False Flag

by Jack Slater

  He wondered whether he could handle a woman like that, and then figured he’d like to give it a go. He thought back to their race through the warm waters of Deep Water Bay, and the graceful sight of Ikeda’s athletic body cutting through the saltwater.

  “Couldn’t get a camera feed from inside his suite. Too much risk of his guards doing a sweep. But we are hooked into the hotel’s security system, and I’ve got one of our own devices in the hallway as backup.”

  “Good,” Trapp said.

  He had to hand it to Ikeda. She was a damn good operative. Every base seemed to be covered. But then, as Trapp’s favorite saying went, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And Trapp never felt confident before a mission. In a perverse way, he almost enjoyed the nerves that gripped his stomach in the hours before going into battle. They reminded him that he was alive—and that his life was a precious thing.

  “Are you ready for tonight?” he asked, studying her Asian features for any hint of nerves. He wondered if he was doing the right thing. It wasn’t too late to rethink the plan. He could still do this himself.

  Ikeda stood and walked toward the door to leave. She shrugged and shot Trapp a cheeky wink as she did so. “I guess you’ll have to wait and see…”

  7

  The electronic lock to his suite snicked, and within an instant, Trapp had sprung to his feet and leveled his Beretta 9 mm at the entrance way.

  Eliza Ikeda stepped through and kinked her eyebrow, turning slightly to close the door behind her. “You sure know how to greet a lady…”

  Trapp grimaced, lowering his weapon and shoving it between his waistband and his back. He studied the female operative for a few seconds, his brain almost unable to process the change in her appearance. He had known she was attractive before—in fact he had barely been able to keep the image of her perfectly proportioned body cutting through the waves off the coast of Hong Kong out of his mind. But then, she had kept her hair in a ponytail, or dressed in business attire.

  The Eliza Ikeda standing in front of him now wasn’t just pretty. She was stunning.

  “Cat got your tongue?” she asked.

  A glimmer of amusement in her eye told Trapp that she knew exactly what effect her appearance was having on him. He ground his teeth together with irritation. He wasn’t exactly playing it cool. And what was worse was that Ikeda clearly knew exactly what was running through his mind.

  Jesus, Trapp. Pull it together.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “About the nearly shooting you thing.”

  “Me too.” She grinned. “Blue on blue is a one-way ticket to endless paperwork. So—how do I look?”

  She twirled, and Trapp’s eyes nearly broke free of his skull. She was dressed in a black cocktail dress made of shimmering silk, which broke several inches short of her knees. The material wasn’t tight around her body, but it didn’t need to be. The way it hung complimented her figure, the expensive material dancing and glittering in the light when she so much as breathed.

  The material wasn’t cut low at her chest, but rather fell in two waves that crossed at her breast, mostly hiding a restrained yet lacy silk bra. Mostly hiding it, but revealing enough that the effect was obviously intentional.

  She didn’t look like an escort, less still the coarser description of ‘hooker.’ Her hair had been washed and conditioned, and shone. Ikeda looked more red carpet than red light. A slim leather purse completed the look, adding a layer of elegance to the overall ensemble.

  Trapp whistled quietly. He figured she knew how good she looked—and knew how he felt about it. There was no point trying to hide it. “You’re wasted in the Agency, you know that?”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’d make millions on the catwalk,” he said simply. He wanted to add more, perhaps embellishing with a description of her long legs or her perfectly toned body. But he knew better than to take this beyond flirting. Soon enough he would be done with the CIA—and no matter how appealing, Eliza Ikeda was the kind of complication he definitely did not need in his life.

  Ikeda grimaced and faked a retch as she walked toward him and tossed her purse onto the bed. “Gross. Believe me, I’m not a green salad and straight vodka kind of gal.”

  “I can believe that. Run me through the plan one last time,” Trapp said, quickly refocusing his mind.

  He trusted Ikeda. She seemed not just competent, but driven, and Trapp had worked with enough operatives through his long career to be able to identify the good ones by smell, let alone sight. But he also knew that they were on enemy soil, and that surviving this operation would require meticulous attention to detail.

  “State security has two men watching the door at all times, and three in the suite next to Alstyne’s,” Ikeda replied with a challenging stare. “The whole floor is closed off, and only the Chinese and Alstyne have access to it.”

  Trapp gestured for her to continue.

  “One of my team will call his suite, and tell him there’s a girl on the way, courtesy of management. From everything we know about Emmanuel Alstyne, he won’t be able to resist. You have the nerve agent?”

  Trapp nodded. “Langley couriered it over this morning, in the diplomatic pouch. It’ll send him to sleep first, but he’ll never wake up. Not without the antidote, and except for the dose in my fridge, there isn’t one for thousands of miles.”

  Ikeda grimaced. “About that… is it intravenous?”

  “Yep.”

  She went white. “I hate needles.”

  “You’re telling me you’re comfortable swimming twenty miles through Arctic water, or stepping into an unknown situation with Chinese state security—but you don’t like needles?” Trapp muttered in disbelief.

  Ikeda shot him a sharp, challenging glare.

  Trapp raised his hands in surrender.

  “Good,” she replied, more softly this time. “I’ll need you to do the injection.”

  Trapp diplomatically agreed, and decided to return to safer ground. “Surveillance says he’s still wearing the USB drive on a chain around his neck. We’ve made an exact copy. All you need to do is drug him, switch the drive for the fake, make it look like you both partied a little too hard, and walk out of there. We’ll be out of Macau before the Chinese know he’s dead.”

  “That easy, huh?”

  Trapp knew better than that. He’d rarely been on a mission that had gone to plan. And when he’d realized that he wouldn’t be working alone on this mission, he’d twisted Mitchell’s arm into securing some more unconventional assistance.

  “It never is.” He walked over to the wall safe inside a cream-painted cupboard with a sliding door, punched in a code, and retrieved a thin printed piece of paper. He walked back to Ikeda and handed it to her. “If we get separated, or if things go sideways for any reason, there’s a Los Angeles class nuclear submarine sitting a couple of miles off the coast. It’ll surface at four a.m. at those coordinates, and then again twenty-four hours after that. Head there, and the navy will get you out.”

  It was Ikeda’s turn to whistle. She spoke in an affected Southern accent. “Well, hell, mister secret agent man. Looks like you got some real clout with the boys upstairs.”

  Trapp fixed her with a serious stare. “You know the stakes we’re playing for on this one. The Chinese won’t mess around, so nor can we.”

  “I get it. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “On that, we agree.”

  Just an hour later, the operation was underway. Trapp had drawn the curtains to his suite, blocking out the blinking lights of Macau, which stood out against the onrushing gloom, and administered the antidote to the nerve agent—a necessary step due to the means of delivery. Eliza nearly passed out when she saw the needle.

  She had painted her lips an alluring shade of red, courtesy of a tube of lipstick formulated in a lab at Langley. The makeup contained a deadly nerve agent. The second Ikeda brushed her lips against Emmanuel Alstyne’s face, the man would be dea
d—he just wouldn’t know it. Within minutes, he would start to feel drowsy. Within an hour, he would slip from sleep into a coma from which he would never wake.

  He would be dead by the end of the day.

  The nerve agent would leave no trace in Alstyne’s system, and if everything went to plan, the CIA team would wipe every trace of their presence from the Ritz-Carlton’s computers. Ikeda had added a wide-brimmed black hat to her outfit, which would hide her face from any cameras the Chinese themselves had set up.

  The female operative would no doubt be frisked and searched before entering Alstyne’s suite, but her purse contained a small hidden compartment which hid the replacement USB drive.

  And so, at that very second, she was in an elevator rising to Alstyne’s floor.

  Trapp paced in the control room the CIA surveillance team had set up in the suite that adjoined his own. His Beretta was tucked under his waistband, and he had several additional magazines distributed in his denim pockets. He wore an ‘I Love Macau’ baseball cap reversed on his head—just in case he needed to make a quick exit—which he twisted nervously, first forward and then back, as he returned to the surveillance equipment.

  The technician had accessed the Ritz-Carlton’s security cameras, and Trapp could just about make out Ikeda’s silhouette in the grainy footage delivered by the elevator’s camera.

  “The shooters?” he asked the surveillance tech for at least the third time. The man, to his credit, replied without a hint of irritation. “In rooms next to the stairwell, above and below Alstyne’s floor. If something goes wrong, they’ll be there in under twenty seconds.”

  “If the shit hits the fan, they shoot to kill, understood?”

  The technician nodded and communicated the message to the CIA special operators.

  Trapp knew that if anything went wrong, Ikeda could be dead long before the cavalry arrived. His heart was racing a mile a minute in his chest. He ground his teeth together, wondering why the hell he had agreed to her plan. He hated endangering other operatives. Maybe he should have done this his way after all.

  He wished he could contact Ikeda and call the whole damn thing off, but they had decided against giving her an earpiece. He figured the MSS grunts were probably just muscle—but they couldn’t be sure. If Alstyne’s babysitters were even halfway competent, they might notice the communications unit and blow the mission before it even began.

  So all Trapp could do was wait. He watched on the fuzzy camera as the elevator’s doors slowly opened, and Eliza Ikeda stepped out.

  8

  Ikeda’s palms were slick with sweat as she stepped out of the elevator. She wedged her purse between her upper arm and her torso, then wiped them against her forearms to avoid marking her dress.

  You can do this, she assured herself.

  The truth was, Eliza Ikeda had never killed a man. She had run drills of course, hundreds of times, both during her initial training back at the Farm, then on refresher courses all around the world. But while those had honed her skills, that was all in theory. The American government had taken the soft, pliable clay of her body and fired it into a deadly weapon.

  But could she kill a man? Was she truly prepared to turn that theory into practice?

  Emmanuel Alstyne was a traitor. That much was clear. He was willing to sell out his country for little more than a life of creature comforts, and Chinese protection from the long arm of American justice.

  She was that arm.

  “Hey, who the hell are you?” a man said in thickly accented Mandarin, starting toward her and leaving his post by the door to Alstyne’s suite. He had the features of an ethnic Han Chinese, but Ikeda sensed from his voice that he was from the provinces, perhaps Xinjiang, not far from the Mongolian border. His cheeks were puffy from overindulging, and Ikeda nicknamed him Chubby. The second agent didn’t move, but his eyes flickered in Ikeda’s direction, and the CIA operative got the distinct sense he was checking her out.

  The Chinese agent had the telltale bulge of a slimline pistol just beneath his left shoulder. He made no move to go for his weapon, no doubt seeing a pretty woman and discounting her as a threat. The Chinese were nothing if not chauvinistic, Ikeda thought tartly. Sure, she was a woman—but she knew she would be able to lay him on his ass without a second thought.

  “I’m a present,” Ikeda said in perfect Mandarin. “For the American.”

  “Fuck off,” Chubby grunted, gesturing toward the bank of elevators Ikeda had just exited. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  Ikeda placed her hands on her hips, resting most of her weight on one leg, and spoke in a voice that screamed attitude. “I didn’t ask you. Management sent me. Ask the American.”

  Chubby traded a glance with his partner, who Ikeda noted had briefly grazed the butt of his weapon with his fingers before settling his suit jacket back into place. “How do you know about the American?”

  Ikeda knew that she didn’t look her true age—thirty-three. Her keen exercise regime meant she barely had an ounce of fat anywhere on her body. In this dress, with this makeup, she looked a decade younger, and she played up to it. She rolled her eyes and let out a long, grumpy breath. “I told you. Management sent me. And I don’t get paid if I don’t screw him.”

  The light finally dawned in Chubby’s dark, recessed eyes. “You’re a whore.”

  Internally, Ikeda recoiled at the use of the word. But, somehow, it had disarmed Chubby’s suspicions. He still seemed conflicted, a dark wave of confusion crossing his face as though wondering why the Ritz-Carlton Hotel would have sent the American a prostitute. But then again, this was Macau—it was the Wild West of Asia, like Vegas back in the sixties. They were babysitting an American billionaire. It wouldn’t seem that out of character.

  She nodded. “You got it,” she said, leaning into her bitchy persona. “Now be a good little boy and ask the man if he wants me.”

  Chubby grimaced, but probably figured it was above his pay grade to question. “Xi, search her,” he grunted.

  Ikeda walked toward the door of Alstyne’s suite. The second Chinese agent, the one known as Xi, pushed her roughly against the wall. “Hands above your head,” he said.

  She complied, placing her palms against the wall and grinding her teeth together as the man lingered altogether too long on her body. He searched her from the bottom of her ankles to the top of her head—even though there was no way she could have concealed any form of weapon inside her cocktail dress. His breath was hot and rancid and danced over her shoulder into her nostrils. He was a pig.

  He grabbed the purse next, flicking the gold clasp open and cursorily glancing at the contents. Ikeda held her breath without seeming to, but seconds later she learned she needn’t have. Xi wasn’t just a pig, he was a fool to boot.

  “She’s clean,” Xi said, covering Ikeda in a thin wisp of spittle as he spoke. She concealed her distaste.

  Chubby knocked on the door, and within seconds Alstyne answered. Judging by the bright expression in his eyes, he was extremely interested in the proposition of spending an evening in the presence of a woman as attractive as Eliza Ikeda.

  “Let her in,” Alstyne said.

  He was a chubby man, wearing a pair of crumpled navy blue suit pants and an untucked shirt open several buttons too deep. A wisp of gray chest hair escaped the pressed white fabric, and then she saw it—the chain around his neck. Proof that Trapp’s intelligence was correct—and that Emmanuel Alstyne deserved his fate.

  Ikeda fixed the American traitor with a seductive stare from her slate gray eyes as she closed the last few yards to the door. Before she stepped through, she stroked the line of Xi’s hairless jaw with one outstretched finger.

  “Good boy.” She grinned. Before the night was out, his principal would be dead, and she would be gone. The pervert’s career in the Ministry of State Security would be as good as dead.

  “Well you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Alstyne leered as the door swung closed behind her, sealing the pair of
them into his opulent suite. The gentle sound of blues music played from the overhead speakers. If Ikeda wasn’t very much mistaken, it was John Lee Hooker. She smiled at the coincidence.

  “How so?” Ikeda replied seductively.

  She felt somewhat isolated now, alone in this suite with an unknown man. She knew Trapp was watching the door—but he couldn’t listen in. It would’ve been too dangerous to drill a line into Alstyne’s suite with the surveillance team just next door. But she squashed the sensation. Pushed away the fear, just like she did on a long open water swim. She wasn’t alone; she just didn’t need anyone except herself.

  Alstyne didn’t answer her question. In fact, an almost jealous look crossed his face. He jerked his thumb at the closed door. “What was that all about?”

  Ikeda bent down, making sure the folds of silk briefly parted as she did so, revealing her chest, and set her purse down on a nearby coffee table. “Oh, him?” she replied quizzically. “He got a bit handsy patting me down.”

  “I’ll have him fired.” Alstyne glowered. “I’m sorry.”

  Ikeda straightened and took a pace toward the American. Her heart was racing, and she wondered whether he could tell how nervous she was. Could he see it in her eyes? Smell it, somehow?

  She reached out and stroked the side of Alstyne’s torso. She leaned in close and whispered into his ear. “I’m just going to freshen up. Why don’t you get us something to drink?”

  Alstyne nodded furiously, and if Ikeda had glanced downward, she had no doubt she would see a telltale bulge at his crotch. But she didn’t glance downward. She stayed precisely where she was, her hot breath tickling the billionaire’s ear. Slowly, deliberately, she turned her face so that her left cheek grazed his, and kissed him gently on the lips. Her tongue flickered out, and his mouth opened greedily, unleashing a snake.

  Ikeda pulled away.

  Her eyes roved hungrily over Alstyne’s lips, but not out of attraction. The man disgusted her. Not just because of his sexual appetites, but because of the things he was prepared to do to sell out his own country. But although he didn’t know it, he was already dead. His lip was smudged red. Within seconds, the nerve agent would begin making its way across the skin barrier.