Harris brought his eyes to rest on hers. “You already dragged my ass down the rabbit hole. So I’ll keep it going. Say Deng puts her men on the Stalwart to make sure it can’t send out an SOS. Then say her brother, the captain, sends his boats to haul the ship off to that reef. It’d be a perfect inside job.”

Morse nodded. “Perfect.”

“Except for me the question’s still why?” he said. “I get it that the Chinese think they own half of the Pacific. I know they like to strut and act tough. But that’s a long way from an outright attack on an American ship.”

Morse held up a finger and reached for the low stack of paper on her desk. There were three stapled copies of a single thin document. She gave one to each of the men in front of her.

“Two days ago, POTUS spoke to President Tsao on the phone. She provided me with a call transcript.”

Harris thumbed through the pages. They had been prepared with a manual typewriter as a precaution against anyone hacking the file. He saw three security designations above the header: Secret/ORCON/NOFORN.

The first was nothing exceptional for a conversation between heads of state. It meant the transcript might contain information that was damaging to national security and was usually applied as a general precaution before a full State Department review cleared it for release. The ORCON—Originator Controlled—grading was a little rarer. It tightened access to the doc a few notches, restricting it to members of the intelligence community specifically authorized by the White House. Not even personnel who normally saw top secret documents could read it without the president’s nod.

The NOFORN—Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals—classification raised Harris’s eyebrow. It would have been tagged on by the Secretary of Defense or some other upper-echelon intelligence official. But it was only supposed to be used for hush-hush field reports and analyses from the CIA or other agencies. He couldn’t remember it being applied to any other type of document.

“President Fucillo personally overrode the DoS so we could see this, Leo,” Morse said. “The most remarkable excerpt is on the last page. Alex is already familiar with it.”

He flipped to the page. A single exchange toward the bottom was marked with a yellow highlighter.

President Tsao: On the subjects of transparency and reciprocity... I would caution your nation about exploiting undersea cable networks in latitude fifteen-five, longitude one-hundred-fourteen-five for future intelligence operations.

The President: Excuse me?

President Tsao: Madame President, I think you understand...

“Don’t tell me,” Harris said. “These coordinates cover the spot where the Stalwart was operating?”

Morse nodded. “They pinpoint it,” she said. “The tenth parallel crosses the Spratly Islands midway between the Philippines and Malaysia. They’re spread out over about a hundred sixty thousand square miles. And China asserts sovereignty over every one of them.”