At nine fifteen a.m., the Crawfords sat down for their breakfast, and they checked out at 10:32 a.m. and got into a waiting taxi. The taxi driver was tracked down and questioned until the investigators were satisfied that on the morning in question, the driver received a call from his base to pick up the American couple from the Shanghai Waldorf Astoria and deliver them to the international departures terminal at Shanghai Pudong International Airport from where they were going to fly back home. They talked a bit on the way to the airport, but it was all about how they loved Hong Kong and how much they were looking forward to getting back to the USA. Yes, he dropped them off at the airport, they paid him in cash, and he left. No, he didn’t see them enter the building but assumed they did.

  At nine forty-five a.m., Yasmin Burke, the American woman with a diplomatic passport, sat down for breakfast. She checked out at 10:47 a.m. and caught a taxi to Shanghai Pudong International Airport, where she would board a flight directly to Los Angeles, California. Her taxi driver gave the investigators an account very similar to what they’d heard from all the other taxi drivers they had questioned.

  With the wisdom of hindsight, the chief investigator would later point out that the first sign that something was amiss came on Friday at ten a.m. That was when the chambermaid had entered General Yuan’s room and found his bed had not been slept in since she had made his bed and cleaned his room the morning before. Her failure to report it earned her six grueling hours in the MSS interrogation cells. She had a hard time convincing the investigators that it didn't raise her suspicions at all because the General could have been working through the night. He could have been visiting friends or, as a single man, he could’ve found company and spent the night. No, it never happened before, but there is always a first time.

  Questioning the general’s aide de camp revealed that the general told him over the phone late afternoon on Wednesday that he was going to be out of town for the next two days as he had been summoned to Hong Kong for important meetings. According to the aide, the general said he would be back in the office on Monday morning. No, there was nothing untoward about that, the general was a busy man and often had to change his schedule to attend to urgent matters all over the country. Yes, that included Hong Kong. No, the general didn’t tell him who he was meeting in Hong Kong; if the general wanted him to know, he would’ve told him.

  The chief of the MSS was livid as he paced back and forth in front of the wide-eyed team of investigators. “The Americans made fools of us! We look like idiots! Morons! And you’re supposed to be our best. The top investigators in the country, and you can’t tell me how they snatched one of our most senior generals, a traitor to be sure, from right under our noses.

  “He didn’t decide to defect on the spur of the moment, that we know now. He had been planning it for a while. He had help, and that help is staring at you from the information you’ve collected. It’s right in front of your eyes, but you’re too stupid to see it! How did they do it? I want answers! I want them in the next twenty-four hours. Get out! Go, and do your job!”

  The team scurried out of the room and assembled in another room. The lead investigator suggested they start again and review each bit of information they had. He agreed with the chief; they had the answer in their hands—they only had to find it.

  It took them a few hours to sift through the information and ended up with the six suspects: the Italian couple with their dog, the Texas couple, and the American woman with a diplomatic passport. Two of the investigators were assigned to check if those people did board planes indeed for the destinations mentioned in the computer records when they checked out of the hotel. It took half an hour to get confirmation from the airlines, the airport’s CCTV cameras, and customs, and again CCTV camera footage showing them board their flights. No discrepancies there. Even General Yuan’s trip to Hong Kong on a military passenger jet was verified. They didn’t check if the Italian couple and their dog got a connecting flight from Vancouver to Rome. If they did, they would have found their first discrepancy.

  Next, they considered the roles each of the six could have played. For the dog, they were unable to come up with an explanation of what his role could have been. The five humans did it. But how? Out of desperation, they called in their facial recognition experts and told them to analyze each of the five faces. Change their faces, make them younger and older. Change their hair color. Then try and match each change with what they had in their vast databases. A study of the CCTV camera footage, collected from the moment they entered the country until they had left, told them nothing more. Hours later, they admitted defeat.

  The lead investigator was sitting with his hands in his hair; he looked as if he was ready to start pulling it out. He looked up at the leader of the facial recognition team and said, “I want you to try one more thing. It might be crazy, but then this whole case has been crazy all along. I want you to take the CCTV footage of the Italian couple checking in at the hotel and compare it with the footage when they checked out. I want you to compare the gait of the old man arriving with the gait of the old man leaving. Then do it for all of them.”

  The team lead nodded and went to work. Twenty minutes later, he declared with certainty, “The old man with the woman and the dog arriving is not the same old man that left with the woman and the dog that night.”

  A protracted silence descended upon the room as they stared at each other in disbelief, and the realization dawned on them. The old man who had been at the side of the woman, accompanied by the big black Dutch Shepherd service dog, at 10:02 P.M. on that Wednesday night at the front desk of the Shanghai Waldorf Astoria was General Yuan Lee, the traitor, and defector. That then meant the man who sat down for breakfast at precisely six thirty a.m. on Thursday and who walked through the lobby at precisely 7:20 a.m. was an imposter. The best imposter anyone of them had ever seen except for those seen in Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible movies. That was their conclusion; the Americans had used one or more disguising experts to disguise the two men. It was so expertly done not even their much-acclaimed facial recognition technology was able to pick it up. It was only the different gaits of the two men that gave it away.

  Which one of the Texas couple or the woman with the diplomatic passport was the disguising expert they could only guess. Maybe it was all of them. Perhaps the Texas couple . . . They decided to stop speculating and report to the chief of the MSS.

  What they would never know, and it didn’t matter that they didn’t know, was that the disguising expert was the woman with a diplomatic passport. Everyone else, including the dog, were there for purposes of deception and backup if it were required.

  It was only much later that the lead investigator, who was still troubled by how the Americans got the better of them, would come across an article that described how brilliant the CIA disguising experts were. According to this article, one morning during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, the CIA’s chief of disguise entered the White House wearing a mask that was an exact replica of the face of a female colleague of hers. She sat in the intelligence briefing close to the president for the duration. When the meeting was over, she removed the disguise and surprised the president with the fact that he had been in the presence of an impersonator without an inkling of an idea.

  After reading that, the lead investigator knew how it was possible that a Caucasian person could be made to look Asian and vice versa in such a manner that no human or computer program could spot it. Not without a deliberate effort at a very close range, and even then, it would not be easy.

  Chapter 40 - 22 Hours to H-hour

  Shanghai, China | Hong Kong

  Day 21

  BY 9:00 A.M. THURSDAY, WHEN Rex boarded the military passenger plane for the three-hour flight to Hong Kong, the British Airways Boeing Airbus was already eight hours into its fourteen and a half-hour flight to Vancouver. Onboard was Catia disguised as an old Italian woman, Digger was in his disguise as a service dog, and General Yuan Lee was disguised as an old, near-deaf Italian man and husband of the woman he was with.

  Rex was in the full-dress uniform of a general of the People’s Liberation Army, and the nameplate on his chest said his name was Yuan Lee.

  The plane had seating for twenty, and Rex was glad to see only ten of the seats were occupied. He had two seats for himself. As soon as the plane reached cruising altitude, an air hostess served them with drinks and snacks. When Rex opened the small packet of peanuts, he was not surprised to find peanuts nor the tiny thumb drive inside. On that thumb drive was one of the most critical pieces of intelligence that a courier had ever carried in the history of humankind. The race against time was on. The lives of millions of unsuspecting, innocent people across the globe were at stake. Putting that information in the hands of the President of the United States in time was vital to ensure their survival.

  However, before any of that could happen, it was necessary to find out if the thumb drive contained a verifiably authentic audio recording of the meeting between Yuan and Li Lingxin in Beijing the day before.

  Apart from the authenticity of the recording, a lot of things still had to fall in place before John Brandt would be able to put his “Mission Accomplished” stamp on it. Besides General Yuan, who had to get to Washington, DC safely, Catia and Digger, Josh and Marissa, and the CIA disguising expert, Yasmin Burke, all had to get to DC safely as well. Rex had to get the information on the thumb drive verified in Hong Kong and then make his way to DC via Australia and Los Angeles. And most important of all, the final step, the president had to put the fear of God into President Li Lingxin and sway him to cease and desist from his diabolical plans.

  Unable to contact Catia or anyone else to get status updates, Rex couldn’t help but worry a little about her and Digger and everyone else who had been involved in the escape of General Yuan the past twenty-four hours. Yet Rex’s face revealed only impassiveness, and his body language showed no tension.

  On arrival at the Shek Kong Airfield, home to the Hong Kong Garrison air force units of the People's Liberation Army, the first thing Rex did when he was out of the plane and outside earshot of anyone was to take his satphone out and call John Brandt. He was relieved to hear that the Chinese were still oblivious about their general. Brandt also told him that the CIA had been keeping track of the three planes carrying his team and General Yuan, and all aircraft were on course and schedule as per plan.

  Ending the call, he noticed a driver with a military vehicle was waiting for him. The driver approached and saluted, and Rex returned the salute. The driver relieved him of his grip bag, which he carried to the car and placed in the trunk. He held the back door open for Rex to get in. Half an hour later, they pulled up in front of the JW Marriott Hotel, where the driver retrieved Rex’s bag from the trunk and handed it to the waiting porter. The driver saluted, Rex returned the salute, and the driver left.

  Rex checked in at the front desk for a two-day stay and went to his room. There he took the uniform off, removed his disguise, and placed it in the grip bag from which he had taken his jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers. He wiped the room clean of his fingerprints and took the elevator down to the parking area in the basement. He found the Mercedes in the parking bay where Jethro told him it would be and the key below the left front mudguard. It took him less than fifteen minutes to get to the ferry terminal, where two of Ramesh Ojha’s men were waiting for him to take him across to Matz Island.

  On approaching Matz Island, Rex looked at the empty space in the marina where the TOMATS had been lying at anchor for the past fourteen days. Spencer had lifted anchor early in the morning the day before. Rex glanced at his watch and made a quick calculation; the TOMATS would by now be about four hundred fifty nautical miles away, more than one-third of the way to Singapore.

  In Jethro’s study, Rex plugged the thumb drive into Jethro’s secured laptop computer and started the audio recording on it. The conversation between General Yuan and Li Lingxin was in Mandarin, of which Rex only understood a few words. Mandarin and Cantonese speakers were able to understand each other with minimal difficulty when they used the written form of the languages, but the two languages were distinct when spoken. Jethro, Tamara, and David were in the study, all fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese. They listened to the recording of the meeting and told Rex that they could not confirm or deny that the voice of General Yuan was authentic because they had never heard him talk before. Nonetheless, they had no doubt whatsoever that the second voice on that recording was none other than the President of China.

  As a first step in the verification process, their word was good enough for Rex. He immediately called John Brandt and told him that the audio file was in the process of being transferred to the CRC’s secured servers from where Greg had to transfer it to the CIA servers because Rex didn’t have access to them. The file transfer was complete before the call ended. Within minutes, the CIA’s technicians with the world’s most sophisticated voice analysis software would run a comparison of the voices on the recording to the voices of Li Lingxin and Yuan Lee in their databases and deliver a verdict.

  While waiting for the CIA to deliver the verdict, they talked about the contents of that recording. It was two p.m. in Hong Kong and Beijing—twenty-two hours to H-hour, the time when the virus would be set free upon the unsuspecting citizens of every country across the globe. H-hour was the military term for the time of day at which an attack, landing, or other military operation was scheduled to begin.

  Half an hour after the call to Brandt, Rex’s satphone rang, and Brandt told him, “Both voices are a hundred percent match. Now, get your ass out of there.”

  Rex was forty minutes into his flight onboard Jethro’s Gulfstream G550 private jet speeding at 705 kilometers per hour towards Brisbane, Australia, 6,930 kilometers away, when the machine transcription and translation of the audio recording were brought up on the big screen in the Situation Room in DC. The human translated and transcribed versions would arrive two hours later.

  A little over an hour into the flight, Rex called John Brandt again and said, “John, can you do me one big favor, please?”

  “Just say the word.”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but I know you have the contacts to make it happen. Contact that British Airways Boeing with my wife on it and tell her I’m fine and that I love her.”

  “Consider it done. I’ll let Josh and Marissa know as well but leave out the I love you part.” Brandt chuckled.

  “Thanks, John, I appreciate it.I’m going to eat then sleep.”

  “Have a safe trip. See you in DC.”

  Chapter 41 – 20 Hours to war

  White House, Situation Room, Washington, DC

  Day 21

  IN THE SITUATION ROOM, the atmosphere was somber before the arrival of the transcript, and it got worse after. By the President of China’s own words, the world was twenty hours away from the outbreak of a biological world war.

  The president had kept the USA’s allies informed from the day the NSC had received the tranche of information from Hong Kong that Jethro got from Generals Dai and Wan. He was ready to notify the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The US ambassador to the UN had all the information she needed; she was in her office in the UN building in New York, waiting for the president’s orders.

  By the time they had read the meeting transcript, Yuan Lee’s flight was two and a half hours out of Vancouver. From there, it would be another five and a half hours by commercial passenger plane to DC on a direct flight without the time it would take to get off the British Airways plane, go through customs, and check in for the flight to DC.

  “We need to get Yuan here much quicker,” the president said as he looked at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  The General shook his head and said, “I’ve already thought about a fighter jet, Mr. President. By my calculations, with a Gulfstream or similar jet, we can get him here in a little over three hours. I suggest we make arrangements with the Canadians to get him off the plane immediately after landing and put him on such a jet.”

  The president looked at the vice president and said, “Can you make it so?”

  “On my way, Mr. President,” the vice president said and left the room.

  They didn’t have to spell it out. If all the chips fell in the right place at the right time, General Yuan would be walking into the White House no sooner than six hours from now—thirteen hours before H-hour.

  They had set the cutoff point at ten hours before H-hour. If General Yuan Lee were not in the White House, standing next to the president at that time, the president would make the call to President Li Lingxin without him. The Secretary-General of the UN would be informed after the call irrespective of whether the president was successful in persuading the Chinese president to back off or not; the world deserved to know what this maniac had in mind for them.

  If General Yuan arrived within the next six hours, as planned, they had three hours to talk to him and prepare him for what was about to happen.

  Chapter 42 – From Shanghai to DC

  Various transcontinental flights

 

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