Code of Honor

by Marc Cameron

  The man tossed a casual glance over his shoulder. “A bit,” he said. “Though rarely on anything this small.”

  Winterflood strode up a moment later, a ceramic mug of what was presumably tea in one hand and a Bacardi and Coke in the other. He gave the tumbler to his friend. “Best give us back the helm before young Jaret has a stroke.” The skipper punched a code into the instrument panel to the left of the wheel, engaging the autopilot.

  “Jaret,” Winterflood said. “I’d like you to meet Admiral Peter Li of the United States Navy. We sailed together as part of the Joint Antipiracy Task Force 150 off the Somali coast . . . too many years ago.”

  “Admiral,” the first officer said, stepping forward to shake the offered hand.

  “Retired,” Li said. “In the private sector now. Please call me Peter.”

  Jaret gave a nervous chuckle. “That’s not going to happen . . . Admiral.”

  * * *

  —

  Li took a sip of his Bacardi and Coke, smelling the sea over the top of his glass. Rum, he thought, was best when consumed near salt water. It put him in mind of sea captains of old, sampling the wares of the rum trade.

  Winterflood handed the mug to his first officer. “This is for you.” He turned to Li. “Speaking of your private-sector job, there’s a saucy brunette at the bar who wants to meet you. Says she’s from some online rag I can’t recall. Fiona something. Dundee or Dunford, something like that. I only spoke with her for a moment, but she’s quite engaging. Been around the world so many times, she’s got more culture than a month-old mango. She must have written books, because she’s wearing a silk frock that probably costs more than I make in a month. All the reporters I ever met looked like they got their clothes from the rubbish bin behind a thrift shop.”

  Li chuckled. He’d always enjoyed listening to Winterflood’s Aussie accent and colorful turns of phrase.

  “I’m not interested in meeting women,” Li said. “Or talking about my work.”

  “Too late, mate,” Winterflood said, glancing toward the port-side door to the main saloon.

  The skipper had been right. Saucy might have been a sexist term, but it was a good descriptor of this woman. She slinked as much as she walked, giving the impression to anyone looking that she was dancing her way to wherever she happened to be going. The yellow silk sundress clung alluringly to the dips and swells of her body, falling off her right shoulder to expose exquisitely tanned collarbones. The sea breeze had freshened significantly, making the dress not quite enough to keep her warm. Li imagined that would be no problem. Not for long, anyway. Some poor schmuck would offer her a coat. She was the kind of woman that oozed sexuality from every curvaceous pore, the kind who gave the impression she was naked even when fully clothed—the kind who made wives angry.

  Her face brightened when she caught Li’s eye.

  “Out warning him I’m on the hunt, are you?” she said to Winterflood, the r’s lost in her New Zealand accent. The clingy silk dress left little to the imagination, forcing both men to focus on her eyes or risk getting caught looking somewhere else.

  “Not at all, ma’am,” the captain said. “We were, in fact, just talking about you.”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding more like yis. She stuck out her hand. There was a gold ring on the thumb, and an AppleWatch with a white leather strap, but no other jewelry that Li could see. “Fiona Dunfee,” she said. “Auckland Mirror. Did the captain tell you what I wanted?”

  “We hadn’t gotten there yet,” Li said.

  “Might we sit down?” Ms. Dunfee lifted the hem of her dress more than she needed to, drawing his attention to her calves. The white leather of her sandals stood out in stark contrast to bronze legs and bright red toenails. “I wore the wrong shoes for this. My feet are killing me.”

  Li motioned toward a large round sun lounge between the wheel and the saloon. A canvas cover blocked the view from party guests who milled on the other side of the windows, but the front was open to the helm.

  “I don’t want to whinge,” Ms. Dunfee said. “But I was thinking out of the wind. Maybe someplace more private . . . where you’d feel free to talk.”

  “And just what is it you want to talk about?”

  “You, Dr. Li,” she said, as if it were obvious. He didn’t follow, so she gave up going inside and sat on the lounge, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She looked up at him, batting her eyes. “The work you’re doing. Sources tell me it’s cutting-edge communications tech. The so-called Internet of Things—you know, the future of mankind. That kind of stuff. I don’t want you to talk about anything top-secret, of course—unless you want to, which I’d be fine with—but anything you could give me that could be open-source.” She patted the cushion beside her, beckoning him to sit down.

  He remained standing. “A lot of top-secret stuff is open-source, if you know where to look.”

  “True.” She made like she was pulling up the shoulder of her dress, but ended up toying with it for a moment and leaving it where it was, low, cutting a diagonal line from the bottom of her deltoid across the swell of her breast. “My source says your team has developed some remarkable communications systems between Wi-Fi-compatible devices.”

  “If that is true,” Li said, “your source is telling you a lot more than I ever would. Who is it you’re talking to, exactly?”

  “Nice try, Dr. Li,” Ms. Dunfee said, eyes sparkling in the sunlight as she looked him up and down. A stray lock of dark hair blew across her face. She left it there, as if she’d planned it that way all along. Her lips blossomed into a pout, which, in her case, was even more alluring than the smile. “How about you give me something on background so I can corroborate the things I already know?”

  “Afraid not,” Li said, hackles up. She could very well be a journalist in search of a scoop, but she could also be working for the endless list of foreign intelligence services pecking away at the United States—China, Russia, North Korea, Iran . . . Hell, even Israel wouldn’t let a little thing like friendship get in the way of spying to learn what Li knew.

  “Come on . . .” the woman whined—whinging, she called it—then suddenly brightened as if a novel idea had just popped into her head. “I can make it worth your while.”

  Li laughed out loud at the audacity of that. “Are you actually offering me money?”

  “I can pay,” Ms. Dunfee said. She was leaning back now, on both arms, knees swaying under the thin silk. “But it doesn’t have to be money.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Li said.

  “Yay, dialogue.” She clapped her hands. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Go ahead. Ask me anything.”

  “Does this ever work?”

  Dunfee raised a wary brow. “Does what work?”

  “The Betty Boop shtick,” Li said. “I mean, I’m as red-blooded as the next guy, but I’m also smart enough to know I’m a little old for you.”

  Dunfee shrugged, sticking out her bottom lip and tilting her head to look at him for a long moment. At length, she said, “You know what they say, sixty percent of the time, it works every time.”

  “It’s been interesting talking to you, Ms. Dunfee,” Li said.

  “Fiona, please,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Not in a million years.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  A whole load of heartache and a case of the clap, Li thought. He said, “Oh, I’m sure I do. Good evening to you, Ms. Dunfee.” He turned to rejoin Winterflood at the helm.

  * * *

  —

  He’s not interested,” Fiona Dunfee whispered to the Asian man beside her at the fantail bar twenty minutes later.

  “Maybe you’re losing your touch,” the man said. He was a member of the Chinese delegation to New Zealand, an economic adviser on paper. Off paper, he was an undeclared intelligence offic
er. The shoulder of Fiona’s yellow sundress was up now, still indecent, but not deliberately so.

  “Come on,” she said. “Would you say no if I offered myself to you?”

  The man looked around at the other guests milling on the deck, then leaned in shoulder to shoulder. “Are you offering?”

  She didn’t answer, taking a long drink of vodka instead.

  The man sat up straight again, apparently abandoning the idea of a fling. “Perhaps you came on a little too strong?”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered.” She lit a cigarette and watched the smoke blow away on the wind. “That one is an oak. He’s an old man, but he has the look of a newlywed in his eyes.”

  “Very well,” her handler said, his voice far away. “I do not trust our other option. That person is, what is the word you use . . . odd . . . weird . . . ?”

  Elbows on the bar, Fiona turned just her head to stare at him. “Flaky?”

  “That’s it,” the Chinese man said. “We will have to use the flaky asset, though this way would have been much cleaner.”

  Fiona laughed out loud, swirling the ice in her glass. “You think photos of this geezer naked on top of me would be clean?”

  “I said cleaner.” Her handler shrugged. “The other way will surely be messy, especially for Dr. Li.”

  “I hope so,” Fiona muttered into her glass. “I don’t trust a man who won’t look at my tits.”

  13

  David Huang was sitting in his study when he heard his wife scream. Her shrieks came from the patio, loud enough to reach the opposite end of their house in the rural neighborhood outside Annapolis. It was a home fitting a Canadian lobbyist.

  The scream came again. More emphatic this time.

  The uninitiated might think that wild animals were ripping the poor woman apart, but Huang was happy for the interruption. Laurie was well aware of his job, knew the possibilities, guessed the probabilities—but never asked him about it. It was better that way. It protected her from the dirty details. She knew he was seeing someone else, but not who. When he came home late, she accused him of feeling sorry for the other woman. And how could he not? Even spies were human beings, and sleeping with someone for months . . . well, the exposure went both ways.

  His initial meeting with Chadwick had, of course, been arranged, highly choreographed to look accidental. It took a great deal of work to make something look serendipitous. Fortunately for Department Two—the intelligence directorate of the People’s Liberation Army, Chadwick virtually bled information about her personal life. The Americans called it TEMPEST—spying on the electronic emissions that leaked from virtually every building, vehicle, or pocket. Wi-Fi routers, smart devices, and cell phone signals could be cloned. A man-in-the-middle attack revealed incoming and outgoing information that passed over the Internet. What they couldn’t find out that way, they simply purchased.

  Advertising companies spent billions developing algorithms and artificial intelligence programs to tailor person-specific ads. Huge sums of cash were traded for information on consumer interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes. Much of it freely given by mindless millions who answered surveys on social media or downloaded free apps on their phones or computers. As the saying went, if something is free, then the consumer is the product. And the people who Huang worked for were more than happy to buy that product. That same information—particular tastes, down to the fact that a person preferred the color azure—could be extremely valuable in the social-engineering aspects of espionage.

  David had demurred at first, at least as much as one could when officers from PLA Department Two darkened the door. He told them he had no training in such things, but they’d assured him he had all the training he needed. Senator Chadwick was a powerful woman, more like a male, they said. Seduction of a person in power was all too easy. All one had to do was make them feel like it was their idea. In other words, all he had to do was show up and let her do the seducing.

  And that was exactly what had happened.

  The entire thing was at once fascinating and sad, to watch this otherwise strong woman yield to him so freely, to allow herself to be so vulnerable, so exposed. She would, no doubt, be a casualty of this battle, completely broken and unable to trust anyone ever again. Huang felt no joy at the thought of her fall. On the contrary. He felt pity. Michelle had learned secrets about him, too, things that were difficult to hide under intimate circumstances. He’d given up nothing mission-related, of course, but his wife could tell. She saw it in his face every time he left the house. For now, she was too worried about a spider.

  Huang pushed back from the open laptop on his desk and gave a low groan.

  He did not mind his wife’s irrational fear of spiders. It gave him frequent opportunities to swoop in for the rescue and make up for the rest of the terrible actions required by his job. Such rescues usually involved smashing the spider into oblivion before Laurie threw out her back trying to clobber it with a shoe. She’d thought of him as a knight when they first met, but it took frequent acts of derring-do to keep up that mystique. He lied for a living and she knew it. It took a lot of heroics to redeem himself from the truth. Fortunately, northern Virginia had plenty of golden orb weavers.

  Huang padded quickly down the hall, past the family photos of him and Laurie and their little girl. Barefoot, he wore khaki shorts and a loose white T-shirt—what Laurie preferred him to wear at home. At a hundred and ninety pounds, he was a trim six-foot-two, well muscled from many hours in the gym. He was only thirty-eight, but silver already encroached on his dark hair—surely a product of the stress brought on by so many lies. At least he wasn’t going bald. Better to turn gray than turn loose—a quaint Virginia saying, but true enough.

  Huang reached the dining room to find his wife on the other side of the sliding glass door, holding Claire on her hip. She brandished a gardening trowel in her free hand, as if to ward off an attacker. No matter how often he told her to the contrary, she could never shake the notion that spiders could fly.

  His first choice would have been to relocate it, but Laurie wanted to kill every spider she met with fire. They settled on something in the middle and used a rolled magazine he’d brought with him for that purpose to swat the hapless creature.

  Three-year-old Claire hugged his neck and, having not inherited her mother’s phobia, said they should go bug hunting.

  “Daddy has to change for work,” he said.

  He put the little girl down to play in the grass and leaned in to kiss his wife, avoiding looking directly into her eyes. It didn’t matter. Her face fell into a sullen pout.

  “I love you,” she said. “But I hate what you do.”

  “Someone has to take care of the spiders,” he said, and got ready to go ruin Michelle Chadwick’s life.

  * * *

  —

  Senator Chadwick could feel David Huang’s eyes on her neck as she cleared the security checkpoint at the Northwest Appointment Gate. As a senator, she could have driven onto the White House campus, rather than clear security like a common citizen. Still, the Secret Service Uniformed Division did their officious best to make her feel small. Apparently, working for the President snuffed out any awe they might have otherwise felt for a ranking member of Congress. The same was true of the Marine posted at the door, though he didn’t say a word. There was no love lost between her and the military. The rosy-cheeked Marine could not have been more than twenty-five years old—but Chadwick could tell from the look in his eyes that he was well aware of her thumbs-down voting record when it came to wars and rumors of wars. These war-fighters worshiped their President, and would follow him blindly into any conflict. Poor bastards.

  Arnie van Damm met her in the lobby, just inside the door, looking stodgy in his rumpled suit jacket and loose tie. He’d obviously just come off the treadmill or exercise bike and was still flushed and sweating. He gave her a wary glance as the
y padded down the carpeted hall past more Uniformed Division guards, toward the Oval Office and the secretaries’ suite. Betty Martin gave her a courteous nod, though it was clear she, too, didn’t trust her boss’s avowed enemy as far as she could throw her. Van Damm peered through the peephole in the door to the Oval Office and turned to give Chadwick a halfhearted shrug of apology.

  “He’s on an important call,” the chief of staff said.

  Chadwick eyed his wrinkled jacket, his flushed brow, and fought the urge to call him Rumpled Sweatskin.

  “No worries,” she said. “I appreciate him working me in like this.” She dropped her cell phone into a basket at the corner of the secretary’s desk. Chadwick had been here before and knew the drill, though she hadn’t told Huang that when he’d fiddled with her cell and turned it into an active mic.

  Van Damm gave a shake of his head, as if to clear his vision. “Don’t be nice,” he said. “It creeps me out.”

  The door to the Oval opened before she could think of a snarky answer, and the man himself waved her inside.

  Van Damm followed her in, as if he were afraid she might try something. That was a joke, considering the circumstances.

  A steward brought in a coffee service and, to Chadwick’s surprise, Ryan poured her a cup as if they were old friends. He held up the small silver cream pitcher, brow raised.

  “Black,” she said.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Ryan said. “Me, too.” He air-toasted with his cup. “So, what can I do for you, Madame Senator?”

  Chadwick took a deep breath. “An olive branch,” she said. “As it were. I’ll just get right to it.”

  “That’s best,” Ryan said.

  “I’m planning to sponsor a bill that I believe you could get behind.”

  Ryan raised an eyebrow.

  “I know how you feel about welfare,” Chadwick said. “What I’m proposing is a literacy program for Indian Country. A virtual bookmobile to benefit children and youth.”