Code of Honor

13

David Huang was sitting in his study when he heard his wife scream. Her shrieks came from the patio, loud enough to reach the opposite end of their house in the rural neighborhood outside Annapolis. It was a home fitting a Canadian lobbyist.

The scream came again. More emphatic this time.

The uninitiated might think that wild animals were ripping the poor woman apart, but Huang was happy for the interruption. Laurie was well aware of his job, knew the possibilities, guessed the probabilities — but never asked him about it. It was better that way. It protected her from the dirty details. She knew he was seeing someone else, but not who. When he came home late, she accused him of feeling sorry for the other woman. And how could he not? Even spies were human beings, and sleeping with someone for months… well, the exposure went both ways.

His initial meeting with Chadwick had, of course, been arranged, highly choreographed to look accidental. It took a great deal of work to make something look serendipitous. Fortunately for Department Two — the intelligence directorate of the People’s Liberation Army, Chadwick virtually bled information about her personal life. The Americans called it TEMPEST — spying on the electronic emissions that leaked from virtually every building, vehicle, or pocket. Wi-Fi routers, smart devices, and cell phone signals could be cloned. A man-in-the-middle attack revealed incoming and outgoing information that passed over the Internet. What they couldn’t find out that way, they simply purchased.

Advertising companies spent billions developing algorithms and artificial intelligence programs to tailor person-specific ads. Huge sums of cash were traded for information on consumer interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes. Much of it freely given by mindless millions who answered surveys on social media or downloaded free apps on their phones or computers. As the saying went, if something is free, then the consumer is the product. And the people who Huang worked for were more than happy to buy that product. That same information — particular tastes, down to the fact that a person preferred the color azure — could be extremely valuable in the social-engineering aspects of espionage.

David had demurred at first, at least as much as one could when officers from PLA Department Two darkened the door. He told them he had no training in such things, but they’d assured him he had all the training he needed. Senator Chadwick was a powerful woman, more like a male, they said. Seduction of a person in power was all too easy. All one had to do was make them feel like it was their idea. In other words, all he had to do was show up and let her do the seducing.

And that was exactly what had happened.

The entire thing was at once fascinating and sad, to watch this otherwise strong woman yield to him so freely, to allow herself to be so vulnerable, so exposed. She would, no doubt, be a casualty of this battle, completely broken and unable to trust anyone ever again. Huang felt no joy at the thought of her fall. On the contrary. He felt pity. Michelle had learned secrets about him, too, things that were difficult to hide under intimate circumstances. He’d given up nothing mission-related, of course, but his wife could tell. She saw it in his face every time he left the house. For now, she was too worried about a spider.

Huang pushed back from the open laptop on his desk and gave a low groan.

He did not mind his wife’s irrational fear of spiders. It gave him frequent opportunities to swoop in for the rescue and make up for the rest of the terrible actions required by his job. Such rescues usually involved smashing the spider into oblivion before Laurie threw out her back trying to clobber it with a shoe. She’d thought of him as a knight when they first met, but it took frequent acts of derring-do to keep up that mystique. He lied for a living and she knew it. It took a lot of heroics to redeem himself from the truth. Fortunately, northern Virginia had plenty of golden orb weavers.

Huang padded quickly down the hall, past the family photos of him and Laurie and their little girl. Barefoot, he wore khaki shorts and a loose white T-shirt — what Laurie preferred him to wear at home. At a hundred and ninety pounds, he was a trim six-foot-two, well muscled from many hours in the gym. He was only thirty-eight, but silver already encroached on his dark hair — surely a product of the stress brought on by so many lies. At least he wasn’t going bald. Better to turn gray than turn loose — a quaint Virginia saying, but true enough.

Huang reached the dining room to find his wife on the other side of the sliding glass door, holding Claire on her hip. She brandished a gardening trowel in her free hand, as if to ward off an attacker. No matter how often he told her to the contrary, she could never shake the notion that spiders could fly.

His first choice would have been to relocate it, but Laurie wanted to kill every spider she met with fire. They settled on something in the middle and used a rolled magazine he’d brought with him for that purpose to swat the hapless creature.

Three-year-old Claire hugged his neck and, having not inherited her mother’s phobia, said they should go bug hunting.

“Daddy has to change for work,” he said.

He put the little girl down to play in the grass and leaned in to kiss his wife, avoiding looking directly into her eyes. It didn’t matter. Her face fell into a sullen pout.

“I love you,” she said. “But I hate what you do.”

“Someone has to take care of the spiders,” he said, and got ready to go ruin Michelle Chadwick’s life.

Senator Chadwick could feel David Huang’s eyes on her neck as she cleared the security checkpoint at the Northwest Appointment Gate. As a senator, she could have driven onto the White House campus, rather than clear security like a common citizen. Still, the Secret Service Uniformed Division did their officious best to make her feel small. Apparently, working for the President snuffed out any awe they might have otherwise felt for a ranking member of Congress. The same was true of the Marine posted at the door, though he didn’t say a word. There was no love lost between her and the military. The rosy-cheeked Marine could not have been more than twenty-five years old — but Chadwick could tell from the look in his eyes that he was well aware of her thumbs-down voting record when it came to wars and rumors of wars. These war-fighters worshiped their President, and would follow him blindly into any conflict. Poor bastards.

Arnie van Damm met her in the lobby, just inside the door, looking stodgy in his rumpled suit jacket and loose tie. He’d obviously just come off the treadmill or exercise bike and was still flushed and sweating. He gave her a wary glance as they padded down the carpeted hall past more Uniformed Division guards, toward the Oval Office and the secretaries’ suite. Betty Martin gave her a courteous nod, though it was clear she, too, didn’t trust her boss’s avowed enemy as far as she could throw her. Van Damm peered through the peephole in the door to the Oval Office and turned to give Chadwick a halfhearted shrug of apology.

“He’s on an important call,” the chief of staff said.

Chadwick eyed his wrinkled jacket, his flushed brow, and fought the urge to call him Rumpled Sweatskin.

“No worries,” she said. “I appreciate him working me in like this.” She dropped her cell phone into a basket at the corner of the secretary’s desk. Chadwick had been here before and knew the drill, though she hadn’t told Huang that when he’d fiddled with her cell and turned it into an active mic.

Van Damm gave a shake of his head, as if to clear his vision. “Don’t be nice,” he said. “It creeps me out.”

The door to the Oval opened before she could think of a snarky answer, and the man himself waved her inside.

Van Damm followed her in, as if he were afraid she might try something. That was a joke, considering the circumstances.

A steward brought in a coffee service and, to Chadwick’s surprise, Ryan poured her a cup as if they were old friends. He held up the small silver cream pitcher, brow raised.

“Black,” she said.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Ryan said. “Me, too.” He air-toasted with his cup. “So, what can I do for you, Madame Senator?”

Chadwick took a deep breath. “An olive branch,” she said. “As it were. I’ll just get right to it.”

“That’s best,” Ryan said.

“I’m planning to sponsor a bill that I believe you could get behind.”

Ryan raised an eyebrow.

“I know how you feel about welfare,” Chadwick said. “What I’m proposing is a literacy program for Indian Country. A virtual bookmobile to benefit children and youth.”

Arnie asked, “You have a draft?”

Chadwick nodded. She didn’t, of course, not yet. But that wouldn’t take long for her staff to do. There was a Navajo girl from Window Rock who’d been champing at the bit to get something exactly like this into committee.

“Okay,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair. “I have to be honest, though. I’m mildly stunned that you came here in person — and I’m not an easy man to stun anymore.”

“I understand completely,” Chadwick said. She tried, but couldn’t quite bring herself to say “Mr. President.” “This is odd as hell for me, too. You stand for virtually everything I am against. But for all that, this program seems like something you could support. If your side of the House finds out you’re behind it, they’ll come aboard as well. The thing is…” Her voice trailed off.

Ryan waited a beat, prodding when she didn’t continue. “What?”

“It would be cool if we could work together on the language, so the thing has both our stamps on it.”

Van Damm’s brow furrowed, the way it did when he didn’t like the smell of something. “You know that ‘working together’ means some of your people hammering out details with some of our people? The President doesn’t have time for daily sit-downs over a bill that should be hashed out by the legislative branch.”

“Fully aware,” Chadwick said, swallowing what pride she had left. She addressed Ryan instead of his lackey — who was too smart for his own good. “I would just ask for one or two of those sit-downs, mano a mano, so to speak.”

He gave a noncommittal nod. “I’m happy to take a look at your proposal.”

“To be honest,” Chadwick said. “I’m tired of fighting you, Mr. President.” There, that wasn’t so hard. “We disagree on a shitload of key matters. But in order to get anything done, we need to find something on which we can work together. It’s time you and I bury the hatchet.”

Van Damm shot a glance at the President, and then let his gaze settle on Chadwick. “Not in his back, I hope.”

“I get it, Arnie,” Chadwick said. “But you know me. I’ve been a front-stabber from the beginning—”

There was a knock at the door and Betty Martin stepped in, beckoning the chief of staff. “That call you were waiting on.”

Van Damm thanked her and then turned to Ryan. “Don’t you dare agree to anything while I’m gone.”

Ryan waved him off. “I’ll be fine, Arnie.”

The door shut, leaving Chadwick more alone than she’d ever felt in her life. She was definitely in the lion’s den now. She held her breath.

It was time to see what the all-powerful Jack Ryan was made of.