David said, “So what does Jinshan have to do with a Chinese attack on the U.S.?”

“I don’t know exactly. I just know that our ground asset had started getting close to people in the CCDI. He began to realize that the whole point of that organization, which is supposed to be about stopping corruption, was now to fill key government leadership roles with people who were handpicked by Jinshan. I told you that before Jinshan got tapped for the CCDI leadership role, we didn’t have too much on him. Well, that isn’t true for the people he was picking to fill different political leadership roles. They are stacking the deck with politicians that are or have been closely aligned to the military or intelligence services. It’s like they’re militarizing all government posts over there. The CIA agent was supposed to get into some secure hard drive that would give us more info on their strategy and end game. That is where he must have gotten the info Tom shared earlier. Someone must have been onto him though…”

“Shit. This reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

“Well, they are Communists too, you know.”

“Right. So who else at the NSA knows about what Tom told us? About China having a ton of spies in the US, and about the invasion?”

“My boss was working with Tom and some others in the CIA. But at the NSA, it was just my boss and me. We compartmentalize information like crazy. Thank goodness we do. If there really are sleepers in the NSA, we wouldn’t want this to get out. We wouldn’t want them to know that we know. With any luck, we still might be able to get out ahead of this thing.”

Brooke and David talked for another hour. She was a local Maryland girl, had gone to UMBC, and excelled in mathematics and computer science. She had interned at the NSA while in college and worked there for the past 15 years.

Eventually, David politely hinted that he needed a nap. He got the impression that she would talk the entire flight if he let her. But they ended their conversation and David found himself alone looking out the oval window into the vast evening sky.

David kept thinking about his family. He was worried about the short-term and how his wife would react to his being missing. And he was worried about the long term—about how their lives might change if America really was thrust into a war of this scale.

Could this really be true? He kept asking himself that question. It was all just too hard to believe. What was the saying? The simplest explanation was usually correct. The problem in this situation was that there didn’t appear to be any simple explanations.

The answer to the truth question had a significant implication. He had a choice here. David could go or stay. Tom didn’t say that he had a choice, but David could try to escape when they landed if he really felt this wasn’t safe or legitimate.