On Fire

by Thomas Anderson

Christopher Gray is left cooling his heels in the Assistant Director’s dim outer chamber, Deep in the labyrinthian Liberty Crossing Building Two, it is lit but by a single table lamp. There are no windows to the outside, but there is a window on the side wall with blinds pulled open to view the corridor. A rose teak coffee table sits in front of him, set with random magazines. He sits back on a vinyl black sofa, crossing his legs, and wondering when they are going to get him.

  Gray managed to return to the states without incident. The cramped drone left him off at the former Clark International Airport, now the main airport of Manila and the Philippines, where he hopscotched aboard a fast supersonic to the US mainland. Along the way he checked in with Ciaran Burris, who informed him that a meeting with the Group was being held for him on his return. Catching a regular flight to Washington, he had arrived by mid-afternoon at Liberty Crossing.

  He watches as occasional shadowy figures move down the hallway. He used to work for these people and thanks his lucky stars that he doesn’t anymore. He can be amused at the insider commendations stuck up in frames on the wall behind him, rather than be intimidated by them. Nice if you cared but he no longer does. He no longer has to. This gives him weightlessness and a buoyancy he could only have dreamed of when he had originally enlisted with the agency as nothing more than a kid out of college.

  Now it’s someone else’s turn. A green looking kid steps into the room.

  “They’re ready for you.”

  Gray gets up, still feeling sore from his entombment in the drone, and follows the kid out the bowels of the building to one of the new conference rooms. They enter and Gray can actually feel the flood of sunlight on his skin from the two stories of brightly lit window wall that looks outward onto the rest of the surrounding business park. The room may be rectangular but the false ceiling above is a circular semi-transparency with wide bands of phosphorescent light. Side walls of striped gray metallic finish are fitted with wide black screens. At the center is a round table, more like a dais, around which are two dozen wheeled office chairs that should be able to slide easily on the white marble flooring. The slim chairs have headrests and are padded in lime green, which contrasts strikingly from the room’s white and gray.

  “Ah, it’s Mr. Gray! Please, take a seat.”

  This is said by the coiffed woman in the red business suit at the opposite end of the room, the sun to her back. Gray thinks how interesting it is how the first person to speak in a situation like this is always the one in charge. Everybody else just defers, or demurs, depending.

  He hears the kid close the door behind him, the latch snapping shut loudly, and he takes the nearest chair, pleased that he can roll it to meet himself as he sits.

  “Nice to see you again, Josephine. Looking good, as always.”

  He nods at Jeb Stoddard and Frank Cullen, seated nearby to his left. Both have coffee and rolls that they have taken from the chic and well-stocked sideboard.

  “Skipping lunch are we?” Chris asks them cheekily.

  “Hi Todd, how was your trip?”

  Gray is nonplussed. Who is this disembodied voice he is hearing over the room’s sound system? It takes him an instant to recognize who it is.

  “Good morning, Lonnie. Didn’t realize you were such a fan of the speaker phone. Trip was fine. For a sardine.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Ciaran was kind enough to make an exception for us to get you back,” replies Lonnie James.

  Burris sits to Gray’s right. He seems engrossed alternately in the papers before him and in a small monitor. Gray can barely make out that Burris is looking at a feed of the Operations Center.

  “And of course I want to thank you too, Joe. I know this would never have happened if it hadn’t been for you,” says the voice.

  Josephine Catral nods. She knows that Lonnie is watching a live feed of the room.

  “Of course,” she says. “But I didn’t know we were dealing with a cut out here.”

  She gives Gray additional scrutiny.

  “You are?” she tilts her head, questioningly.

  “Nonexistent.”

  “Not Christopher Gray?”

  “There is no Christopher Gray. He is a legend created for the benefit of the Chinese to whom various actions have been ascribed over the years. But he doesn’t really exist.”

  “Christopher Gray is a construct of Cetron Corporation,” says Burris, still looking at his monitor of the Center.

  “One of our better inventions,” joins just the voice of the absent Lonnie James.

  “How wonderful for you. You know my favorite expression?” responds Josephine.

  “We’re all in the same alphabet soup?” queries Burris without looking up.

  Assistant Director Catral is annoyed and shakes her mane.

  “Exactly,” she states with emphasis, throwing daggers at Ciaran.

  “Whatever is so fascinating on your monitor, Ciaran?” she finally asks him with a look of daggers. There was a time when she would have gone out of her way not to seem bugged by things like this, but that time is gone.

  Finally, Ciaran looks up.

  “Oh, sorry about that,” he says.

  “Be sorry all you like. What’s going on?”

  “Tarik Usmani. Seems he is about to take Mardan. Our drones indicate his forces are being moved into position to take the City.”

  “We have anybody there?”

  “Special Ops.”

  “They better be thinking about exiting. Now, since we have Mr. Gray, or should I say Todd?”

  “Todd Harris.”

  “Yes. Todd Harris. Since we have Mr. Harris here and he happens to have been at the Imperial Gardens when we so injudiciously lost whatever information there was to be had from one of China’s leading dissidents, perhaps we could see what Mr. Harris knows.”

  Todd, aka Christopher Gray, is not in the least intimidated.

  “Of course. How can I be of assistance?”

  “What happened?”

  “The Embassy was contacted by this Li Hua Wang.”

  “Stop right there. He showed up at the Embassy?”

  “No. He used encryption and hacked our email. It’s not hard to figure out. He suggested a meet and that’s how I knew to be there when it went down.”

  “What went down?”

  “Some guy, pretty nondescript, attacks him before I can get to him. I don’t know who the attacker is or who he might be working for. A criminal element? A random act? A triad looking to make money? A government conspiracy? I have no idea.”

  He holds up his hands.

  “Alphabet Soup,” replies Josephine in the way of some kind of revenge, brushing her do out of her eyes.

  There is general understanding among those gathered. Conspiracy isn’t real until the people in this room say it is.

  “You mean is there government involvement? Possibly, for all we know.”

  “But why didn’t the attacker manage to liberate the flash memory?”

  Todd is enjoying his sudden preeminence in the group. But he is not impressed by the people in the room. Why didn’t he leave the agency sooner?

  “Because there wasn’t time. An American graduate student reacted before the guy even went down. The kid made me instantly. Wang had time, before he bled out, to communicate directly with the American and to hand over a USB flash drive. We just assume that he did.”

  “He instructed the kid?” she asks.

  “Yes, I think so. It was known that Wang was a maverick journalist. The information he had gathered could have been intended for anyone.”

  “But it wasn’t just for anyone, was it? It was meant for you. Why do you think that was? Don’t you think you should have made an attempt to get it yourself? You are, to the Chinese at least, the legendary Christopher Gray, the embassy’s man of many faces and talents.”

  “I really don’t know that it really was meant for me, or even the embassy. Given
the situation, I can’t see the United States using anything this potentially big against their country. I think it was just an attempt to get it out of China, with a view to it being redirected once out in the open. I followed up but only to find out that the MSS appeared to be interested in the recovery of the device and had ordered that I be picked up immediately.”

  “Who was the individual who executed an attack aboard the Star Ferry?”

  Todd is taken by surprise. He had not heard of this.

  “I don’t have any idea. But if I hadn’t been called here to Washington, maybe I could be in California actually recovering the flash drive as we speak,” he says with some exasperation.

  “I would have to agree with Todd here. It seems to me we’re taking our eyes off the ball. I just want to thank Ciaran again for his patience on the whole Palo Alto thing,” chimes in Lonnie James on the intercom.

  “Oh? Palo Alto? I see I’m going to have to hold Mr. Burris after school.”

  Josephine Catral rolls her eyes, then gives Burris that same look of daggers from before.

  Chapter 41