her useful to the DPRK. Then they were arrested. He kept it up with her in the camp. Maybe it allowed them to secretly communicate, or maybe it just functioned as a way to hold on to something from their old life. It sounds like the father didn’t put much effort into teaching Jin-Sang. Only words and phrases he thought might be helpful if they ever escaped to China.”
“What about the attack?” Fordyce asked. “Does the boy know anything about it at all?”
“No, but he says his sister knows—a lot.”
CHAPTER 27
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* * *
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS
FBI Special Agent Heidi Roe looked at the text that had just come across her BlackBerry. Unbelievable.
Her partner saw her shaking her head. “What’s up?”
“Our task force officer in Nashville says Tommy Wong never got off the plane.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I wish.”
“What happened?”
“I have no idea,” said Roe, “but I intend to find out. Are you good here if I duck out for a minute?”
Her partner nodded and Special Agent Roe stepped out of the conference room they had been assigned. It felt good to stand up and stretch her legs. They had been at it nonstop since arriving from Los Angeles. The FBI had brought their best people in from all across the country. They were in Houston to conduct interviews and follow up every single lead in relation to six Muslim engineering students who had gone missing and were suspected of plotting a mass-casualty terrorist attack on the U.S.
But just because the FBI had called for all hands on deck didn’t mean other cases could be allowed to lapse. Roe and her partner had already been working on breaking the LA arm of a Chinese transnational criminal organization involved in narcotics and child sex trafficking. After identifying the major players, they had focused on members further down the food chain. Their hope was to find cause to arrest one of them, and then offer immunity if that person would become an FBI mole within the organization. Tommy Wong was the man they wanted.
They had placed Wong under loose surveillance and had been watching him for several months. They knew he was up to something. They just hadn’t been able to put their finger on what that something was. To do that, they’d need to devote a lot more manpower to the surveillance. Roe had run it up the flagpole at the LA field office only to be told that without something more substantive, no additional resources could be assigned at this time.
It was a typical Catch-22. She knew the guy was dirty and her bosses knew he was dirty. He was too small a fish, though, to justify investing any more dollars in. But if they didn’t invest more, they wouldn’t get what they needed to roll him and move up the triad food chain. In her head, she understood the bureaucratic limits that she had to work under, but in her heart they still pissed her off. It was one of her biggest complaints about law enforcement. Cops and FBI agents had to operate by the rules. Bad guys were free to do whatever they wanted. Even with all the government’s tools for eavesdropping, tracking, and surveillance, the bad guys still kept coming up with ways to stay ahead of them.
Roe, who had been an attorney before joining the FBI, understood the importance of law. Without it, freedom was impossible. She was amazed by how many Americans, when asked what kind of system of government the U.S. had, would answer, “Democracy.” America wasn’t a democracy. It was a republic, and that was because of one thing—the law.
When each of her three kids started studying government in grade school, she made them watch a YouTube video called “The American Form of Government.” She wanted them to understand why America was different and why their mom had joined the FBI and worked a lot of late nights and weekends.
The video began with Ben Franklin exiting the Constitutional Convention and being asked by a woman, “Sir, what have you given us?” Franklin’s response? “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”
It then went on to describe the difference between a democracy and a republic. A democracy was where majority ruled. If a posse rode off after a horse thief, caught him, and voted fifteen to one to hang him, that was democracy. He would be hanged by the neck until dead.
In a republic, though, the sheriff arrives and tells the