The Wuhan Mission

Xue Lin batted her eyelashes: “Were you friends with Dr. Xiaofan?” she countered, smiling sweetly. The name was in the file Jimmy had given her. It was a safe name to drop as she was on staff in Beijing but had never worked with Dr. Wu.

“No, unfortunately we have never met.” Dr. Wu replied, turning back to the other two candidates.

Xue Lin’s mind ticked over as the other two answered a few questions, flirting with him just as she had.

‘Shit! This guy is going to take the other two!’ She thought to herself.

As one of the other girls purred her answers back at Wu, Xue Lin sat up straighter and arched her back, just a little, pushing her breasts out, cocking her head slightly to one side, pouting her lips almost imperceptibly.

“Are there any questions about what the work would entail?” Wu inquired, smiling at all three girls.

The two other girls shook their heads meekly. Xue Lin’s mouth opened momentarily, the tip of her tongue touching the inside of her front teeth. She looked intently at Dr. Wu before pursing her lips and shaking her head.

“Are you sure you don’t have a question miss?” he looked intensely at her.

“No questions Dr. Wu.”

“Good, well thank you for your time, I will email each of you with my decision by the end of business hours today. Two of you will start work on Monday morning.”

As the girls were leaving the building Xue Lin hugged each of them and wished them luck. She had casually dropped the activated GPS tracker in the handbag of the first girl, during the hug, hoping to God that Dr. Wu’s choice would not force Xue Lin to strangle the poor girl before the weekend was out. Sam had made it clear that getting this lab assistant job was of high priority.

On her way home, Xue Lin found a hardware store a few blocks from her apartment. She had some renovations to do today while waiting to hear from Dr. Wu about the job by the end of the day.

She found everything she needed and arrived home with a large bag full of plastering and painting tools and two cans of off-white paint which she’d hung on two ends of a piece of wood to carry them back to her apartment. On the walk home, she looked for a clever place to stash the bug detector. It had to be a cool dry place where nobody would think to interfere in any way.

A crumbling red brick wall around the corner from her building reminded her of tradecraft training. Loose bricks are great for concealing stuff. She’d come back tonight and look for a loose brick. Meanwhile she had an apartment to paint.

*

Roet was pleased with his team’s work on the job application. It was solid work and with a bit of luck it would hold up under scrutiny and all would go smoothly for Xue Lin.

Back in 2003 he had sent a young couple to Beijing to establish a cover story while blackmailing a virologist who was working on the SARS virus. Unfortunately, however, he had neglected to pay one of his Chinese assets who was supposed to be helping the couple. He was never exactly sure what had happened over there but the couple had managed to avoid prison.

Chapter 17 Renovations

Xue Lin’s weapons and gadgets lay spread out on the bed. She needed to be able to access them with relatively short notice, but they needed to be totally unfindable if someone turned over her apartment while she was at work.

She picked up the multi-frequency bug detector and turned it on. It looked like a little walkie talkie with two aerials. She swept the room with it, and as expected, no broadcasting signals were detected. It was still too soon for that.

She propped the Hello Kitty Spy-cam on a shelf in the corner. It was motion activated.

The Ruger LC9S pistol needed to go into a hole in the wall along with the five spare mags, each with nine rounds. Also her escape papers including her Canadian passport and a big roll of local currency and US dollars. She hoped that she wouldn’t be needing the pistol or papers until the project was near completion.

After moving the bed out of the way, she put on the paper coveralls a dust mask and protective glasses and started to dig quietly into the wall behind where the bedhead would be.

Soon she had a thirty centimeter square, shallow hole in the wall.

“There goes the security deposit” she said out loud in Mandarin.

She shoved the roll of cash, the passport and papers, the pistol and mags into a ziplock and lodged them in the wall and with the help of a piece of drywall that would not sound hollow if knocked upon, she plastered over it using the method she’d been taught at Langley.