Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  But now she was starting to regret the whole thing. She should wash her hands of Kovic.

  She opened the door and climbed behind the wheel. She felt better inside the car. It was her own private APC and an instrument of rebellion. She refused to go around in the government-issue Cherys. All of them smelled of disinfectant with a hint of body fluids that had more to do with their misuse as mobile fuckstops than any actual espionage. She took out the key.

  Something wasn’t right.

  There was someone in the rear-view mirror – Kovic.

  ‘I thought you might want an update.’

  She whirled round.

  ‘How the fuck did you get in here?’

  ‘One of my people, he’s good with locks.’

  ‘Why—?’

  ‘I wanted to catch you before you got to the Golfball, in case you had a change of heart.’

  ‘What makes you think I would?’

  ‘Because it would be entirely understandable.’

  He rubbed his eyes. Hannah thought he looked like he had had no sleep.

  ‘And because it’s getting uglier out there. Just this morning some guys jostled me off the sidewalk.’

  ‘Do you mind if I drive? I’m late.’

  ‘Sure, go ahead, you can drop me at Chifeng Road Station. I’ve got a name for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tsu Yuntao.’

  Kovic observed no reaction other than a mild flicker of recognition.

  ‘So you’ve heard of him. You’re ahead of me there.’

  ‘I didn’t say I had.’

  ‘Come on, Hannah, we’re both trained at this. What do you know about him?’

  ‘All I know is that he runs a private security operation for public figures.’

  ‘Jin Jié’s?’

  ‘No, Jin Jié prides himself on no bodyguards. It’s part of the image he likes to project.’

  ‘Well tell him he needs to be careful. Some of this anti-America shit may rub off on him since he’s such a hit over there.’

  Kovic fixed his eye on her in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Is our deal still good? I worried it mightn’t seem such a good idea to you in the cold light of day.’

  She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had read her mind.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘No, no, we’re still good.’

  The Metro stop came into view.

  ‘I’ll update you when I know more.’

  He opened the door and was gone.

  27

  Huangpu, Shanghai

  ‘You want my advice?’

  ‘No, just the information.’ Kovic was impatient. Time was passing.

  Qi looked at Wu and Zhou and then back at Kovic.

  ‘Go home. Now. On the next plane.’

  Kovic smiled at the idea. Qi let the tablet he was waving as a fan drop out of his hand. He clutched his head.

  ‘You’re playing with fire, man. Nobody crosses this guy, not even the most powerful.’

  Kovic signalled with a finger for him to shush.

  ‘Duly noted. Now, just gimme the facts.’

  Qi sighed. He had lost a good few battles with Kovic before and knew when to quit. Kovic also knew that Qi loved nothing better than to be the oracle, especially in front of an audience. For a solitary hacker he was surprisingly gregarious.

  ‘C’mon, do your stuff. You know you want to.’

  ‘First of all Tsu is not technically Chinese. He was born in America but don’t get the impression he has any attachment to the stars and stripes, except when he wipes his ass with it.’

  ‘Interesting. Keep going.’

  ‘His father took off for LA in the late 1940s after getting caught on the wrong side of the Revolution. He did good there – became a big fish in Chinatown. Tsu grows up with every luxury, wanting nothing, but he’s a loner, incapable of bonding with family or friends. He’s given a hard time at the flashy school he’s at, so he starts exhibiting anti-social traits that even by his father’s standards are way out of order. He doesn’t target the bullies themselves, he goes for their mothers. Believe me when I say you won’t want to know the details. LAPD called it aggravated rape, but for what he did that’s a hell of a euphemism. Before the cops could connect the crimes, dad sends son into exile – to Shanghai. Timing couldn’t have been better. He arrives in 2000, just as things are taking off. So he tries to revive his dad’s old gang.

  ‘The trident part of the tattoo.’

  ‘Correct. He tracks down sons of his father’s fellow gang members, but what they’re into, the traditional stuff – armed robbery, racketeering, extortion, smuggling, drugs trafficking, gambling, prostitution – is old hat to him. Then he gets a visit from an old guy who says he belongs to something called the Flaming Fist.’

  ‘I know about those guys, they were Mao’s super-secret guard.’

  ‘They were all old, but having been part of the party apparatus they had great contacts and had been both feared and revered even by big deal politicos. The Fist guy gives Tsu a better idea. Being raised in America Tsu already knows all about wealth, understands what comes with it, how complicated it makes people’s lives. Fist guy tells him how they kept Mao’s people in line, while seeming to offer them protection.’

  Wu raised his hand as if he was in class. ‘You’re talking home security, right?’ He pointed at Zhou, ‘To stop people like him.’

  ‘There isn’t anyone else like me,’ Zhou said reproachfully.

  ‘Security – but at a much more sophisticated level. What’s the point of being worth a fortune if you’re scared the whole time someone’s going to steal it from you? Paranoia is a major headache for Shanghai’s new super rich. So Tsu, the son of a criminal, pioneers the business of crime prevention. He offers a twenty-four-seven three-hundred-and-sixty-degree service to Shanghai’s first generation millionaires – he supplies their drivers, their minders, their housekeepers, people to walk their dogs, take the kids to school. He sources them their home security systems, and has them wired up to a central command centre that monitors properties, cars, secret apartments for the mistresses round the clock. But the twist is by doing this he gets to know everything about them. Very fucking powerful. If he wants he can control their lives. And because he’s cornered the market, no one dare do without him. And don’t even think of terminating your contract.’

  Kovic shook his head.

  ‘A private secret police; how come I’m hearing this for the first time?’

  ‘Because what Tsu also learned from the Fist guy was the advantage of invisibility. It’s like a secret society. Gangs are all about making noise, cool wheels, turf wars. Tsu’s the opposite. He’s not really in it for the money, just the power.’

  ‘So answer me this, what’s he doing getting involved in a border skirmish with North Korea?’

  Qi shrugged.

  ‘Pass.’

  ‘Why is there no visibility? Is he some kind of a recluse?’

  ‘Correct. Only if there’s something messy to be done he sometimes appears. He likes to show his guys who’s the toughest. He gets off on it.’

  Kovic let out a long breath. ‘That might be his weakness.’

  They all looked at him.

  ‘Suggests he’s not got complete control of his blood lust. It could work against him.’

  He glared at them. No one looked convinced.

  ‘Just an idea. So Qi, where did you get all this?’

  ‘I pulled it off an archived MSS file I harvested. The guy who wrote it was a counter-terrorism officer – he was poisoned the week after he submitted it. His replacement wisely filed it away on his first day and no one’s touched it since. That was three years ago.’

  ‘And where do we find him?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I did warn you.’

  Qi touched his head with his hands, as if holding his brain in.

  ‘No, no, no. You don’t get it. He missed you on the border �
�� his men came after you here in the city. They burned your house down and your woman.’

  ‘Lucky then that he thinks I’m dead.’

  ‘He finds out you’re not, he’ll go on and on and on until he gets you.’

  ‘No, I’m going to him. Show me where he hangs out.’

  Qi turned to his screens.

  ‘You won’t find it on Google Earth.’

  He punched up a page that said this image is no longer available.

  ‘He’s had all the photographs deleted or destroyed, except for this one I found from 1992 which was incorrectly catalogued. Here.’

  He tapped his keyboard. A grainy image in monochrome appeared on the screen. It wasn’t so much a mountain as a giant funnel of rock, as if something molten had burst through the earth’s crust, soared upward, and then frozen. Qi enlarged the picture. The base and the surrounding hills were covered in thick forest. At the summit was a wall and behind it a few buildings that looked like ruins.

  ‘This isn’t much help.’ Kovic’s fuse was particularly short today, he noticed.

  Qi held up a hand, like a medieval messenger with important news from the front.

  ‘Behold.’ He tapped away and the huge screen above his desk sprang into life to reveal a satellite image of forested mountains threaded with sinews of cloud.

  ‘The Huangshan mountains: three hundred miles from Shanghai as the missile flies.’

  Seven hours’ drive.

  Qi magnified the image.

  ‘The structure was a martial arts school dating back to the fifth century. It carried on right up to the 1920s when it was briefly occupied by a warlord. Most of the wooden part was destroyed in a battle with a rival, after which it was rebuilt by monks. But in the Cultural Revolution it was attacked again, this time by Red Guards who hung the monks on long ropes from the edge with signs round their necks proclaiming their supposed crimes against the state. They used them for propaganda films – it’s the only moving footage of the rock.’

  He hit a key and another screen lit up. The scratched monochrome footage showed three of the unfortunate monks as birds pecked at them.

  ‘That’s a bad omen,’ said Wu.

  ‘Never mind that, check out the ladder going up to the top.’

  Kovic got off his stool and pointed. ‘See?’

  He punched up two more pictures, stills taken from the ground. Just visible through the foliage was an immensely long, thin bamboo ladder with two ant-like figures making their way up it.

  ‘Who took these?’

  ‘Someone on a student exchange programme, thirty years ago. They produced a magazine. Guess what it was called? Open China. Funny, huh?’

  None of them spoke. They could all guess what was in his mind and hoped they were guessing wrong.

  Another screen lit up. Qi moved a small wand on his control panel. The image zoomed on the pillar of mountain growing out of a sea of cloud. Tsu’s lair from above.

  ‘Nice. How are we seeing this?’

  ‘A Russian weather satellite. I’ve overridden the controls. The guys in Vladivostok just think it’s a power failure – pretty common with their equipment, so they won’t even think it’s abnormal.’

  ‘It looks different.’

  ‘The walls have been rebuilt and a whole new complex added under a layer of shrubs, a lot of it carved out of the rock. The courtyard serves as a helipad. See the Z-8?’

  Just visible was the shape of a large military helicopter.

  ‘Whose is that?’

  ‘Registered to a cargo firm in Guam. He doesn’t directly own any aircraft.’

  Qi moved his cursor in a circle over an area where the foliage was even denser.

  ‘He has a staff of twenty running it, but there’s room for another fifty so it’s much bigger than it looks. Then his own quarters have space for six guests. There’s a separate kitchen, pool, gym and hydroponic vegetable garden. Up there he can cut himself off from the rest of the world. It’s got a dedicated hydroelectric power source and they stock enough food for a year. It’s like a space station, basically, but on Earth.’

  ‘Who uses the guest quarters?’

  ‘Not known. This is a log of all helicopter flights in and out over the last six-week period. Doesn’t tell us a lot as there are no registrations captured, but they are all big fat privately registered Z-8s. Since the only way in is by air it could just be supplies.’

  ‘Is this for real? Or has he just been watching too much James Bond?’

  ‘This is real all right. He controls everything from here. He has a private satellite channel, a dedicated private cellphone network that only connects with his people. He has direct personal contact with all his people on the ground. They are his eyes and ears. When they meet clients they have receivers so he can hear the conversations and he can give them orders in real time. When you work for Tsu, you are never alone. He’s always in your earpiece. You go off air, you’re toast. He sends another man in to replace you.’

  ‘Can we listen in, get a feel for him?’

  ‘Sure, if you’ve got six weeks to spare. He uses a different encryption every day – never the same sequence twice in a year. There are 365 of them; by the time I’ve cracked one, he’s moved on to another. He’s also got a further communication set-up with an entirely alien set of protocols.’

  ‘Can you describe it?’

  ‘Other than it looks like a jamming signal, just a fog of interference, it lasts less than a second so it can’t be captured and examined, it just dissolves into the ether. But here’s a thing. Twenty-four hours ago, a radio operator on the USS Valkyrie forwarded a dispatch to the NSA in Fort Meade reporting an identical signal coming from guess where?

  Kovic felt his pulse quicken.

  ‘The North Korean border?’

  Qi nodded. ‘And coming right into China.’

  Kovic got to his feet. ‘He’s our man then, no question. When shall we start?’

  Each one was frozen in their place as if time had stuttered to a halt. Kovic patted Zhou’s shoulder.

  ‘Zhou, you’ve gotten in to some unusual places.’

  He looked at Kovic, incredulous. ‘You want to actually go there?’

  ‘That’s where he hangs out.’

  Kovic’s gaze moved to Wu. ‘After yesterday, I think you’re ready.’

  Wu looked at his boss. He had never refused him, but this was not like anything he had been asked to do before.

  Qi was looking quite cheerful, as if his work was done. Kovic put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Your box of tricks fits in a backpack right?’

  His face fell. ‘Man, I work on the inside.’ He gestured at his screens. ‘This is my battlefield.’

  ‘I can’t get in without you. Their security will be state of the art. I’ll need major disruption as well, security system, power supply.’

  The other two were concentrating hard on the floor. If one of them agreed, Kovic reasoned, the other two would follow. The loss of face would be more unbearable than any thousand-foot drop.

  Qi spoke up. ‘You’re a mean son of a bitch asking us like this in front of others. I mean, that’s not how it’s done in our culture.’

  ‘Don’t pull that “our culture” shit on me, we’re way past that. I’ve got the whole of Shanghai out there; young men desperate to prove themselves, earn some serious cash, maybe a free passage to the US—’

  28

  Qi’s text with the number and encryption code for Garrison’s secure phone came through. Kovic stared at it for some time. If the Valkyrie sent that message about the unusual signal to the NSA, then the Commander would have sanctioned it. What was also on Kovic’s mind was that since it was Garrison who selected the Marines for the mission, he would be wanting answers too. He would have seen the photographs; he would be making the calls home, fielding the questions he couldn’t answer because doubtless Cutler wouldn’t be giving him anything but Agency spin.

  But calling him was a risk, breaking his us
eful cover of being officially dead. And then there was the matter of Garrison’s son, the dedicated young Marine who had died in Afghanistan under Kovic’s command. Garrison’s opinion of him couldn’t get any lower. He could just pick up the phone to Cutler and Kovic would be blown. But if there was anyone else in the world who might share Kovic’s desire for retribution it would be him. And if something happened to him, if this mission failed and he didn’t survive, well then at least there was someone on the US side who could do something with the knowledge other than bury it – which was what Cutler was most likely to do.

  It rang only once.

  ‘Sir, this is Kovic.’

  There were several seconds of silence at the other end.

  ‘Holy mother of fuck. What in goddamn hell’s name are you doing on this line? How come you’re even alive?’

  Kovic could hear his sharp angry breaths, the breaths of a 200lb, underslept, sixty-two-year-old naval commander on his sixth cup of coffee, being telephoned on his private cell by the man apparently responsible for the deaths of six of his Marines, not to mention his own son. He could feel the anger from fifteen hundred miles away. It didn’t feel like nearly far enough.

  ‘I am deeply, profoundly sorry for the loss of your men, sir.’

  ‘We’ve been here before, Agent Kovic. Haven’t we?’

  More than once, Kovic had tried to contact Garrison after Tommy’s death, but he had refused to take the calls so he had written him a personal note. They had only ever spoken in the run-up to the Highbeam mission and Garrison had kept that conversation extremely short.

  ‘I guess so, sir.’

  ‘I just got off the phone to Sergeant Olsen’s mother. She wanted me to explain why her son’s corpse is appearing on photo sharing sites and why the US government can’t stop it.’

  There wasn’t anything Kovic could say about that so he remained silent. If Garrison needed someone to sound off at, why not him? Whether it would have been any different if someone else had led the mission he couldn’t say, but that was irrelevant now. The Commander was properly warmed up now, a man who would have fielded a hundred questions from the Pentagon and another hundred enquiries from the US Navy’s press office, trying to nuance a statement that wouldn’t increase America’s humiliation any more than absolutely necessary – while the CIA stayed silent.