Red Cell (29 page)

“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 she 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 Washington, 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.”

“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.