Threat Vector

FIFTY

Su did not like the way Wei had summoned him today. He had meetings scheduled all day at Zhongnanhai, but shortly before noon his office contacted him and told him President Wei demanded his presence in his living quarters at lunch.

Su bristled at the intemperance of his coequal demanding anything of him, but he cut short his noonday meeting and went to Wei’s quarters without delay.

It was not as if he needed time to prepare for the conversation with the president. He knew exactly what the man would say.

The men embraced and called each other Comrade and asked after their family members, but these pleasantries were dealt with in seconds, not minutes.

In short order, Wei sat down with Su and spoke in a concerned voice. “This is not at all how I pictured events unfolding.”

“Events? I take that to mean events in the South China Sea and the strait?”

Wei nodded and said, “I feel like you have manipulated me to some degree, taking my initial program for economic improvement and folding it into your own agenda.”

“General Secretary, we have a saying in the military: ‘The enemy gets a vote.’ What you have seen over the past weeks — the aggression by India despite our clear warnings, aggression by the United States as we executed carefully calculated maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait to display our readiness to act against any show of force by the ROC — these situations were brought on by our adversaries. Of course, if all my… excuse me, if all our forces stayed at their bases or in their ports, well, then certainly none of this would have happened, but in order to achieve our territorial objectives, which will, in so doing, help us achieve our economic objectives, we had to make these forays into contested areas.”

Wei was almost overcome by all the rhetoric. He lost his train of thought for a moment. Su was known as a firebrand, not as an orator, but Wei felt the man had just manipulated time and space in order to win his argument.

“The cyberattack against America—”

“Have no connection to China.”

Wei was surprised. “Are you saying we are not involved?”

Su smiled. “I am saying they cannot be connected to us.”

Wei hesitated again.

Su took the opportunity to add, “Within the past hour my naval intelligence service has notified me that the Ronald Reagan carrier group has begun moving to the northeast.”

Wei cocked his head in surprise now. “And we think this is a reaction to our demand that they move back to three hundred nautical miles?”

Su said, “I am certain of it.”

This brightened President Wei immediately. “So Jack Ryan can be reasoned with, after all.”

Su fought to keep a calm gaze. No, of course Ryan could not be reasoned with. He could only be threatened or beaten. But Wei chose to look at this military brinksmanship as some sort of moment of detente.

Idiot, Su thought.

“Yes,” he said. “President Ryan only wants what’s best for his country. Quitting the region is what’s best for him as well as us. He is learning slowly, but moving the Reagan shows us he is learning.”

And with that, Wei’s anger seemed to dissipate. He talked for the next half-hour about his plans for the future of the economy. About potential state-run enterprise opportunities in the SCS and his hope that the transition in Taiwan back to mainland rule would be even quicker and more painless than his greatest hopes.

Su parroted Wei’s ambitions, and struggled not to look at his watch.

Finally Wei drew the meeting to a close. But before Su left Wei’s quarters, the president regarded the chairman for a long moment. Clearly he hesitated to ask the next question. “If the circumstances change. If we decided the time is not right… will we still be able to stop this?”

“Stop China’s growth? China’s only prospect for growth?”

Wei vacillated. “I mean the most extreme military measures. Some of the larger cyberattacks you hinted at in our earlier discussions and the naval attacks and air attacks.”

“Are you thinking of stopping this?”

“I merely asked the question, Chairman.”

Su smiled thinly. “I am at your service, General Secretary. I can do whatever you wish. But I will remind you, there is much at stake. The way forward was never going to be without roadblocks.”

“I understand.”

“I hope you do. Adversity is part of the process. As I said before, the enemy gets a vote.”

Wei nodded, his face solemn now.

Su, on the other hand, smiled. He said, “But Comrade, remember, America voted today, and they voted to get out of our way.”

* * *

The five men working at the CIA safe house at 3333 Prosper Street in Georgetown were enjoying a mid- morning break, but they were not enjoying it as much as the young man locked in the soundproof room on the second floor.

Three of the five were armed security, one kept his eyes out the kitchen window toward Prosper Street, and a second stayed on a chair moved to a second-floor bedroom that looked through a magnolia tree and down to the old carriage lane converted into an alley that ran behind the property.

The third security officer stayed downstairs. He was positioned at a kitchen table with a bank of monitors, and here he monitored the radio and the home’s robust security system. He kept his eyes on the monitor showing the feed from the four security cameras.

The other two men stayed upstairs, either with their subject or in a small office where they met to plan the next “interview” with their subject. Several times a day, one or the other of the men would enter the soundproof room with a recording device and a notepad and pen, and he would go through a long list of questions that, so far, the subject had done his best not to answer.

Zha Shu Hai had not been tortured in any physical sense, but he’d been kept awake through the night and subjected to dozens of rounds of interrogations at all hours. Different people asked him the same things in different ways so many times that Zha could not even recall most of the conversations.

He felt certain, however, that he’d said nothing at all about Tong, the Ghost Ship, the UAV hacking, or his breaking into the classified government networks.

He knew he could not hold out indefinitely, but he felt confident he would not have to.

He’d asked for a lawyer at least two hundred times since arriving here in the United States, and he could not understand why one had not been given to him. He’d done time in prison here in America before, and it wasn’t bad at all, really, but he knew that was a minimum-security facility and he was now likely in a hell of a lot more trouble because of the UAV attack.

But he was in trouble only if they managed to make the charges against him stick, and Zha had spent enough time in the U.S. system during his previous trial and incarceration to know that right now they didn’t have anything on him nearly as explosive as everything he had on them. The illegal kidnapping, the shooting of the 14K guys in Hong Kong, the sleep deprivation, and so on, and so on.

Zha Shu Hai knew he had to hold out for only a little longer, to use his superior intelligence — the benefit of coming from a superior race — and then the Americans would determine he would not crack.

Zha was exhausted, but that was just a nuisance. He was better than these fools, and he would beat them; he only had to keep his mouth shut. They wouldn’t beat him or kill him. These were Americans.

One of the interrogators came back into the room and beckoned Zha to the table. As he climbed off his sleeping mat and reached for the plastic chair, all the lights in the room flickered and then went dark.

“Shit,” said the interrogator as he stepped backward to the door, keeping his eyes on his subject in the dim.