Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER NINE

The Chinese intelligence officers hooded Court as they had when they brought him to the safe house, but on his return trip down the hills and through the tunnel under Victoria Harbor he at least was allowed to sit upright. A young man pressed against either side of him, and as Court sat quietly during the drive, he occupied a portion of his time by coming up with ways to take them down, relieve them of their weapons, and then hold the men in the front seat at gunpoint. It would have been no real trick for Court to pull this off; these MSS operatives were highly trained but they were not ready for him to make a move at all.

But the fact was they were correct to assume Court would come along compliantly. He wouldn’t take these guys down; he wouldn’t hold the driver and front passenger at gunpoint.

For the time being, anyhow, Court Gentry was Colonel Dai’s bitch.

The men dropped him off once they were north of Tsim Sha Tsui; they just pulled over to the side of the road, yanked the hood from his head, and let him out of the SUV.

As the vehicle screeched off on the wet streets, Court saw that it was a BMW 2 Series Gran Tourer, a small minivan that looked like it had some power and cost a few bucks. Court watched it disappear, then turned and continued on to the north, back in the direction of his hotel.

Walking through Mongkok on a rainy late afternoon, Court realized he did have to agree with Colonel Dai on one thing. Hong Kong looked like capitalism had put its head between its knees over a big green beautiful island chain and vomited out its shinier, flashier, and baser elements. HK was New York on steroids. Vegas on acid. Virtually every square inch was a bright sign, an explosion of color and noise and scent, an assault on the senses thinly disguised as an offer to sell something, a product or service one absolutely could not afford to miss out on.

Or else it was a Dumpster, a garbage can, or a plastic bag full of the detritus of all this humanity squeezed together.

Court had been all over the world, and he’d seen all the other economic systems firsthand. They sucked more, to be sure, and he’d given the good years of his life fighting for the very system on display here, but he had to admit that this version of unadulterated capitalism was a mess to look at.

He believed in it, and he liked it better than any alternative; he sometimes just wished it would scrub itself up a little.

Court made his way through the orgy of noise, smell, and light, back to his guesthouse, where he passed through the lobby and endured the overt stares of the old man behind the counter. This was the same man who’d checked him in this morning, and he’d probably been here to watch the spectacle that had happened earlier in the day, when Court was frogmarched out by goons with a hood over his head.

The man behind the counter ended his condescending stare abruptly and turned away, surely curious about the business of the American but not wanting to make the American’s business his business.

Back in his little room, Court immediately saw that it had been ransacked by Chinese intelligence. They’d done a fair job of it, and Court was instantly relieved he had not taken the Montblanc pen with the truth drug powder in it. That would have immediately tied him to the incident in the Peninsula, and had it been found in his room, he’d now probably be lying dead along the side of the road back up in the Peak.

He lay down on the bed and thought over his situation. There was no reason for him to leave the hotel for operational concerns; the men he’d run from at the Peninsula were on his side now, or as close to being on his side as they ever would be. But still, he didn’t know who had seen him leave with the government goons, and the thought that there were eyes on him around here made him uncomfortable.

But he fought the urge to get up and go; as much as he loathed staying right where the bad guys knew he could be found, he recognized that leaving would just make Dai suspicious.

With his accommodations settled, he turned his thoughts to his larger operation. After a few moments’ worry and the resultant pain in the pit of his stomach that indicated he understood the stakes of this assignment, he told himself to calm down. Other than the situation with the two attackers the evening before, everything was proceeding exactly according to plan.

The CIA had sent Court on this operation in the first place because they knew he could get close to Fitzroy, and Fitzroy would get him in with the Chinese. Brewer’s orders to Gentry were to make contact with Fitzroy, act as if he were just an old employee looking for work, and get himself assigned to the Fan contract.

Court had done just as he’d been directed, and Dai had taken the bait. The colonel had given up little information about who, in fact, Jiang was, but Court knew why Dai wasn’t in a chatty mood about the target. Simply put, the colonel was down here to fix an embarrassing mistake, and he wasn’t going to reveal to a Westerner that such a mistake was even possible.

The Agency’s brief to Court told him that forty-eight-year-old Colonel Dai Longhai was the new director of counterintelligence of the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army, General Staff Department (3rd Department). This meant he was army but served as the security chief of a very elite and secretive branch of soldiers tasked with creating advanced persistent threats into the classified intelligence systems of its adversaries. Unit 61398 was the Chinese name for the group, but the CIA referred to them by the code name they’d assigned to the unit — Byzantine Candor.

Unit 61398 was one of the chief cyber warfare arms of the PLA, and they had broken into many Western government secure networks, including those run by the Pentagon and the entire Department of Defense. As far as anyone knew, they had yet to get into JWICS, the U.S. intelligence community’s most secure network, but it was not for lack of trying, and many in America’s counter-cyberintelligence realm thought it was just a matter of time, because the men and women of Unit 61398 were exceptionally well financed, supremely well motivated, and, frankly, the best in the world at what they did.

And within the elite men and women working at Unit 61398, the CIA knew of an even more select, more exclusive group, and this was the outfit Fan Jiang belonged to. Though Fan and his colleagues in this handpicked detail worked and lived near the rest of the unit, they were sequestered from them, because their job was something of the opposite of that of their colleagues. Fan was on a task force simply called Red Cell. They were charged with using the hacking techniques crafted by 61398 and then turning them around, retrofitting them for the purpose of attacking China’s own secure intelligence networks to hunt for flaws in their counter-cyberwar systems.

Red Cell knew the West was doing just what Unit 61398 was doing, so they applied 61398’s latest technology against their own classified systems. Day and night they sought to breach the most secure networks in their nation, to steal secrets from their own Ministry of State Security, their Ministry of Defense, even the Chinese Communist Party leadership.

The government of the People’s Republic of China was not exactly the world’s most trusting organization, so it vetted Red Cell members carefully, lest one or more of their number actually succeed in breaking into the systems and see something he or she should not see.

This made the members of Red Cell the most watched over, the most scrutinized of all of the members of Unit 61398, who were themselves among the most highly vetted in the nation. Every single member of the team had undergone rigorous background and party loyalty checks just to get into the unit. They had been dosed with truth drugs and given lie detector tests; their families, friends, and neighbors were routinely subjected to intense and occasionally hostile interviews.

The Red Cell had been a successful unit in the four years of its existence. It had found weaknesses in the Chinese intelligence community’s electronic communication practices by using the work of Unit 61398 to poke holes in what were thought to be secure networks. And they had done it all without one single security issue from any Red Cell members.

Until that night less than two weeks earlier — the night Fan Jiang ran from a hotel in Shenzhen and began his journey into the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.

The evening of the incident, Lieutenant Dai Longhai had been second-in-command of 2nd Bureau’s counterintelligence department, which meant he was the number two man over security for Unit 61398, but he’d been called into work in the middle of the night and informed that, beginning that moment, he was now a colonel, and he was now in charge, and his one priority was finding a runner from Red Cell.

Dai was given unprecedented powers to call up forces from the military and intelligence services, to put the border guards on high alert, and then, when there were confirmed CCTV images of Fan Jiang in Hong Kong, Dai had been given authorization to go over the border himself with a small army of killers and spies, and even to call in Western contract killers to help him out, since Dai thought white faces might make it into certain areas where Fan might try to run — places where his Chinese military and intelligence officers could be easily identified.

Fitzroy was contacted to bring in the gweilos, but to date, Fitzroy had failed.

Court learned all of this in his CIA brief, although he was not told how the CIA obtained this information. This was an SAP operation — a Sensitive Access Program. Sources and methods had to be protected, after all. But the CIA freely admitted they did not have a clue why Fan Jiang decided to run in the first place.

Court understood how these sorts of things worked for security chiefs; if Colonel Dai Longhai returned to the mainland with Fan’s head on a pike, his career would not benefit from this. He’d win nothing if he succeeded, but he would certainly lose everything if he failed.

The CIA did not want Fan Jiang dead, of course. They wanted him alive, which certainly complicated things for Court, but he understood how important it would be for him to succeed in his mission. Fan Jiang knew the Chinese secure networks inside and out, and Court couldn’t imagine anyone on Earth the U.S. government would want to get their hooks into more. The Agency would offer Fan Jiang the moon and the stars to work with them, and if Fan turned the Agency down, then the dangling carrot would be replaced with a swinging stick.

American national security was at stake — Fan Jiang would not be given much of a choice in the matter.

Court wasn’t sure if he was on a rescue mission or a kidnapping mission. It all depended on how Fan Jiang looked at his situation.

The only problem Court could see with the Agency’s plan was that if brought to a successful conclusion, it would leave Sir Donald Fitzroy in a house filled with over two dozen Chinese military and intelligence operators who would all be extremely angry with him.

Dai would kill Fitzroy for Court’s duplicity; of that Court had no doubt.

The CIA operation took this into account, at least on paper. Their plan was for Court to locate Fan Jiang, then for Special Activities Division Ground Branch paramilitary operatives to swoop in and snatch the Chinese soldier in such a way that made it look as if the Gray Man had executed his contract.

They would fake Fan’s assassination, thus keeping the U.S.’s involvement secret and saving Sir Donald Fitzroy.

Hell of a plan, Court thought. How, exactly, this would all come to pass was a bit murky, since the Agency had no idea who was helping Fan, where he was being held, what his disposition was, and so forth. Court was simply to get the answers the Agency needed to go forward, involve himself in the ruse by being on scene when the man was taken in by U.S. operatives, and then report back to Dai that the job had been done. If Dai wanted pictures, DNA, witnesses, or even one of Fan’s fingers to prove that Court had accomplished his mission, then the Agency could make that happen. If Colonel Dai wanted the body, then Court and CIA would devise a reason this was not possible. A sinking boat, a burning building, too many police to simply scoop up the body of an adult male and shuffle into a cab with him.

Yeah, when Court first read the op specs on the plane, he recognized that the details on how to placate the MSS were paper-thin, but he noticed something else from the wording and the orders.

Saving Don Fitzroy was secondary to nabbing Fan. Very secondary. In fact, the CIA had put significantly more emphasis on Court Gentry’s own personal security than on Fitzroy’s life, which should have made Court feel better, but for some reason it did not.

Court lay there on his bed, analyzing his situation. Don Fitzroy had been a high-level officer in MI5, British intelligence, so Fitz must have seen the peril of his situation. He had to have known there was a huge chance he would be killed at the end of this operation, regardless of how it turned out. But he seemed to have done nothing to save himself.

Court understood. Fitzroy knew the Chinese had global reach, so he had to give them an easy target. Otherwise there was always the chance they would go after someone else.

Sir Donald Fitzroy’s daughter and his twin granddaughters could have been used for leverage, and Fitzroy would die a thousand deaths before he let that happen. He’d sit there compliantly in Hong Kong, wait for the day the colonel came downstairs with his gun in his hand, and by doing this, he’d protect those he loved.

In that moment Court felt nothing but respect for the old man held in the twenty-million-dollar house on the hill a few miles to the south of him. Fitzroy would fight and die for his family, but Fitzroy had no one fighting for him. The CIA, the Chinese, his own security detail. Everyone had, apparently, bailed on the Englishman.

But Fitzroy had saved Court’s life once off the coast of Sudan. Court’s own sense of honor told him he could not let Fitzroy die alone without a friend in his corner. Court would be Sir Donald’s champion, and if CIA had a problem with that… then CIA could go fuck itself.

Court told himself there had to be a way to pull off the trifecta on this mission: nab Fan for CIA, get his own ass out of this in one piece, and get Fitz out of the clutches of the Chinese and back home safe.

It was doable, Court still told himself. Tough, to be sure, but doable.

To this end, Court’s first objective would be to find the exact location where Fitzroy was being held. The only way he could be confident that he could help his former handler, especially if something went wrong during the extraction of the Chinese computer hacker by the CIA, was if Court knew he could always hit the big house up on the hill, guns blazing, and attempt to rescue Fitz himself. It was a last-ditch option, but if he did not know the location of the house, it was no option at all.

He knew how to solve his problem. He’d gotten a perfect look out the back window of the property, and he’d examined his view of the skyline of Hong Kong. With this information stored in his brain’s memory, he could figure out the exact location of Dai’s safe house.

So now he scanned the Peak on Google Maps, using the relative positions of several buildings he’d noticed from Dai’s office as reference points. After a few minutes he recognized Dai’s safe house, zoomed into Street View, and found it at 1 Pollack’s Path Road. Typing this info into his search engine, he found the property on a real estate website and saw that it was available to rent for one month for sixty-five thousand U.S. dollars. Court wondered if Dai had paid this amount, or if the entire real estate concern was actually owned by mainland China’s defense or intelligence services. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was the fact that the real estate website had photos of the inside of the building.

Court had hit an operational-planning gold mine.

But only for his own personal operation. He would need this information if the CIA’s plan to ensure Fitzroy’s safety failed. If Dai and his people realized the Gray Man had deceived them and passed Fan Jiang off to the CIA, then he would need to engage in these desperate measures. He hoped like hell he wouldn’t have to come back, but if the shit hit the fan, it might be necessary.

Court nodded off, hoping to sleep through the night to shake off the last vestiges of jet lag. Tomorrow morning he would go full tilt after Fan Jiang, knowing now he could finally focus on the reason he’d been sent here in the first place.