Day 5—Sunday
Yuri and Laura enjoyed breakfast at the deck table of their hillside home. Madelyn Grace was in her nearby playpen, busy lining up her collection of toy horses. Yuri drank coffee; Laura sipped orange juice. They had just finished the meal—scrambled eggs, toast and fruit prepared by Yuri. The temperature hovered in the mid seventy degrees Fahrenheit. In the distance, the sapphire waters of Lake Sammamish shimmered.
“Where’d Amanda go?” Yuri asked. Maddy’s nanny left half an hour earlier.
“To meet her boyfriend and some friends. They’re all going hiking today, somewhere near the pass.”
“Have you met the guy?” Yuri crossed his ankles. He wore sandals, Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt.
“Once. He came by to pick her up. Nice guy. Courteous. Didn’t say much.” Laura wore a sleeveless blouse, a pair of blue jeans and tennis shoes.
Yuri took another sip. “She seems a good match for Maddy.”
“She is. I’m very pleased so far.”
“Good.”
Fretting all weekend, Laura decided it was the right time to bring up a delicate subject. “I had a visitor at the office Friday…a detective assigned to the Sarah Compton case.”
“What did he want?”
“The detective was a she. Sarah’s family is pressing hard. They want a court hearing to investigate her disappearance. Both of us will be called to testify.”
Yuri let out a deep sigh. Six months earlier, he’d hired the security company to provide around the clock protection for Laura and Maddy. Sarah Compton was on duty at Laura’s home when the kidnappers invaded. Laura and Madelyn were snatched; Sarah vanished.
Yuri said, “If the local cops start checking up on me, everything will unravel.”
“I know. Maybe Tim Reveley can delay the hearing.” Laura referred to her personal attorney.
“It’s probably worth trying.” Yuri drained the coffee mug and set it on the table. The consequences of his actions regarding Sarah’s disappearance simmered. “I’m convinced those bastards killed her and disposed of her body—she’ll never be found.”
“It’s not your fault, Yuri. She must have confronted them; she was doing her job.”
“She never had a chance. They were military.” Yuri grimaced, recalling the Chinese operatives that abducted Laura and Maddy as a ploy to force him into cooperating. Sarah Compton was collateral damage.
“Stop beating yourself up. They used us to get to you.”
“I should have never involved you with the Neva. You would be fine and Sarah would be alive. It would have been better if I’d never escaped.”
“Honey, what you did was miraculous. Russia left the Neva’s survivors to rot but you rescued them. I’m so proud of what you did.”
“But look what’s happened. I’ve endangered you from my actions. Kwan and his PLAN operators kidnapped you and Maddy. And then an MSS hit team targeted you—twice!” Yuri raised his arms. “And the U.S. Justice Department is still threatening you because of me. I’m ashamed to have caused you so much grief.”
Laura reached across the table and took hold of Yuri’s hand. “You’re an honorable man, Yuri Ivanovich Kirov. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
* * * *
Fifteen time zones ahead, Ministry of Public Security technical specialist Yu Ling was in her cubicle at the Qingdao bureau. It was late evening; most of the others left hours earlier―burned out from the compulsory extra work over the weekend. Yu and just one other staffer slogged away.
The day was long and boring for Yu as she fast-forwarded through dozens of surveillance videos of the City of Qingdao’s bay and coastal shoreline. She attempted to track down the mysterious workboat that was sighted near the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge just before the nuclear bomb detonated. The previous day she discovered that the same vessel had operated in Qingdao’s Middle Harbour waterway an hour before the blast.
Yu queued up the next video, downloaded from a master file in the bureau’s mainframe computer. A recent decree from Beijing required all commercial and public entities operating in China’s principal cities to provide live video feeds of their security cameras to the MPS. Patterned after the City of London’s video camera surveillance system, the Qingdao system collected hundreds of terabytes of digital images each hour.
The video Yu currently viewed was recorded at 5:12 A.M. the day the bomb exploded. The camera was located at the entrance channel of a small boat moorage facility located in eastern Qingdao near Maidao Island. The HD video captured the image of a workboat as it navigated through the marina entrance.
“That’s the boat!” Yu muttered.
The yacht club that operated the moorage facility had installed the high-end surveillance system after several yachts moored in the harbor were burglarized. The black and white image Yu viewed was exceptionally detailed due to the camera’s FLIR night vision system. The forward-looking infrared optics revealed that the 10.5-meter-long workboat was of modern construction with clean lines. As the boat’s stern passed by the camera, it captured the vessel name. Yu Ling froze the image and magnified the name. Although the Mandarin script was blurry, the name was legible: YI JIE.
Happy and Pure was the English translation for Yi Jie.
Yu Ling stretched out her arms, suddenly weary from the taxing day but pleased. She now had a name and a location to resume the search.
Yu gathered her personal items from the desk and placed them in her handbag. As she made her way to the door, she embraced the thrill of the hunt. She sensed that she was on to something important. It would consume her thoughts for the rest of the evening, following to her dreams.
* * * *
Laura Newman was asleep in the master bedroom; Maddy slept in her own room. Yuri wasn’t ready to retire yet. He was alone in the living room with the lights off. A few minutes earlier, he heard Amanda’s Honda Civic when she returned home. Maddy’s nanny lived in the apartment over the attached three car garage.
Amanda had no idea that her comings and goings at the Sammamish residence were videoed and manually recorded in an official log book by the FBI.
The presence of the nearby federal agents provided Yuri with a measure of relief. Should Laura again be targeted by foreign intelligence services to get to him, she would be protected. But how long would that last? The FBI would eventually retrieve their outdoor cameras and shut down the surveillance op. What then?
Yuri broached that subject with Laura earlier this evening. He suggested that for the next six months they rent a condominium in a building that was just a couple of blocks away from Cognition’s headquarters. Security in the Bellevue luxury high-rise was top notch, which was one of its main selling points. Laura said she would think about it.
Yuri would push for temporary relocation. It would help mitigate his angst. He recognized that once again he would likely not be around to protect Laura and Maddy.
In the coming morning, Yuri had another meeting scheduled with the FBI in Seattle. During the course of the debriefing, Special Agent Michaela Taylor would undoubtedly pressure Yuri to make a decision on the Department of Justice’s offer to drop espionage charges against him and—Laura—in return for his full cooperation with the U.S. Intelligence Services for the next three years.
Yuri was now ready to make that commitment, knowing that he would forever be turning his back on his birth country—and his colleagues and friends in the Russian Navy.