Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  “It’s a possibility.” She was hedging, but it was as close as she wanted to come to admitting he was right.

  He looked down at her, surprised. “Then why do it?”

  Kyra gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and turned away from him as she stopped walking. He said nothing.

  “I went for a walk,” she said.

  “Outside the embassy?”

  “Yes.”

  “That wasn’t smart,” Jonathan said.

  “No, it wasn’t. I was followed. Beat up, actually,” she admitted.

  Jonathan paused before answering. “And you gave as good as you got.”

  I really wish you’d stop reading me like that. Kyra nodded. “Better than I got, actually. I took a piece of rebar to his nose and his knees. It was like I was watching someone else do it.” She finally turned around and looked up at Jonathan.

  “Nobody tried to stop you? Did anyone follow you back to the embassy?”

  “No, and I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly working a surveillance detection route,” she admitted.

  “Then he was the only one following you. If he’d had partners, they’d have nailed you.”

  Kyra nodded. She felt numb. “I feel like I’m crippled,” Kyra said. “Or busted.”

  “It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder. You should talk to one of the counselors at the Employee Assistance Program,” he said. “It helps.”

  “You had PTSD, didn’t you?”

  “Once, after Iraq. I was one of the analysts that George Tenet sent over to find all those weapons of mass destruction. I was working inside the Green Zone when some insurgents set up one of those hit-and-run mortar attacks. A round hit near my position.” He frowned faintly at some memory that he decided not to share. “It doesn’t mean that you can’t do your job,” Jonathan assured her. “It does mean that you should think long and hard before you sign on for Mitchell’s op.”

  “We need to get Pioneer out.” She winced as she realized that she had spoken the crypt in public. She looked around. No one was in earshot.

  “I’m sure Mitchell appreciates your devotion to duty,” he said.

  Kyra wanted to swear at the man but she held her tongue. Analysts, it seemed, could use logic to read people as well as case officers could for all their training.

  They crossed the street and left the official bounds of the square. The noise of the crowd was slowly fading behind them. “I know that Kathy Cooke asked you. Just because the request came from higher up doesn’t make it any smarter,” Jonathan told her.

  “What is it with you two?” Kyra asked, exasperated.

  Jonathan frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh please,” Kyra exclaimed. “She could’ve hid me anywhere in the Agency, but she gave me to you and walked down to do it in person. And CIA directors don’t give briefings to line analysts or invite them to hang out and watch Chinese presidents give speeches. She’s done both and it wasn’t my company she was after. You two know each other and it isn’t just professional.”

  Jonathan turned his head a bit and looked over at her but said nothing. “I can keep a secret. I work for the CIA,” Kyra said. It felt good to finally have Jonathan on the defensive.

  “Those two don’t go together as often as you might think.” He sighed and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “Kathy wasn’t playing in that game at the War College when we met. She was deputy director of PACOM’s J-2 intel shop and she was running the game. So she wasn’t thrilled when this civilian decided to work around some of the rules he thought were less than realistic. We ended up talking naval tactics over dinner. She asked me out, if you can believe it. She retired from the Navy after that tour, came back to DC, and started a war-gaming think tank. Offered me a job, which I declined, but we picked up where we’d left off on the personal side. Then Lance Showalter became the SecDef. Kathy worked under him at PACOM, and suddenly she’s on the president’s short list for CIA director. She got the nod and that was that.”

  “She shut you down?” Kyra asked.

  “‘Bad practice to date subordinates,’ she said. And some of the good old boys like Rhead have been looking to run her out, which makes me a liability she can’t afford.”

  “She won’t be running the Agency forever,” Kyra observed.

  “George Tenet had the job for seven years, and Kathy Cooke is better than Tenet ever was,” he replied. “And people change.” He fell silent for a half block and didn’t speak again until they reached a corner. “But she’s not here on the ground. Mitchell doesn’t want to lose a major asset on his watch, and you don’t know what he’s telling her. And I doubt that you’re being objective.”

  “I have reasons,” Kyra protested. It sounded weak to her. It must have sounded worse to the analyst.

  “You don’t have anything to prove,” he said. “Don’t do this for your career. Don’t do it unless you really believe in it.”

  Kyra stopped walking. “We owe this man. You’ve read his reports.”

  “I have.”

  “He’s taken more chances for us than we can count. Twenty-five years and they could have found him and executed him a dozen times. That kind of pressure can break a person, you know? He’s probably so paranoid that he doesn’t know what it’s like to feel normal anymore. What does that say about us if we use someone like that and throw them away because we’re not willing to take a risk?” she asked.

  “Smart risks, fine,” he replied. “I’m not sure I’d call this a smart risk.”

  “We play the hand we’re given,” she told him. “If he’s willing to gamble with his life every day for us, we have to be willing to do the same for him at least once. If we don’t, we’re no better than the Russians or the Chinese or anyone else who throws assets away when they’re done with them. And we are better than that. This isn’t about logic and odds and doing the smart thing. This is about paying a debt. It’s about doing the honorable thing.”

  Jonathan just looked sideways at her. There was no arguing with emotion and particularly not this patriotic kind. But his own thoughts were jumbled up, he couldn’t straighten them out, and it disturbed him. “Just don’t let the honorable thing earn you a star on the wall,” he finally said.

  CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

  The green phone rang and Cooke lifted the receiver. “Cooke.”

  “Barron. I just got the call. Stryker accepted escort duty for Pioneer.”

  Cooke nodded despite being alone in the office. She looked up at the clock. “When?”

  “They hit the street tomorrow at dusk,” Barron said. “She’ll have a ninety-minute window to get him to the meeting site. Their flight out leaves at twenty-one hundred local time, so they’ll have a few hours to hunker down.”

  “The MSS will be all over the airport by then,” Cooke said.

  “No help for it,” Barron said. “But, yeah, trust me, I’d love to have the Navy send in a sub and use a SEAL team to extract him by sea.”

  “The Navy wouldn’t cut one loose for us. It’s a bad time to have a war,” Cooke said.

  “The Chinese forgot to call us first,” Barron admitted. “Awfully inconsiderate.”

  “I thought so,” Cooke agreed, smiling for the first time in days.

  “I’ll call as soon as we know something.”

  “I’ll be here,” Cooke said. She hung the green phone back on its cradle and stared out into the early dawn rising across the George Washington National Forest.

  CHAPTER 13

  FRIDAY

  DAY THIRTEEN

  BEIJING

  Beijing’s air under the streetlamps looked like the fall morning fog that rolled off the James River bend at Scottsville where Kyra grew up. Her bedroom had given her an open view of the river valley, which was usually covered by mist formed by the supersaturated air hiding the trees along the shorelines. She had always cursed the pervasive humidity in Virginia, which never died except during winter, but this urban fog was a deep, dull gray. It
disgusted her to see the monochrome color so clearly in the headlights of hundreds of cars, and the smell made her want to retch her dinner onto the sidewalk. She could feel the particulates seeping into her lungs, and the urge to hold her breath was overwhelming. She assumed that her body could learn to ignore the odor, but she imagined that, given time, the air would paint her lungs with a black coat of toxin and guarantee cancer or worse.

  Kyra hoped that she would get a few minutes in the safe house to wash the city air off her skin, but her discomfort was a minor issue. Her immediate concern was the fog’s effect on surveillance. For her, it would make detecting surveillance a more complex chore than usual. Her forward visibility was less than fifty feet; people faded into hazy shapes beyond that range, but that worked both ways. MSS teams would have to ride her closer than they might otherwise prefer. They would likely give her some distance, but in the gaseous soup the instinct would be to close the distance to keep her in sight. It seemed counterintuitive, but the plan said that her best countermove was to help them do exactly that. It made her nervous but she trusted the plan. The variables were eliminated or controlled in ruthless fashion as far as Mitchell could manage, but the odds still were not in her favor. Don’t think about the odds, he’d said. Follow the plan, choose your moments, remember your training.

  Of course, Mitchell didn’t know that Kyra had nearly beaten an MSS officer to death in an alleyway the night before. That man was surely in a hospital. If he had identified her and the MSS picked her out tonight as the woman responsible, they would probably be looking for payback. Then again, they were keeping their distance tonight. Maybe finding one of their officers crippled had made them think twice about their tactic of playing rough. The change introduced a new level of uncertainty.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have done this, she thought. Jonathan was right. She really hadn’t been thinking straight. No help for it now. The MSS had fallen back. That worked in her favor for the moment, and all she could do now was follow the plan.

  Her first task was to let the MSS keep her in sight. They were working hard at that, and it was now an advantage that Kyra was taller than the average Chinese woman and had far lighter hair. Her second task was to make them believe she was unskilled and a desperate choice on Mitchell’s part. Too tall, too blond, badly dressed for a covert operation—an American woman with a bright red backpack had no chance of mixing with the pedestrian crowd here no matter what she tried.

  That she was even trying was a false assumption.

  She fumbled to put on a baseball cap, then pulled off her coat and reversed it far too slowly after turning the corner, to make a few other clumsy changes to her appearance. All were awkward. Amateurs could have done as well. Kyra was no amateur.

  Her third task was to let them see the red backpack. The bag could not have been more visible had it been the blaze orange color she’d worn those times when her father had dragged her into the woods hunting Virginia white-tailed deer. Here it would create a constant point of reference for anyone following her at a longer distance, even through the fog. No matter what else she did to change her gross profile, the surveillance team could always look for the red backpack. In the polluted air, with visibility low and the crowds heavy, it would draw their focus.

  Then she would perform an act of magic.

  Every magic trick has three parts. Kyra had already delivered the “pledge” to her hostile audience. She had offered them an ordinary American woman walking for twelve blocks. Kyra memorized the route before stepping out—so many blocks in one direction, then turn, so many blocks in the next direction. A few landmarks had kept her on the track. With those in sight, Kyra maintained the appearance of a disinterested expatriate wandering the Beijing dajies and dongdajies. She did nothing unusual, and the resulting boredom would set up the gallery to focus on the “turn,” when she would give them something interesting to watch. The MSS would have to wait a few minutes for the “prestige,” the act of misdirection that would complete the trick. They wouldn’t appreciate the artistry when they finally realized that a trick had taken place. This act would be subtle. It would not be a performance meant to impress.

  Pioneer lived in a studio flat on the tenth floor of an aging tower. The building was a cylinder, twice as tall as the Watergate and topped by a roof that extended past the exterior walls. Lit apartment patios lined up in neat columns and drew muted vertical concrete stripes in the haze.

  The building was less than a block ahead now and Kyra could sense the surveillance team behind her. She wondered if these particular foot soldiers knew about Pioneer. Given the extent of Pioneer’s treason against the state, Mitchell considered it likely that the MSS would have compartmentalized his case. The Ministry of State Security was not small, and anyone low enough in the organization to be stuck following random Americans on the street likely wouldn’t know about him, and therefore where he lived. It was a gamble, but an unavoidable one. Depending on the efficiency of their internal communications, she would likely have a few minutes before the Sixth Bureau pieced anything together. If they were like CIA’s bureaucracy, she could have days. Another gamble—the enemy’s response time was unpredictable.

  Kyra entered the building.

  The cramped lobby was not well lit and the dark paint and carpet soaked up most of the available light. The elevator was ahead to the left, out of the line of sight of anyone at the front door. Unless the surveillance team wanted to enter the building to maintain pursuit, they would have to fan out to cover all the exits. There were two others, one a fire exit to the east, the other a cargo entrance in the building rear. Spreading the team out would actually help her. Her magic act would work best if played out for a small audience, the smaller the better. A single witness could be more easily confused than several who might each notice different details and piece together the truth more quickly. If only one man saw the trick, he would call out to his team, out of sight at the other exits, and they would have to take his word for what he saw.

  Kyra called for the elevator. Then she closed her eyes and listened. Turning back to look around the corner and watch the door would have been obvious, but sound carried through the lobby just fine. The elevator took more than a minute to reach the lobby floor, and the building’s main entrance door didn’t open during that time. Either she was alone, the best possibility of all, or the surveillance team was splitting apart to surround the building. They might have been calling for additional assets, but even so it would likely take them longer to arrive than she planned to give them.

  Kyra stepped into the elevator car and wondered where the hidden cameras were.

  The view of the Forbidden City was one of the few amenities worth the rent Pioneer had paid for more than twenty years. Looking south he could see the Qianqinggong, the Palace of Heavenly Purity, rising above the northern wall. Beyond it farther to the south was Tiananmen Square. He couldn’t see the square from his bedroom but he knew it was there.

  The MSS knew what he was. There was no question about that. They had not dragged him away to be shot only because they wanted to expose the larger network of which he was a part. He had signaled the CIA and only after did it occur to him that it might have been exactly the wrong play. CIA now knew he was exposed, and there would be no more covert meetings. They might not come for him. Pioneer would live out his last days working for the party until the MSS decided that there was nothing else to be gained from watching him, and then they would come for him some night, take him away, and shoot him in a grubby basement. He didn’t know how many more days he had, but the length of his life would be set by some MSS officer’s patience.

  There had been a disturbance in the apartment above his the night before, heavy knocking on the floorboards. Perhaps the MSS had taken over the apartment. They could have installed fiber-optic cameras in the ceiling when he had gone for dinner. His first impulse was to search for them, but he had concluded that it was futile. If the MSS wanted to watch him, they would watch him and he c
ouldn’t stop it. They could enter his home anytime he left within moments of his departure. Any person he passed in the hallway could be the MSS officer who would soon put the pistol to his head. Any apartment in the building could be an MSS watch post. The same held true for any apartment in any building he could see from his own home. He’d felt alone for years, but now his home was filled with a sense of murderous hostility.

  Despite that, he felt a strange calm. He wondered if the unknown God was with him, whispering peace to his soul. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Could God love a traitor? Perhaps, he supposed. A loving God surely could not love the party, so perhaps God could love one who fought them. Perhaps there was some reward waiting for him after death instead of the oblivion that the party promised. Either was a more tempting path than what he was living now. Suicide had occurred to him, but Pioneer felt that would be a surrender to the enemy. He had fought the party for more than half his life and he could not give that up so easily. No, if he was going to die today, they would have to kill him. He would not do their job for them. If he couldn’t hurt them any other way, they would at least pay for the cheap bullet they would use on the back of his head.

  Someone knocked on his door. Pioneer turned and didn’t rise from the table. The knock came again after a half minute.

  They had come. The MSS officer in charge, whoever he was, wasn’t a patient man after all.

  Pioneer pushed his half-eaten plate of lamb roast across the table, wiped his mouth, and stood. He walked to the entryway, gripped the knob until his knuckles cracked, and opened the door to look his short future in the face so he could spit on it.

  “Jian-Min!”

  The blond woman leapt at him. Only the smile on her face kept him from backing away in a panic, and he found his arms full of an American girl he did not know. She jabbered at him in Chinese with an accent poor enough that he questioned whether she understood her own words or was just repeating memorized phrases like a good foreign actress.