table.
Ding said, “I need you to focus on the target, not the dancing girls.”
“Oh, all right. Zoom in a bit.”
Chavez did so, and then recentered the image.
“Got it. What am I looking for?”
“Just keep tabs on them. You’ve got the eye. I’m pulling Ryan out, and I’m turning away from them. There is too much surveillance in this room already.”
“Got it.” He laughed. “I’m on a mission. Well… a
Domingo brought Gavin into the conference call with the other two and then explained to Jack and Adam what he’d done. Jack left the club and went out front, crossed Jaffe and sat at a tiny noodle bar open to the street. From here he could see the stairway entrance to Club Stylish.
Yao, Chavez, and Ryan simultaneously received e-mails on their phones. They opened them to see a good picture of a quarter-shot of Zha’s face and three-quarters of the back of his head, as he spoke to an older Chinese man in a white shirt and a light blue or gray tie. The older man’s face was clear enough, but none of the three recognized him.
Chavez knew Biery had special facial-recognition software on his computer, and he would be trying to get a match right now.
Yao said, “He’s not familiar to me, but you think he looked important, Ding?”
“Yes. I’d say you might be looking at the MFIC there.”
Yao responded, “The what?”
“The Motherfucker in Charge.”
Ryan and Yao just chuckled.
Gavin Biery’s voice came back over the headsets of the team a minute later. “Domingo, pan the camera to your left.” Chavez reached out and did so as he kept his eyes in the opposite direction, toward the bartenders.
“What do you see?”
“I noticed that the tough guys around Zha were all looking at something or somebody. I think it’s those two white guys in blue blazers. One of the Triads just pulled out his phone and made a call.”
“Shit,” said Ding. “I’d be willing to wager that the consulate guys made it obvious they aren’t here to watch the dancers. Adam, what do you think Fourteen-K is going to do?”
“My guess is they will bring in a few reinforcements. If they were really worried they would shuffle Zha out the back door, but all is quiet back here. Ryan, what’s going on at the front?”
Jack noticed a group of three Chinese men entering the club. Two were young, early twenties or so, and the third was perhaps sixty. Jack thought nothing of it, people were coming and going with regularity.
“Just regular traffic out here.”
“Okay,” said Yao. “Be on the lookout for more Fourteen-K, though. If those guys just called in a potential threat, things might get tight in there.”
Our boy has visitors,” Biery said a minute later, when the three newest patrons to the bar, the older Chinese man and his two friends, slid around Zha into the booth. “I’m sending a screen shot to your phones so you can see.”
Adam waited for the picture to arrive, and looked at it closely. “Okay. The older guy is Mr. Han. He’s a known smuggler of high-end computer equipment. He’s the one I was tracking when I ran into Zha in the first place. I don’t know what his relationship to Zha is. Not sure who the other two are, but they aren’t Fourteen-K. They are too puny and bewildered-looking.”
Gavin came over the call: “I’m running their faces through facial-recognition software against a database of known Chinese hackers.”
No one responded to this for several seconds.
At the noodle shop, Ryan cursed to himself, and at the bar in the strip club, Chavez groaned inwardly. It was going to be a hard sell to Adam Yao that this database, which The Campus had pulled from a classified CIA database, would be something a financial management firm, even one hunting for a Chinese hacker, could just call up on a laptop.
Ryan and Chavez waited to hear what Yao said next.
“That’s pretty handy, Gavin. Let us know.” His voice was overtly sarcastic.
Gavin was clueless about what he had done, and it was clear he did not pick up on Yao’s sarcasm. “I’ll let you know. And by the way, I ran the other guy, the MFIC, too. No match at all,” he said, a tinge of frustration in his voice.
Yao said, “Hey, Domingo. Any chance you could meet me around back of the club for a quick chat.”
At the bar by the entrance to the strip club, Ding rolled his eyes now. This young NOC was about to take Ding to the woodshed, and he knew it.
And at the noodle shop, Jack Ryan put his face in his hands. As far as he was concerned, their cover was blown to the CIA man.
Chavez said, “I’ll be right out, Adam. Ryan, why don’t you come on back in and take the eye up on the mezzanine? Keep a soft surveillance. Just make sure nobody joins the entourage without getting a look at them.”
“Got it,” said Jack.
It took a few minutes to get Jack into position and Chavez back out the front, up the block, and back around into the small street behind the nightclub and high-rise apartment buildings, but finally Ding climbed into the passenger door of the Mitsubishi.
He just looked at Adam and said, “You wanted to talk?”
Yao said, “I know you are ex-Agency, and I checked you out. You retain your TS security clearance.”
Chavez smiled. The sooner they got this charade over with, the better.
“You’ve done your homework.”
Yao was not smiling. “You have friends at the Agency, friends all over. And I am going to go out on a limb here and say that you know good and damn well that I am Agency, too.”
Ding nodded slowly. “I’m not going to lie to you, kid. I am aware that you wear two hats.”
“Are you going to tell me the real reason you guys are here?”
“No mystery to that. We’re here to find out who the hell Zha is. He is trying to get into our network.”
“Trying to? He has not succeeded?”
“Not that we know of.” They had lied to Yao about that. “Sorry, kid. We needed your help, and we wanted to help you. I fed you a little bullshit along the way.”
“Fed me a little bullshit? So you came all the way to Hong Kong to tail a hacker who is trying to hack your network? It sounds like you have me on a steady diet of bullshit.”
Chavez sighed. “That’s
“How do you know he was involved in the UAV attack?”
Chavez just shook his head. “Word gets around.”
Yao did not seem satisfied by this answer, but he moved on. “What is Jack Junior’s role in this?”
“He’s an analyst at Hendley Associates. Simple as that.”
Yao nodded. He didn’t know what to make of Hendley Associates, but he knew Domingo Chavez had as much or more credibility than anyone who had ever worked in the U.S. intelligence community. Chavez and company were providing him with the assets he needed to tail and, he hoped, identify some of the people working with Zha. He needed these guys, despite the fact they weren’t exactly part of his team.
“The Agency is not buying into the fact that Zha is part of the UAV attack. They think it was a state actor of some sort, maybe China, maybe Iran, and since Zha clearly isn’t working for either of them over here, they figure he’s not involved.”
