Shadow of the Dragon

64

Tim Meyer sent an emergency message to Dot, telling her he had to meet.

She told him to call her instead, on the burner he kept hidden in a fake pipe beside the garbage disposal. Most guys who went into law enforcement or counterintelligence wouldn’t know jack shit about installing their own appliances. Meyer sure wouldn’t. If they did ever search his home, they’d look right past it.

“They arrested Gretchen Pack,” he said, feeling light-headed, elated that he’d temporarily escaped the mole hunters.

“That is fortunate,” Dot said. “They will assume she is their only leak.”

“I don’t know about that,” Meyer said. “I still want out. I mean, they’re pretty serious about plugging any holes after your guys killed the people in Albania.”

“I assure you I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dot said. She was careful that way, always worried that he was wearing a wire or recording their calls.

“Whatever,” Meyer said. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that over the line. But listen… Rask, the station chief in Tirana, has gone dark. Disappeared. Did your guys… you know. Him, too?”

“I said I don’t know, so let’s leave it at that. I still look forward to any information you receive on CROSSTIE.”

“Will that be enough to get me out?” Meyer said. “Seriously, I think my days are numbered. They’re still polygraphing people. I’m not so much worried about that. It just means they’re still hunting.”

Dot paused for a long time. Meyer knew she was still there. He could hear her breathing.

“Yes,” she finally said. “Find us CROSSTIE’s identity and we will take care of you as you’ve requested. Also, I am supposed to ask you, have you heard any talk regarding a special submarine propulsion system?”

Jack Ryan leaned back in his desk chair, fingers interlaced on top of his head. The trip to Alaska had been postponed indefinitely.

The Russians had provided the Chinese a submarine rescue vehicle to get the marooned crew off the 880. The Mirage drive must have been so badly damaged that they did not try to take it off the vessel. Hours after the rescue, the departing Indiana picked up the sound of an explosion that they presumed to be the destruction of the 880. PLAN officials announced that Liu Wangshu was in the hospital, recovering slowly. VICAR’s Russian asset in China, however, confirmed that the professor had succumbed to a massive stroke.

“You think it’s possible?”

Dr. Patti Moon thumbed through a file of schematics and line drawings of the Mirage propulsion system as designed by Medina Tohti.

“I’m not that kind of engineer,” Moon said. “But as far as the sound goes, yes, your idea is certainly possible. I can work with the team that manufactures this to make sure it chirps periodically.”

“But nobody could hear it without special equipment?”

“Right,” Moon said. “We can calibrate something, preferably a hard surface instead of a belt — a bearing, tiny flywheel, some piece that seems integral to the design but really is only there for the chirp. To anyone else it would sound like a biologic.”

“Like a whale or one of those farting cod you showed us in our first meeting.”

“Exactly,” Moon said. “We’ll make it happen. This looks like it would be an extremely quiet mechanism. Absent your invisible chirp, I mean. It should be a simple task for our subs to track anything that has this installed. But the Chinese could never know to look or they’d simply track down the noise and fix it.” She closed the file and set it flat on her lap. “I’d think it would be tough to get the plans into their hands, though, without them knowing, I mean.”

“I have some really smart people working on that as well.” Ryan sat forward in his chair, leaning on folded hands. “How does it feel to be part of our little conspiracy?”

Monica Hendricks gave her replacement on the China desk a file on a Uyghur woman named Medina Tohti, including a set of meticulously hand-drawn plans for “some kind of submarine system.” Hendricks was on her way out, but suggested her replacement pass the file along to Odette Miller, the referent from the Counterintelligence Mission Center to the Central Asia desk. The issue for Miller had little to do with the plans themselves, and everything to do with the young Uyghur woman who had brought them forward. She was under CIA protection with her daughter for the time being, but Hendricks had a hunch there was a good chance she was a dangle for the Chinese, or possibly just attempting to make herself more valuable than she really was in order to gain asylum. Tohti had come out of China, but Miller handled Central Asia. Medina Tohti supposedly had family in Kazakhstan. Perhaps Miller could open a CI case and do some digging into the woman’s background. See what she could find before the Navy invested any more time or money into something that was probably a scheme to get asylum. The Uyghur woman talked a good game, but one never knew. Anyway, it was worth a second look.

Monica’s replacement locked the plans in a cabinet with the counterintelligence case file and left them there for Odette Miller to access. It took three days for Tim Meyer to hear about the information from Miller naturally, but only two hours for him to find a reason to sneak a camera into the restricted file room.

Back at the ELISE station in Crystal City, Monica Hendricks thanked her team. Mary Pat Foley was present as well. Apart from a close circle around the President, the people in this room were the only ones who knew of the ruse.

“He was responsible for Leigh Murphy’s murder,” Mateo said, almost in tears. “I understand why we have to do this, but I don’t like it.”

“SURVEYOR was responsible for more than one death,” Hendricks said. She didn’t even like to say his name. “It absolutely kills me to let him go.”

Foley stepped up to the table. “It’s a gut punch, I know,” she said. “But I can promise you, we’re not done here. The Bureau has their best surveillance teams up on SURVEYOR’s handler now. She’s very good at her job. Gretchen Pack hadn’t given them anything too damning yet. In fact, much of what she handed over could have been found on the Internet if you knew where to look. But once she started giving them anything, she was trapped and she knew it. The President and I believe — and I imagine all of you do as well — that it would be worthwhile to keep ELISE up and running for at least another month. Sadly, Admiral Li has to leave us to return to his day job, but Chief Hendricks has agreed to deprive the private sector of her presence for a little while longer while we watch the illegal, see if anyone else contacts her. You found two. We have to work under the assumption that there are more.”