Dragonfly

by Dean R. Koontz

  The three-foot-square portable computer monitored Yuan's pulse, blood pressure, skin temperature, rate of perspiration, and brain waves. Furthermore, it listened to his voice and analyzed the stress patterns which were beyond his conscious control. Instantly assimilating these indices, the computer translated them into a purple line that glowed across the center of a small read-out screen. If the line was comparatively still, the subject's answers were close to the truth. If the line began to dance and jiggle, the subject was most likely lying. It was a very complicated yet simple machine; Canning had seen it used, had taken a course in its use, and he trusted it.

  Because Yuan Yat-sen spoke no English, Lee Ann would ask all the questions.

  Canning turned to her now. “We'll start off with questions we know the answers to. The first one is —'What is your name?' ”

  She relayed the question to Yuan.

  “Yuan Yat-sen,” he said.

  The purple line vibrated for a moment.

  Smiling, Canning said, “Very good. Now ask him to tell you his real name, the name he was born with and not the one he adopted when he became a deep-cover agent.”

  Lee Ann asked the question.

  Yuan said, “Liu Chao-chi.”

  The purple line did not move.

  The questioning led to the Dragonfly project, but for the next ten minutes the purple line rarely moved.

  At last Canning switched off the polygraph and said, “Yuan is not the man we want. He doesn't know anything at all about Dragonfly or trigger men.”

  General Lin said, “You are certain? The machine could be wrong.”

  “That's not likely.”

  “He seems like a crafty old man,” the general said doubtfully.

  “Not crafty enough to deceive a computer,” Canning said. “Printed circuitry and microtransistors aren't susceptible to guile.”

  The general nodded. “Very well. What is the name of your second agent? We are wasting time here.”

  “I agree that we ought not to waste time,” Canning said. “This is a very grave matter. On the other hand, Dragonfly has been ready for activation for months and hasn't yet been used. I don't understand your great impatience, General.”

  General Lin frowned. “I do not understand it either. But I feel—something very wrong. I have nightmares, and recently they have grown worse. I know time is running out. I sense it. So… The second name, please?”

  WASHINGTON: FRIDAY, 11:45 P.M.

  Andrew Rice was surprised to hear the President's voice on the other end of the line. “Is something wrong, sir?”

  “Yes, Andy, I'm afraid that something is very wrong. The Soviet ambassador paid me a visit a few minutes ago. He outlined their reaction to the Dragonfly project if it should be carried out.”

  His heart suddenly racing, Rice said, “I see.”

  “I'm sending a limousine around for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It'll bring you to the Pentagon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Why not the White House? Rice wondered. But he did, not ask, for he knew they had said all that could be said on an open phone line.

  “See you within the hour, Andy.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Rice hung up, cursing the goddamned Russians. He expected that they would invade China from the west once the plague had struck in Peking. That was acceptable. That could be dealt with in due time. But this sounded like something much more ominous. Had the Russians given Washington some ultimatum? Were those crazy goddamned Bolsheviks siding with the Chinese? They hated the Chinese! Why would they line up with them? It was craziness!

  He dressed hurriedly and was standing in front of his town house, crunching LifeSavers two at a time, when the limousine arrived.

  PEKING: SATURDAY, 5:45 P.M.

  The second CIA deep-cover agent was a sixty-four-year-old man named Ku K'ai Chih. Like Yuan, he had been a follower of Chiang, and he had lost his entire family and his business in the revolution. Another natural for the CIA. He had returned to the mainland in the spring of 1951, and he had rapidly established himself as an ardent Maoist, organizing a Party unit among the dock workers and seamen in the great eastern ports like Foochow, Shanghai, and Tsingtao. Today he was one of the twelve members of the board of managers of China's merchant marine.

  The interrogation went as it had with Yuan: Canning asked the questions in English; Lee Ann rephrased them in Chinese, the subject replied, and the computer analyzed the responses. The purple line seldom wavered.

  At the end of fifteen minutes of intense questioning, Canning said, “This one's clean too.”

  Lee Ann explained to Ku that he would remain at the embassy, would later be flown to the United States for debriefing in full, and then would be returned to Taiwan.

  “We are left with the conclusion that the trigger man for Dragonfly must be your third agent,” General Lin said.

  “It certainly looks that way,” Canning said.

  “His name?”

  Canning hesitated for an instant, then said, “He is Sung Chu'ung-chen. As you may know, Sung is in charge of a branch of your Internal Security Force.”

  General Lin's yellow-brown face darkened perceptibly. He was extremely mortified by the news that one of his own subordinates was a CIA deep-cover agent. “I know Mr. Sung all too well.”

  “Shall we go find him?” Canning asked.

  “I shall go find him,” the general said. “I will not require your assistance this time, Mr. Canning. Since Sung is obviously the trigger agent for Dragonfly, the crisis is past. We can arrest him and get to the truth in our own fashion, without your marvelous computerized polygraph.” He smiled coldly. “And later, of course, he might also wish to tell us what misguided citizens of the People's Republic cooperated with him in the passing of secret information.”

  Getting swiftly to his feet, Webster said, “General Lin, may I say that this is a most uncooperative—”

  “You may say what you wish,” Lin assured him. “But I have no time to stand here and listen.” He turned and strode out of the drawing room.

  Webster was nonplused. He sputtered helplessly for a moment and finally said, “Well, I told you he was a cunning little man. In spite of all your precautions, your network is blown.”

  Lee Ann began to laugh.

  Canning smiled.

  Amazed, Webster said, “I fail to grasp the comic element.”

  Stifling her laughter, Lee Ann said, “David foresaw just this situation as he was drifting off to sleep last night in Tokyo — that neither of the first two agents we interrogated would be the trigger for Dragonfly. He got up and put through a call to Bob McAlister and asked him to dig up a good fourth name.”

  “A fail-safe name to keep General Lin honest,” Canning said.

  Webster nodded slowly. “So… Mr. Sung is not one of ours. He's an innocent.”

  “Exactly,” Canning said. “General Lin will arrest him. And I'm afraid that Sung will be tortured for several hours. But eventually the general will realize that Sung is no more a CIA operative than he is himself. Then he will be back here, demanding the name of the real third agent.”

  “And you'll give it to him?” Webster asked.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “But when he has the right name, why should he play by the rules any more than he's doing now?”

  “Because,” Lee Ann said, enjoying herself immensely, “he won't be absolutely certain that the next name David gives him is the real article. He'll have to suspect it's another ringer, a double fail-safe. He'll have wasted so much time on Sung that he won't dare waste more on what might be another hoax— expecially not when he's having these nightmares and feelings of imminent disaster. So he'll bring our man here for confirmation, and we won't let him take our man back again.”

  “Mr. Canning, you have a splendid oriental mind.”

  “I know. I cultivate it.”

  “And now what do we do?” asked Webster.

  �
��How about dinner?” Canning asked.

  “Certainly. But what a letdown after the tension of this afternoon!”

  “I can assure you,” Canning said, “this is going to be the tensest dinner of my life.”

  SIX

  THE PENTAGON: SATURDAY, 12:30 A.M.

  The office in E Ring belonged to one Lionel Bryson, a full admiral in the United States Navy, one-time lightweight boxing champion of the Naval Academy, father of seven children and one of the twenty most knowledgeable amateur numismatists in the country. None of these achievements, all-American as they were, had earned him a forty-foot-square office in E Ring. He could also captain any nuclear submarine currently in service. But that ability had not won him his very own secretary with her own connecting office. Bryson was a very special kind of engineer-architect, a doctor of marine design. It was his talent for designing magnificent machines of death, rather than his ability to pilot them, that had earned him the wall-to-wall plush carpeting, the leather couch and armchairs, the executive desk, the private telephone line, the mahogany bookcases, the trophy case, the soundproofed walls and ceiling, and the heavy blue-velvet drapes at the window-with-a-view.

  Bryson was not here tonight. Which was just as well. He would not have liked the idea of his office being turned into an interrogation chamber.

  There were four people in the room. An armed marine guard, cleared for top-security matters, was standing to the right of the door; the holster at his hip was unsnapped and the revolver in it looked like a howitzer to McAlister. Major Arnold Teffler, night-duty physician at the Pentagon, was sitting on the couch with his black bag; he was also security-cleared all the way up to eyes-only material. Bernie Kirkwood was slumped in an armchair, his feet propped up on a coffee table, his eyes closed, and his hands folded in his lap. McAlister sat behind Admiral Bryson's desk and played with a scale model of a Trident submarine. No one spoke. They had nothing in common and no reason for being here until the fifth man arrived.

  Rice.

  McAlister still had a bit of trouble believing it.

  The telephone rang.

  McAlister grabbed it. “Yes?”

  “This is the door sergeant at the Mall Entrance,” the man on the other end said. “Mr. Rice just came through here.”

  “Thank you.”

  McAlister hung up, got to his feet, and came around from behind the desk. “Gentlemen, we're about to begin.”

  The marine and the doctor remained where they were.

  Bernie Kirkwood stood up and stretched.

  A minute passed. Then another.

  Someone knocked sharply on the door.

  The marine opened it.

  Two other marines stood in the corridor, and Andrew Rice stood between them. Rice came into the office and the two marines stayed in the hall and the marine already in the room closed the door behind the President's chief advisor.

  Rice looked at the doctor and then at McAlister and then around the room. He seemed perplexed. “Where's the President?”

  “He couldn't make it,” McAlister said.

  “But he called me less than an hour ago!”

  “He had some important reading to do.”

  “What about the Russian—”

  “There is no Russian problem,” McAlister said.

  Frowning, Rice waited and said nothing more.

  “Don't you want to know what the President is reading?”

  “What sort of game is this?” Rice blustered.

  McAlister picked up one of Hennings' magazines from the desk and held it out toward Rice.

  The fat man just stared at it.

  Kirkwood said, “There's also a most interesting article in Friday's Washington Post.”

  Rice looked at him.

  “Some poor hooker got nearly beat to death,” Kirk-wood said.

  At last McAlister had the pleasure of seeing a quick flicker of fear pass through Rice's eyes.

  “I haven't any idea what you're talking about,” the fat man said.

  McAlister said, “we'll see.”

  THE PEKING RAILROAD STATION:

  SATURDAY, 8:55 P.M.

  Chai Po-han got off the train. Slinging his single sack of belongings over his left shoulder, he walked along the concrete platform, past huge pillars bedecked with political posters, up the skeletal steel stairs, and into the public area of the main terminal.

  His mother, father, brother, and one of his three sisters were waiting for him. They all wore different expressions. His father was smiling broadly. His brother was quite solemn, as if to say, “What happened to you might as easily have happened to me.” His beloved mother and lovely sister were crying with joy at the sight of him.

  It was a very Confucian scene, the kind discouraged by the Party. Love of country must take precedence over love of family.

  Chai Po-han began to weep too, although his tears were shed because he knew that once he left China as he planned to do, he would never see any of them again.

  PEKING: SATURDAY, 9:00 P.M.

  At nine o'clock Canning and Lee Ann went up to their rooms, ostensibly to get a few hours' sleep before General Lin Shen-yang came back to them in a rage. But at her door his goodnight kiss metamorphosed into a long, soft, moist battle of lips and teeth and tongues.

  “You aren't really sleepy?” she asked.

  “Not in the least.”

  “Me either.”

  She got her suitcase, and they went quietly down the hall to his room.

  Inside, she said, “I feel like a high-school girl sneaking off on a forbidden date.”

  He held her and kissed her, but that was not enough. His fingers tugged at the buttons of her blouse and slid behind her to unhook her bra. He held her warm breasts in his hands.

  She pulled away from him then and said, “I feel all grimy. Let's have a bath together first.”

  “In that ugly tub?”

  “I'll make it beautiful,” she said unabashedly.

  And she did: she made it beautiful.

  Later they made love on the four-poster bed while George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln watched.

  At the end of it, while he was going limp but was still snug within her, he said, “When we get back to the States — will you come stay with me?”

  She smiled. “I think that might be good for me.”

  “And wonderful for me.”

  “I could have a talk with that son of yours.”

  “I don't know,” he said. “I've been thinking about him. Maybe most people in the world should believe in black and white morality. Maybe they shouldn't ever be fully aware of all the animals ready to prey on them. A handful of people like you and me can do the dirty work to keep the balance. If everyone was aware of the nature of the jungle, not many people would be happy.”

  “No more talk,” she said.

  They stretched out side by side and pulled the covers over themselves.

  He thought of Dragonfly…

  But then he thought of Lee Ann and knew that he would always have her, knew it in his bones and and blood and muscle, reached out and touched her, and dozed for a while.

  THE PENTAGON: SATURDAY, 5:00 P.M.

  McAlister felt malarial — worse, cancerous — as if he belonged in the terminal ward of a hospital. Every one of his joints ached. His head ached. His eyes were grainy and bloodshot. He was sweaty and rumpled; his face itched from his beard stubble. His tongue felt swollen, and his mouth was sour. He wanted someone to give him a pill and a swallow of gingerale; he wanted someone to tuck him in and fluff his pillow and sing him to sleep.

  Andrew Rice seemed to be in even worse shape than the director. His puffy face was as white as coconut meat. His lips were bluish. His quick little eyes were still little but no longer as quick as they had been; they were eyes that had seen more than they wanted to see; tears of weariness streamed from them constantly. Rice breathed as if he were inhaling all the air in the room, as if he were causing the walls to expand and contrac
t like a bellows. His stubby-fingered hands were at his sides, palms up, motionless.

  Yet the son of a bitch would not break down!

  For the first time in his life Bob McAlister really knew the meaning of the word “fanatic.” Not that he had wanted to really know it. But there it was.

  Kirkwood said, “You can't put it off any longer.”

  Furious, too weak to deal with fury, McAlister got up from the couch and walked over to the armchair from which Rice was actually overflowing. “Damn you, we know! We know so much that you can't win! Why not tell us the rest of it?”

  Rice stared at him and said nothing.

  Wiping a hand across his face, McAlister said, “Rice, if you won't talk, I'm going to have to use a drug on you. A very nasty drug.”

  Rice stared. Said nothing.

  “It's that drug I found the agency using when I became director. It's barbaric. I outlawed it. It's the drug your men used on Carl Altmüller when they were trying to establish a list of other federal marshals who wouldn't recognize him. I saw the needle mark on the man's arm, Rice. It was swollen up like a grape. This drug is so hostile to the human system that the point of injection swells up like a fucking goddamned grape!”

  Rice was unmoved.

  “And now you're forcing me to use it on you.”

  Licking his cracked lips, Rice said, “I suppose that offends your delicate liberal conscience.”

  McAlister stared at him.

  Rice smiled. He looked demonic.

  Turning away from the fat man, McAlister said, “Dr. Teffler, please fill the syringe.”

  Teffler got up and opened his bag and arranged his instruments on Admiral Bryson's desk. He examined the vial that McAlister gave to him. “What's the proper dosage?”