Jake slammed his head against the glass to get away from her nail blade, feeling the threat. Panting, he said, “How would I know what he said? He was shouting in Chinese. I’m not Chinese! I keep telling you guys that.”
She raked his neck and he recoiled farther. She said, “You are Chinese now.”
Jake looked at the other two men in the cabin for support. They stared back with dead eyes.
Chen saw the terror mounting in him and said, “Enough.”
Zhi straightened up and Jake exhaled. Chen said, “Somehow they found us. Jake, stand up.”
He did so, nervously flicking glances between the two of them.
Chen said, “Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
Chen grew angry. “Take off your clothes! Now.”
Jake glanced at the other two men, then at Zhi. He saw nothing but contempt. He began to slowly undress. When he was naked, wearing only his underwear, Chen said, “Search it.”
The two other men went through the clothes, finding nothing.
Jake said, “It’s not me. I’ve followed all of your instructions. It’s not me.”
Chen leaned back, thinking. He said, “I believe you’re telling the truth, but they found us some way.”
He pulled out his phone and stared at it for a moment, remembering how he had wanted to trap the man called Pike, using Clifford Delmonty’s phone. He needed this handset as a conduit to his control, as it was built with Chinese encryption embedded. If he destroyed it, he would be reduced to talking in the clear, making mission decisions very difficult. But he understood, even given the technological advantages of encryption, it still used the cell network. Meaning it could be tracked.
He didn’t know if it had been, but he had to suspect. Like a cruise ship on quarantine, the only way to stamp out the threat was to eliminate the chance of infection, good or bad.
He made his decision. “Everyone destroy your phones. Rip them apart to the microchip level.”
Zhi said, “What?”
“They’re tracking us somehow, and it might be through our phones.”
She nodded and the gondola burst into a flurry of activity, everyone in it smashing their cell phones while Jake sat in his underwear, scared for his life.
The cable car continued on its path, all of them tossing the pieces of their phones out into the jungle.
Chen said, “Your hard drive. Can we be traced by that?”
Sitting in his tighty-whiteys, Jake said, “No. No way. It just holds data. There is nothing in that that transmits. Nothing. It’s just a hard drive. Until it’s plugged into a computer, it’s nothing more than dead silicon.”
Zhi said, “We can’t toss that out the window. It’s the whole mission.”
Chen rubbed his face. “They found us somehow.”
Zhi said, “It had to be the phones. They always leave a trail.”
He nodded. “I hope you’re right.”
She said, “And you have one more phone. Not the operational one.”
Incensed, he said, “What are you talking about?”
“Your child’s phone. The emergency one. The one she uses to contact you. You should get rid of it as well.”
He said, “I don’t have another phone.”
“Yes you do. I’ve seen it. You call every two days on it. You’ve left a trail because of it.”
Growing angry, he said, “I don’t need you looking at me twenty-four/seven. I use that phone to call my daughter. That’s all it is. It isn’t tainted by anything that’s happened over here. There is no way they could find that handset.”
She leaned back, saying, “If you want to believe that.”
He thought about it, then pulled out the second phone, smashing it with his heel.
Chapter 61
Paul leaned back from the computer screen, incredulous. There was no way the target he’d been tracking was this man. No way.
Since he’d lost any ability to leverage NSB assets, he’d gone his own way, using whatever means he had. He’d followed Fly Boy for days, taking picture after picture, and then had uploaded them into Google, doing a reverse image search.
He’d come up with nothing. Well, he’d come up with a slew of other possible identities, from a bit actor in a Korean soap opera to a millennial YouTube star. But nothing that was realistic.
He’d decided to track the man to his command, at least narrowing down his assigned unit. As a full colonel, it shouldn’t have been too hard. He had to have a home base, which meant he’d have to at least check in once in a while. But Paul failed in that as well.
The man never reported to a regular unit. He spent all of his time working inside other government agencies, like the Mainland Affairs Council where Paul had first seen him. When he interacted with the military it was always some different unit, and he conducted strange interactions. He didn’t appear to have any formal unit at all, but whenever he showed up, he was well known and treated like a DV—a distinguished visitor.
Like most of the men his age who had been conscripted in their youth, Paul was well versed in the military, and Fly Boy’s ability to interface both with civilian government and disparate military units was an enigma. Especially since he couldn’t put a name to the face.
Paul still wanted to believe the colonel wasn’t a traitor, wanted to have faith in the uniform the man wore. But he’d had one final encounter with Fly Boy’s outside protection, cementing the fact that the man was working something subversive.
Yesterday he’d followed Fly Boy to the high-speed rail terminal in Taipei, dressed yet again out of uniform, wearing khaki pants and a linen shirt. He’d watched him buy a ticket for a train headed south to Tainan, and Paul had followed, wondering what this trip was about.
The oldest inhabited spot in Taiwan, Tainan had been the original seat of government for centuries. Ruled at one time or another by the Chinese, Dutch, and Japanese, it was an eclectic city that melded the old with the new, and didn’t have anything that should’ve interested Fly Boy. Well, there was one thing.
Tainan Air Force Base was located in the city, and as the country’s southernmost military outpost—and thus the closest one to mainland China—it was home to the headquarters of the country’s entire coastal defense, as well as the first base designated to house the new F-35 fighter jets.
Paul was sure that was Fly Boy’s destination, but after the train arrived, he didn’t travel there.
He’d exited the terminal and then taken a cab to Anping, the oldest section of the city. Set on the outskirts of town, right on the coast, with salt marshes running up to the original merchant ports, it had been the first area the sea traders used. Now it consisted of parks and markets, but as far as Paul knew, it should contain little of interest for Fly Boy—although Paul would be the first to admit that he was by no means an expert on the town.
The last time Paul had traveled to Tainan had been as a child. His grandfather had worked in the salt pits of the town during the Japanese occupation, and after he passed away, his mother had taken him there on a nostalgic journey that had ended with her embittered. Instead of fondly showing Paul his heritage, she had grown surly over memories Paul didn’t understand, eventually cutting the visit short and returning to Taipei.