And all this had to be done in an MSS-controlled building filled with surveillance cameras, and dozens of security guards, who would respond instantly to the tumult of an all-out catfight. If Dominika could not take the Chinese girl out quickly and silently, the responding security guards additionally could power the surveillance equipment in the apartment back on, documenting for Gorelikov and Putin Dominika’s efforts to save Nate. They would draw the same instant conclusion: Dominika was working for the Americans. She’d be arrested in Hong Kong, flown to Beijing for interrogation, bundled onto the interminable flight to Moscow, and then driven in a closed van directly from the tarmac to the gates of Butyrka Prison, where more than interrogation would be waiting for her. That is if Zhènniǎo didn’t kill her first.
She knew she couldn’t simply walk out of her apartment door tonight—it certainly was connected to an alarm—go down one floor, and gaily knock on Zhen’s door—also probably alarmed—to invite herself in for a late nightcap. She had scoped out her balcony, and that of Zhen’s apartment directly below. She thought she could climb over her balcony railing, lower herself as far as possible, and take a swinging drop down onto Zhen’s balcony. If she mistimed her swing, or if her hands slipped, nothing more would matter. They were nine stories up. Dominika had searched her apartment for any possible weapons. The kitchen was not stocked; there were no chef’s knives. She had found a small toolbox in the utility closet from which she took a box cutter with retractable blade and a medium-weight claw hammer. Both these potential weapons were close range and inefficient, but that’s all she had. She retracted the blade, tucked the box cutter into her bra, and stuck the handle of the hammer into her waistband. Time to go poison-bird hunting. She remembered to unlock her apartment door from the inside so she could get back in after she settled with Zhen.
The Grenville House building was totally dark. Dominika was relieved to find that by hanging by her fingers she could actually touch the lower balcony railing with her toes, and was able to drop quietly onto the dark balcony of Zhen’s apartment. The balcony door was open and she tiptoed in, passing into a wall of ylang-ylang fragrance. The sound of shower water came from the bedroom, and Dominika reached for the hammer as she moved forward in the dark. No hammer. She had not heard it slip out of her pajama bottoms or hit the driveway nine stories down.
Dominika peeked into the bathroom. Flickering candlelight was barely enough to see through the fogged glass partition of the big walk-in shower. Zhen stood with her back to Dominika beneath the rectangular rain showerhead luxuriating under the soft deluge, arms above her head, muscles in her buttocks bunching as she moved, wet hair slick on her skull. Dominika tried to remember the locations of the major veins and arteries in the human body, knowing the box-cutter blade was only an inch long. Get on with it, she told herself, before you start moaning like a cow.
A wave of rage boiled in Dominika’s gut for what she was about to do, for what They were forcing her to do. She measured the distance through the opening of the glass, and felt for the box cutter, thinking Slash, don’t stab, slash at throat, eyes, neck. Just before she stepped forward, her eye caught a kimono hanging on a wall peg and she left the box cutter alone, reached over, and drew the silk belt free, then quickly twisted two loops into a constricting slip knot, stepped into the shower, and slipped the loop over Zhen’s head, pulling the knot tight. Moving faster than humanly possible, Zhen turned to face her and tried to bow her head to slip the loop, but Dominika stepped outside the glass, drew the belt over the top edge, and pulled the belt down with all her might, adding her body weight, yanking Zhen’s cheek sideways against the inside of the glass with a clunk and, with another pull, off her feet. The glass kept Zhen’s hands and feet away from her.
Zhen’s toes drummed against the shower wall; her breasts, brown nipples, and pubic delta flattened against the wet glass, her fingers scrabbling at the material around her throat, but the soaked silk had tightened into an impossible knot, the loop pulling her head ear-high, and she shook like a fish side to side, and tried to push off the glass with her feet, her thighs flexing. Rasping grunts came out of her open mouth, but the noise of the shower covered the sound. After three minutes of violent thrashing, as the oxygen in her brain was used up, her kicking slowed, and her hands fell away from her throat, and she quivered for another three minutes, head canted sideways, spittle drizzling out of the corner of her mouth. Rivulets of water ran down the glass as Zhen stared through it dead eyed and openmouthed at Dominika, who had sat down on the bathroom floor with a thump, feet braced, holding the belt, her arms screaming, staring back at the wet corpse.
Five minutes, ten, an hour later—Dominika couldn’t tell—she made her cramping hands let go, and Zhen slid down the partition, her pancaked breasts squeaking on the wet glass, normally a bawdy and erotic sound during shower sex, but now it was ugly and final. Zhen flopped on her back, chin up, legs splayed, the shower water filling her mouth and dribbling down either cheek. Dominika turned off the water. The tock-tock sound of the dripping drain beneath the body was her only requiem.
Frantically drying her feet and legs, Dominika moved fast through the living room—no more chakras to palpitate with vibrating gongs here—opened the front door, ignoring the possibility of a silent alarm, and left it ajar, got into the stairwell, and pulled the handle of the fire-alarm box she had marked the day before. Now she wanted noise and confusion. The peculiar Hong Kong fire alarm was a woop-woop siren that brought tenants out into the hallway as Dominika ran up one flight to her apartment door, pushed it open, and quickly put on a robe, then stood in the corridor, looking uncertain and frightened. Rainy Chonghuan came running down the corridor in a hoisin-stained sleeveless undershirt and boxer shorts, and he protectively bustled her down nine floors in a stairwell crowded with yelling residents, crying children, and a squawking cockatoo in a bamboo cage.
Dominika was booked into a luxury hotel suite in Kowloon that night, her clothes, toiletries, and belongings packed up and delivered to her the next morning. A shaken and embarrassed Rainy told her that fire investigators responding to the alarm had found Zhen Gao murdered in the operational apartment, strangled in the shower. The MSS were convinced that a CIA action team had killed her—likely they had rappelled from the roof—and that the American Nash had probably assisted. There were other theories as they cast wildly for explanations.
“No single person could have caught Zhènniǎo off guard, and bested her in combat,” said Rainy. “There’s no other explanation.”
“It could not have been a random crime? Rape? Robbery?” asked Dominika.
Rainy shook his head. “Impossible. She could have thrown a petty thief over the balcony railing with one arm.”
“An unfortunate and frustrating conclusion to this operation,” said Dominika. “What will you do now?”
Rainy wanted to regain some face in light of this debacle. “The gweilo, the foreign devil Nash, is in Hong Kong temporarily, without diplomatic immunity. Beijing has instructed me to direct the Hong Kong Police to arrest Nash on suspicion of murder. He will be remanded to Stanley Prison until his trial and sentencing, then sent to a Laogai, a work camp, in western China where he will learn to dig coal in the mines. That is if something worse does not happen to him while he is in custody.”
This was a whole new danger. If Nate was arrested and jailed, the MSS wouldn’t have to assassinate him. They would stage a dramatic show trial, with international coverage. He would die in a prison camp on the windswept steppes of western China. He had to get out of Hong Kong immediately. But would the Station learn about Grace’s death and the arrest warrant in time? Or would Nate blithely appear at her apartment tonight with a bouquet of flowers? Bozhe, God, he could walk right into their arms.
Dominika fought her panic: Would she have to barge into the US Consulate to deliver a warning? She daydreamed about it. The end of her career as a spy and the start of a life together with Nate. It was a warm daydream. He would be astonish
ed to see her in Hong Kong, halfway around the globe. She imagined their first kiss in the lobby of the consulate, not caring who saw them. Snap out of it.
But the MSS made up her mind for her. A female escort stayed in the hotel room with her for the evening, and the next morning Dominika was driven to the airport by a dyspeptic Rainy Chonghuan and put on a direct Air China flight to Moscow, with no further courtesy calls in Beijing proposed or offered. It wasn’t exactly a snub: The Chinese were agitated and bewildered. The MSS, General Sun, and the Minister of State Security, moreover, were mortified over their operational failure, witnessed firsthand and up close by a Russian intelligence officer. The loss of face was too great for her to be received as a guest at the ministry. What would they think if they learned that their exalted guest from a fraternal service was the one who had throttled their highly trained executioner?
Now it was a race against time. Would the Americans learn about the warrant before Nate was rounded up by the Hong Kong Police? She wouldn’t know until tomorrow. The flight would take ten hours. She’d read the SVR Asia reports in the morning. Nate was on his own.
* * *
* * *
As it turned out, Dominika needn’t have worried. A cooperative young lieutenant in the Hong Kong Police who received an envelope every month for “confidential chats” with Bunty Boothby passed the news about the murder and the arrest warrant. The ASIS officer requested an urgent meeting with Nate and COS Burns. They all were seriously shaken to learn that gorgeous Grace Gao was an MSS bird dog. Nate was utterly gobsmacked when Bunty’s agent added that Grace had been part of an MSS operation to suborn Nate and elicit the name of their new PLA recruitment. A close call. But who had killed her? COS Burns paced in the five feet of his cubicle office.
“Right now, it doesn’t matter who whacked her. We’ll find out sooner or later,” he said. He pointed at Nate. “You just avoided the Little Bighorn.”
Nate put his head in his hands. “The university, and the restaurant, I should have seen it,” he said almost to himself. “I was too focused on signing her up.”
“You did nothing wrong,” said Burns. “By the book. I read and released all your cables and contact reports.”
“These things happen, mate,” said Bunty solicitously, one leg hooked over the arm of the couch in Burns’s office. “Tell me at least she gave you a gobby.”
* * *
* * *
Nate couldn’t leave Hong Kong or Macao by air, for both airports were being watched closely. There were no cruise ships in harbor. Bunty floated the idea that Nate could, just possibly, take a train from Hong Kong Hung Hom Station to Guangzhou’s East Station, and catch a flight to Seoul or Tokyo from there. He thought the MSS would never expect such a bold maneuver. That option would require Nate to wait for an unspecified amount of time for an alias passport from Langley, which was problematic. He couldn’t hide indefinitely in the consulate—too many locals.
Finally, the risk of Nate actually traveling into China to get out of China convinced COS Burns that the option was not viable. CIA Headquarters, meanwhile, was flooding Hong Kong Station with interrogatory cables about the developmental case against Grace, her murder, the continued security of the new asset SONGBIRD, and proposals for smuggling Nate out of Hong Kong. Benford personally spoke to Nate on the secure phone and seemed calm and mild.
“Your performance with SONGBIRD and with this woman was exemplary,” said Benford. “Keep me apprised of your exfil plans, and get back here as quickly as possible.” He hung up before Nate could reply, but from Benford this was a love letter. That was something, at least.
A day later, COS had a plan. They borrowed a uniform from the curious but cooperative assistant military attaché, a commander in the US Navy. The tech officer in the Station matched the color of Nate’s hair in a modified “lip brow” mustache, and gave him slightly longer sideburns and heavy tortoiseshell eyeglasses to round out his face. The next evening, humid and overcast, Commander Nash boarded a bus from the motor pool with twenty consulate employees, the majority of whom were from the Station. The bus drove down Connaught Road, through the tunnel under the harbor, and pulled up to the municipal pier on Canton Road in Kowloon for a public ship visit on the USS Blue Ridge, a six-hundred-foot amphibious command ship and the flagship of the US Navy’s 7th Fleet, making her biannual amicable port call.
As they arrived, Bunty Boothby and Marigold Dougherty were hectoring Hong Kong Police on duty at the foot of the gangplank to be let aboard without invitations. Marigold was in a long dress and heels, yelling at Bunty for forgetting the invitations at home, calling him a nong and breaking into tears. The busload of consulate employees arrived, and the overwhelmed police privates hurriedly did a head count and let everyone on board. They didn’t blink at Nate in all the confusion. Bunty toasted Nate in the wardroom, thanked him for being a mate, and noted that Beijing would be “mad as a cut snake” when they eventually realized that Nathaniel Nash was out of China. At the end of the evening, a young petty officer switched places with Nate and got off the ship while Nate stayed aboard, out of sight.
The Blue Ridge departed Hong Kong the next morning and returned to fleet headquarters in Yokosuka, Japan, in three days, a transit of fifteen hundred nautical miles, during which time Nate stayed in his cabin, ate alone in the officers’ mess, and watched half a dozen movies. He brooded about Grace; he wondered about Dominika and the mole hunt, the briefing for the DCIA candidates, and his standing with Benford and Forsyth, and waited in uneasy anticipation of what they had in mind for him next. Overseas assignment? Secondment to FBI? A tiny cubicle in the basement of Headquarters?
He didn’t know why, but he had a feeling—he just knew—that he would see Dominika very soon.
ZHÈNNIǍO’S SHĒNGCÀI—LETTUCE SOUP
Sauté diced white onions and minced garlic in butter in a soup pot, stirring until softened. Add chopped coriander, salt, and pepper. Add peeled, cubed potatoes, whole lettuce leaves (do not trim the ribs), and water to cover. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer until potatoes are soft. Purée liquid to a velvety texture, whisk in butter, and season to taste. Serve hot or at room temperature.
31
League of Nations
“You’re as bad as Angleton,” said Acting Director Farrell to Benford, who was standing in front of the spotless desk in the DCIA’s office on the seventh floor of Headquarters. Unsullied by cables, memos, or ops plans, the Director’s workspace contrasted wildly with Benford’s desk three floors down in CID, which more closely resembled downtown Tokyo after Godzilla walked through. “You counterintelligence fanatics waste time chasing shadows that don’t exist.” Angleton had been the zealous messianic CI chief in the seventies who saw Soviet disinformation and provocation under every rock. Benford shifted his feet slightly.
Farrell was a lank-haired economics analyst from the Directorate of Intelligence who was, in the eyes of the jaundiced workforce in Langley, an unlikely pick to run the Agency, even temporarily. He had dishwater eyes, a waxen complexion, a reedy cartoon voice, and an abiding, singular interest in promoting himself. Farrell had first been noticed by POTUS as a fellow internationalist with a healthy dislike of CIA cowboys. Farrell had further endeared himself to the White House after publicly declaring he would credit the assessments of Headquarters-based analysts regarding the political situation in any given country, rather than rely on the estimations of the Chief of Station on the ground, an apostasy increasingly in vogue after the drowning of DCIA Alex Larson. As Farrell’s comment became common knowledge, operations officers in the foreign field continued their work, silently toasting the Acting Director at recruitment dinners worldwide.
“This mole is hardly a shadow,” said Benford, controlling the impulse to tell this ponderous bureaucrat he was a preening cockatoo. “His existence has been corroborated by a sensitive asset in Moscow.” The Director snorted.
“It’s always the same,” Farrell said. “Sensitive asset says something
, and we go off on a wild-goose chase. It’s absurd. What asset reported this?” The Director had the right to ask about any source, including true name, but Benford protected his restricted-handling cases jealously, usually referring to them only by cryptonyms.
“DIVA, our top source in Russia, her intelligence has been impeccable, she’s stolen secrets from inside the Kremlin itself.”
Farrell made a face. “I prefer to avoid that hackneyed phrase, ‘steal secrets.’ Stealing implies extralegal and morally reprehensible methods.”
“It’s the definition of espionage, since Judas kissed Jesus,” said Benford. “What do you call it?”
Farrell looked up, nettled at his tone. The two men glared at each other. “We don’t steal secrets,” he said.
Benford kept a straight face. “I’ve heard that homily before, somewhere. It’s as imbecilic now as it was then.”
Farrell swiveled in his chair, turning his back on Benford. “I didn’t call you up here to listen to your old-line retrogressive cant. I called you because I understand you are not fully briefing the three nominees for the Directorship. You are to brief them all unreservedly, with no evasion, including the reporting from this star asset of yours. Do you understand? Full briefings.”
“The asset is in a precarious position. The intelligence can be sourced directly to her,” said Benford, already knowing what he was going to do.
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