He pounded on the door with his fist.
Zha Shu Hai’s heart began beating with excitement. He sat down at the chair, placed his hands flat on the table.
He did not expect this. Despite himself, he smiled brightly.
“What’s so funny?” asked the interrogator.
Zha had not spoken yet that day, but now he could not hold his tongue. “You will see what is so funny.”
The man did not understand, but he banged again on the locked door to the soundproof room. He knew the locks were mechanical, not electrical, so there was no reason why his partner wouldn’t let him right out.
After a third time banging against the door, the interrogator went to the one-way observation window. He could not see out, of course, but his partner should have been looking in.
He waved back and forth, and then he heard the bolt lock of the door disengage.
The door opened.
The interrogator began walking out. “Did we blow a fuse, or is the whole neighborhood—”
An Asian man in a black jacket stood in the doorway; a suppressed handgun was extended out in front of him. He looked down through the sights with cold black eyes.
“What the—”
Crane shot the CIA interrogator through the forehead. His body landed with a muted thud on the floor of the soundproof room.
Zha was careful to keep his hands on the table. He bowed quickly. “Crane, I have not spoken. I have not said a—”
“Center’s orders,” Crane said, and he shot Zha Shu Hai through the forehead as well.
FastByte22’s body tumbled out of the plastic chair and onto the floor. He came to rest facedown next to his interrogator.
FIFTY-ONE
Valentin Kovalenko was walking back to his apartment from the liquor store when he realized that multiple sirens were blaring to the southwest. It occurred to him that they had not just begun; maybe they had been sounding even before he stepped into the tiny soul food cafe to pick up some carry-out lunch prior to stopping at the liquor store for a fresh bottle of Ketel One.
Almost immediately he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He did his best to shake it off as he continued down 17th Street, but well before he turned onto Swann Street he heard helicopters in the air.
He kept a leisurely pace up Swann Street to his basement apartment, but once inside the door he shot across the living room to the television, dropped his bottle and the take-out food on the sofa, and turned the TV on to a local station.
A soap opera was playing. He switched the channel to another local station and saw a commercial.
He sat down on the couch, his eyes riveted to the screen, waiting for the noon news, which was coming up in five minutes.
While he waited he listened to the distant sirens’ wail, and he poured two fingers of lukewarm Ketel One into a glass he’d left on the coffee table the night before.
He chugged it down and poured another.
He almost made himself believe his fears had been unfounded. Until the news began, and they opened with a live helicopter shot over Georgetown. Valentin saw the smoke pouring out of the home on the wooded lot on Prosper Street.
The news anchor knew little, except there were fatalities, and neighbors reported the sound of gunshots from inside the house and a mysterious van.
Kovalenko’s first inclination was to drink, and he did so, straight from the bottle this time. His second inclination was to run. To just get up and go, to make tracks in the opposite direction of the sirens.
But he fought this urge, stood, and went to his laptop. His hands were shaking as he typed into Cryptogram: “What have you done?”
He was surprised by how fast the green letters appeared on the black window in front of him: “Explain your question.”
The delay was only a few seconds, then, “You and your work have not been compromised.”
The thirty-six-year-old Russian looked to the ceiling in his room and shouted, “Fuck!” He typed, “Who did you kill?”
“That is not connected to you. Stay focused on your daily instructions.”
Kovalenko typed furiously: “Fuck you! You had me go over there!!!! I could have been seen. I could have been filmed. Who was in the house? Why?
Now there was a long pause for the response. Valentin pictured Center waiting to send a message just to give the angry man on the other end of the connection time to calm down.
Finally, “I am monitoring police and other official traffic. There has been no mention of you. I assure you there were no CCTV recordings of you or your rented vehicle anywhere around Prosper Street. You do not have anything to worry about, and I do not have time to placate every one of my agents.”
Kovalenko wrote, “I live less than two miles away. I will have to relocate.”
“Negative. Stay where you are. I need you near Dupont Circle.”
Kovalenko wanted to ask why, but he knew he needn’t bother.
Instead he drank for a minute, felt the effects of the vodka calming him somewhat, and then asked, “The people at 3333? Who were they?”
No response came.
Valentin typed: “It will be on the news soon enough. Why not just tell me?”
“One was a problem.”
That told Valentin nothing. He started to type a line of question marks, when a new line of green type flashed on the screen.
“The other five were employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Kovalenko just stared at the screen blankly, his mouth slightly open.
He whispered,
Jack Ryan learned directly from CIA’s Intelink-TS network that the biggest news story of the month in D.C., the murder of six men that morning in Georgetown, would have been an even bigger news story if the truth got out.
Traffic between CIA and NSA revealed 3333 Prosper Street to be a CIA safe house, and communications confirmed that five of the dead were CIA employees and the sixth was the main suspect in the UAV attack.
FastByte22, the guy Jack Ryan and his colleagues helped identify and capture.
Needless to say, Ryan had the entire Campus operational and managerial staff convene in the conference room so he could disseminate the news.
Chavez could not believe the audacity of the crime. “So the Chinese really have the balls to send a wet team into Georgetown to kill CIA officers?”
“I don’t know that it was actually the Chinese who did it,” Director of Analysis Rick Bell said as he walked into the conference room. “We just intercepted a CIA message to U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade. In one of FastByte’s interrogations, apparently one where he was severely sleep-deprived, he mentioned the name Tong Kwok Kwan as the true identity of Center. Maybe Center did it as punishment for giving up his real name.”
“What do we know about this Tong guy?” Granger asked.
