Free Lethal Circuit by Lars Guignard Page B

gated communities didn’t go for backpackers or else they were extremely lonely because, upon startling the guard with a tap at the window, he immediately got on the phone. Within moments a second guard had pulled alongside Michael on a motorcycle. Michael now had two guards to contend with. But it didn’t stop there. Two more guards arrived by car, then another on a bicycle. They were coming out of the woodwork and as it turned out, they weren’t angry, just eager to offer him a ride to the bus station. This wouldn’t happen at home, but Michael had to remind himself, he wasn’t at home. He was in China. And apparently the sight of a backpacker out here in the far flung suburbs was still unique enough to cause a spectacle.
    Fortunately, Kate’s call on the internal security phone soon came in and all five of the guards were off to the races, checking on what might be the matter. Michael snuck into the parking lot behind them. He skirted the far wall, meeting Kate on the south side of the complex as planned.
    “What took you so long?”
    “Made some new friends.”
    Kate ignored him. “As far as I can tell Chen’s condo is the one nearest to the perimeter wall, there,” she said, pointing at a dark building.
    “No lights, no answer on the phone, we good to go?” Michael asked.
    “As good as it’s going to get.”
    “I was kind of hoping for some spook talk. Maybe you could tell me SAT RECON is in, subject identified, target acquired, that kind of thing. Like I told you, us spies expect that kind of thing.”
    “This isn’t a game, Michael.”
    “I wasn’t playing.”
    •   •   •
    T HE TRUTH REGARDING the “sat recon,” which Kate hadn’t shared with Michael, was that she had attempted to contact the MI6 sub-station in Hong Kong to get precisely this information. Her highly modified iPhone contained the latest in secure satellite technology. It was a marvelous piece of personal communication equipment, equipped with such an array of electronic shielding and countermeasures that interception of its signal was thought to be impossible. Unfortunately, on attempting to dial out, Kate had been greeted with dead air, no dial tone, no static, nothing. She had assumed that sunspot activity was interfering with her transmission, but as is often the case with such things, the real explanation was more sinister.
    The Chinese Bureau of Scientific Affairs had for years been working on a special project code named 411 whose stated purpose was the interception and decryption of enemy satellite communications. To date, decryption was still a complicated affair requiring both the brute force of supercomputers and the time to let them work, but interception had proven to be a workable problem. In addition to accurately intercepting satellite transmissions, the Chinese had discovered something else. If they had a particular region under surveillance, they were able to acquire the location of the transmission, something that the users of encrypted satellite phones, unlike their common cell brethren, believed they were immune to.
    It was in such a way that Chinese Ministry of State Security Captain Zu Huang caught his break. Earlier in the day Captain Huang had been tasked with ferreting out an American spy. He had been given surveillance photos taken by a security camera at Chek Lap Kok airport and a purported agenda, but little else. Huang didn’t need to be told that his homeland was an enormous country and that without actionable intelligence he’d been set up to fail. It was well known that all agents were set up to fail. The system was designed to ensure that only the strong survived.
    Fortunately, in addition to being strong, Huang was a very thorough man. An earlier request to monitor the Greater Shenzhen Special Economic Zone for encoded satellite transmissions had resulted in two hits. One came from a known MI6 safe house in the Lo Wu border area, but the other, which Huang had just received word of,