The Wuhan Mission

The first time he was contacted by the American, Marcus Roet, an officer from the CIA, was after he’d been given the job of guarding the Secretary. Roet had offered him a hundred thousand a year in a US bank account just to keep his ears open and to report back to him every week. Jimmy was all about the dollar signs, and wanted a better life. He hadn’t been sucked in by all the Chinese propaganda and he’d seen all those Chinese industrialists get rich while he risked his life for a crappy salary. The rich little Chinese princesses were not interested in a guy like him. No money, no nice clothes. He had never traveled. Jimmy felt like he had a lot to offer a girl. He was being held back. Marcus Roet offered him a leg up and he grabbed the opportunity and at every possible chance he turned that opportunity upside down and shook it to see what more he could get out of it.

Jimmy was one of the Secretary’s special forces guard team, and was also his driver. He drove a Hongqui Sedan, or as it was known in unofficial circles, a ‘Red Flag Limo’. Jimmy was privy to all kinds of conversations, particularly of interest to Marcus Roet were those between the Secretary and the Chairman.

Roet occasionally would ask Jimmy to do some physical jobs, including a couple of ‘wetwork’ jobs. When he had extra work from Roet, there would appear an extra deposit in his US bank account, negotiated in advance of course.

The Secretary was paranoid about cell phone radiation. It was possible that he knew something that no-one else did. In any case, the Secretary always used speaker-phone and held the phone away from his head. This meant that Jimmy could always hear both sides of the conversation.

Tonight, as he drove the Secretary home from a restaurant in Beijing, he overheard the Chairman telling the Secretary about some virus that a Doctor Wu was working on. It seemed like valuable intel, so Jimmy called Marcus as soon as he got home to his modest Government apartment in Beijing. Marcus had provided Jimmy with a secure phone that he hid under the fridge. He had to jack the front of the fridge up with a crowbar to get it out.

“Yo! My brother! It’s Jimmy.”

“Yes, I can tell, Jimmy, you have a bit of an accent” said Roet sarcastically.

“The Chairman told my boss over the phone that some Doctor Wu was working on a new a virus.”

“Thank you Jimmy. I shall look into it. If you can find out in what city this Doctor Wu lives and works, that would be helpful. I’ll be in touch soon. Anything else interesting?”

“New iPhone coming out soon!” Jimmy said, rather stupidly.

“Ok Jimmy, you take care.”

Roet hung up abruptly and scratched his head.

“Another virus. It was going to be like 2003. SARS again” he thought to himself, concerned.

He picked up the phone on his desk: “It’s Marcus. Can you look up Chinese passports that have entered the country with the surname Wu within the last ten years. Run it against known scientists in China. See how many names come up. We can narrow it down from there.

Chapter 4 Marcus Roet

Marcus Roet was a career CIA officer who had nasty streak. At the age of fifty-three he was still a platinum blonde but the striking colour of his hair was negated by his somewhat feminine yet ferret-like facial features. He was mutually disliked at the agency, and had a string of dead assets to his name, mostly due to his own negligence. He had graduated near the bottom of his class, but his father’s connections had been instrumental in pushing him into his first job at the agency, and his subsequent promotions above talented and more accomplished officers had not gone unnoticed by his colleagues.

Roet didn’t particularly like Jimmy. They had never met, but Jimmy called regularly with intel about what the Chinese Government was up to. Jimmy’s intel was usually quite useful and therefore valuable to the CIA, so Roet managed to rationalize to his superiors the significant funds he required to run Jimmy as an asset. One of the CIA accountants had begun a secret audit of Roet’s accounts as there had been more than a few red flags. The truth was that Marcus had been characteristically rude to the accountant recently in the elevator and the accountant had decided to start paying close attention to his finances.

Roet’s attention was now focused upon Jimmy’s recent intel. The news about work on a new virus was concerning and Roet had already started to try and work out the identities of the principals involved.

The call that he’d been waiting for came through.

“Marcus here.”

“We had thousands of Wu’s in the last ten years. Over five hundred were scientists.”

“Seems like a lot” quipped Roet. “It’s a big window of time. Want me to narrow it?”

Marcus thought for a moment, and said: “Try biologist, then virologist”

“OK, biologist, 10 years, still hundreds… um… virologists we have… had… only seven.”

“Do a search for ‘family of.’ We are looking for ‘F1 student visas’.”