Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  Kyra said nothing for a moment. He was right. If Pioneer was detained, there would be no saving him from a sure bullet to the head after a trial that would be finished in a few weeks at most. “No. But somebody will have to tell the director ASAP.”

  “Agreed.” They lapsed into silence. The GPS unit mounted on the dash guided them into the airport and Kyra pulled the car into a covered garage. Someone from the embassy would come out to retrieve it later.

  Kyra killed the engine. “I’ll go in first. Follow me in five minutes.”

  “See you in Seoul.”

  Kyra moved through boarding security without drawing attention, retrieved her carry-on, and worked through the masses toward her assigned gate. The airport crowd was thin, but the number of uniformed guards moving through the terminal was far higher than the night she and Jonathan had entered the country. Soldiers were standing by the doors leading to the boarding ramps. To her eye, there was no sense of urgency on their part. They stood to the sides, close enough to the boarding lines that some of the Western passengers seemed uncomfortable with the attention. The Asian passengers seemed unmoved by the scrutiny. The sense of calm was a good sign. A blatant show of hostile sorting through departing passengers would be the surest sign that the MSS had figured out something was up. Kyra had managed her magic trick almost two hours ago. Mitchell’s liberal estimates gave them at least another hour before the MSS would figure out that Pioneer had disappeared. Jonathan was not so optimistic, but even if his calculation proved better than Mitchell’s, the MSS would still be losing the game. There were so many ways to leave Beijing, the MSS couldn’t cover them all. Even with the help of the PLA and the other security services, they would have to spread themselves thin in a panicked effort to canvass the major travel hubs. Even then, they would have no assurance that CIA hadn’t simply driven him out in a car. The options were legion, China was a very large country, and the security resources were not unlimited. Time and geography were finally working against the MSS.

  Kyra found her gate and scanned the waiting group. Mitchell had advised that flights to Seoul at this hour were usually full, and the numbers seemed to confirm that guess. There were few open seats. She did not have her pick, and that alone gave her plausible deniability that she knew any of her covert traveling companions. No security officer could reasonably use the seating arrangements here to infer personal connections. She chose one of the few open seats, settled herself, and stared out the bay windows to the dark tarmac.

  Two guards stood by the boarding door, watching the seated passengers. Kyra saw them study her for a moment, but neither made a move in her direction. Her watch, an atomic piece accurate to within hundredths of a second, showed eight minutes to the posted boarding time. Mitchell had tried to time their arrival at the airport to get the group to the gate with little time to spare and therefore to be observed and identified by any officials. It was strange how time could be both an ally and an enemy. Jonathan was five minutes behind her. Mitchell and Pioneer should have been there already, but she couldn’t pick them out in the crowd and didn’t look around for them. Still, the crowd was calm moving through the terminal. Likely they would have been excited had the soldiers been dragging men away anywhere nearby. Mitchell and Pioneer were still loose, if they were here.

  If the airline delayed boarding, it would be the first sign that something was going very wrong.

  The boarding was announced in Chinese, English, and another language she did not recognize but assumed was Korean. The crowd stirred and Kyra released the breath she hadn’t realized that she’d been holding.

  It was a mistake. She heard the shouting before she saw the running guards following two civilian men in suits. The waiting passengers turned en masse as four PLA soldiers in fatigues with weapons drawn slowed to a fast walk, led by the civilians holding portable radios. Other mixed groups of suits and fatigues ran past, moving out to cover the other boarding areas.

  The suits—Kyra assumed they were MSS—were speaking loudly in Chinese and the crowd parted before them. They reached the podium and cornered both the guards on duty and the airline staff who were preparing to open the door to the passengers. The guards who had been standing over the crowd shook their heads vigorously to some question. The MSS officers pushed them aside and began to bark orders to the airline staff. One, a petite Chinese woman, picked up the wall microphone. She issued her announcement first in Mandarin, then English.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin boarding. As an extra security precaution, in addition to your boarding passes, we ask you to please produce your passports and present them for inspection. We appreciate your cooperation. Our first-class and business passengers are now welcome to board, as well as any other passengers who may require extra time or assistance.”

  Kyra, trying very hard not to take a deep breath, dug into her carry-on for her falsified passport. Hers and Jonathan’s were economy seats. She didn’t know which seating class Mitchell and Pioneer would be in. She looked through the crowd and picked out Jonathan thirty feet from her position, standing in the thoroughfare. She didn’t make eye contact with him. He had nothing to worry about. He wasn’t the one who had beaten an MSS officer in an alley or ditched several more during a run through the city with the most-wanted man in the People’s Republic of China.

  The MSS officers stood almost shoulder to shoulder, the first taking a passenger’s passport and holding it over a printout the second held. They compared the travel document with the printed page, then held it to the passenger’s face.

  They waved the first passenger through.

  They know he’s loose. The MSS had almost certainly detained the Zhous. But the large number of security officers and soldiers running past through the terminal meant they didn’t know where Pioneer was.

  Kyra approached the gate. An old Korean man standing at the head of the line moved forward, leaning on his cane, and he held his boarding pass and passport out to the security officers. The lead MSS officer took the passport, rifled through it until he found the visa stamp, and scrutinized it for several seconds. He turned to the inside cover and held the man’s photograph next to the sheet his partner held. They jabbered on in Mandarin. The one not holding the passport spoke into a portable radio and waited until he received an answer. Kyra wished dearly that she could understand the language to get some feel for their level of anxiety.

  The Korean stood calmly as the two Chinese security officers talked over his case. The one holding his passport leaned over and looked at his face for several seconds. The Korean pulled back, apparently uncomfortable with the close inspection, but otherwise held his ground.

  The MSS officer frowned, closed the passport, handed it to its owner, and waved him through. The airline attendant gave him a traditional Mandarin greeting. He nodded and gave her his boarding pass. She ran it under the scanner and extended it to him, but the Korean was still trying to pocket his passport with shaky old hands, leaving Kyra to wait an eternity until he could move on. He finally managed to secure it inside his jacket, then took back his pass and awkwardly pushed himself forward through the door.

  Several more passengers moved through, then Kyra stepped up to the gate and held out her passport. She focused on her hands to make sure there was no tremor in her fingers. She wanted to give no outward sign of discomfort. The MSS officer took the passport and studied the brunette with an ugly look for a long second before opening the fake document. She put her hands in her pockets and turned her attention to her breathing and her heart rate, which was faster than its usual pace but not enough to make her uncomfortable. The two officers spoke again and the officer holding the radio clicked the mic and spoke into it. It spat back an answer and the MSS officers frowned but said nothing. The one holding her passport looked to her again. Kyra gave them no expression. She wondered if they had studied Western faces enough to discern emotional states.

  Just give me back the passport, she thought.

  The Korea
n reached the end of the ramp and carefully stepped over the small gap onto the Boeing 767. A pretty young Korean attendant asked him in her native tongue if he would like help finding his seat. He didn’t understand the language, but he nodded anyway. She took his boarding pass, directed him toward the first-class cabin, and then took his arm and helped him down the aisle. He shuffled between the seats, using them for support, until he reached his row. The attendant helped him settle into the seat, noted that he had no carry-on for the overhead bin, and asked if he would like a drink and a hot towel for his face. He demurred on the towel.

  He had no idea what it would do to the prosthetics Monaghan had applied to his face.

  The attendant left and Pioneer turned to the window. His face rigid, he stared unseeing at the city skyline in the distance. Beijing was lost to him. He realized that he didn’t know what tears would do to the prosthetics either. Perhaps he should have asked for the towel after all.

  He looked to the front and saw the attendants repeating the greeting ritual with another passenger who entered the cabin. Kyra Stryker nodded to the attendant and turned down the aisle. She didn’t look at him.

  The MSS officer returned the last passport to its owner, a teenage Canadian girl, and his partner shrugged and spoke into his handset. Their superior acknowledged and the PLA soldiers who stood to the side slung their rifles. They moved as a unit through the terminal toward another gate at the far end. Flights would be boarding all night. The entire Sixth Bureau was stretched very thin, they had been told, and no one could tell them when replacements would arrive.

  The attendant closed the boarding ramp door, locked it, and tested the security panel. Her shift was over. Walking away from the gate, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a disposable cell phone, and pressed a button. She didn’t know who she was calling or even what phone number had been preprogrammed into it.

  “Hello,” a woman answered in excellent Mandarin.

  “Dinner is served, four courses, all cold,” the attendant said.

  “My thanks.” The call disconnected from the other end. The attendant entered the nearest restroom, waited a few moments until the lone visitor walked out, then removed the SIM card from the phone and flushed it down a toilet. She then dropped the phone into the garbage.

  At Mitchell’s now-empty desk, Monaghan replaced the telephone handset and put her hands over her face. See you soon, boys and girls, she thought. She suppressed the urge to walk to the window and make a rude gesture in the direction of Zhongnanhai.

  Mitchell had prewritten two cables to Langley the night before. Now Monaghan could tell his former deputy, the newly promoted chief of station, which one to delete. The other would only take a few moments to transit the Pacific. There was no telling how long it would take the Ops Center staff to flag it for Barron after it arrived. The NCS Director would be impatient. Monaghan picked up a secure phone and dialed.

  CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

  Cooke hadn’t left her office on the seventh floor for two days. She took her meals in the director’s dining room—the Agency provided her with a personal chef, who worked in a restaurant-quality kitchen—and stepped out into the hall only when she had to return to the Operations Center for short briefings on military developments in the South China Sea. When Barron had advised her to go home the day before, Cooke had dismissed the suggestion out of hand. She knew that it had hardly been sincere, made more out of duty than any belief she would act on it. Barron would never sincerely ask her to do something he wasn’t doing himself. Still, the guilt from wanting to heed the man was sharp. Cooke was tired and even the coffee was losing its power to keep her going. The amount of caffeine required to keep her alert was making her hands shake. She told herself that going home was pointless, that she wouldn’t be able to sleep because the thought of her people in the field would keep her awake. Cooke knew that was a lie and wouldn’t admit it to herself, but finally she didn’t have a choice. The couch looked to be a better pillow than her desk, and so she dismissed Barron, locked her office, and reclined on the couch. The director kept the lights on, the blinds open, and hoped that she had enough strength left to keep the rest short.

  She knew she had failed when the knock came at the door. Her sense of time was gone and her mind was foggier than before. Her vision finally focused on the wall clock. Four hours had passed. She pulled herself up. The doorknob felt like lead in her hand.

  It was Barron. Her body felt like a heavy sack of grain as it fell into the chair. “Give me some good news,” she ordered.

  Barron obeyed the order after he’d closed the door behind him. “He’s in the air,” he said without preamble. Cooke closed her eyes in relief. “Ninety minutes and he’ll be on the ground in Seoul. The MSS overran the airport but they didn’t ID him. Two feet away and they couldn’t figure out who he was. Monaghan did some great work.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Everyone’s on the plane,” Barron said. “They’re all clear unless the PLA decides to send some MIGs after them.”

  “Make sure Stryker gets a promotion and a week’s leave. Monaghan too. I take it you flew Pioneer in style?”

  “You asked, he received,” Barron said. “First-class seat and a charter flight to Dulles from Seoul. Mitchell is sitting nearby to keep him under control in case he gets panicky. That happens sometimes when people finally realize that they’re not going home again. They’ll be on the ground here by tomorrow afternoon. We’ll change planes there and take him to the Farm.”

  “He deserves it. Stryker?”

  “She and Burke got coach. We didn’t want everyone sitting together in case somebody got picked up.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigar tube, a Davidoff Millennium. He offered it to Cooke and pulled out another for himself when she took it. “He’s out of China. I think that’s worth breaking a minor federal law.”

  Cooke extracted the pungent stick from its cylinder and drew it under her nose. “Expensive. I thought you gave these up.”

  “It’s never too late to restart a bad habit.”

  “I have a better tradition in mind. And it’ll save you from an argument with your wife.” Cooke took Barron’s cigar, pulled it from the cylinder, and put the brown stick in her mouth. She replaced the cigar he had given her in its tube. Then she fetched a Sharpie from her desk and scrawled Pioneer 2016 on the side. The CIA director turned to the shelf behind her desk, opened the humidor sitting there, and dropped the cigar inside. Barron’s addition to her collection made four.

  INCHEON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA

  The handwritten sign read “KWON Moo-hyun.”

  Milo Sachs had no idea who Kwon Moo-hyun was but he doubted that Mr. Kwon was truly Korean. Sachs was the youngest case officer in Seoul, so he’d drawn the short straw for this duty. Chief of station Seoul gave him the name for the placard and an order not to ask questions. He was to stand with the other professional drivers, meet Mr. Kwon, and lead him to a private hangar near the edge of the field, then fly with him on the private Learjet back to Dulles Airport. He was under orders not to talk to Kwon except to direct his movements. Sachs was an escort, nothing more. He would get three days’ leave in Northern Virginia as compensation, hardly enough to recover from the time lag, after which he would fly back to Seoul to resume his regular tour of duty.

  The plane landed on schedule, the airline attendants opened the door, and the limousine service drivers took their places to the side of the exit. The first two people off saw his sign and walked to him. The Westerner was balding, salt-and-pepper hair in the places he still had it, with a sizable paunch at his waistline. The Korean man walked with a cane, but he appeared somewhat more spry than his age should have allowed.

  “I am Kwon,” the man said in Korean. It clearly was not true. His accent was so heavy that Sachs was sure the man had memorized the phrase. He probably didn’t even know what he was saying.

  “A pleasure,” Sachs replied. �
�Come with me, I will take you to your next flight.”

  “Not yet,” Mitchell said. “We need a private place where we can ask this gentleman a few questions first.”

  “You’re Mitchell?” Sachs asked. Mitchell nodded. “We’ve got a charter flight waiting in a private hangar. Safest place to talk is probably on the plane.”

  “Works for me,” Mitchell said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the door where the passengers were deplaning. Another pair of Westerners exited, looked around for a brief second, and then moved in their direction. The woman was quite pretty, Sachs thought. A short-haired brunette with glasses, she doubtless was a case officer. He wondered how old she really was. It was easier to make a younger person look older than to do the reverse.

  “Time to talk?” Kyra asked Mitchell without preamble.

  “Private hangar,” Mitchell told her. “You get fifteen minutes. That enough?”

  “We’ll find out,” Jonathan said.

  Mitchell gestured everyone toward couches in the plane’s aft section and they all took their places. Jonathan leaned forward and studied the Chinese man. He had extrapolated Pioneer’s age from the biographical data in the files he’d finally gotten after badgering Barron for access. The Chinese asset had been in college during the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which meant that he would be middle-aged now, but the disguise obscured all traces of that. He’d only seen the man’s true appearance for a short minute before Monaghan had gotten her hands on him. Pioneer had looked somewhat older than middle age, though Jonathan knew he had no baseline for comparison, but it didn’t surprise him. Pioneer had been committing treason for over twenty years. Such a life could age a man well before his time.

  “I’m Jonathan. This is Kyra,” Jonathan said in English. “I want to ask you some questions about the Assassin’s Mace program.” Mitchell translated. If the senior officer disapproved of using real names, he said nothing. Jonathan caught the shashoujian term but recognized nothing else. It was a beautiful language. The tonals made it sound like singing and he doubted that he could ever master it. He spoke Romance languages only and found them difficult enough.