The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Read online

  ‘Roger that,’ came the reply.

  ‘Did you see the other guy? Six four, two hundred fifty pounds, African American?’

  The agent looked at Ethan strangely. ‘I didn’t see anybody else in the vicinity.’

  Ethan sighed as the agent held out a hand and hauled Ethan to his feet. Mitchell was here, and that meant that the MJ–12 now had the Chinese technology that Ethan had been trying to hunt down.

  Ethan clambered to his feet as armed police rushed toward the vehicle and yanked the cab doors open. The two men were yanked from the vehicle and pinned down to the ground, a young man who remained stoically silent and an older man with a defiant set to his expression. The older man shouted a warning in heavily accented English.

  ‘You’ll kill them all!’

  ‘Stay on the ground!’ the police yelled in unison as Ethan covered them with his pistol as they manacled the two prisoners.

  ‘We’ll kill who?!’ Ethan demanded.

  The older man glared up at Ethan, rage radiating from his expression.

  ‘We were trying to help! Now you’ve ruined everything!’

  Ethan glanced at the police.

  ‘Get them back to the station as fast as you can, and get the techs’ to put these computers and screens back together. I need to know what they were doing.’

  *

  ‘I want a name.’

  The Chinese technician sat in the police interrogation room, his hands manacled to the Formica table top and his ankles likewise gripped in steel cuffs. He had been strip–searched, his clothes burned and was now dressed in a loose fitting gray jump suit, his nose swollen and the side of his face puffy and bruised.

  Ethan sat opposite him, two law enforcement officers and two DIA agents accompanying them in the tiny room.

  ‘I don’t know any names,’ the technician replied miserably.

  Ethan smiled bitterly.

  ‘I don’t think that you understand quite what’s happening here,’ he said, trying to restrain his anger. ‘All that’s standing between you and a major international incident is us, and you’re not helping. Who is your commanding officer? Who were you watching? Who sent you to Washington DC and why?’

  The technician, who had revealed his name to be Sung, stared at the table top, his black hair glistening in the harsh white light from the ceiling, dried blood encrusting his lips.

  Ethan smashed his fist down on the table before Sung and the Chinaman jerked in his seat and stared at Ethan.

  ‘I don’t know any names,’ he repeated in a monotone voice.

  Ethan leaned back in his seat and folded his arms.

  ‘It’s your superior officers you’re afraid of, right?’ he suggested. ‘If you go home now, having told us everything, you think that you’ll be sent into some prison somewhere for betraying state secrets.’

  Sung’s oriental features were hard to read, somehow less expressive than those of other races, but Ethan saw the technician’s eyes wobble in their sockets as he thought of whatever hellish prison awaited him back home for his perceived failure.

  ‘It’s not going to be much better here,’ Ethan said as he leaned forward on the desk. ‘You’re in the country carrying out illegal surveillance on US assets on behalf of China. You’ll be tried, sentenced and imprisoned in a high–security facility where you’ll be on permanent lockdown twenty three hours per day. On the hour that you do get out there will be killers, drug dealers, Hell’s Angels and every other maniac you can think of who’ll just love to get to know you real well, and being a foreigner who tried to kill members of our military, just how much sympathy do you think you’ll get from the guards?’ Ethan let a smile crawl across his features. ‘There’ll be nothing left of you come this time next year.’

  Sung swallowed but remained silent.

  ‘Or, we can cut a deal,’ Ethan suggested. ‘You go free.’

  Sung looked up in surprise at that. So did the police officers and DIA agents.

  ‘I don’t know that we can offer him that after…’ began one of them.

  ‘Hear me out,’ Ethan said as he raised a hand to forestall the objection and then turned back to Sung. ‘You’re a computer operator, right? Are you the superior officer?’

  Sung thought for a moment and then shook his head.

  ‘So you were just doing your duty,’ Ethan said.

  Sung nodded and Ethan went on.

  ‘If this attack you’ve planned goes ahead, our countries could find themselves at war, Sung. China could find itself under attack, which will then draw other nations such as Russia into the conflict. Before we know it we could all be fighting each other in World War Three. Is that something you want to be responsible for Sung? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Your failure will be not helping us and seeing millions of innocent people die both here and in your own country because you didn’t have the guts to stand up and help us stop this attack before…’

  ‘We’re not attacking your country!’ Sung shouted.

  Ethan looked at him for a moment.

  ‘You’re here,’ he replied, ‘you’ve implanted people, you were watching them on your screens Sung, I saw the video feeds before the crash.’

  Sung glared at Ethan, hatred radiating from his dark eyes.

  ‘You Americans, always so sure of yourself and yet so simple in your thinking. We’re not attacking your country, we’re trying to stop an attack.’

  Ethan frowned and leaned back in his seat.

  ‘Sure you are, Sung. You came all this way to protect our interests.’

  ‘Abrahem Nassir,’ Sung growled.

  The mention of that name got Ethan’s attention and he leaned forward again. ‘What do you know about Nassir?’

  ‘He stole our country’s technology and we’re trying to get it back before he does anything else to provoke conflict between our nations.’

  Ethan stared at Sung for a long moment. ‘You mean the technology that your country stole from ours, way back in 1997? The technology that you took from four National Security Agency employees and then killed them for it over many years?’

  Sung averted his gaze, his anger deflated. ‘I was not involved in that operation. We are trying to make amends.’

  ‘How were you planning to do that, Sung? Who are you controlling?’

  Sung smiled, his eyes still cold and black.

  ‘Your agents,’ he said, ‘maybe people in this room. Maybe people you know.’

  Even as Ethan was about to ask who the technician was referring to, the door to the room opened and an officer urgently beckoned Ethan to join him.

  ‘You need to see this.’

  Ethan got up and followed the officer to a second room down the corridor, where the computers and screens from the captured van had been set up again.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell we’ve got here,’ a police IT expert said as he sat before the screens, ‘but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’

  ‘I thought that the hard drive had been stolen,’ Ethan said. ‘I saw it taken.’

  ‘It has,’ the IT man said, ‘but the other drives were recording much of the data the Chinese must have collected since they arrived here. You’re looking at footage a few hours old.’

  Ethan looked at the screens before him. Both showed images of the view through a windshield of a car driving through what looked like Washington DC, and Ethan peered at the images for a moment as he tried to figure out whose eyes he was observing the scene through.

  He turned to a man sitting manacled to a chair in the same room, the older Chinese agent they had captured in the van.

  ‘Get him over here.’

  The police hauled the man to his feet and dragged him across as Ethan pointed at the screens.

  ‘Who are these people?’

  The man remained silent, his lips thin and straight and his gaze directed somewhere over Ethan’s shoulder. Ethan stepped forward, reached down and grabbed the man’s testicles in one hand as he twisted them and ya
nked them brutally upward.

  The man jerked as though electric currents were seething through his body as he went up on his toes and Ethan growled into his face.

  ‘Ten seconds and I’ll twist them clean off! Your name and the names of those people on the screens!’

  ‘Jiang Sin!’ the man squealed. ‘I can’t tell you their names!’

  Ethan twisted harder for a moment and then he released Jiang Sin. The Chinese man sagged, coughing and tears streaming from his eyes as he spoke.

  ‘We’re trying to stop Abrahem Nassir,’ he said weakly.

  Ethan peered at Jiang. ‘Prove it!’

  ‘Nassir is trying to assassinate the Presidents of both our countries!’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Yes!’ Jiang insisted. ‘His plan is to start a war between China and America, and that’s something that we do not want!’

  Ethan stared at the screens for a moment longer. ‘But you were watching through the eyes of two people.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jiang said, ‘the second signal was not ours! That person is being controlled by Abrahem Nassir! We intercepted it and were trying to track them down using the person we implanted!’

  Ethan stared at the two screens, and then he saw the person in the car look across a quiet street at a row of buildings, one of which Ethan recognized instantly. Vantage Aviation Hire. He heard Jarvis’s words echo through his mind.

  During the attack, several witnesses reported noticing that the general was suffering a nosebleed. The small size and design of the devices caused minimal discomfort for the wearer, but he has told us that they also caused nosebleeds from time to time.

  Ethan whirled to the police officers.

  ‘I’ve got to move, now! Keep these men in custody, no matter what!’

  ***

  XL

  Ethan dashed out of the police station, his cell phone in his hand as he hurried toward his vehicle.

  ‘Jarvis’

  ‘Hannah Ford was implanted,’ Ethan said as he reached the pool car. ‘The Chinese must have got to her when she was in Hong Kong.’

  ‘But she was checked, scanned!’ Jarvis protested. ‘She was clean when they passed through the airport!’

  ‘Well, somehow the Chinese got something into her and they’re not telling us what!’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘She’s in custody,’ Ethan replied. ‘She got into a gunfight with Nassir and he got away, started shooting the place up before we got there.’

  ‘I just got a call from her partner, Vaughn,’ Jarvis revealed. ‘They’re starting to understand what’s happening here and that they’re being set up somehow. I think they might come over to our side.’

  ‘I can’t be sure if the Chinese wanted to help Nassir escape or were trying to gun him down, but Hannah wasn’t in her own mind. It’s possible that they might have been using Hannah to catch or kill Abrahem.’

  Jarvis’s voice brooked no argument.

  ‘Get to the White House,’ he ordered. ‘Nassir will head there while he still has enough time to take the President down. He’ll have to be close by, near enough that he can see his plan come to fruition before his eyes. He’s not going to want to watch this go down on a television somewhere.’

  ‘Agreed. What about Hannah?’

  ‘I’ll worry about her! You get to Nassir before he gets to the President!’

  Ethan stood alongside his car and looked at the traffic building up on the nearby freeway, lines of stationary vehicles, horns honking and bodywork glinting in brilliant flares of white light in the heat.

  ‘There’s no way I’m going to get to the Capitol by car,’ he replied. ‘You’re right though. Nassir’s a hands on killer, he’s not going to stand by and watch this from afar. My guess is that he’ll be on foot, maybe in the crowds somewhere.’

  ‘I’ll get the MPD onto it with their helicopters,’ Jarvis replied, ‘they’ll be able…. see more than… and pick him up more quickly… we could on… own.’

  ‘You’re breaking up Doug,’ Ethan replied as he looked about. ‘I must be in a dead–zone or something. I’ll have to call you back and…’

  Ethan’s train of thought slammed to a halt and he stared at his cell phone again.

  ‘You there, Ethan?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here,’ he replied, still staring at his cell’s screen.

  The screen was showing a signal of two bars, but Ethan recalled reading somewhere that nobody actually knew what the bars on cell screens really meant. It was possible to hold a cell phone call with one bar, or be cut off with five. The signal icon on his cell at least suggested that the reception was weak, perhaps affected by the heat and the high buildings surrounding the police station.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Damn me,’ Ethan said finally. ‘I think I know how they’re getting signals to the victims, how they control them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Grab cell phone data from the date of the attack at Fort Benning! Run it against any of the signals detected coming out of Fort Benning, anything at all!’

  Ethan waited as he heard Jarvis and Hellerman running the data onto one of their computer screens. A few moments passed and then Jarvis came back on the line.

  ‘According to this the cell towers between Parkwood, where General Thompson set off, and Fort Benning both recorded an identical cell phone signal that remained active from just before the general left his home until the moment he took his own life. The frequency of the transmission matches precisely that detected at Fort Benning – eight hundred eighty hertz.’

  ‘Genius,’ Hellerman whispered in the background, audible now as Jarvis switched his own cell to speaker, ‘absolute genius.’

  ‘They used cell phones to relay the signals, didn’t they,’ Ethan said.

  ‘Cell phones, everybody’s got one,’ Hellerman said. ‘They’re one of our most ubiquitous devices and we carry them on our person. They hacked the general’s cell phone and used it to relay signals to the implant in his skull. I’ll be damned, it’s like they dialed into his brain.’

  ‘Can we trace that cell?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘They’ll have tossed it,’ Jarvis said.

  ‘It’s their Achilles Heel,’ Ethan said. ‘Hannah attacked Nassir’s storage depot, but according to her partner half way through the attack she suddenly faltered and looked as though she were waking up from a dream. If Abrahem Nassir is using cell phone networks to control his victims, then it makes sense that he would set up shop in an area where cell phone reception is weak. The area of Bethesda he was in is a dead–zone, hardly any reception at all, and it may have caused the Chinese to lose their control of Hannah.’

  ‘Which would prevent anybody from using his own technology against him,’ Jarvis surmised, ‘and make it harder for them to track him down. But surely the White House must be protected against cellular signals?’

  ‘Maybe the White House but not necessarily the lawns. If Majestic Twelve are hoping for Abrahem Nassir to succeed, they’ll have somebody on those lawns boosting the signals. We need to figure out who and fast,’ Ethan said. ‘The District isn’t known for being the best when it comes to cell phone reception and I can’t believe that Abrahem wouldn’t have known that when he came here.’

  ‘I’ll inform Lopez and the Secret Service,’ Jarvis said. ‘Get to the White House as soon as you can. I’ll get Lopez to identify the source of the signals both inside and outside of the White House.’

  ‘Don’t risk letting Abrahem finish his mission,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If we have to shut the ceremony down, then do it!’

  ‘Leave that to me. Jarvis out.’

  Jarvis cut off the line and Ethan stared at his cell phone for a moment longer. General Thompson had been in possession of his cell phone when he had died, the device in the pocket of his uniform. Commander Sandy Veiron had also had his cell phone on him in the cockpit of his F–18E Hornet when he had ploughed into the deck of his aircraft carrier, pilots often using t
he devices to take photographs of other aircraft while flying operationally.

  A cell phone was carried by almost every human being in the western world and the perfect vessel through which to pass signals to the devices implanted into the heads of victims of the Chinese or Abrahem Nassir. Ethan knew that there were devices capable of blocking all cell phone signals, disrupting communications and preventing Nassir and his people from taking control of human minds, but there was no way that the entire network could be protected all at once. If Nassir had a person on the inside, then Ethan knew that if he was close enough he would be able to boost his signals and get anybody in the vicinity who had been implanted to attack the President from close range.

  Ethan glanced at the nearby traffic once again and made his decision. He turned away from his vehicle and hurried across the lot until he saw what he wanted. Ethan hurried across the lot and crouched down alongside a massive Harley Davidson Sportster 883, hurriedly pulling wires from behind the clocks and after he had examined them for a few moments he cut two of them and then stood up. He used a pocket knife to jack open the seat compartment and expose the battery, then touched one end of the bare wire to the twelve volt positive terminal. He connected the other end to the feed wire on the coil, then took his second wire and connected the solenoid and the starter. The big V–Twin engine coughed into life as Ethan secured the wires in place and slammed the seat back down over the battery.

  ‘You done there, boy?’

  Ethan turned and saw four bikers standing watching him, their muscular arms folded across broad chests and bulging bellies, eyes hard and cold. The sound of the motorbike’s rumbling engine had masked their approach. One of them slipped a blade from beneath his jacket, the steel glinting in the sunlight.

  ‘I need your bike,’ Ethan replied. ‘If I don’t use it, we may be facing World War Three.’

  The bikers stared at him for a moment and then they chuckled grimly. Their leader, a man with a thick and drooping moustache that framed his thin lips, smiled back at Ethan.