Gauntlet Group Incorporated had, for its own reasons, signed on to support China in this operation, and senior company operative MikeScardino had been sent by the home office to run the mission closely with J.W., the American face of Chinese interests in Washington.
Gracie doubted that Westwood and Scardino would have any idea how many cleanskins there were like them, already operating in government and industry around D.C., and they would never know.
Gracie herself did not know. She ran Westwood and Scardino, as well as a couple of sitting congressmen, a half dozen influential lobbyists, and several hotel managers around the city who provided her information about comings and goings.
China, as always, played the long game. They cultivated these assets for one reason, one mission.
Someday, China would take Taiwan. It would be vicious and brutal, and Beijing knew the optics around the world would be bad.
The only reason they had not already invaded Taiwan was the assumed reaction of the West. Not so much the military response China expected out of them; there was little the West could do in the Taiwan Strait to stop China from attacking and winning. Even less they could do to fight China off the island after the fact.
But the diplomatic response would be savage. Sanctions, expulsions, dissolutions of international partnerships and business dealings.
Trade deals would evaporate, and China’s strength on the world stage would be eviscerated.
This had been the sole impediment to China reclaiming Taiwan.
But if Beijing had enough intelligence about the West and they had enough agents in positions of power in the West, the response to the attack to come would be blunted, perhaps significantly so. A few sanctions, some full-throated but toothless whining in the UN and the G7, and a few years of annoying but ultimately anemic bad press.
ThisChina was prepared to absorb in order to reclaim the island they had been coveting since it broke away in 1949.
Therefore, people like Gracie Wu were sent out to keep the connections with the cleanskins working in the West, to execute operations beneficial to China’s long-term interests.
But nothing had ever happened in America like what was now less than forty-eight hours away.
Operation Wanshou Ju.Marigold.
Obviously assassinating nearly two dozen American officials would have started a war under normal circumstances, but the Chinese had a plan to false-flag Russia for the killings. A Russian assassination network was in the United States now; China knew about them, but the Americans did not. The Russians had not done anything of importance yet, and they never would, because China had decided to use them for their own aims.
China planned to conduct its own assassination campaign against the U.S. intelligence community, leave cyber breadcrumbs for investigators that would lead back to the hapless Russians now living in Brooklyn, New York, and then use Gauntlet security officers to eliminate the Russians before authorities could detain them and realize they had nothing to do with the massacre across the U.S. intelligence community.
It was an audacious plan, but the plan could not wait any longer, because China’s greatest intelligence asset in the U.S. government was at risk of being discovered.
The Nicaraguan operation had been unrelated to Marigold, but it could easily put the Chinese spies in the American government in peril. Time was short, so Marigold had to happen now if it was to happen at all.
Gracie Wu didn’t know how or why Westwood and Scardino came to be working for Chinese interests, but for now, Westwood and Scardino were merely cogs in a machine that Gracie herself was a cog in.
Westwood had been receiving intelligence from someone at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and passing it to the Chinese, and the Chinese had been using this intelligence around the world to further Chinese aims.
Now the intelligence would be used right here in Washington.
The young Chinese woman ran on through the darkness, her bodyguards all around her, armed and prepared to fight and even die for her to keep her safe, to keep her on her mission.
Her mission was to weaken America, to strengthen China, and to make certain no one in America knew that China was involved at all.
Fifteen
Matthew Hanley flew to D.C. from Norfolk on the first commercial flight of the day, arriving at 6:49 a.m. carrying nothing but his coat and a leather shoulder bag.
Once he stepped out of Reagan National Airport, he slid his coat on over his blue blazer and pulled a tie from the front pocket of his trousers. He’d pre-tied it on the plane, planned on just putting it under his collar and tightening it upon his arrival here, but before he got it over his thick neck, three SUVs stopped directly in front of him. The back door of the Lincoln Navigator in the center of the trio opened, while the two Chevy Suburbans rumbled, one in front of the Nav, the other just behind.
Just a couple of years earlier, Hanley himself would have been in that Navigator or one like it, but now he hurriedly shoved his tie back into his pocket and climbed inside, a guest in the vehicle.
There in the backseat waiting on him were one man and one woman. William “Trey” Watkins, deputy director for operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Angela Lacy, a senior operations officer in the CIA who worked closely on special projects for the DDO.
Hanley looked back and forth between the two of them, then out the window at the light snow falling in the predawn on this early December morning.
The vehicle rolled away from the arrivals lane, heading towards the exitto the airport; the other two SUVs maintained their positions in front of and behind it. Matt Hanley just sat there a moment waiting for someone to speak. When no one did, he addressed DDO Watkins. “When you set me up as an off-book shop, you made it pretty clear that you and I would not be meeting in person.”
