Red Cell (31 page)

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.

Pioneer had never seen her before, so there was no question the MSS wouldn’t be able to figure out their relationship. Almost certainly that would put them on alert. If she was CIA, here to exfiltrate him from China, they wouldn’t have much time.

“
I missed you so much. It’s been so long!
” she said in her poor Mandarin. In fact, her intonation sounded robotic, like she didn’t understand what she was saying.

“
Yes, it has.
” It was best to keep his answers short and simple. If this woman didn’t speak Chinese, she wouldn’t be able to form answers to complex statements. Her replies would be nonsensical if he even asked her a simple question, and that would almost certainly bring the MSS running.

“
I’m so happy you are free tonight. I promised you dinner at the Yueming Lou if you would show me the Forbidden City, remember?”

Pioneer stepped back.
Yueming Lou.
He had almost forgotten, but in the instant she said it, the memory came back with force.

Yueming Lou,
he thought.

The Yueming Lou was a three-story restaurant in the Xicheng district converted from a church by the owners and popular with the Western tourists. The food was good, not excellent, traditional Hunan, and the prices were reasonable. He enjoyed it more for the third-story terrace views of the northern Beijing lakes and the
hutong
, the ancient narrow alleyways that had once spiderwebbed across Beijing before the party rebuilt the city after the Revolution. Pioneer had dined there many times, at least yearly, under orders that his case officer gave him starting in the third year of his treason. The request surprised him initially. Once he had earned the trust of his case officers, in the fifth year of his labor, they made their reasoning clear. Not every asset earned the promise of exfiltration to the United States. Many didn’t really want it. Abandoning home was not an easy matter even for traitors and especially for those motivated by ideology and not money. Among those who did want the promise, relatively few proved themselves worth the risks involved. Pioneer had.

Clark Barron—Pioneer had not known him by that name—was the case officer who made the promise. When Pioneer had asked him about the details of the plan, Barron had refused to answer. It was better if he didn’t know the details. What he did need was the signal that the plan was in motion. When the moment came, Barron explained, the case officer would give him a code phrase. “Whatever you’re doing,” Barron said, “drop it. Walk away. We’ll give you some warning if we can so you can pack some things, one bag at most. But when you hear that phrase, you leave with the contact right then. Whatever the contact tells you to do, follow their orders and they’ll get you out.” What Barron didn’t say, but what he had implied, was that hearing the code phrase meant that after he left China, he would not be coming back.

The code phrase was
dinner at the Yueming Lou.
The woman was here to keep Barron’s promise.

Pioneer stepped back and for a moment Kyra wondered whether his nerve was going to break.

The man looked at her. His face became a serene mask, but she had
seen the brief emotion on it. The look on his face at that moment was a pure expression of his true feelings before it hardened to control his surprise.

For the first time in her life, Kyra had seen pure, unrelieved bitterness. It was hatred so intense she couldn’t understand what could cause it.

Then he looked at her again and she knew that she was not the target.
They
were the target of his anger, whoever
they
were, the ones who had driven him to choose this life. They had led him to this moment when he had to abandon his homeland or die. Kyra Stryker had no idea exactly who they were, but in that moment she hated them as much as Pioneer did, and then she understood.

She looked back at him.
They’ll have to kill me to stop me from getting you out
, she thought. Kyra hoped that he understood.

Pioneer eyed the young woman. She was still smiling, but it was a facade. There was a hard look in her eyes that sent him a very different message and, in the instant he saw it, he trusted her. She couldn’t speak Mandarin, which perplexed him for a second. Why did they send someone without that skill? Something was wrong. But this girl had come for him anyway, and that meant she was a bold one. He hoped it would be enough. His options were limited at the moment.

“
I remember. Let me get my coat. It’s very cold outside,
” he said in his native tongue. He saw that she tensed up as he started speaking. She clearly didn’t understand a word he’d said, but she relaxed when he turned away, walked to the closet, and retrieved a thick jacket. Then he indulged in a moment to look around home. It had never been a beautiful place, but it had been his shelter. The dishes were undone, food was still on the table. His books were lined up neatly on the shelf by a small television where he spent most of his nights watching party-approved foreign movies. The bed was unmade and his dirty clothing would now sit in the basket until the MSS took it away, searched it, and then burned it. His desk was neat at least. It was a writing desk built by his father for his mother from light brown Chinese elm with a matching chair. It was one of the few gifts that his parents had been able to leave him. He’d committed much of his treason sitting at that desk as he typed out reports on his laptop for the CIA. There was not much here that he could live without, but the desk he would miss. He prayed that rather than destroy it, some MSS officer might appreciate
the craftsmanship and take it for his own. He thought for a moment that it might have been better to burn it, but in truth he wanted it to survive even if he couldn’t be there to own it. He’d known for years that he wouldn’t be able to take the desk to the United States were he ever exfiltrated. It was far too large and he’d known there wouldn’t be enough time to pack it up and ship it out of the country.

The CIA had not confirmed that they would be getting him out, so he had packed nothing. He did have a few photographs of his parents in a small envelope; he slipped them into his pocket. His parents were dead. It was the first moment that he was grateful for the party’s one-child policy. He had no siblings, so there was no one else to leave behind. No wife, no children, no lover, not even a pet. He’d only allowed himself a few friends at work, who would wonder tomorrow morning where he was. The party would almost certainly never tell them the truth about his disappearance. Perhaps the MSS would feed them a lie about his being killed in an automobile accident. He hoped they wouldn’t stage one and kill someone to provide a plausible foundation for the story.

He put on his coat and took his last look around his home.
Thank you,
he thought. He had suddenly become a sentimental fool, but this once he could not bring himself to care. A man who couldn’t be sentimental at such a moment didn’t deserve to live.

He looked at the young American woman and smiled. “
I’m ready. Lead on,
” he said. He motioned with his hands so she would understand.

Kyra took him by the hand and led him out the door. He turned, locked it, and they walked down the hallway toward the stairwell.

The stairway shaft leading to the first floor was filthy beyond anything Kyra had ever seen. She refused to touch the handrail and prayed that she wouldn’t fall, more out of fear of touching some organism that she’d never be able to clean off than for physical safety. She was unsure that the builders had ever painted the walls, much less repainted them over the years. Years of grime covered the steps, and the smell rising from below was ugly enough to be nauseating.

Kyra held Pioneer’s hand as they took the stairs by twos as fast as she thought was safe. They’d covered less than half the distance to the ground floor when she heard a noise from above. Several pairs of feet struck the metal stairs. She took a short moment to judge their direction
of travel by the volume and decided they were descending the steps at least by threes. Kyra grabbed Pioneer by the arm and led him down the next flight to the sixth-floor exit. She tested the knob, found it unlocked, and no one was standing on the other side. Kyra pulled her charge through the door and closed it as quietly as she had opened it. She scanned the hallway and looked around the corner for any alcove deep enough for them to hide. There were none. The choice was to remain in place or run around the curved hallway to the opposite stairwell. Kyra judged the distance and decided they could not get out of sight before the men on the stairs would reach their level. She pushed Pioneer against the wall next to the door hinge so the opening door would give him some cover. She stood on the opposite side and set her balance for a strike to the face of anyone who came through.

The feet on the stairs reached their level. The men on the other side did not test the door. They continued down and Kyra counted to thirty before cracking the door. Without it closed and impeding her hearing, she took another moment to judge their distance and direction. The men were nearing the bottom and still moving.

She had focused on sounds in the stairwell too much. The MSS officer came around the corner, his feet silent on the worn carpet, and he caught Kyra across the face with a stiff forearm, pinning her against the wall. Pioneer grabbed for the man’s head. The attacker kicked backward into Pioneer’s stomach and knocked him to the ground with a hard grunt. It was a moment’s distraction that he couldn’t afford, and Kyra made him pay for it.

She kicked her own foot back against the MSS agent’s knee, and the man’s joint bent in the wrong direction almost to the point of breaking. He cried out and staggered back, unable to keep his weight against the woman to pin her to the wall. Kyra threw a hard elbow, caught him square on the nose, and she felt the crunch against her arm. The adrenaline killed the pain from the unhealed wound in her triceps; she felt nothing but the hard hit of the man’s face against her elbow. Her attacker fell back further, his hands over his face to hold back the blood that started to flow from his damaged nose. Kyra drove her foot into his stomach, but the officer was too close to the wall and Kyra’s kick compressed his solar plexus enough to drive the wind and vomit out of him. He started to double over. Kyra pivoted, stepped forward to close the distance, grabbed his hair, and pushed down as she drove her knee
against his face. The bones she had cracked before shattered this time. The strike knocked him backward against the wall. Kyra finished him with a forearm across his throat. The officer fell to the floor, curled into the fetal position, unable to make a noise other than a rasping gurgle as he tried to suck in air and tasted his own blood for his trouble.

Kyra led Pioneer around the bending hall to another stairwell. She had planned to cross over to the building’s other side at some point, but Mitchell had left it to her discretion when to make the move. They entered the second shaft, as filthy as the first, and she listened. There were shouts from far above and below, but Kyra started down anyway.

She surprised her charge by leaving the stairwell again on the third floor. Pioneer watched as the woman reached into her pocket and pulled out a disposable cell phone. It had only two numbers preprogrammed. She speed-dialed the first as they ran. Eight doors down on the left, a door opened and Pioneer heard a telephone ringing inside. Kyra pushed him in.

The apartment was decorated in modern Chinese fashion with only a few nods to traditional furniture. The television was on with the volume unduly loud, the blinds were drawn, and the lights dimmed. A Chinese woman stood behind the door and closed it behind them.

“You’re Kyra?” she said.

“I am. You speak English?” Kyra said.

“Duke University, class of 2003. The package is on the counter by the stove.” Kyra nodded and made for the tiny galley kitchen.

The woman turned to Pioneer. She was Kyra’s age as best he could judge. She was young, lithe, taller than the average Chinese woman by several centimeters, with blond hair, which shocked him. He had seen her on occasion in the building lobby, but never often enough to warrant his close attention and always with black hair. Now, with light hair and casual Western clothing, he realized that she was not pure Chinese. He inspected her face closely and saw that her Chinese features were softened by some Western traits. “
You are Long Jian-Min
,” she said. Her Mandarin was flawless.