Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3)(36)
Borger’s mouse highlighted a string of dots moving in one direction. “This was his path until the tower lost signal.”
“What does that mean…he drove out of range?”
“I don’t think so, sir. I think he turned off his phone.”
16
Langford raised an eyebrow. “He turned it off?”
“Yes, sir. There were a few towers he was still close enough to connect to. And even if he didn’t have a strong enough voice signal, he should have been well inside the range of the control channel used for text messages. Text messages can be received farther away, which still would have allowed the towers to triangulate.”
“So he receives the case from Li, immediately gets in his car and heads north, then turns off his phone.” Langford’s face was somber. “Then what?”
“That’s where things go from strange to bizarre.” Borger hesitated before continuing. “He disappeared from the grid for almost fourteen hours before his phone came back on, at roughly the same place as it went off.”
“So he turned it back on?”
“Yes, sir.”
Langford crossed his arms, thinking. “Do we have any indication whether he still had the case with him?”
“There’s no way to know,” Borger replied. “But my bet is that he didn’t.”
Langford nodded. “I wouldn’t exactly call that bizarre. My guess is our good General hid it somewhere, or with someone.”
“Uh, that’s not actually the bizarre part. It’s that General Wei’s reappearance on the grid was short-lived, literally. He never returned home. Instead, he drove himself back to Beijing, found a parking lot, and killed himself in his car.”
“What?!” Both Langford and Clay were stunned. “Are you kidding?”
“No, sir,” Borger shook his head.
“Jesus,” Langford groaned. “This just keeps getting worse and worse.” He looked at his screen with exasperation. “Any of this making sense to you, Clay?”
“I’m afraid not, Admiral. But I agree with Wil. If this General Wei went to so much trouble to get that case and then disappeared just before ending his life, I think we can be pretty certain it wasn’t with him when he came back.”
This wasn’t making sense to any of them.
“Why on Earth would a man with that kind of power, who now has something virtually every person on the planet wants, simply kill himself?”
“To keep it quiet,” Clay mused. He looked back to Wei’s picture on the screen and it suddenly fell into place. “That’s it. That’s the answer.”
“What is?”
Clay’s voice rose excitedly. “There is no coup in China’s Standing Committee. It’s in the Central Military Commission. General Wei is the coup!”
“Wei?”
“Wei was in charge of the find in Guyana. So he knew what they had. He had the authority to launch a strike on the Bowditch. And he also had the authority to order the sinking of their own ship and the Forel. He was trying to destroy the cargo. The last remaining piece was the DNA-infused bacteria in the case that Li flew back to him. Wei was systematically destroying any evidence of what they’d found.”
“But why?” Langford asked. “Why destroy the one thing that could change everything?” He shook his head and thought it over, then looked back at Borger’s image. “Wil, if he wanted to destroy the samples, couldn’t he have done that just about anywhere?”
“I suspect so.”
“So why disappear with it while trying to avoid being tracked?”
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“It does,” said Clay, “if Wei wasn’t intending to destroy it.”
Border nodded. “For example if he were hiding it.”
Langford folded his arms again with a stern expression. “He destroyed what he wasn’t able to contain and hid the rest.”
“It appears so.”
“Which means that briefcase may still be within a seven-hour drive from his phone’s last coordinates.”
“Or less,” added Borger. “If he had to sleep.”
After a long silence, Langford looked back at the screen. “How’s your Chinese, Clay?”
Clay was already searching for more on Wei when he looked back to Langford’s image in surprise. “What?”
Langford checked his watch. “Pack your bags. I’ll arrange for your ride. In the meantime, Borger, you have approximately thirteen hours to figure out exactly where Clay is going.”
By 3:30 a.m. Clay was already at thirty-two thousand feet aboard the C-20D Gulfstream III. The model C-20D was the most common variant used by the U.S. Navy and retrofitted with special naval communication equipment. It was also the same aircraft which Clay and Caesare had taken to Brazil just a few weeks earlier. A trip which set in motion a chain of events that none of them could have anticipated.