him bad data. Data that was real enough to look legitimate, but corrupt enough so that Mobi could never crack it. What if Quiann’s whole point, and by that measure Alvarez’s, was to get him off the scent? Mobi wasn’t sure what happened next. He felt a sudden lurch in the floor below him as though the whole alcove was going to fall to the bottom of the building, followed quickly by the cold metal of a night stick thrust against his throat. But Mobi didn’t struggle. He didn’t even move. Because he had a hunch. Now, all he had to do was prove it.

45

T
HE
PERCUSSIVE
IMPACT
of the blast brought Michael to the floor atop Kate, chaos unfolding all around them. All he saw after the initial blast of light was blackness and all he heard was a terrible ringing, so piercing that when the second and third detonations hit, he heard nothing at all. Michael coughed because the cave was now filled with billowing clouds of dust, but the strange thing wasn’t the grit in the air or the ringing in his ears, but something else, something like the rush of water.

Michael had no idea how much time actually elapsed between the final detonation and the wall of water that followed it, but he knew that what felt like hours may well have been less than a second. In that time, Michael could sense the wave that was coming to take him away, he could feel the rush of moist air, and then the wall of river water simply picked him up, propelling him under the Horten and toward the back of the cave. He felt arms and legs flailing about, arms and legs that definitely didn’t belong to him, and at the same time he felt Kate beneath him. Somehow she had been able to grab a hold of him.

Michael struggled under the rushing tide, desperately hoping that the water would recede, but instead it continued to push them further and higher, until finally they both hit the back wall of the cave. Then miraculously enough, the river water began to recede, dragging them with it, until Michael grasped a slippery rock and held onto to it like he’d never held onto anything before. The current ripped at them, but in the end relinquished its tug, pulling back until they were left wet but alive on a low ledge on the far recess of the cave wall.

 
A battery powered lantern must have floated to the surface, because a dim light was now cast through the cave and already Michael could see Huang’s men picking themselves up. There was shouting. Even though Michael couldn’t hear it, he could see it. But that wasn’t all. Something else had come in with the torrent of water — a hail of gunfire. And though Michael couldn’t see who was shooting, he could see Huang's men being cut down, even as they searched the waist deep water for their weapons. One by one they collapsed, only Ted escaping the hail of bullets as he wrenched himself to cover under the Horten.

Michael shared a glance with Kate. She was as beat up as he was, but the unspoken communication was clear. They would lay low until they knew what they were up against. As Michael broke eye contact with Kate he saw a single bright light entering the cave. It looked like a Cyclops, or train in the night, except its luminosity betrayed an airy quality, almost as if the light itself was floating on air. The light grew in intensity, floating toward them like the great white beacon at the end of the tunnel of death. At that moment, Michael didn’t care what was on the other end of that light. What mattered to him was that it represented a release from the black bowels of the bat cave and for that he would be grateful.

It didn’t take long, however, for Michael to recognize that they were not the focus of the light’s beam. In fact their very presence seemed incidental to the men who leapt off what was now identifiable as a Zodiac rigid inflatable boat. Michael watched as the men, whose faces were all but obscured by shadow, rounded up Ted with the frightening efficiency of seasoned professionals. Ordering him to raise his hands above his head, they zip cuffed his hands from behind and led him at gun point through the chest deep waters to the waiting boat.

Michael carefully craned his neck out of the recess in the rock for a better view. Once Ted was aboard, the focus of the men in the water changed. They set their sights on the Horten which, though standing in several additional feet of water, appeared undamaged from the blast. Their first order of business was to call a command into the dark reaches of the cave. Another spotlight glowed bright white and within moments a second Zodiac containing another crew of men purred in. They bumped up against the base of the Horten and the crew began unfolding mounds of black rubber from their boat. There was little light to make out the proceedings and Michael’s left cheek was level with a cold wet rock, but from what he could see, the men were placing the black rubber under the fuselage of the Horten, all to the chorus of a muted popping. Michael knew his hearing still wasn’t right and that the popping sound was no doubt the sound of the rubber slapping the water as it was unfolded but before he could confirm it, he felt Kate nudge him.

Michael mouthed the word, “What?”

She pointed above, pantomiming a gun. Michael got it. The popping he heard wasn’t the slap of rubber on water but gunfire echoing from the karst above. There was a shooting match going on up there even as the men below proceeded with their task, unrolling the rubber tubes like snakes beneath the Horten. Michael began mouthing another word, but Kate motioned him not to talk. It didn’t matter. It was obvious that the question on both their minds revolved around their next move. The wall of water that had deposited them so high up on the cave’s wall had given them an excellent vantage point, but it also made them sitting ducks. It would require some tricky climbing to get down, and getting down without being noticed would be even more difficult. For now it was best to stay put.

The bravado that Michael had felt in the face of the Chinese agent’s interrogation had been mostly washed away by the wall of water. Now all he felt was wet. Wet and cold and glad to be alive. He took the moment to empty his pocket of the sarin laced coins, placing his change on the ledge beside him. They were better there than in his pocket. Except as he placed the final two coins on the slippery rock beside him, he caught his wrist on the pile. One of the coins began to roll. He reached out to catch it, but he wasn’t quick enough. The coin bounced down and hit a rock which it again bounced off before hitting the black water below.

It was a tiny splash really. Nothing to get excited about. But someone must have taken notice. Because the powerful spotlight which illuminated the Horten began a slow arc over the cave wall. Michael and Kate lowered their profile as much as possible, doing their best to blend into the rock. It seemed to work at first because the spotlight passed right over them. Then the beam retraced its path backward, shooting past them again before returning to bathe them in a white focused light. Michael knew his hearing was back because he clearly heard the Cantonese chatter drifting up from the cave floor below. Whatever the merits of laying low, they didn’t much matter now. They had been discovered.

46

M
OBI
’
S
EXTRACTION
FROM
the alcove was brutally efficient. Within minutes of being subdued he was transported to a glass walled holding cell. They had cuffed his hands, but there had been no interrogation, only Rand and Alvarez arguing heatedly outside the cell. Mobi could hear nothing of course as the cell was completely sound proof, but what surprised him was that he didn’t care. What he cared about was following up on his hunch
—
a hunch that told him that he had just wasted a whole lot of time barking up the wrong tree.

If Quiann was trying to get Mobi off track it would be something simple. As far as Mobi knew, Quiann had no way of knowing he would contact him. Therefore if Quiann had wanted to mislead Mobi, it had to be done quickly. After all, the data had arrived soon after Mobi had phoned. There wasn’t a lot of time to alter it. Quiann would have wanted Mobi to believe the data was real, yet he didn’t want it to be real. That meant the changes would be slight, yet significant. And a rigorous scientist like Quiann was nothing if not a perfectionist. Even if engaging in an act as of subterfuge, Mobi assumed Quiann would go for the elegant solution. Simple, but systematic. To Mobi, it suggested one thing: that the damage could be reversed. But if his premise held, if the data stream had been altered, the bigger question was how to bring it back to its natural form. Mobi considered this point as the glass door to the cell slid open behind him.

“Mobi?” Alvarez said softly.

Mobi didn’t react, but simply stared at his reflection in the glass wall, his thoughts churning.

“Mobi, it’s me.”

Mobi heard the Deputy Director this time around, but continued to stare at his reflection.

“Mobi, damn it, I’m the only thing standing between you and the three hundred forty-two pages of the Patriot Act. Talk to me.”

“You know there’s somebody sending messages out of this facility.”

“I’m the one who told you about it.”

“That person would need access.”

“Of course.”

“That person might even want me to waste my time with Quiann.”

“Mobi,” Alvarez said, uncomfortable with the suggestion, “whatever you’re thinking you need to put that aside for the moment and focus.”

“Why?”

“Because you can still help.”

Mobi looked to Alvarez. He didn’t want to doubt her, but it didn’t change the fact that he did. Regardless, she was right. He could help. Even if he wasn’t sure which side he would be helping. “Quiann wasn’t square with us,” Mobi finally said.