by Mark Henshaw
Pioneer waited twenty minutes before standing to leave. He had given the MSS nothing to see. He was a humble government servant who had bought dinner and eaten it in a park where he could enjoy the rare warm sunset in winter. Still, he would run another surveillance detection route on his walk home as he always did. No matter how good the planning and careful the execution, any operation run long enough would suffer mistakes owed to chance. Pioneer had been an asset long enough for bad luck to finally get its turn to play in the game.
Mitchell was partial to the classier British term “dead letter box,” but dead drops were his preferred operation. Trying to intercept one was a counterintelligence nightmare and Pioneer had a talent for choosing good sites that gave his case officers the short time needed to retrieve a package even under surveillance. Beijing’s alleys were an embarrassment of riches that gave him time to spare to do his work, especially at night. Figuring out from a distance what a man is doing with his hands at a given moment was almost impossible without the sun’s help.
Mitchell gave himself better-than-even odds that someone was behind him tonight. The MSS hadn’t played rough this time, but one man had shown himself in two places far enough apart to reduce the chance that it was mere coincidence. Mitchell was tall enough that the crowds didn’t give him enough help, so he played with his adversaries, donning a hat, doffing his coat, changing his gross profile from time to time. His overcoat was black, his slacks charcoal gray, and there was no moon, so the shadows cast by buildings and parked cars swallowed him and spit him out every few seconds. Every so often he wandered directly under a streetlight to destroy whatever night vision a surveillance team had managed to preserve.
The little market was not so different from dozens of the stores where he had shopped at home in New York City. Fresh foods sat out on open stands, boxed foods on shelves, cooked meals behind long serving counters. Mitchell made his way through the aisle toward the back. Several men in rumpled clothing sat on bar stools before the counter or a few round tables, eating hot food and reading newspapers. Mitchell couldn’t read the Chinese script handwritten on an old chalkboard pinned to a ceiling rafter that published the menu, but he’d been here enough to know the fare and prices.
The cook was an elderly man named Zhang Rusi. The American had gone out of his way to make friends with Rusi, and not for operational reasons. The old man’s culinary talents were more worthy of the Fangshan than this ramshackle eatery. Rusi had formal training but had abandoned that career to run the market that his family had owned for three generations. The other men sitting around the counter were childhood friends poor enough that they couldn’t afford better than the free food he shared with them. He cared nothing for politics and loved Americans. He had taught Mitchell the game of mahjong, the tuition for which was English lessons, and their matches were still one-sided. Rusi was clever and refused to play below his skill, but the cook appreciated the humility the younger man demonstrated in defeat. Mitchell was improving quickly, and Rusi would be proud when he finally lost a match to the American someday.
“Carl, good evening. How are you?” His accent was harsh but Mitchell had nothing but respect for a man in his seventies who was willing to tackle English as a second language.
Mitchell replied in Mandarin. “Hai hao. Ni ne?” I’m well. And you?
“Hai hao. Will you have dinner with us tonight?”
“I regret that I cannot,” Mitchell replied, keeping his language simple, slow, and formal. Rusi’s comprehension was still lacking. “I would like a bowl of your mapodofu to go, please.”
Rusi nodded his head. He held up a handful of fingers. “Five minutes. And you come tomorrow and play or it will be ten minutes.”
Mitchell smiled and nodded. “I will.” Rusi nodded back, his head dipping low, and threw black bean paste and chopped scallions into his wok.
Mitchell walked past the mahjong tables to the tiny restroom hidden behind a high row of stocked shelving. It was a dirty closet that barely offered a tall man room to squat over the toilet without bumping his knees against the wall. The dark space was lit by a dim bulb, for which Mitchell was grateful. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to see the room under full light lest he lose his appetite. It was hardly Rusi’s fault. The room was as old as the rest of the building, grubby to the point that no amount of scrubbing would ever make the worn concrete and tile floor look clean again.
Mitchell closed the door and reached behind the heater. He felt nothing, suppressed a curse, reached into his coat, pulled out a tiny Maglite and turned the head until it lit. The flashlight had a red lens that dimmed the bulb, though he doubted that anyone outside would have seen any light leaking out from the door. He pointed the Maglite down behind the grating.
Mitchell froze. He swept the beam through the space again and confirmed that he hadn’t just missed the expected package in the low light. The space was empty. He killed the Maglite and sat in the near dark to think.
Pioneer had given the signal that he had loaded this dead drop. The chalk mark on the alley wall had been clear and Pioneer wouldn’t have drawn it before completing his half of the operation. There had been no miscommunication about which site he’d used, but there was nothing here.
The possible explanations were limited. The first was that someone had removed the package. Either that person worked for Chinese security or they did not. If they did, the MSS could be waiting outside the bathroom to grab Pioneer’s handler. If that person did not work for the government, there was an excellent chance they wouldn’t know what they had removed, the package wouldn’t make its way into government hands, and Mitchell would get to walk out of the market with his dinner in hand. In either case, this site was compromised and Mitchell would never play mahjong with Rusi again, or even see him.
The second possibility, that Pioneer was working for the MSS, was worth a moment of panic. The arrest of a station chief would be embarrassing and end Mitchell’s career, but the finest Chinese asset in the Agency’s history turning out to be a double agent would be disastrous on a scale that he wasn’t paid enough to even consider.
The tiny bathroom suddenly felt smaller and he didn’t want to open the door, as though the flimsy wood could protect him from anyone standing outside. He stopped his breathing to listen and did not hear voices of any kind, but that did nothing to reassure him. Had the men playing games outside simply stopped talking, lost in thought over some brilliant lie of the tiles? Could he have heard them anyway? He’d been stupid for not paying attention to that detail the other nights he had come here. Or had Rusi’s friends been hushed by the sight of armed soldiers moving into their private little game parlor? Mitchell could not see the shadows of feet through the small crack at the bottom of the door.
He cleared his mind and forced himself to think about nothing. Lord, help me to accept the things I cannot change, he thought. Mitchell stood, flushed the unused toilet, and washed his hands anyway. He faced the door and turned the knob. The light flooded in.
There were no soldiers, no plainclothes MSS officers. The old men playing mahjong didn’t even look up from their tiles as the bathroom door creaked on its ungreased hinges.
Rusi waved Mitchell over. The mapodofu was ready, boxed to go, and the elderly cook held the brown paper bag out to the man.
“Thank you, Rusi.” For everything. I’m sorry, my friend.
“It is my pleasure, Carl. I look forward to our game tomorrow.”
“I will be here,” Mitchell lied, and it hurt. Good-bye, Rusi. He took his dinner, paid the cashier at the door—Rusi’s granddaughter, attractive but a Chinese national and too young for him, both factors preventing her from becoming a temptation—and made his way out to the street. He felt tired. Another friend lost to his job. That list was getting long.
What just happened? he wondered.
TASHAN POWER PLANT
SHUITOU VILLAGE, JINCHENG TOWNSHIP,
KINMEN ISLAND, TAIWAN
2 KILOMETERS FROM THE
CHINESE COAST
James Hsueh tossed his cigarette stub onto the gravel, where it glowed briefly in the dark before fading. The engineer slipped his wrench into his toolbelt, then fumbled for the diagnostic laptop that he’d left on the ground after putting another tobacco stick between his lips and lighting it with the last bit of butane in his Zippo. Last night’s storm had brought lightning with it and one of the flashes had struck a substation tower. It hadn’t worried him at the time. A lightning strike wouldn’t damage the equipment while the arresters were working. The surge arresters saved the voltage transformers, but the mainframe insisted that the power flow was now twitchy. He didn’t believe it despite what the computers insisted, and so he had to make a trip to the station to see the equipment for himself.
James finally admitted to himself that he really just wanted to be home. He didn’t mind the overtime, but there was a young lady in the picture now. He’d met Ju-hsuan at the Taipower human resource office the month before when he’d marched in to argue about a discrepancy in his paycheck. The woman’s smile had disarmed his venom in an instant. He hadn’t thought about anything else for a week until he finally went back and asked her to dinner.
The engineer stared down at the laptop screen in the darkness. Still with the power fluctuations, it said. He made a rude gesture toward the machine that refused to let him leave for the night and leaned back against the steel pylon behind him. He would finish the cigarette to buy time to think before he made another move.
The high-pitched sound caught his ear for a brief second. He looked around, then up, but could see nothing. The lights of Jincheng washed out virtually all the stars and the moon was absent. The substation lights prevented him from seeing most anything beyond the chain-link perimeter fence. Still, he looked back to the street beyond, trying to identify the sound. Nothing was moving inside the perimeter. He was quite sure that he was alone.
The explosion erupted fifty meters behind him at the other end of the substation, far enough that the structures between James and the compression wave gave some protection, but not enough. The wall of air was supersonic for an instant, then slowed and began breaking up as it passed through the now-crumbling obstacles presented by the substation. The part of the remaining wave that struck James blew out his eardrums before it picked up his body and threw him against the chain-link fence along with the shrapnel created from the now-shredded metal parts of the station. His larger bones shattered and his eyes were saved only because he was facing away from the blast.
The fence collapsed in a fraction of a second, and the engineer resumed his own tumble along the ground for another half-dozen meters. The largest of the flying razors had missed him while he was pinned off the ground, but a few dozen smaller pieces tore into his back and legs. Surgeons would remove them in a few hours in a failed effort to save his life. The pieces that would kill him were the six that punctured his lungs. He was fortunate that he wasn’t conscious to feel them ripping into the soft tissues in his chest cavity.
The heat came next, hot enough to curl the paint off the few substation signs that were bolted to the pieces of metal infrastructure still holding together. The exposed edges of the shredded pylons and equipment casings closer to the expanding crater glowed brilliant in a second as they turned white hot. The fireball, cooling as it rushed through the air, had dropped in temperature enough that the engineer didn’t catch fire when it reached his prone body. It was hot enough only to blister his skin and burn off the exposed hair on his head. It also cruelly preserved his life by fusing the cloth of his overalls into the open holes in his back, cauterizing the exterior wounds and saving him from bleeding out.
James Hsueh opened his eyes a moment later for the last time. He could hear nothing. He had just enough time to notice that the Kinmen skyline was entirely dark before the merciful pain knocked him unconscious again for the last time.
CHAPTER 5
THURSDAY
DAY FIVE
ZHONGNANHAI, BEIJING
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
Ambassador Aidan Dunne sat with his legs crossed, wishing, as he had daily for three years, that he could read the organized scrawl of a Chinese newspaper. It was absurd, he thought, that a Harvard PhD should feel illiterate. He’d spent exorbitant amounts of time and money on his education, and it galled him that he couldn’t read a local tabloid. As a boy, one of the sisters teaching at the Maryland Catholic school decided that he had “the gift of tongues” and had promised it wouldn’t go well for him on Judgment Day if he couldn’t answer the Judge’s final questions in at least three languages, including Latin. The nun had been right about his gift for languages, but the ones he’d studied used Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Chinese pictographs were incomprehensible, and the humiliation had finally driven Dunne to admit that, at age sixty-five, his mind wasn’t up to that particular task. He dropped the People’s Daily on the hand-carved cherrywood end table and held his poker face. His hosts knew he couldn’t read their language, but they didn’t need to know that it bothered him.
Dunne was a career diplomat, having spent the better part of thirty years living outside the United States and more than a few in some of the most underdeveloped, if not godforsaken, countries on the planet. His reward for it had been the deputy ambassador post in Beijing, after which tour he’d expected to retire. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the People’s Republic of China was a prized post in the State Department usually given to some favored donor to the sitting president’s political party, so Dunne’s nomination for the ambassadorship had come as a shock to everyone. But President Harrison “Harry” Stuart was in his second term and wouldn’t be trolling for campaign contributions again, which afforded him the luxury of picking people for their skills and experience instead of their largesse. The Washington Post and New York Times editorial pages had praised the pick as a tribute to the way the process should work, which had sucked what little wind there was out of the opposition. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee failed to dredge up any defensible reason to kill his nomination, and few senators were ready to vote against a man who was so obviously qualified and deserving. It was too good a chance to earn some political capital of their own, so they praised him on C-SPAN and confirmed him. The only senator who hadn’t voted for him had been out of town when the vote was taken. The only critics had been those offended that they didn’t get the job, and none were willing to say so in public. The job afforded Dunne and his wife a comfortable last assignment in a modern city and would guarantee a nice stream of moderate speaking fees during his retirement.
Dealing with the Chinese wasn’t always pleasant, but he couldn’t complain with their preferred venue. West of the Forbidden City, Zhongnanhai was a brilliant estate of lakes, gardens, villas, and office buildings that housed the highest levels of the Chinese government. Their version of the White House . . . or the Kremlin, Kathryn Cooke had once told him during his intelligence briefing before assuming the post. Mao had built up the place after the Revolution in ’49. It was a massive complex and, in true government fashion, was off-limits to the average citizen. More than a few of the commoners who were “called to Zhongnanhai” during Mao’s reign never walked out again. Dunne had no doubts that the security services watched him when he came inside, which was fine. He was not an intelligence officer, and whoever was watching for him to plant a microphone was wasting their time. He’d never been declared persona non grata before and he wasn’t going to end his career that way now.
Dunne heard footsteps, the sound of hard-sole shoes beating on the stone tiles in the hallway. He waited for several seconds before turning his head, giving no impression of anxiousness. It would have been undiplomatic to say, and so Dunne would never say it, but the aide looked in no way remarkable. The man’s attire was straight from the universal bureaucrat dress code. The clothes belied the man. Zeng Qinglin was mishu to President Tian Kai, the personal aide to the chief of state of the People’s Republic of China, a civili
zation a few thousand years older than the United States. His position gave him powerful guanxi, the network of personal connections to other leaders in the party who would one day ensure his own rise in the ranks, possibly even to full member status in the Central Committee if he didn’t fall out of favor with the wrong people. The great truth of bureaucracy, Dunne thought. The gatekeeper is almost as powerful as the person behind the gate. More, in some ways.
“Ambassador Dunne, the president will see you now.” Zeng’s English was grammatically correct and spoken with a hint of an English accent. Oxford. Dunne had read the CIA’s file on the man before meeting him for the first time. The Communist Party wouldn’t send its most promising sons and daughters abroad and risk their defection for the sake of a third-rate education.
“Thank you,” Dunne replied.
Dunne stood and rested his weight on his cane, less an affectation and more a needed crutch every year. But the walk was a short one before Zeng stopped and opened one of a pair of dark hardwood doors. He stood aside like a proper doorman, and Dunne walked into the office of President Tian Kai.
Tian—Chinese surnames precede first names—stood beside his desk, an ornate piece of furniture that reminded Dunne of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. The rest of Tian’s office was comfortable, though not to excess, and some of the furniture looked like it was drawn from the Victorian era.
The other men in the room were an impressive group in their own right.
Dunne’s memory for Chinese characters was weak but his memory for faces was excellent. He had spent time studying the leadership biographies provided by both CIA and State Department. He’d never seen so many members of the Politburo Central Committee and Central Military Committee in one place outside the Great Hall of the People.