The Identity Mine

XXVI

Mitchell glanced over his shoulder at Hannah, who lowered her weapon as she stared at the Chinaman’s tortured face.

‘Everything, Jin Chen, if you want to survive this,’ Mitchell snapped.

The agonized victim sucked in a trembling breath as he replied.

‘We’d been watching them for months, waiting to see what they were doing. We knew about the listening posts in Hawaii of course, but it wasn’t possible to spirit NSA operatives away from there to China without being intercepted. Kowloon was much closer, so we focused on the embassies and CIA fronts based there.’

Hannah stepped forward. ‘What happened to them?’

Jin Chen struggled for breath, mastering his pain.

‘They were interrogated for weeks, deep inside the mainland. The purpose was to break down their will before then showing them kindness and compassion, winning their “hearts and minds” as you Americans say. It took time and a great deal of suffering on their part, but we were helped by America’s media suggesting that they had died in a boating accident: the agent’s families were not looking for them anymore, and the American government was more interested in hiding the existence of its listening posts than protecting its own people.’

‘How far did they help you?’ Hannah pressed.

‘They were invaluable,’ he replied. ‘Our technology leaped immensely just from those four individuals, and the devices they carried revolutionized our understanding of neurology.’

‘What’s the connection to the attacks in America?’ Mitchell pressed.

Chen drew another breath. ‘I don’t know about any attacks in…’

Mitchell slammed the plyers against the man’s groin but did not twist them.

‘Please, no!’ the captive shrieked.

‘Give me a reason not to.’

Chen’s features imploded with the helplessness of his situation.

‘We reverse engineered the neural implant technology that the NSA operatives were found with,’ he said finally. ‘Then we developed it over the next decade. We used the NSA operatives as test subjects, controlling them, improving the work.’

‘What work?’ Hannah asked, but was silenced by a harsh glare from Mitchell.

‘What’s the connection?’ Mitchell demanded once more. ‘How did they end up in the heads of our personnel?’

Jin Chen sagged against his bonds, sweating profusely from the pain wracking his body.

‘We used the Iraq war as a means to test the devices more thoroughly by implanting them into the brains of American servicemen fighting in the conflict. We could not enter Iraq directly, so instead we used our finest operatives disguised as American soldiers to abduct an Iraqi software engineer’s family on the threat that his family would be executed if he did not comply. We used him to smuggle implants into Basra’s hospitals, where they were implanted into American service personnel.’

Hannah stared at the Chinaman in disbelief.

‘You were trying to remotely control human beings?’ she gasped in horror.

‘What happened to the engineer?’ Mitchell demanded.

‘When we were done with him, we executed the engineer and his family, our people disguised as American soldiers,’ Chen replied. ‘We could afford no links back to us so they had to die. But one of them escaped, a teenage boy.’

Hannah felt a pulse of alarm surge through her. ‘What was his name?’

‘Abrahem,’ came the reply. ‘Abrahem Nassir.’

Mitchell glanced at Hannah. ‘This could all be about revenge.’

Hannah nodded as she looked at the captive. ‘How did the Chinese implant our service personnel after the war ended?’

Jin Chen shook his head. ‘We didn’t. The boy, Abrahem, he grew up during the occupation of Iraq and become one of a small team of smugglers we used to supply a German doctor in Basra, who was paid to implant the devices on our behalf into your servicemen. We didn’t know it was Abrahem of course, so many years having passed by. On our last run, Abrahem did not deliver the devices to the American hospital and instead disappeared. We’ve been looking for him ever since.’

‘How far did you get?’ Mitchell demanded.

Chen sighed.

‘The last known position of Abrahem Nassir was on a boat from Basra to somewhere on the African coast, but we don’t know where. Intelligence suggests that countries like Somalia represented the best place for someone like Nassir to hide, but we had no known location to search.’

‘What was his assumed destination?’ Hannah asked, fearful that she already knew the answer.

Chen smiled through his pain, as though his answer was a bitter victory for him.

‘America,’ he said. ‘Nassir thinks you killed his family, just as you murdered so many thousands of innocent Iraqis in your war for oil. The President of the People’s Republic of China is already in the United States in preparation for a ceremony to mark China’s integration into the Trans Pacific Partnership deal, and Nassir’s likely target will be either him or the American President, or both. It is already too late to stop him.’

Mitchell looked across at Hannah. ‘Where is your partner?’

Hannah’s heart leaped in her chest as she realized that Vaughn had not yet shown up.

‘Who’s pursuing you?’ she countered as she glanced over her shoulder in the hopes that Vaughn would be somewhere behind her.

The plyers hit her across the face even as she turned back to Mitchell. The blow caught her off balance, pain ripping across her scalp, but even as she fell she tried to swing her pistol around and take aim at Mitchell.

A heavy boot slammed across her wrist and her pistol spun from her grip as she crashed down onto the forest floor. Hannah’s breath bolted from her lungs as she tried to get up, her right arm numb from the wrist up, but she saw Mitchell loom above her and then suddenly his muscular arms wrapped around her neck and tightened like a metal vice.

Hannah’s eyes bulged and her throat collapsed as Mitchell squeezed with unbearable strength. Hannah reached out for his face, her nails scraping across his skin and seeking his eyes, but the powerful man buried his face in her shoulder to protect it and her arms flailed uselessly for a moment and then sank to her sides as though of their own accord.

Moments later, Hannah’s vision turned to black and she lost consciousness.

The gunshots were loud in the otherwise silent forest as the men hurried up the hillside, their weapons drawn, their eyes seeking motion amid the towering trees and dense foliage. Dark suits, designer sunglasses, black hair and stern expressions.

They moved without words, silent glances and nods all that was required for them to systematically advance until they reached a clearing deep in the forest. They slowed, edging their way closer, weapons trained on the clearing and the body they could see lying on the forest floor.

A woman, dressed in heeled boots, gray slacks and a white shirt, a gun in her open hand.

Opposite her, a Chinese man with his skull shot through, the fingers of one hand bloodied and bent out of shape, his groin thick with matted blood and a pair of plyers in one hand. Behind him, a length of rope cut through with the plyers lay around the trunk of a nearby tree.

The armed men surveyed the scene and the wound to the woman’s head where she had been struck, and then they moved forward as their leader, a stocky, older man, leaned down and searched for a pulse in the Chinaman’s neck. He waited for a moment and then shook his head.

‘He’s gone. They killed Jin Chen.’

The leader stood upright as he turned and watched as from behind him his colleagues carried the body of a man that they tossed into the clearing. Vaughn’s face was badly beaten, his eyes swollen as he slumped onto the forest floor and lay in silence.

‘This must be his partner,’ one of them said as he pointed to the woman. ‘The FBI, they always work in pairs. They must have been torturing Jin Chen.’

Another stepped forward and aimed down at Hannah Ford’s body. ‘Let’s finish them, right now.’

The leader’s arm swung out and belayed the pistol, pushing it up into the air as he looked down at Hannah Ford.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I have a better idea.’