by Alex Ryan
“Supposed to be.”
“You need more chicken stock,” Lankford said, then leaned in and sniffed. “And more white wine. And probably salt.”
“Thanks,” Nick said, pouring a little of both into the pan and reaching for the salt as he stirred.
“Dr. Chen will love it,” Lankford said coyly.
Nick ignored the probe and raised an eyebrow. “So why exactly are you here?”
Lankford put a finger to his lips in the universal hush sign, then pointed to the ceiling. Nick nodded. Yes, the Chinese were almost certainly listening. The Chinese government made no secret about watching and listening to foreigners living and working in their cities. Nick was American—and former military—so it was guaranteed that he was under surveillance, even if he was not now associated with Lankford. When Nick, Dash, and Lankford had teamed up with China’s elite Snow Leopard Counterterrorism Unit to stop a bioterrorism threat, they may have earned the formal gratitude of the government, but no matter how grateful the Snow Leopard Commander might be, he now knew who Lankford was and why he was in China. For Nick it was, at a minimum, guilt by association.
“I was in the neighborhood—thought I’d stop by and say hello.”
Nick rolled his eyes.
“Also, I could use a favor.”
“I’ve told you before, I’m not interested in working for your tech company.”
Lankford smiled. “Yes, you’ve been quite clear about that, but that’s not why I’m here.”
Nick was about to make a sarcastic reply when his phone chirped. He picked it up and read the text, then slammed the phone onto the counter. “What the hell did you do, Lankford?”
The CIA man looked genuinely confused and picked up Nick’s phone to read the SMS, which turned out to be from Dash:
Nick . . . so sorry but had to fly out for work. Reschedule? My treat? My apartment? Call you in a few days or when I can.
“I didn’t do this,” Lankford said, setting the phone down.
“Bullshit,” Nick said as he threw his dish towel in the sink.
“Nick,” Lankford said, grabbing his arm. Nick turned to face the CIA man. No Team guy would screw a buddy like this. “Seriously, man. All of our thrust and parry aside, I had nothing to do with this. I like the girl, really. I’d love to see the two of you together.”
Nick sighed, leaned forward, and rested his hands on the kitchen counter. He knew he shouldn’t feel this dejected over a canceled date, but the buzzkill hit him hard. He exhaled and tried to shut down the mental vitriol his subconscious was slinging around.
“She’s giving you a rain check at her place,” Lankford said. “Compared to the ambience you’ve got going on here in your Spartan studio—I’m just saying, it can only be a step up.”
Nick shot him a look.
“No offense,” Lankford added.
“Hmm, I suppose you make a good point,” Nick said, cracking a smile.
“It’s what I do.”
“Are you this annoying with all your friends?”
“Pretty much.”
Nick grabbed two beers from the fridge, popped the caps, and handed one to Lankford. Lankford extended the neck of the bottle in a toast. “To Dash and rain checks.”
They clanked bottles.
After his first swig, Nick said, “So tell me about this favor you need, Chet.” Suddenly, he found himself very curious about what was going on in the CIA man’s world, something he didn’t want to admit to himself and sure as hell wouldn’t admit to Lankford.
Lankford made the hush sign again and pointed his index finger toward the ceiling. Then he lifted the lid to check the “risotto.” Nick saw that the little grains were now sticking to the bottom of the pan, a small funnel cloud of dark smoke rising from the center of his culinary disaster.
“This looks basically inedible, dude,” Lankford said. “Turn it off, put your lamb chops in the fridge, and let me buy you dinner. Think of it as recompense for tonight.”
“Fine,” Nick said. He dropped the pan into the sink, where it hissed when it hit the wet surface. Then he packed up his lamb chops, tossed them into the fridge, and turned to Lankford. “Your treat.”
“Of course.”
“Where?”
“I know a place.”
The countersurveillance dance from Nick’s apartment to the restaurant took over half an hour, and Nick figured every minute over thirty upped the stakes of whatever it was Lankford wanted to tell him. When they were finally settled into a booth, sipping on bottles of Tsingtao beer, Lankford ended the suspense.
“I’m missing a man,” he said, suddenly looking five years older.
Nick was a SEAL—or used to be—so the weight of “a man left behind” was not lost on him. He looked around the room. No one seemed to be paying them any mind, so he leaned in. “Tell me?”
“His name is Peter Yu. He was conducting routine surveillance in Xi’an and missed a check-in. I didn’t think anything of it, at first—lots of check-ins get missed, and we have a protocol for that. But then he missed another and then a third. I have managed assets in Xi’an—you know, guys we pay for information. They checked his apartment and his office—he’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
Lankford clenched his jaw and balled his hand into a fist on the table.
“Well, I don’t fucking know, Nick. If I did, he wouldn’t be missing, would he?”
Nick pursed his lips.
“Sorry,” Lankford said after a beat. “I’m tired.”
“It’s fine,” Nick said—and meant it. Two months ago, Lankford had lost an agent on his watch—a talented rising star in the Beijing office named Jamie Lin. Lankford had bonded with the girl, had thought of her as a surrogate daughter. Her murder had hit him hard. Best to tread lightly on this one, Nick thought.
“What was Yu working on?”
Lankford placed a silver tablet computer on the table between them.
“I loaded his reports on this. Feel free to take a look, but I suspect you won’t find anything interesting. I didn’t. Yu was fairly new to the post and was spending the majority of his time sniffing around for anything that didn’t smell right. Routine monitoring and surveillance mode, you know the gig. His official cover was as a branch manager for ViaTech, mostly business development and IT staffing for some of the big Chinese tech companies in Xi’an.”
“Placing talent?”
“Exactly, to keep an eye on government contracts, tech transfer, pipeline R&D, cyber, and so on.”
“So what do you want from me?” Nick asked, feigning apathy. He didn’t want to care, but he did. His mind drifted to Afghanistan and the brothers he’d lost. When he left the SEALs to join a charitable NGO, he’d intended to leave the clandestine life behind. But here he was, dining with the CIA’s ranking official in China, talking spook shit. He didn’t regret the decision to leave the SEALs, and he didn’t regret working for an NGO. But Lankford’s tale of a missing American operative stirred old, powerful feelings.
No man is left behind.
It was the mantra of Special Operations and an ethos of the SEALs. Since their birth under Kennedy in the early 1960s, not one SEAL had been left behind on the field of battle, alive or dead. His desire to help find Yu was not something he could ignore or resist—it had been spliced into his very DNA.
Lankford pushed the still untouched tablet computer closer to Nick. “I was hoping maybe you could poke around Xi’an for me.”
“Poke around Xi’an?” Nick echoed, cocking an eyebrow at Lankford. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I can’t trust my assets in Xi’an with this. They’re all managed assets. In my experience, the minute a managed asset thinks he’s in any real danger, he turns. They’ll do the scout work for me, but that’s about it. I need someone I can trust to go to Xi’an and try to pick up Yu’s trail.”
“I thought you had people for shit like this!”
“Of course,” Lankford said. “But thanks
to you, your girlfriend, and your buddy Commander Zhang, my entire operation in Beijing is outed. My people, as you say, are blown. Peter Yu is proof of that. Anyone I send could be in real danger if the Chinese government is behind Yu’s disappearance.”
“Yeah,” Nick agreed, leaning in with a tight smile. “But then wouldn’t I also be in danger? You know for damn sure that they’re watching me. No mystery there. Zhang was explicit—get caught working with you and the CIA again, and he’d personally kick my ass out of China on the next available flight.”
“He was just trying to rattle your cage.”
“Oh, I see how it is. Since I’m not on your payroll, I’m expendable. Is that it?”
Lankford looked irritated. “It’s not like that, Nick. You have a real NOC. You don’t work for me, as you love pointing out. You conduct legitimate business in Xi’an. Hell, you were there just a few weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken. No one would find it curious if you traveled back to Xi’an for Water For People, or Habitat for Humanity, or whatever the hell tree-hugging shit it is you do for a living.” The tension in his voice was rising now.
“Relax, Chet. I was just kidding,” Nick said. Then, under his breath he added, “Well, sort of.”
Lankford said nothing. He just held Nick’s gaze with tired, desperate eyes.
Nick flashed him a half-baked smile. “Isn’t this the part of the conversation where you’re supposed to pull out the red pill and the blue pill and tell me I have to choose between taking the trip down the rabbit hole or going back to living my normal, boring life?”
Lankford tapped the tablet computer with the tip of his index finger and said, “Red pill.” Then he tapped Nick’s beer bottle. “Blue pill . . . Look, Nick, it really is that simple. Either you go to Xi’an and look for my missing man, or you stay in Beijing, hang out, drink beer, and learn how to cook risotto.”
Nick grimaced.
“Look, you said you’re a fixer—and I need your help to fix this mess. You’re either up to the challenge or you’re not.”
Nick stared at the tablet. No matter how much Lankford loved to mock him, the work he did with Water 4 Humanity was important. Access to sanitary drinking water was the most fundamental of human needs. In the few short months he had worked for W4H, he had helped provide life-giving water for thousands of poor and indigent Chinese, most of them children. He believed in the mission, and yet here he was, bantering with Lankford about spy games. The truth was obvious. He wouldn’t be having this discussion if the NGO career fulfilled all his needs. The chase and gunfight in the tunnels of the Beijing Underground City, solving the mystery of Jamie Lin’s murder, stopping a bioterrorist minutes before he killed thousands of innocents—all of that had made Nick feel alive, but they weren’t the things that would make him say yes.
Peter Yu was an American operator in a foreign land, a kindred spirit . . . a brother by proxy.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Nick said. “We have a satellite office in Xi’an, where we manage projects in the north and west—mostly around the low mountain villages outside of Yaojiagouzhen. I’m sure I can invent some reason to go there and check in with my regional managers on those projects. While I’m in Xi’an, I’ll stop by Yu’s apartment and report what I find. Will that help?”
“Yes. Thank you, Nick,” Lankford said with more sincerity than Nick had ever heard from the sarcastic spook. “All of Peter’s reports are on the tablet—zipped in file number one. All of his assets’ reports are zipped as file two. Fair warning—there’s not much to work with. The third and final file contains the details of his official cover in Xi’an and his redacted personnel file.”
Lankford pulled a small gift-wrapped box from his coat pocket and slid it over. The card on top read, “Thanks for everything.”
Nick looked up and arched his eyebrows.
“Don’t get too mushy or excited on me,” Lankford said. “It’s an encrypted burner. Call me if you need help or if you find anything. Anything at all. That being said, save your minutes, because once you start using it, our friends will get to work cracking the encryption. The number for my encrypted burner is in the speed dial.”
Nick slipped the tablet and the gift box into the pocket of his barn jacket.
“Thanks for this, Nick. I mean it.”
“I know you do, Chet. I hope I can help.”
Lankford stood up from the table.
“I thought you were buying me dinner?” Nick said.
“Should’ve eaten before you let me screw you,” Lankford said with a chuckle. “You’re a SEAL—even you know that.”
The waitress arrived and set a plate of steaming beef noodles in front of him. Nick looked from his food back to Lankford, but the spook was already gone.
Shit, Nick thought as he dug into the spicy fare. Here we go again.
But this time, he realized he was smiling.
CHAPTER 2
Somewhere over China
Citation X, cruising at 24,000 feet
The first time she flew on a private jet, Chen Dazhong felt like a celebrity. No waiting in line, no security screening, no baggage hassles, free concierge-level service, and comfortable leather captain’s chairs—these were the VIP luxuries of chartered air travel that the everyman dreamed about. For Dash, that first magical flight had been four years and many jaunts ago. Tonight, the magic was gone. Tonight, she did not feel like a celebrity. Instead, she was very much aware of the flip side of being that someone who is whisked away on a private jet at a moment’s notice. Being that someone carried obligation and risk. It carried high expectations and even higher stakes. Tonight’s free ticket from Beijing to Hong Kong was a thinly veiled ride on the devil’s chariot. They were flying her to the gates of hell . . . in Hollywood style.
The call from Commander Zhang had come unexpectedly, while she was dressing for her dinner date with Nick Foley.
“It’s happening again,” Commander Zhang had said when she’d answered her mobile.
“What’s happening again?” she’d asked, a lump already in her throat.
“Dead civilians. Except this time, it’s different . . .”
“Different how?”
“Words don’t do it justice. You’ll just have to come see for yourself.”
A black sedan had picked her up in front of her apartment ten minutes later.
Now here she was, with her “go bag” propped on the empty seat beside her, en route to tackle China’s second bioterrorism event in as many months. As the CDC’s senior representative on China’s Quick Reaction Bioterrorism Task Force, she was both a first responder and a primary investigator. She had been handpicked for this role by the Director of the CDC—namely, because of her success in starting up China’s first Ebola relief hospital in Liberia. Her decisive leadership in the field and her exemplary safety record during the relief effort had reflected positively on the Chinese CDC—and China as a nation—in the eyes of the international community. Her heroism in the days following a bioterrorism attack in the western desert city of Kizilsu had cemented her position as a permanent task force member.
Now rumors were circulating at the CDC that she was next in line to become the department head of the Office of Disease Control and Emergency Response (DCER). It was a promotion she did not relish because it would mean forfeiting her current position as a lead researcher of emerging diseases. Any department head position, especially as head of DCER, would take her out of the laboratory . . . probably for the rest of her career.
She had joined the CDC as a scientist. Research was her passion. The promise of discovery was the thing that got her out of bed in the morning, not ladder climbing. She was no bureaucrat, but that didn’t matter. Her future was not her own. She was being groomed to someday become the first woman Director of the Chinese CDC, an honor and a burden she wholeheartedly did not want. Which left her in the unfortunate and awkward position of knowing that the only way to change her fate was to sabotage her own career, something she simply could no
t bring herself to do.
The cabin steward approached her with a hesitant smile. “May I get you something to drink, Dr. Chen? Tea, water, a soft drink beverage?”
“Coffee, please,” she said.
“Any milk or sugar?”
“Yes, sugar, please. Be generous with the sugar.”
“My pleasure. Anything else?”
“Yes, how much longer until we land?”
The young man checked his watch. “Thirty minutes, approximately.”
She nodded, and he departed to fulfill her request.
From the moment the plane landed in Hong Kong, a tidal wave of bioterrorism operations activity would sweep her off her feet and carry her wherever it would. For the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, she would work nonstop, without sleep or a proper meal, until the biological threat was identified and contained. On the Quick Reaction Bioterrorism Task Force, she shared tactical and operational command with Commander Zhang of the Snow Leopard Commando Counterterrorism Unit’s Ninth Squadron, as well as Major Li Shengkun of the PLA’s Nuclear Biological Chemical Regiment 54423 out of Shenzhen. Together, they formed the holy trinity of China’s bioterrorism defense strategy. Together, they had the power to marshal every resource that the CDC, the Army, and China’s National Police Force had available.
Tonight, she prayed they wouldn’t have to.
Her mind drifted to Nick. She wondered if he was upset with her. Probably. She had, after all, canceled their date thirty minutes before she was supposed to arrive. His response had seemed cordial and forgiving enough. She retrieved her mobile phone and reread his text message reply:
Completely understand. No worries.
Talk soon and be careful.
If she took Nick’s message at face value, then he was not upset with her. They were both working professionals who traveled regularly. Work interrupts life. Plans change. Nick understood this. But on the other hand, his reply was very succinct. Almost terse. Clearly, he was irritated with her, which was why he’d said so little. And there was the fact that he didn’t even acknowledge the offer she’d made in her text message to make up the dinner date at her apartment. Maybe he’d been planning a romantic dinner. Maybe he’d been hoping she’d spend the night. If he’d misconstrued her acceptance of his dinner offer as a romantic invitation, then that would be a problem. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for a romantic relationship with Nick yet. It was too soon. Just two months ago, she had been married . . .