The Wuhan Mission

“I thought you’d say that.” Sam replied. “Wheels up in forty-five minutes. Bring your backpack with the vials, and your weapons. We’ll be able to land non-commercial but bring your Chinese passport anyway. If you get taken down, at least the Chinese will get blamed. Let’s go to the armoury. We may be going in heavy. To be determined. By the way, did you keep that submachine gun you stole from the lab?”

Xue Lin smiled just for a split second as she walked briskly with Sam to the armoury. Sam exited the armoury fifteen minutes later with a long, black canvas bag, heavy looking, and a long gun slung over his shoulder.

He told Xue Lin to check if the armoury had any suppressors that fit the pistols in her backpack.

“They’re all Chinese. I doubt they’ll fit anything here.”

“Just ask. When you are done here, go grab the Barret that I saw you put in your locker, and those pistols and that Chinese machine gun. Meet me outside the mess hall in fifteen minutes. We’re getting a ride to the plane in twenty.”

“Roger that.”

‘Poor kid!’ Sam thought to himself, respecting the professionalism she was showing.

*

Roet’s plane had been in the air for several hours. He was angry that both his assets had left China. They were of much greater use to him back in China where they could be bribed and coerced into doing his bidding and keeping him informed. Maybe not so much Dr. Wu anymore since he had shot the girl in the neck, but definitely Jimmy. It was time to take all that money out of Jimmy’s US bank account and take it offshore and put it with the rest of his money. It seemed that the CIA executives up on the seventh floor were looking to retire him after the killing of Wu’s daughter and a series of other mistakes. He’d also had a call from an annoyingly obsessive CIA accountant concerning his massive over-spending the budget allowance for Jimmy and his other foreign assets and confidential informants. Roet had established US bank accounts under each of his informants’ names, setting himself up as a co-signatory. He could empty all of the accounts whenever it suited him, filtering all of the funds to a numbered account in Switzerland.

It could soon be the right moment to pack up shop. He was getting tired of the game and he was well aware that he was drinking too much these days and it was affecting the way he was seen at work.

In any case, he needed to get into a room with Dr. Wu soon and find out the whole story about his virus. Things had been left up in the air since the daughter’s death. He needed to find out if Wu had completed the work on altering the virus to be non-dangerous to white people.

Chapter 43 In the Air

The Gulfstream jet streaked into the sky towards Europe with Sam, Xue Lin and a big bag of guns aboard. Xue Lin had a poke through the bag to see what kind of toys Sam had collected. Nothing much out of the ordinary except for the pair of hand grenades which she picked up and weighed in her hands. Xue Lin needed to sleep much more than Sam did, and she lay down in the bed up near the front of the luxurious plane and went straight to sleep as soon as she put her head on the pillow.

Sam’s phone had been buzzing with the receipt of files from the analysts at Langley. He read through the analysts’ reports on the video of the couple. They’d isolated and cleaned up background noise but still didn’t have a clue where they were being held. Other analysts were going through immigration footage from the last couple of days of flights from San Diego and LAX to Milan but it was going to take a while longer.

Sam figured that he might make that phone call to the Chinese kidnappers a little early and try to ‘poke the bear’ and see if they made a mistake. Sam was getting frustrated. He needed to know where they were holding the couple if he was to stand a chance of getting the drop on them.

Xue Lin awoke after more than three hours of deep sleep. Groggily she went to the back of the plane and made herself a cup of coffee as Sam continued to read reports from the analysts.

Xue Lin had dreamt about the locator that Jimmy had dug out of her shoulder. It had clearly caused her some anxiety. “What an invasion of privacy!” she’d thought to herself.

“Sam! I have an idea how we might find out where they are hiding my parents. The Chinese Government would most likely have put locator chips in them when they vaccinated the three of us during my adoption process back in ’95.”

“What?” asked Sam, quite incredulously.

“Yeah, Jimmy dug my chip out when we were on the run. I couldn’t believe it either. Apparently they chip anyone they feel like. I guess my parents were ‘persons of interest’, so they did all of us and told them that it was a vaccination.”

“Jesus Christ!” said Sam, his sense of justice rearing its head.

“Anyway… it occurred to me that perhaps Jimmy, being a Communist Government man might be able to help one of our CIA geeks hack into their database and find my parents on a map.”