Brooke came around and sat in the empty seat across from him. She smiled and raised her eyebrows like she wanted to talk.

She said, “How are you doing?”

“Well, I just got kidnapped from my home and now I’m being flown to God-knows-where on some sort of CIA plane to help save the country from World War Three. I’m good. How are you?”

“It’s good to have a sense of humor about it.”

“I suppose.”

“I just found out about twenty-four hours ago. My boss made me meet him off the grounds of Ft. Meade. He introduced me to Tom and gave me the quick and dirty. I can’t believe it either. I work in signals intelligence. To be completely honest, I spy on the Chinese for a living. Used to be on the Iran team. Now I’m on China. I work in cyber operations. We hack into their computers. They hack into ours. It’s like the cold war all over again but over the Internet. But just like the cold war, there are rules. Over the past couple of weeks though, I’ve noticed a few things that were very unusual. Some of the rules were being broken.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like this CIA guy that they killed. Tom didn’t tell you what he was looking for. It was part of an op that I was working. Have you ever heard of the CCDI?”

“No.”

“It’s the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. A Chinese organization that is supposed to root out corruption in their government. A few months ago, it got a new boss. A guy by the name of Jinshan. Cheng Jinshan. Heard of him?”

“Uh, no.”

She laughed. “Sorry, of course you haven’t. Sometimes I forget that everyone doesn’t spend all day studying obscure Chinese businessmen and politicians. Well, this guy Jinshan is well-connected. He’s a very successful entrepreneur, but also was rumored to be tapped into the Chinese cyber warfare units with some of his Internet companies. We knew he was working closely with the government agency that heads up their internet censorship program. Turns out, he’s more than tapped into the government’s cyber warfare. He practically runs China’s cyber warfare. This guy has been interwoven into their operations from the beginning. Anyway, Jinshan is put in charge of the CCDI, a position that is almost always given to a politician. But this time the Chinese President himself picks Jinshan, a businessman. So the Chinese President has been using Jinshan and the CCDI to whittle away at the government’s leadership and shape it the way he wants. It’s Tyrant 101; clean house of all who could oppose you. Well, naturally we started hacking into Jinshan’s files and computers more closely. Turns out he really is a much bigger fish than we thought. He had his hands in everything. He rubs elbows with their highest-ranking military brass and has played golf with several members of their politburo. Some people think he might even be responsible for getting the current Chinese president in office. So we started an operation to monitor him more closely. The CIA agent that was killed was our man on the ground. But I had no idea what he had uncovered until yesterday when Tom read me in.”