“Oh, go ahead, tell him,” the face said, in McGill’s distinctive voice. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Wha-a-t?” she cried. “What are you saying? What doesn’t matter?”
Allender slid his seat back to its original position while they held their ghostly dialogue. “They know,” the hologram said. “They know everything. Spare yourself. I release you. Tell him what he needs to know so they don’t hurt you. Or worse, much worse.” Then the mists returned and the hologram dissolved into darkness.
Rebecca looked back toward where Allender had been, unaware that he had moved again. Her eyes flicked back and forth before settling on his face. For an instant he thought he had her, but then, as he’d almost expected, she settled back in the restraints and looked directly into his eyes.
“Nice try,” she said. “Especially the hologram.”
“Well, shit,” Allender sighed. “And you’re right—we did try. The easy way, I mean. Lights.”
Normal lighting brightened the room, and then the door to the adjoining room opened on silent hinges and a Chinese man stepped through, dressed in surgical scrubs. Behind him the brightly lit room revealed itself to be a pre-op room. The Chinese man greeted Allender in Mandarin.
“Quite a show, I must admit,” he said, examining the perspiring woman glaring at him from down the table.
“Usually does it unless you’re facing a deep-training operative,” Allender replied. “So: Get your team scrubbed. Take one kidney for now. We’ll show it to her and explain that we’re going to keep it viable for two hours, then send it out to the city organ-transplant center. If she won’t talk after that, we’ll take the other one and send her downstairs, hook her up to life support, and then do comprehensive harvesting. We don’t have time to go through any more profiles with this one.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Chen said. “One hour, we’ll be ready.” He headed back into the OR suite.
Allender got up, shucked the lab coat and the gloves, put on his glasses, and started to walk out of the room.
“You wouldn’t,” Rebecca said, in flawless Mandarin.
Allender stopped long enough to suppress a smile. Then he turned around. “You’re right,” he said, also in Mandarin. “I wouldn’t. But Chen will. The MSS killed his parents, so he’s a bear when it comes to Chinese operatives. You’re lucky it’s going to be a kidney. His last one involved surgically removing the guy’s eyeballs from their sockets and letting them dangle on his face so he could see him piss himself. Think about it.”
He then did leave the room before she could say anything. The door to the operating area was still open, leaving her a great view of the preparations being made in there, including trays of brightly glittering surgical instruments. Allender walked to the elevator, went up two floors and then down to Battle’s office, where he and Melanie congratulated him. “How in the world did you do the hologram?” she asked. “I swear, McGill was right there.”
“Gave five minutes of video of McGill talking to a camera plus about a hundred scripts to an outfit in Hollywood that does those cartoon movies. Took ’em six months. We have an entire database of faces and short speeches like that, including over a hundred foreign spymasters. It’s pretty effective, except with jihadis.”
“What do you do with them?”
“You probably don’t want to know that, Melanie. Deacon, I think she’ll break on the table, but if not, I intend to have Chen put her to sleep, make the appropriate external incisions, and then establish some pain paths that would resemble a post-open-nephrectomy recovery. We’ll bring her out, show her a ‘kidney’ in a dish, and then try again.”
“What do you think she knows?” Battle asked.
“I’ve already made her as an MSS operative. Her Mandarin tells me she was probably taken as a small child, most likely in Hong Kong, and brought up Chinese in service to the State. She’s Caucasian on the outside but all ChiCom inside. Their Section 70 has a whole stable of them. Closest thing to a perfect robot you’re going to see, at least for the next five years. They call them dragon seeds.”
“Are you saying that this woman is a mole in the DDO’s office?” Battle asked.
“Worse than that, probably, but I’m still in the dark on some aspects of this mess. Remember, the Chinese are masters of the long game. She was probably sent for immersion training here in the States as a strictly supervised teenager right through college.”
“And this is the person who was sent to assist the FBI in finding out what happened to Wallace?” Melanie asked.
“Supposedly sent by the director, but so far, at the admin-assistant level, we find out that they’ve never heard of her, at least under that name.”
“And yet she had access to Agency assets when Chiang’s son showed up,” she pointed out.
“Which means?”
“She has to be working for McGill,” Battle said.
“That’s what I need to prove,” Allender said. “I think she knows at least the outline of what McGill is up to, and that was the second thing Hank Wallace will need. Time is of the essence, because Congresswoman Greer is about to nuke the Agency on public media. Now: Where can we get lunch?”
Battle looked at his watch. “The roach coach should be here any minute. They’ve got sandwiches, hot dogs, soft drinks, stuff like that.”
They met the food truck a few minutes later outside the building, in company with several of the employees. The truck looked like an oversized ice-cream truck, and it was doing a healthy business with one side opened for food service. Battle recommended the organic chili dogs. Allender just rolled his eyes and went with a plain ham sandwich.
They went back to the office and had lunch in Battle’s small conference room. A television screen on one wall showed Rebecca still sitting there at the table, under restraint, and looking increasingly worried. They saw one of the escorts come in to check on her. She asked for water, but he declined, telling her nothing to eat or drink before general anesthesia. Dr. Chen’s orders. The OR was out of the frame, but they could still see the bright white glow of the operating lights and hear muted conversations.
When Chen finally called, Allender went back down to the lower level. An escort in scrubs was waiting, and they went back to the interrogation suite, walked past the by now sick-looking Rebecca and into the preoperative suite. The actual OR was visible through glass walls in an adjacent room. Chen and his surgical team were waiting in the OR. Allender nodded to Chen and then went back out talk to Rebecca one last time before Chen got to work. There were two orderlies standing behind Rebecca’s chair. Rebecca’s face revealed that she was long past her “nice try” moment.
“As far as we are concerned, you are a spy for the People’s Republic of China,” Allender began, after taking off his glasses. “If our roles were reversed, I would be standing in an execution courtyard in front of a firing squad. Or, like General Chiang, facing disembowelment and then a lunch date with a pack of vultures. So: One last time—what is your name?”
She swallowed hard. Almost on cue, someone in the pre-op suite dropped a steel pan, causing her to flinch and look over at the door. Then she looked back into Allender’s amber eyes. Fear and fatigue had finally broken down her mental defenses, so this time he could hear her: Mei Ling Won. He switched to Mandarin.
“Mei Ling Won,” he said. She blinked in surprise. Allender wasn’t entirely sure whether she’d said it or just thought it, but the fact that he knew it was apparently the final straw. The woman closed her eyes and collapsed in the restraints with a great sigh. One of the orderlies, suspecting they’d missed a suicide pill, immediately felt for a pulse then looked up at Allender and nodded. Still alive.
Allender reached under the tabletop and withdrew the restraints while the orderlies held her upright in the interrogation chair.
“Give her some water,” he ordered. She opened her eyes and drank half the bottle when it was handed to her. Then she put it down and looked back at Allender.
“I
don’t know what exactly he has planned,” she said. “But it does involve killing Henry Wallace. And by now, you.”
“Carson McGill?”
She smiled at him as if he was a fool. “Who else?”
TWENTY-FOUR
Allender went back to Battle’s office where Melanie was waiting. “Mister Battle’s gone to wrap up the surgical team,” she said. “And get Rebecca—or I guess it’s Mei Ling—to a detention cell.”
“Have we heard from Wallace?”
“Yes, sir, we have. His people have asked us to call a certain number when we have a result.”
“Okay,” Allender said. “Call that number, and tell whomever answers that I want a videoconference with Henry Wallace.”
While Melanie was making the call, Allender went over to a small bookcase in one corner of Battle’s office, pressed the spine of the Holy Bible. Two doors opened to reveal a well-stocked liquor cabinet. He poured himself a small Scotch and then sat down at Battle’s desk. He’d come to the realization while riding the elevator up that this one had been a close-run thing. If Mei Ling had been Japanese she never would have broken, and some of the Chinese operatives he’d worked were that strong, too. The first surgery would have been a fake, of course, but if she’d kept on, he’d have had to tell Chen to actually take a kidney, and, if necessary, the other one. Shit, he thought. I’m getting soft in my old age. Chen, on the other hand, was probably frustrated.
“Sir?” Melanie called from across the room. “Their operator says they don’t have video capability at their current location.”
“Then tell them to get some,” Allender said. “I’m not speaking to Wallace until I can both hear him and see him.”
Wallace himself called back five minutes later. “O ye of little faith,” he began. “Don’t you recognize my voice? I’m told it’s unique back at Langley.”
“And so it is, Mister Wallace,” Allender said. “But since I can’t be sure where you are, I want a little more proof that you are who you’re supposed to be.”
“We’re on a secure Agency voice link right now, are we not?”
“You, me, and who else? Carson perhaps?”
There was a silence on the line for a few seconds. “Okay,” Wallace sighed. “I’ll have to move. Stay right there.”
Battle came back about then, saw Allender sitting at his desk, and asked what was up. Allender told him to get a videoconferencing terminal set up in his conference room.
It took an hour, during which Allender wrote out what had transpired in the interrogation suite and what he’d actually achieved. Obviously Wallace wouldn’t have had Rebecca Lansing picked up if he didn’t already suspect her, but Allender still could not figure out what the game was here.
The phone in the conference room rang, and then the flat wall screen at the end of the table lit up, revealing Henry Wallace in all his annoyed glory. Melanie and Battle took seats alongside Allender.
“Okay,” he began. “Satisfied? And, no, there’s no gun in my back.” He reached a hand up to the camera on his end and swung it around the room, which appeared to be a large conference room. As best Allender could tell, there was no one else in the room with Wallace. “What did you find out?”
“That she is MSS, probably one of their Section 70, dragon-seed creatures. She told me that Carson McGill plans to kill you. And me, apparently.”
“Does she know what he’s up to?”
“She says she does not,” Allender said. “Do you?”
“I have my suspicions,” Wallace said. “But we need to smoke McGill out somehow. I’m hoping that when Greer unloads, that will do it.”
“She hasn’t gone public yet?”
“No, and that’s another little mystery. Perhaps McGill’s made her an offer she can’t refuse.”
“My sense of Chairwoman Greer is that she is not easily intimidated,” Allender said. “Quite the opposite—I think that would make it worse.”
“May not be intimidation,” Wallace said. “Remember, she’s a congressperson. Refresh my memory: Tell me how you got into this goat-grab in the first place?”
“It started with McGill telling me that you had been found dead of unknown causes at your home. He was supposedly keeping that news close-hold, but he told Hingham, who informed Greer. She, of course, didn’t trust Langley to do anything but cover it all up, so she got the Bureau into it. McGill said he wanted me to ‘assist’ as a senior liaison officer between the DDO and the Bureau’s team.”
“‘Assist’? As in lead them astray at every inconspicuous opportunity?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, now walk me through the rest of it, by which I mean your involvement.”
Allender did, ending with what Mei Ling had said.
“How dramatic,” Wallace said with an expression that said he thought it was bullshit.
“What do we do with her?” Allender asked.
“Eventually, we’ll hand her over to the Chinese embassy and formally thank them for her services to the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. Tell them that she’s been extremely helpful, but that she probably needs a little vacation back in China just now.”
“What will they do to her?”
“Same thing we’d do: Either give her a medal for her efforts, or, if they think she was turned, close her out. I could give her one last chance to expose her own network in return for the same thing we did for Ms. Sloan, there, but, the moment she was taken, I have to assume that network rolled itself up. Keep her there for now.”
“All right; I’ll have Deacon set that up.”
“In the meantime, you and Ms. Sloan go back to your town house and await further instructions. I’ll have people in place to make sure no more Kung Fu Pandas come calling. I think I know what Carson’s up to, and it involves his endless pursuit of the top slot at Langley.”
“Except for one open question, Mister Wallace,” Allender said.
“What’s that?” Wallace asked, sounding impatient now.
“He had an MSS operative working for him. That can mean one of two things: He knew she was a double, and it pleased him to make her expendable. The second alternative is too awful to contemplate.”
Wallace just stared at him for a long moment. “There are days, Doctor Allender,” he said, finally, “when you scare even me. Don’t leave for Washington until your escort arrives. Once you get there, stay put. I may have one last job for you.”
“I’m a retired interrogator, Mister Wallace,” Allender said. “Not an operator.”
“That’s what you think, sport,” Wallace said with a wolfish grin.
The screen went dark.
One last job, Allender thought. As in, Why don’t you become the goat that gets staked out in the jungle to draw in the tiger. He looked over at Melanie and saw from the expression on her face that she was thinking the same thing.
* * *
Eight o’clock found them in the tower study trying to figure out what would happen next. A Secret Service SUV was parked out front and there were two agents standing out on the sidewalk in front of the house. Allender had seen another vehicle in the alley and two more agents patrolling back there plus a third in the backyard itself. They’d had to cool their heels in the Dungeons for two hours while Wallace got everything set up in Washington. The drive up from Williamsburg had been uneventful, with only a single pit stop for a bathroom break and a greaseburger.
“Uncle Hank must be expecting a full frontal assault of some kind,” Allender said, peering through the front curtains one more time.
“Do we really know who those people are out there?” Melanie asked. “They could be there to keep us in, not someone else out.”
Allender sat back down, took off his protective glasses, rubbed his tired eyes, and looked longingly at the Scotch decanter but decided against it. He’d been turning to a wee dram a bit too often these days. “If that were the case,” he said, stifling a yawn, “it would have been easier just to keep us on the Farm. I’v
e set you up in the guest room, by the way.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m more than ready.”
“Yeah, me, too. It’s been a long day. An interrogation like that one is always stressful.”
“As in, this will hurt me more than it will you…?”
“Something like that,” he said, distractedly. “Once the sensory illusions have worked their magic, the subjects often get pretty loud.”
“You mean screaming?”
“Up here,” he said, tapping his forehead.
“You can actually hear what they’re thinking?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “It’s a mixture of hearing, feeling, and subconscious sensing. And mental pressure, just for grins.”
“A blessing or a curse, I wonder,” she said.
“Just like these,” he said with a tired smile, pointing now at his amber eyes. “My classmates in Taipei were apprehensive around me. If I’d been in an American school, I would have been the school freak.”
She tilted her head to one side. “And that’s why you keep your distance from women, isn’t it,” she said.
“Women are dangerous,” he replied. “Let them get close, and they destroy the dragon-eyes mystique. Can’t have that.”
“Let women get close, they can do a lot more than that, Sir Dragon Eyes.”
He shook his head. “I’m going up,” he sighed.
“Chicken,” she said to his back as he went upstairs. He clucked back at her, but smiled as he did. And kept going.
His bedroom, fully restored, took up one entire side of the house, including a part of the tower, which had been made into a sitting alcove. He took one last look out the front windows at the security cordon. Secret Service, he thought. How the hell did the Secret Service get into this mess? Then he remembered where Hank had come from before the CIA.
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