Code of Honor

53

Hope was never a plan, but sometimes, after you did all you could, that was all that was left. Adam Yao had done everything he could to bolster his chances for success.

The execution of Yao’s plan began as soon as the Songs, a very tired little girl, the general’s twitchy aide, and Tsai Zhan, the minder, approached the Immigration checkpoint at JFK on their arrival to New York after the fourteen-hour flight from Beijing. Every country in the developed world had some level of medical screening for inbound visitors. Some methods were overt, like the large, cameralike thermometer aimed at the arrival corridor in Narita, Japan. Some, like the sensors and sniffers at U.S. Immigration in JFK, were less noticeable.

President Ryan had ordered the State Department to smooth the Songs’ entry into the U.S. with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They didn’t have to stand in lines, but they were required to report to an Immigration official.

The inspector, a middle-aged woman of Chinese heritage whom Yao had chosen because her human-capital sheet listed acting experience, noted to Tsai Zhan when he came through that he had a low-grade fever. She asked him a series of mandatory health questions, had him present himself to a bleary-eyed staff doctor in a small room off to the side, who asked him more questions. There had been talk at Langley of stopping him here, but Yao’s supervisors concluded that it would look like too much of an obvious political attempt to scrape him from the entourage, and would only cast more suspicion on the general.

“Welcome to the United States,” the inspector said with a welcoming smile, once the doctor gave the nod. “Probably just a bug. Get some rest and drink lots of fluids. Maybe some chicken soup.”

Tsai said that he felt fine, but the inspector reported to Yao that he’d touched his forehead with the back of his hand as he walked away — just in case.

Because of the late hour, they’d arranged for a charter flight from New York to Wayne County Airport in Detroit.

A clerk at the charter company (a CIA officer whom Yao had embedded there) met the group with a look of genuine concern. He asked if Tsai was feeling a little under the weather, mentioning offhand that there was something going around. He offered him a squirt of hand sanitizer — that Yao had laced with a scopolamine concoction developed by the docs at CIA. Tsai accepted, with a sneer of disgust. He didn’t take much, but he got enough to add to the queasiness he was already feeling from the earlier suggestions that he looked sick. The power of suggestion was a wonderful social engineering tool.

Not an official government trip, the Songs and their two hangers-on had squished into a large sedan, rented at the general’s personal expense and driven west on a dark and almost deserted I-94 through a steady rain. By the time they reached Ann Arbor, the general’s white shirt and his wife’s fashionable gray suit looked as though they’d been dug out of a hamper.

Kellogg had no covered parking, but staff ushered them quickly out of the rain and up to the fourth floor. Mrs. Song helped settle little Niu into an exam room to be prepped for surgery. The room was cramped, so General Song wished his granddaughter well at the doorway and remained in the lobby, slouching on the sofa, stoically looking a thousand yards away.

A callow military aide in his late twenties fidgeted in the seat to the general’s left. Obviously accustomed to a uniform, he wore an ill-fitting suit, probably purchased just for the occasion. The only reason for him to be here was to provide an extra set of eyes and ears for General Bai. Yao could see it in the poor kid’s eyes. The misgivings of being ordered to spy on the man he worked for and the fear of discovery, or worse, discovering something he did not want to know.

Tsai Zhan sat across from the general, between him and the door, a gray cotton golf jacket draped across his lap. His knee bounced slightly. His eyes flicked back and forth, checking every exit, as if he feared Song might try to make a run for it. He held a gardening magazine but didn’t read it. Jet lag alone was enough to make most people feel somewhat queasy, like they were coming down with a touch of something. Tsai needed only a little nudge.

All Yao had to do was walk by with a cart of coffee for the nurses’ station for Tsai to demand some tea. The political minder was accustomed to getting his way.

The nurse standing at an open laptop on the reception counter shot Yao a side-eye and nodded toward Tsai, as if to say, You’d better take care of this.

“Of course, sir,” Yao said. He gave a slight bow, awkward, like Tsai would expect an uncouth American to be — absent even the most basic etiquette. Yao looked at Song and his aide in turn. “I have tea or coffee.”

“I do not care for anything,” the general said.

The aide, terrified at being spoken to in English, gave a twitchy shake of his head.

“I would prefer tea,” Tsai snapped. He might as well have been pounding his fist on the table.

Yao pumped a cup full of hot water from the urn, and then passed it to Tsai with two sachets of tea that looked as though they had never been opened.

Now it was only a matter of time — and how much of this tea Tsai decided to drink.

The operating room was smaller than Mo had been led to believe, or, rather, crowded with more instruments that took up much of the available floor space than she’d realized. Both Dr. Ryan and Dr. Berryhill had taken off their shoes. Ryan explained that eye surgery was often compared to flying a helicopter, as the surgeon had to utilize each hand and each foot independently — focusing the microscope, manipulating the eye itself, suturing, operating the laser, the cameras — or any of the equipment necessary for such a delicate surgery. By the time both surgeons, an anesthesiologist, and two nurses crowded around the table, there was little space left in the room for Mo. The general and his wife were not offered spots in the viewing theater, leaving that room for the two armed agents who were in contact with the detail posted outside and at the nurses’ station.

Adam Yao was out there, too. By now he would have tried to give Tsai Zhan the special tea. If that hadn’t worked — if he simply hadn’t wanted tea — Yao had a couple of other plans that he’d not seen fit to share with Mo Richardson, reminding her that she was a law enforcement officer and he was, well, not.

That part of this gig was his problem. She focused on her charge, the First Lady, appropriately code-named SURGEON by the Secret Service.

Mo had never had kids, but the sight of the little girl conked out on the table, with tubes in her arm and mouth, plucked at her heartstrings. Dr. Ryan and the other surgeon used a lot of words Mo would not have normally understood, but she’d done a fair amount of reading on retinoblastoma. She was, after all, dressed to play the part of a staff member at the clinic and didn’t want to look like a complete idiot if anyone in Song’s group asked her a question. The docs threw around terms like enucleation—removing the entire eye — and photocoagulation—using lasers to blast the blood vessels that fed the tumor. There was a large monitor above, displaying the work. Half the child’s face was covered with a surgical drape. Tape affixed the breathing tube to her cheek. A thin piece of spring-wire claw held the affected eye open, unblinking, fishlike.

Standing in the corner, Mo didn’t study the monitor long enough to figure out exactly what they were up to. She hadn’t seen them cut anything, but the gaping eye itself — looking, but not seeing — was enough to give her shivers. She’d gladly take a grisly murder scene or motor vehicle accident any day over an injured child. There’d been plenty of all those before she came on board with the Service — but it was the sight of helpless kids that stuck with her, that scarred the back of her eye.

Mo tempered her flipping stomach by trying to focus on the First Lady instead of on the monitor. She’d waited outside the operating room dozens, probably hundreds, of times, and knew well the labyrinth of back halls of Dr. Ryan’s home hospital, Johns Hopkins. The Secret Service even had a small office there next to Dr. Ryan’s. But Mo had never watched her work. Her focus was so intense as to be almost Zen-like. Ryan and her partner were playing with some high-powered lasers in the middle of one of the most fragile and important parts of the human body. The eye didn’t offer a great deal of real estate to work in to begin with, and these guys were shooting lasers through the pupil. Watching the steady hands, the total concentration, gave Richardson an entirely new level of respect for her boss.

An hour into the procedure, Dr. Ryan, unrecognizable in her surgical cap and mask, glanced over her shoulder and gave Mo a thumbs-up. Mo looked up at the agents in the viewing window and repeated the gesture. She and Dr. Ryan had agreed on the prearranged signal when the surgeons were roughly twenty minutes away from finishing up. The agents returned the thumbs-up to show that they understood the message and would pass it on.

“And there you go, Adam Yao, CIA dude,” Mo whispered under her breath. “Less than half an hour. Let’s see what you got.”

She couldn’t help but wish she was outside in the waiting area during this part of the op. She’d been around Tsai for only a few moments when the general had arrived. That was plenty long to see he was a vile human being. Mo shook her head, queasy from the images on the monitor. Still, she wasn’t sure anyone deserved what this guy was getting.

Tsai was sweating profusely when Adam Yao brought a tray of donuts into the waiting area. Mrs. Song sat to the general’s right, his hand clutched in hers, leaning against him for emotional support. All her customary stoicism had been leached away by the stress of her granddaughter’s illness and the long hours of travel.

“How much longer?” Mrs. Song asked in accented English.

“I’m not sure,” Yao said. “Maybe an hour. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.”

“What could be taking so long?” the exhausted woman asked. “If it goes longer, do you think that means they are able to save her sight?”

“The surgeons will explain everything after—” Yao said.

“Why are there two?” Tsai asked, gulping back a burp. Yao could hear his rumbling gut from ten feet away.

“Two?” Yao scratched his head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Why two surgeons?” Tsai asked. “There is a limited space for four large American hands around a child’s eyeball. Surely one would be enough.”

The general huffed in disgust, blading away in his chair. Mrs. Song buried her head more deeply into her husband’s shoulder.

Tsai chuckled. “Too many cooks—” An extra-large burp worked up from his belly, as if to punish him. He pushed the glasses up on his nose and stared at his feet.

Yao shrugged. “That’s way above my pay grade, sir. I’m not even a nurse. I’m just an orderly. I help with things like — Hey, you don’t look so good.”

Tsai swayed in his chair like he was about to topple forward. Yao reached out to touch the man’s arm, but he jerked away.

“I am fine!” Tsai snapped. His twisted grimace said otherwise. The thunder in his gut grew louder. His eyes suddenly crossed. The glasses slid down again as his face twisted in pain. “The restroom!” he demanded, cradling his protesting belly.

A morphine derivative based on a medication used to treat Parkinson’s stimulated the chemoreceptor trigger zone, or CTZ, in Tsai’s brain, causing it to send signals to the stomach saying it was time to expel all of its contents. A lot of signals. At the same time, a powerful chemical laxative was sending the exact same message to Tsai’s lower GI. The effects were fast, relatively benign, and extremely dramatic. Knowing full well what was about to happen, Yao steered the rumbling man quickly across the hall.

They almost made it.

In the end, a disgusted General Song ordered his aide to retrieve Tsai’s suitcase from the rental car so he could change out of his soiled clothing — keeping both men occupied and out of the picture.

Ah, Adam Yao thought to himself as he shut the restroom door. The sexy life of a spy… He had to hold his breath to keep from dry-heaving at the horrendous stench — but he’d bought some time, and best of all, Tsai would chalk it all up to a bug.

Now back to you, Dr. Ryan…