“She didn’t say, but she seemed pretty confident, which tells me she’s leveraging a separate collection activity. That meeting is the day after tomorrow at 1100, right before a big luncheon scheduled over at the convention center.”

“Is Zhao staying here at the hotel?” Jed asked hopefully.

Nisha shook her head and frowned. “No. We think his handlers have him squirreled away in a government facility on the mainland side.”

“So they fight the traffic back and forth every day for the convention?” Eli said.

“We think so, but they’re making it difficult to track his movements. Regardless, even if we figure out where he’s staying—and we likely won’t—the odds of snatching him from whatever secure location they’re holding him in are low,” Nisha said.

“That means we’re forced to take him here in Hong Kong at the convention center,” Eli said.

Nisha nodded and opened a satellite view of the surrounding area on a tablet computer. Jed noted the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong just to their west. The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, which to Jed looked like an enormous spaceship, was located across the green space overpass spanning the Central–Wan Chai Bypass tunnel. Two large helipads sat just beyond the northeast corner of the ultramodern structure, beyond Golden Bauhinia Square along Victoria Harbour.

“We have a few options,” she said, “all of them with their own unique challenges and potential advantages. One benefit of an operation to snatch him at the convention center is they expect thousands of people from all over the world at the convention, so there’s the advantage of chaos we can create and the confusion that could help us get away. The flip side, of course, is that we would expect him to be in a large group, which will include plenty of armed Chinese agents from Second Bureau—the short name for the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission Intelligence Bureau, which is their DIA equivalent.”

Eli let a breath whistle out through his teeth. “On the other hand, the meeting here is small and probably a bit easier to breach. Getting him covertly out of the building, however, that’s a different matter . . .”

“What are the other choices?” Jed asked, feeling the likelihood of success dwindling the longer they talked.

“Well, one choice would be to get him en route, between sites, on his way to the convention. The problem is, we don’t know his schedule. I mean, we know when he’s speaking, but we have no idea where he’ll be coming from. He might helo in and we could take him between the helipads and the convention center, or he could come by car, but they’re not going to tell us that.”

“But we know he’s here, day after tomorrow at 1100,” Eli pointed out.

Nisha nodded.