Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  “If he’s really been compromised, he couldn’t give us that,” Cooke noted. “Best case, the Chinese would just roll him up. Worst case, they’d feed him misinformation and then we’d confirm he’s one of ours by acting on it.” She didn’t have to mention that the best case would still be an epic disaster.

  “We’ve got two carrier battle groups sitting less than two hundred miles from the Chinese coast,” Rhead said. “We should get someone in the room with him, calm him down, send him back in to see what he can deliver for us. If we weren’t sending carriers in to protect twenty million people, I’d say pull him out. But we’re facing a war with our ability to maintain alliances in the Pacific for the next few decades on the line. Bad enough to lose our best asset in Beijing, but we stand to lose a lot more if we botch an exfiltration, which could be real easy to do if he’s under surveillance. We should cut our losses.”

  “We owe this man—,” Cooke said.

  “We owe him nothing,” Rhead cut her off. “Traitors don’t work for charity. They have their own agendas and we paid this one. He got what he wanted.”

  “That’s cold, Mike,” Stuart observed.

  “That’s pragmatic, Harry,” Rhead said, speaking informally to the president for the first time in Cooke’s presence. “Kathy’s people make deals with devils and I wouldn’t put this country’s long-term interests at risk for someone like that.”

  “He’s a dead man if we abandon him,” Cooke replied. “Done deal. He gets a bullet in the back of the head.”

  “If we try to save him, we’re risking our long-term relationship with the Chinese,” Rhead said.

  “We’re risking that right now anyway,” Stuart said. The president leaned forward, put his hands together, and pressed them against his chin.

  Stuart said nothing. Cooke held his gaze, refusing to look over at Rhead, whose stare she could feel on her skin. “The only way out is through, eh?”

  “Mr. President—,” Rhead started.

  Stuart cut him off with his hand. “Kathy, proceed at your discretion, but if your people get caught, getting them out won’t be your job. It’ll be Aidan Dunne’s. No ops to save them from jail. Mike has a point. Anyone who gets arrested will be spending a few years in jail. Understood?”

  Cooke nodded slowly. “Yes, sir.”

  CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

  As a rule—and it was a rule that was given no exceptions—the Farm did not graduate case officers if there was any doubt about their skills. There was a wall in the Old Headquarters Building main entrance with one hundred two chiseled gray stars, each marking a dead CIA officer. Beneath them sat a black book under glass, bound in Moroccan goatskin leather, the pages handmade of parchment paper, with the names of the deceased each handwritten in calligraphic style next to a gold star. The Book of Honor had only fifty-four names. Forty-eight dead officers remained anonymous, some more than fifty years after having made their final sacrifice for their agency and their country. They died not because their training hadn’t been equal to the game. It was simply a fact that the game had rigid rules and, at times, no rules at all. Sometimes luck just ran bad and sometimes no training was enough.

  So the exercises at the Farm were constantly revised, trainees were graded by unforgiving instructors, and there was no curve given. Trainees were either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” Those who couldn’t achieve the former rating received desk jobs. Those who did went to the field and ran operations. It was that simple.

  Cooke stared at Kyra Stryker’s file on the flat panel monitor. She had achieved the “satisfactory” rating in every Farm exercise with no exceptions. The instructors’ comments were devoid of negative criticism, and even the known curmudgeons on the Farm staff had found occasion to pay her random compliments. Stryker’s memory was near-photographic and her surveillance detection ability was unusually sharp. The report on her escape-and-evasion exercises was fascinating despite the dry prose. Few students managed to stay free in the woods of the Virginia Tidewater for the several days they were hunted by their instructors, but Stryker had managed it. The spotters spent days searching the brush in lines while the dogs sniffed the swamp marshes. The woman had disappeared into the woods and that was the last anyone saw of her until the morning the exercise ended and she’d walked back out. She endured the kidnapping, the screams and taunts, and the humid sweatbox room during the simulated interrogation course well enough. Her qualification scores with the Glock 17 and the HK417 were excellent, and she’d done as well with the 40 mm grenade launcher as any woman her size could have.

  They had tried every way to break her under stress and failed. One instructor’s typed comment summarized Stryker more neatly than any other phrase Cooke could imagine:

  “She’s solid.”

  Stryker’s career should have been textbook—several field tours, moving from less important and dangerous posts to hard-target countries, an occasional headquarters rotation, eventually a series of station chief posts, one or more in Europe or Asia, maybe working Beijing as a real assignment before being brought home for good. With luck and her tickets punched, she would have been tapped to join the NCS leadership team or maybe take a senior DNI post. Reaching the Senior Intelligence Service should have been an inevitability.

  Cooke considered it an injustice, if so polite a term could be applied, that Stryker’s career had imploded six months after her graduation from the Farm.

  “Mitchell’s exfil plan?” Barron was standing in the doorway to Cooke’s office.

  “Stryker’s service record,” Cooke corrected him.

  “You thinking about giving her to Mitchell?”

  “I’m considering it,” Cooke said.

  “That would be one fewer officer we’d have to get into the country,” Barron admitted. “And Rhead would have a stroke. Win-win.”

  “Fine by me,” Cooke agreed. “Stuart left the call to us, but he promised there wouldn’t be any ops to save our people if anyone gets pinched.”

  “We don’t have any Chinese agents in custody to bargain with anyway. I suppose we could always exhume Larry Wu-tai Chin. Or rearrest Wen Ho Lee,” Barron said, a smile breaking across his weathered face.

  “No leverage there,” Cooke said, half-serious. “The Bureau couldn’t convict him the first time.”

  “True,” Barron said. He pulled the guest chair away from the desk and let his body fall into it. The man appeared tired and Cooke couldn’t fault him for it.

  She turned the monitor off, drained the last bit of cooling black sludge from her mug, then stared at it. “What makes a person turn on their country?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “If we’re going to expose Stryker and Mitchell to that kind of risk, I’d like to think we were doing it for someone who was worth it,” Cooke said.

  “It’s bad tradecraft to spend too much time asking traitors why they’re doing what they do,” Barron said. “You ask them that and the ones that are angels might reconsider. The ones who are devils will just lie, which is usually preferable to hearing the truth. Quite frankly, I don’t want to know the private secrets of dirty people, strange as that sounds. Better to take them as they come. Judge them by their reliability and credibility, not their integrity.”

  “That doesn’t make it easier to risk good people for bad.”

  “Our people are breaking Chinese law every time they set foot on the street,” Barron pointed out. “It’s just a matter of degree what they’ll have to do to get Pioneer out. But I do know how you feel.”

  “Do you?” Cooke asked. It was a genuine question, not a try at sarcasm.

  “Yeah.” Barron sucked on his teeth. “Three of the stars on the Memorial Wall were mine. The first one died in Baghdad. Charlie Lyman. He was on his way to meet with an informer when a roadside bomb took out his Humvee. We had to pick him and his Iraqi translator up with shovels. The second was Tim Pratt. An Afghani drug courier shot him in the head while he was doing counternarcotics w
ork outside Ghazni. It took us two days to find his body. The birds led us to him.” He stopped speaking.

  “And number three?”

  Barron sighed and lowered his head a bit. “Emmanuela Giordano. We called her Emma. She bought it in a car wreck in Moscow. Stupid buggers had her under close surveillance, and the moron driving the lead car actually managed to hit her in the rear quarter. She wasn’t even trying to lose them. The idiot just panicked in bad traffic and spun her out on the freeway. The car rolled three times and a truck didn’t stop quick enough. Hit her broadside on the driver’s side door.”

  “Anyone else with her?”

  “Me. Four broken ribs and a concussion. I have just enough hair to hide the scar.”

  Cooke smiled. “Glad you made it.”

  “Me too,” Barron said. “Emma was dead on the scene. I spent six months in recovery and got sent to Beijing for my next tour. The next year, Pioneer made contact and I set him up as an asset. So I can tell you that he’s as close to one of the angels as we find in this business.”

  “Good reasons for turning traitor?” Cooke asked.

  “One reason, and it’s a good one,” Barron said.

  “I thought you didn’t ask the reasons.”

  “I didn’t ask. He volunteered it,” Barron said. “If I never did anything else here, getting him set up made everything else worth it. I’d sure like to see him again.”

  Cooke finally set the mug onto the desk. “Do you think Stryker can handle the mission?”

  Barron sat back and stared down for a moment. “Hard to say. She passed the Farm. She’s not a seasoned officer and Beijing is a tough place to do the work. But she survived Venezuela. Some of that was dumb luck. A lot wasn’t. She trusted her instincts.”

  “Well, that’s the real issue, isn’t it?” Cooke asked.

  “It counts for a lot,” Barron admitted. “So what’r’ya gonna do?”

  “Trust my instincts, I suppose.”

  “Your call.” Barron stood up to leave for his office. “Either way, we’ll get it done. No excuses.”

  CHAPTER 12

  THURSDAY

  DAY TWELVE

  BEIJING

  Kyra had hoped that a walk on the streets would offer the distraction she had needed so much for weeks, but the reality was disappointing. If not for the signs in Mandarin, the neighborhood surrounding the US embassy could have passed for a great number of cities that she had seen. The architecture was all avant-garde, even daring, and certainly impressive to her untrained eye. The city had become a laboratory for architects, and the modern constructions were devouring the sections that still matched Kyra’s notion of what a Chinese city should be. But her first impression of the city she saw from the taxicab had been right. The Chinese were making their home a modern place at a cost that the case officer found depressing.

  Mitchell had warned her and Burke about leaving safe ground, ordered them against it really, but Jonathan had buried himself in papers and research and Kyra had had enough of that. Her mind was screaming to do something besides sit at another desk and stare at another monitor. She could have that life anywhere, and Kyra had joined the Agency hoping for something better. Now she was standing in one of the great countries—illegally, she admitted—that all case officers hoped to see in their lifetime. It was the new field where case officers could test their skills against an enemy that was respected, skilled, and persistent. It was the kind of assignment that Kyra had hoped to earn, would probably never have now, and so she was determined that she hadn’t traveled so far to see nothing but the inside of the embassy compound. Throwing her out of the country was the worst penalty Mitchell could lay on her and she’d been through that once. So Kyra checked her rear pocket for her passport and Chinese yuan and slipped out through the south gate past the Marine guard onto An Jia Lou Road. The embassies of South Korea and India sat across the street and the embassies of Israel and Malaysia just beyond with their own guards standing watch over the darkened street. Kyra worked her way south until she passed the Israeli embassy and diplomatic housing complex to the south and the loose pedestrian crowd began to change from Westerners and South Asians to Chinese natives.

  Following the map in her mind, she turned southeast when she reached the Liangmaqiao Road and began a long walk. The developed neighborhood of the foreign consulates gave way to a series of half-finished construction projects and then finally to the more traditional Chinese districts that she’d hoped to see. Checking her watch, Kyra decided that she had traveled over two miles; her feet were already hurting. Her sneakers were not designed for long walks. She would have some blisters. She ignored the sore spots and kept up her pace and fixed her eyes on the skyline. The Forbidden City lit up the cityscape in the distance. She doubted that she could make the trip on foot tonight.

  The first blow caught her square between her shoulder blades and knocked her into the brick wall to her right. Kyra got her hands up to protect her face before she made contact but still hit hard enough to scrape her palms on the rough stone. Stunned, she turned her head and saw a Chinese man, well dressed in a British-cut suit, average build, just a little taller than herself. He looked at her, stoic, no expression on his face, but he was clearly focused on her. He stood still as the crowd flowed around him.

  Kyra twisted her neck in a circle to straighten out the kink that the body check had given her, then stared straight at the man as a strange emotion settled over her. The tear along her arm throbbed as her heart started to pound. She thought for a moment that she should have been furious, but she felt detached . . . almost unfeeling.

  You want to play? she thought.

  Kyra turned away from the man and began to walk again. She turned her head briefly to check for the tail. He was barely an arm’s length behind her. She approached the cross street, then stopped and braced herself. It was a good guess. The man walked into her hard enough that she would have sprawled onto the street had she not prepared herself for the hit. This time she didn’t bother to look back.

  Something cold rose up inside her chest and her thoughts went blank. The light changed and she began to cross with the small mob. The man behind bumped her again as she approached the opposite sidewalk, a subtle move intended to make it look as though she had tripped trying to step up on the curb. She was agile enough to clear the rise, but the feeling inside her grew stronger and she lost all desire to suppress it.

  An alleyway cut into the wall on her right fifteen feet ahead. Kyra quickened her pace just a bit, and a brief glance confirmed that she had managed to put a few pedestrians between her and the man behind. She approached the alley, then made a quick turn and ran into the dark space.

  Alpha saw the woman break to the right and sprint into the alley. He pushed a pair of random lovers out of his path and rushed forward to the dark hole between the buildings. He stared into the dark and realized he could see nothing beyond, but there was no light at the end of the alley to suggest another exit. The woman had to be somewhere in front of him, but the streetlamps behind him destroyed his night vision and he wouldn’t recover it until he stepped into the darkness. He took the step and moved into the black space.

  The metal rebar caught him flat on the nose and shattered his upper lateral cartilage into pieces. Blood gushed out in an instant into his mouth and throat and he gagged. The pain tore through his head and he couldn’t think. All he managed was the reflex to move his hands to his face to cover the wound.

  The blow sent a vibration through the rebar that rebounded through her arm, and Kyra felt a burst of pain try to erupt from her gutted triceps. The Vicodin let her ignore it. Kyra swung for his kneecap next. Her aim was off in the dark and she missed the patella on the first try. The second try connected squarely, dropping Alpha to the concrete and forcing a cry from him despite the blood in his throat leaking from the gusher in the middle of his face.

  Kyra was yelling and crying now, had lost all self-control and knew it, but she couldn’t stop herself. The
trained part of her mind watched with detachment as she went wild, unable to regain herself. She didn’t understand that she was cursing, and that part of her mind that was quietly observing the scene caught bits of English and Spanish screams directed at the pathetic, crippled figure on the ground curled into the fetal position.

  She didn’t know how long it went on. It felt like minutes, certainly, but the beating could only have lasted for a few seconds. Then the rebar slipped from her fingers and fell to the concrete with several loud clangs as the ends took turns hitting the ground faster and faster until it came to rest. She didn’t know why she stopped, but Kyra wasn’t a killer. She stared down at the silhouette for a brief moment, then turned and ran.

  She paused at the curtain of light dividing the street from the darkened alley. Her heart was pounding hard and she couldn’t control her breathing. No pedestrians had stopped. The traffic had been loud enough to drown out the noises from the alleyway.

  Kyra turned back toward the embassy district and began to run.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  “That’s it, Mr. President.” Barron closed the book and set it on the table. There were five printed copies of Mitchell’s plan to exfiltrate Pioneer in existence and they were all in the Oval Office. Stuart, Rhead, Showalter, Cooke, and Barron had copies, all received in that order. Barron would collect them all once the meeting was over, carry them back to Langley in a lockbag, and shred them personally. He found himself hoping that the DNI would demand to keep a copy so he could tell Rhead off in front of the president. Barron despised Michael Rhead for several excellent reasons, but the most important one was sure to come out in the next five minutes. He’d been waiting for this particular fight.

  Stuart didn’t close his own leather binder. “It seems too simple.”

  Barron nodded. “The more complicated they are, the more likely they are to fail. Simplicity leaves room for flexibility when things don’t go as planned. Besides, with the MSS putting the lockdown on everyone over there, our resources are limited.”