She wondered again if she’d made the right choice.
10
It was a little bit early, but Congressman Ellis told his secretary good-bye and left the Hart Office Building. He still needed to pack for tomorrow’s travel to the international trade fair in Cairo, Egypt, and the hearings had worn him out.
He strolled at a leisurely pace up Delaware Avenue, away from the Capitol. When he reached Union Station, his heart picked up a bit. He’d either see that his instructions had been passed, and the meeting in Cairo was set, or he’d see that he’d wasted six months’ worth of work.
While in D.C., he lived in a luxury condominium complex at Judiciary Square, just inside Interstate 395 on Massachusetts Avenue. It had taken quite a while to find a location close enough to a Metro station that allowed him to walk to work, and he’d looked hard. His business had to be put on hold until he could, which was a distinct motivator. There was no way he was going to attempt contact with a driver watching his every move, and going out for a walk every day would have raised someone’s suspicions.
Walking home from work, however, was just a congressman judiciously using the taxpayers’ money. No driver for him. No, sir. He’d rather use his God-given legs.
He went straight through the station and took the escalator down to the food court. Walking toward the Union Station Metro stop, he scanned the wall of the up escalator. There were three food-court tables against the wall, and between the second and third table, both occupied with tired tourists eating a hasty meal, he saw a Chinese character scribbled in chalk. He recognized it as the character for victory, and felt the tension leave his body. The transfer was a go.
If he’d seen the character for fail, he would have known the transfer was off. No character at all meant his Chinese contacts hadn’t gotten the instructions.
He had worked for the Chinese for close to forty years, and found them just as confusing now as when he’d first made contact. They insisted on this archaic method of communication, as if it were still the seventies. Originally, they had simply used different colored chalk to denote messages, but there was so much intrigue going on in Washington that, once, they had actually confused signals with some other group. The Chinese had settled on chalking characters from their language and had steadfastly continued doing so while everyone else had gone high tech. They would order food, sit at one of the three tables, and sometime during the meal scribble out the message. Invariably, the tile of the wall would be wiped clean within twenty-four hours.
Ellis found the old-fashioned tradecraft ironic because his job involved transferring cutting-edge U.S. technology to China. He had asked to change tactics, to begin using the very technology he was transferring, but the Chinese had refused. He assumed it was because they knew nobody could hack a chalk mark, and that they liked him taking all the risks. He didn’t really mind. He had to walk through the food court to get to the Metro, so it was a natural movement he took every day to get home. Nearly impossible to prove he was doing something else. So far, the risk had been worth it, with only one close call, and it hadn’t involved chalk messages.
In the 1990s, three separate Chinese rockets with U.S. satellite payloads had crashed. The U.S. satellite companies, in an effort to prevent future losses, had helped the Chinese with their rocket systems — without going through the proper channels in the State Department for release of possible military technology.
The ensuing political carnage had spawned a select committee on Chinese industrial espionage, which had caused Congressman Ellis a great deal of concern. After all, he knew that the crashes were done on purpose. The transfer of technology had been the satellites themselves, supposedly obliterated by the explosion. While they were, in fact, destroyed, the specific computer chips that regulated their functions were not.
Unwittingly, the satellite manufacturers had almost caused his downfall with their stupid release of data, all in the name of profit. Of course, the Chinese had gleefully accepted the information, getting a two-for-one deal. Ellis had managed to become a member of the investigating committee and had diverted attention away from himself, but it had been close.
He didn’t consider himself a spy. Well, not in the traditional sense. He would never sell U.S. military or diplomatic secrets to the Chinese. Only technology, letting them sort out how they would use it. He wasn’t naive. He knew the information could enhance China’s military systems, but in his own mind he had to draw the line somewhere.
He had started out as a case officer in the CIA during the Cold War and had become jaded at how the game was played. And to him, it was just that: a game. Friends one day, enemies the next. And it hadn’t ended with the Cold War, either. It had just carried over.
Going up the elevator in his condominium complex, he reflected on the risks of this latest venture. In the past, he’d simply worked in the shadows. A key vote here, a corporate nudge there, a little information passed on locations, times, or meetings. Now he was the middleman, and it made him both excited and uneasy.
The Chinese had contacted him a little over a year and a half ago, irate, claiming he had failed to warn them about a covert action in Sudan. At the time, he’d told them the truth: He had no knowledge of any covert act against Chinese interests. While on the Intelligence Committee, he wasn’t a vaunted member of the “Gang of Eight,” so he wasn’t privy to anything considered extraordinarily sensitive, which an attack on Chinese assets would most certainly be. The Chinese had abruptly gone silent at his protest, then come back a few months later with a request: Find them a weapon they knew existed. Obtain samples and transfer them to the Chinese.
He’d never, ever been tasked before. In fact, he didn’t even consider himself an “asset” of the Chinese. More like an entrepreneur. When he’d balked, he’d received a veiled threat — something else that had never happened. While the threat irked him, he had decided to go ahead because of the money involved. He was given parameters to research by his handlers, and begun to dig, using his Intelligence Committee standings. He’d found what they were looking for in the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, and now was within a month of transferring the technology.
He had no idea how the Chinese knew what to look for, knew how to point him in the right direction. Maybe there were more like him in America, but he didn’t think so. If there were, and they were feeding the parameters to the Chinese, why wouldn’t they just feed them the device? Why make him dig, and risk exposure? At the very least, why not just tell him where to look? One thing was for sure; he was out after this. The risk was just too great. And the Chinese were now treating him a little like a doormat instead of the rock star he had been. He’d had enough of their ungrateful shit.
Opening the door, he felt his BlackBerry chime with a message to check his e-mail.
He connected securely with his congressional account and saw a note from his aide, short and to the point: “You said to keep tabs on this guy.” Attached was a report from the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command detailing possible information regarding the location of Christopher Hale, MIA in 1970, Cambodia. The name brought a flash of nostalgia, a comfortable blanket he found himself wanting more and more as he grew older.
He remembered the disbelief he had felt when the North Vietnamese had said a reconnaissance team was in the area. At first, he had dismissed the alarm, since he knew for certain where every recon team was targeted and had routinely passed that information on to the NVA. The nearest one was a full day’s walk from the camp. After the gunfire erupted, he had fled with his Chinese counterparts, desperate to beat the bombing that was sure to come.
Returning to his job as CIA liaison to MACV-SOG, he had been relieved to learn the team had died, then mortified to hear one man was MIA. He had lived in absolute terror for weeks, waiting for Chris Hale to pop out of the jungle and finger him. As time went on, and the man never appeared, the terror faded, only spiking briefly in 1973 when the POWs were released by North Vietnam. Chris Hale wasn’t among them.
Returning to the United States, he had forgotten all about the man, until the drive for MIAs in Vietnam had reached a fever pitch in the U.S. consciousness. He’d used his position as a newly minted congressman to be updated on the status of Hale and had done so every year since, more out of a perceived connection to the man
