by Mark Henshaw
“‘Captains talk strategy, generals talk logistics,’ eh?” Stuart asked.
“It’s the literal truth in this case,” Cooke said. She set her own book on the table next to Barron’s.
“Who’s going to perform the retrieval?” Rhead said. The DNI had been remarkably uncritical of the plan. He seemed almost at peace with Cooke’s decision to proceed with the operation.
Barron watched as Cooke took a breath. “They’ve got blanket coverage on most of the long-term residents that pass through the embassies there, not just our people. It’s—”
“Who?” Rhead repeated.
Cooke looked Rhead straight in the face. “Kyra Stryker,” she said.
Rhead slammed his binder shut and beat the leather book on the coffee table so hard that Cooke feared for its structural integrity. “Are you out of your mind?” the DNI yelled. The Secret Service officer standing by the door shifted his stance automatically in response to the sudden display of aggression.
“Mike!” Stuart shouted at the man. The DNI looked at the president, unapologetic for his show of temper. “There’s only one person who gets to yell at people in this office and you aren’t him. Care to explain yourself?” It was not really a question.
“Kyra Stryker is a case officer I ordered Director Cooke to fire a month ago for incompetence and insubordination. And you”—Rhead leveled a finger at Cooke—“disobeyed that order.”
“And I’d do it again.”
“You’re fired!” Rhead snapped. “I want your resig—”
“Put a lid on it, Mike! I decide who gets fired in here,” Stuart practically yelled at the man. “Kathy, what’s the story on Stryker?”
“Stryker is an excellent case officer, Mr. President,” Cooke started. “She graduated from the Farm last spring with the second-highest score on record. Her first assignment was to Caracas—”
“She botched a clandestine meeting with an asset and almost got herself arrested,” Rhead cut her off. “And you sent her right back into the field, against my orders, to exfiltrate an asset in a city that’s even more hostile! You’re as incompetent as Stryker!”
Stuart silenced Rhead with a look. “Kathy, I’m assuming there’s another side to this story?”
“There is, sir. The meeting in Caracas did go wrong, that’s true, but it was a meeting that Stryker had argued against.”
Barron nodded. “There were clear signs that the asset was a double agent working for the Venezuelans. We determined that he couldn’t have had access to the intelligence he was providing us even though it was checking out. So we decided to terminate the relationship rather than risk our people.” He stopped suddenly, clenched his jaw, and fought the urge to launch out of his seat. Surprised, Cooke saw that he had balled his hands into fists. She’d never seen him so tense. When he finally spoke, he was fighting to keep his demeanor professional. “But the chief of station refused our assessment and ordered the original case officer to maintain the relationship. He refused, so the COS took him off the case and assigned Stryker. He threatened to terminate her assignment if she didn’t go. Even so, she went under protest. She made it to the site and figured in two seconds that the meet was an ambush. There were at least a dozen SEBIN commandos hiding around the bridge. Stryker outran them on foot but she took a bullet in the arm for her trouble. She got to a safe house and had to perform first aid on herself with some hemostatic gauze and morphine and almost overdosed. We evaced her to the States and she’s spent the last two months on medical leave.”
“Your chief of station sounds incompetent,” Stuart said.
“He’s not our chief of station, strictly speaking, sir,” Barron said. “He’s not a CIA officer.”
“Who are we talking about here?” Stuart asked.
“I think Director Rhead should answer that question,” Cooke said. Heads turned in the DNI’s direction.
Cooke sat back and Barron suppressed a smile. Rhead looked like he was suppressing the urge to strangle the CIA director only because the Secret Service officer would have beaten him if he had tried. “Sam Rigdon.”
“Rigdon . . .,” Stuart said. “Why do I know that name?”
Barron turned to Rhead. “Are you going to tell him, or am I?”
Rhead gritted his teeth. “Because, Mr. President,” he said, “he was your ambassador to Kenya during your first term. And he donated money to your reelection campaign.”
It took almost ten seconds for the implication to register, and then Stuart ran his hands down his face, pale white. “You gave a chief of station slot to a campaign donor?”
“Six months before you nominated me to take over CIA,” Cooke told him. “The acting director at the time had no political leverage to stop the appointment.”
“Rigdon was a CIA analyst for five years before he went to the private sector—,” Rhead started to argue.
“Analysts read reports and give bad PowerPoint briefings,” Stuart said. “They don’t run ops! What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that you had a major contributor with some qualifications who was more interested in playing spy again than in being a diplomat to some rat-hole country that nobody cares about!” Rhead shot back. “We give ambassadorships to donors! Chiefs of stations are just the intel equivalent, they answer to me, and there’s no law that says they have to be CIA bodies.”
“Unbelievable,” Stuart muttered. “Talk about politicizing intelligence.”
“Is he still in Caracas?” Showalter asked.
“Yes,” Cooke said. Barron had done his duty and it was time to get him out of the direct line of fire. “Director Rhead disagreed with our after-action report and refused to let us remove Rigdon. Instead, he decided that Stryker was at fault and ordered her fired.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here!” Rhead snapped.
“Shut up!” Stuart ordered. “I’ve heard enough from you.”
“Harry—,” Rhead started.
“Shut up!” Stuart yelled. Rhead slumped back and closed his mouth. “Get Rigdon out of there right now, Mike. Do it or I’ll have State revoke his passport and he can stay in Caracas. Kathy, put somebody in who can do the job. And I don’t care if we have to give Rigdon his money back; once he lands in Miami, shut him up. I don’t even want to think what the Post headline would read. And don’t get me started on what could happen on the Hill if this gets out. Mike, are there any more Rigdons out there? Don’t talk, just nod.” Rhead shook his head. “Good. Kathy, can Stryker get the job done in Beijing?”
“Yes, sir, we believe she can,” Cooke said. “Nothing’s guaranteed, but we believe that for this assignment, she’ll do as well as anyone else that we could put on it.”
“When will you pull Pioneer out?” Stuart asked.
“We haven’t asked Stryker to take the mission yet,” Cooke said. “We need your approval for the operation first.”
“You trust her?” Stuart asked.
“Absolutely, sir,” Cooke said.
“Then it’s your hide. Tell her godspeed.”
“I will, sir.”
“And Mike?” the president said, turning to his director of national intelligence.
“Yes, Mr. President?” The DNI sounded hesitant.
“You will not pull a Valerie Plame on that girl. If I see Stryker’s name in the Post, so help me, I’ll turn the attorney general loose on you. You understand me?”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Resignation this time. Cooke watched the DNI’s shoulders slump down.
BEIJING
Kyra had not wanted Mitchell to be an impressive man. Quite the opposite, she had wanted him to be very much the one kind of station chief she already knew, arrogant and unruly. It would have saved her from the guilt of staying silent about beating a Chinese intelligence officer near to death, and that emotion was hollowing her out. Mitchell clearly was competent and he seemed like a decent man, which almost certainly meant he would send her, and probably Jonathan, to the airport the minute sh
e confessed. But the right thing and the proper thing weren’t the same at the moment.
Mitchell was past his prime, in his midfifties by her guess. His time as a field officer was nearly finished, and clearly it had not been wasted. His office walls weren’t covered with trophies like some station chiefs’, with ceremonial weapons or gifts from foreign intelligence services. Mitchell’s office was far more spare. In fact, he had allowed himself only one significant career decoration, but it told enough of his story to make Kyra feel small. Under the glass covering his cherry desktop was a framed array of some fifty challenge coins collected from military divisions and brigades, foreign and domestic, mingled with a few from foreign intelligence services. It was a modest tribute to a covert career that entitled the man to far more hubris than he had shown her. Mitchell had led the life she wanted for herself. Now denied, she wanted to hate him for it but had no good reason to disrespect the man.
Mitchell interrupted her thoughts as he turned around in his chair and pulled printout from the laser printer that sat behind his desk. “Read this,” he ordered. Kyra took the cable.
ACTION REQUIRED: EXFILTRATE PIONEER
1. D/CIA DIRECTS COS TO EXFILTRATE PIONEER.
2. GIVEN EXTRAORDINARILY HOSTILE CONDITIONS ON THE GROUND, COS IS AUTHORIZED TO REDIRECT ALL AVAILABLE RESOURCES AS NECESSARY. D/CIA REGRETS THAT LOCAL SECURITY LOCKDOWN PRECLUDES SENDING SIGNIFICANT ASSETS IN SHORT ORDER TO ASSIST. IF REQUIRED, COS IS DIRECTED TO MAKE USE OF OFFICER STRYKER IN ANY CAPACITY NECESSARY IF SHE IS WILLING. STRYKER IS QUALIFIED AND HAS FULL CONFIDENCE OF D/CIA AND D/NCS. PERSONNEL FILE ATTACHED FOR COS REVIEW.
3. ANY OFFICERS DETAINED DURING THIS OPERATION BY LOCAL SECURITY SHOULD NOT EXPECT IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Stryker has . . . full confidence of D/CIA, and D/NCS. She read the phrase again, struggling and failing to say something meaningful.
Mitchell gave her another few moments of silence before he finally spoke. “Are you in?”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” Kyra said.
“Nobody was,” Mitchell said. “If you don’t want to take part, no one will hold it against you. You’re not familiar with the ground here and it’s hostile territory. But Cooke wouldn’t ask if Pioneer wasn’t worth it.”
Kyra nodded. She reread the second paragraph, then nodded her head. “I’m in.”
“You sure?” Mitchell asked. “You understand paragraph three there? Anyone who gets arrested is going to do serious jail time here, maybe a life sentence. Pioneer is that big.”
She tried to weigh the idea of having Mitchell’s life against a long stretch in Chinese prison but found that she couldn’t think. Her logic and her emotions were taking her in different directions. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the world but it didn’t help. Finally she cleared her mind and said what felt right. “I understand,” she replied. “What’s the plan?”
“We have a plan, but conditions out there are forcing us to revise it. The MSS and the other locals have been smothering us. It’s all been deterrence surveillance on long-term residents, so my people have a high probability of getting burned if they try—”
“But I’m disposable,” Kyra said, interrupting.
Mitchell fell silent for a moment before answering. “I don’t use that word. You’re trained, you’re anonymous to the MSS, and you don’t have to worry about your long-term cover here. I went over your file. You would’ve wiped the floor with me at the Farm twenty-five years ago. So you’re not disposable. You’re valuable. Unless you think you can’t handle it.”
Can I? Two hours ago, before beating a man into the ground with a piece of rebar, she wouldn’t have had a doubt. Now she didn’t know. Kyra said nothing.
Mitchell shrugged. “Just speaking truth.” He reached back into the safe and pulled out a black binder. “Here’s the exfil plan. Go over it. We’re going to make some changes in the next few hours, but you need to know what’s in here if you’re going to help us with that. We’ll be meeting in the conference room to go over everything at nineteen thirty.”
Kyra nodded. “What about Jon?”
“Burke? He doesn’t need to know—,” Mitchell started.
“Yes, he does,” she said, more vehement than she’d intended.
Mitchell frowned. “He’s had some training, crash-and-bang, firearms, but nothing like he’d need to help with this.”
“I didn’t ask for his help,” Kyra said. “But he’s read into everything, the same as me. There’s no reason to cut him out.”
“He’s an—”
“‘He’s an analyst’ isn’t good enough. Not this time.”
Mitchell cocked his head, surprised. “What’s this guy to you?”
“Burke can be a jackass, but he’s my partner on this one. You want my help, you tell him what’s going on.”
Mitchell stared at the woman and let out a long, exasperated breath. “Fine.”
TIANANMEN SQUARE BEIJING, CHINA
The protest was large and loud, but organized in typical Chinese fashion. The protesters carried signs written in a mix of Chinese and English. The grammar for the latter was surprisingly good. Jonathan picked out the CNN camera crew, which was circling the finest-looking female reporter he’d seen in some time. He and Kyra stood at a safe distance and dead center in the reporter’s line of sight, though not close enough to draw her attention. The spot kept them behind the cameras and lights illuminating the darkened square. There was no question that the MSS was watching the feed.
A BBC reporter stood to the east taping a segment, her back to the crowd. Kyra loved a British accent, but she couldn’t hear the words over the chanting locals. Officers of the People’s Armed Police stood around the edges of the square glaring at foreigners but doing nothing to stem the steady flow of natives to the crowd. The protesters were bundled up against the cold and exhaled hundreds of little clouds of freezing breaths as they yelled and chanted. In the center, one man was preaching against the treacherous Taiwanese through a mega-phone, and Kyra wondered whether it was also government-issued. She couldn’t imagine that the man kept one handy in a closet at home just in case a mass protest erupted—not in this country. Maybe in the US, but not in the People’s Republic of China.
Kyra tried to estimate the size of the crowd but couldn’t settle on a number with any degree of confidence and gave up the exercise. Tiananmen Square was the largest open space in Beijing but she didn’t know the actual dimensions, which could have simplified what should have been a simple mathematical problem. The Forbidden City consumed the view across Dongchang’an Jie Street to the north with its massive wall, enclosing a palace almost a kilometer square. The Tiananmen Gate of Heavenly Peace crossed the palace’s perimeter moat to the Taihemen Gate of Supreme Harmony, through which visitors could visit the Imperial Gardens, the Qianqinggong or Palace of Heavenly Purity, and the dozens of other buildings housed inside the complex. The Great Hall of the People stood to the west and Mao’s mausoleum to the south.
It was a clear night and cold, which would make it trivial for one of NRO’s satellites, or even the commercial birds for that matter, to get some clear overhead shots. Calculating the crowd’s size using a high-resolution bird’s-eye photograph would yield a number far more accurate than anything she could guess at, even if she had known the dimensions.
“Fifty thousand at least,” Jonathan said, reading the young woman’s mind.
“You’ve seen protests this large before?”
“A couple of times in the Middle East, usually whenever the Israelis moved on the West Bank. This is all theater. I doubt the masses even know what their signs say.”
Kyra stared at the placards and realized in an instant that more than a few were written not in good English but in perfect English. The grammar was too good to believe the signs had been written by the commoners carrying them, and she wondered which government propaganda department was responsible for cranking out protest signs in foreign languages.
“I’ve seen a few in W
ashington, on the Downtown Mall,” Kyra said. “A couple of inaugurations and the Fourth of July fireworks.”
“You wouldn’t remember it, but the one here back in eighty-nine got real bloody.” He was lost in thought for the moment and was talking as much to himself as to her. “Deng Xiopeng called out the tanks. The whole city went into lockdown and there were some pretty serious riots in the streets—Molotov cocktails, burning troop transports, the works. The PLA gunned down a few hundred students, maybe as many as a thousand, and they jailed at least that many over the next decade. They never made the final body count public, if they ever bothered to total one up. The party tried to erase the whole event from the history books and they’ve been real skittish about letting anything like it start up again.”
“One of our people should write this one up,” she suggested.
“Don’t bother,” Jonathan said. “Leave the cable writing on this kind of thing to State. Nothing here is worth classifying, and the press is watching, so the Open Source Center will get a report to the analysts. Save your energy for more complicated problems.”
He turned and started walking away from the protest. He said nothing for almost a minute. She smelled street food but could not find a vendor within sight.
“They want me to help with the exfil,” she said quietly.
“I know. I saw the cable,” Jonathan said. That surprised her. She wondered how he’d managed that feat. There was no way that Mitchell would have shared it. “It’s a very bad idea.”
“You’re an expert on covert ops now?” Kyra asked.
“No, but I’m not totally ignorant on the subject. You don’t know the city and you don’t speak the language. You don’t have diplomatic cover and I’m not sure the Chinese would respect it if they caught you.” He stopped himself and Kyra stared up at him, surprised. He never looked at her, just stared straight ahead. He finally started again. “The chances of you getting nabbed and spending a few decades in a Beijing prison seem very high to me.”